“While America’s kaleidoscopic metaphor captured the beauty and propulsive force of the country’s energy revolution, it obscured its dark consequences. In the kaleidoscopic viewfinder, there was no hierarchy, no center, no dominant or subservient parts, and no explicit narrative other than the assumption of progress. Further, there seemed to be no exploitation of labor or resources, no class tensions, and no entropic losses. The disquieting instabilities of unemployment, industrial mergers, and frantic urban growth went unnoticed. “Even James Truslow Adams, the historian who gave the 'American Dream' its name — which cast the U.S. as a land of economic and social opportunity — condemned this rampage of development. 'It was not a question of preparing a continent for habitation,' he proclaimed in 1929 . 'It was one of money-maddened men furiously wrenching wealth from it in every way their ingenuity and greed could devise, from the land, from the forests above it, f...
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51