Europe's Anti-American Obsession
Hans C. Andersen
By Jean-Francois Revel
What picture of American society is likely to be imprinted on the
consciousness of average Europeans? Given what they read or hear every
day from intellectuals and politicians, they can hardly have any
choice in the unpleasant particulars, especially if they happen to be
French. The picture repeatedly sketched for them is as follows:
American society is entirely ruled by money. No other value, whether
familial, moral, religious, civic, cultural, professional, or ethical
has any potency in itself. Everything in America is a commodity,
regarded and used exclusively for its material value. A person is
judged solely by the worth of his bank account. Every U.S. President
has been in the pockets of the oil companies, the military-industrial
complex, the agricultural lobby, or the financial manipulators of Wall
Street. America is the "jungle" par excellence of out-of-control,
"savage" capitalism, where the rich are always becoming richer and
fewer, while the poor are becoming poorer and more numerous. Poverty
is the dominant social reality in America. Hordes of famished
indigents are everywhere, while luxurious chauffeured limousines with
darkened windows glide through the urban wilderness.
Poverty and inequality like this should cause Europeans to cringe in
horror, especially since (we have it on good authority) there is no
safety net in America, no unemployment benefits, no retirement, no
assistance for the destitute--not the slightest bit of social
solidarity. In the U.S. "only the most fortunate have the right to
medical care and to grow old with dignity," as one writer recently put
it in Libération. University courses are reserved only for those who
can pay, which partly explains the "low level of education" in the
benighted USA. Europeans firmly believe these sorts of
caricatures--because they are repeated every day by the elites.
Another distinctive feature of the United States: the pandemic
violence. Everywhere you go, violence reigns, with uniquely high
levels of delinquency and criminality and a feverish state of
near-open revolt in the ghettos. This last is the inevitable result of
the deep-rooted racism of American society, which sets ethnic
"communities" against one another, and ethnic minorities as a whole
against the oppressive white majority. And the unpardonable cowardice
and venality that has prevented American leaders from banning the sale
of firearms results in regular bloodbaths in which teenagers
mercilessly gun down their teachers and fellow students in the
classroom. Criticisms of the U.S. system of law bounce back and forth
between the idea that it is paralyzed by legalism and the claim that
the nation is a lawless jungle.
Yet another universally held conviction is that these social ills are
unlikely to ever be cured since Americans make it a point of honor to
elect only mental defectives as Presidents. From the Missouri tie
salesman Harry Truman to the Texas cretin George W. Bush, not to
mention the peanut farmer Jimmy Carter and the B-movie actor Ronald
Reagan, the White House offers us a gallery of nincompoops. Only John
F. Kennedy, in the eyes of the French, rose a little above this
undistinguished bunch, probably because he had the merit of having
married someone of French extraction; naturally, this union could not
fail to raise President Kennedy's intelligence to at least average
level--but doubtless still too high for his fellow citizens, who never
forgave him and ended up assassinating him.
In any case, everyone knows that the USA is a democracy only in
appearance: In the 1950s, the real face of the American political
system was revealed during the McCarthy episode, which remains the
truest revelation of the inner essence of the regime created by the
Constitution of the United States. It is forgotten that the House
Committee on Un-American Activities was originally created in 1937 to
combat the Ku Klux Klan, which was considered an anti-American
organization because it rejected the Constitutional contract that lies
at the heart of the American system.
In 2002, France experienced the humiliation of seeing a demagogic
populist of the extreme right take second place behind Jacques Chirac,
thus going on to a runoff. What was the reaction from E.U. deputy and
professor Olivier Duhamel, one of France's leading commentators? "Now
we are catching up with the degenerate democracies of the type of the
United States." Strangely, it is always America that is described as
degenerate and "fascist," while it is solely in Europe that actual
dictatorships and totalitarian regimes spring up.
The verdict delivered in Europe against U.S. foreign policy
(particularly by France, which wields the loudest bullhorn on this
subject) is a curious one. It alternates between criticizing the
Americans for being too aggressive ("unilateralism") and being too
withdrawn ("isolationism"). When former French foreign minister Hubert
Védrine deplores America's "unilateralism" for causing the U.S.--how
dreadful!--to "base her decisions on her own worldview and on the
defense of her own interests," we should note that this is an
excellent definition of the "independent" foreign policy so forcefully
espoused by General de Gaulle, and adhered to by his French successors
since then. Meanwhile, all across Europe, foreign policy intellectuals
make ritual denunciations of American "arrogance." The very wealth of
the U.S., they insist, disqualifies her from speaking in the name of
human rights.
Many Europeans sneer that America, a society still in a primitive
state, ruled by violence and criminality, couldn't possibly have a
mature culture. American literature and cinema is said to be an arid
desert, devoid of original talent or great creators. They apparently
never heard of Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Henry James, Faulkner,
Tennessee Williams, or Scott Fitzgerald. Piercing analysts like
Theodore
Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, Frank Norris, John Steinbeck,
John
Dos Passos, and Tom Wolfe are conveniently ignored. And never mind
that American film and television are far more willing to confront
sensitive social or political issues than are European productions.
On the whole, American society is sweepingly condemned as practically
the worst association of human beings in history. Fresh evidence can
do nothing to dispel such views, which, filled with distortion as they
are, reflect little on the true strengths and failures of American
society. But they tell us a great deal about the psychological
problems of those Europeans who proffer the criticisms.
I watched the United States from France and Italy during the 1950s and
'60s, and formed my opinion about it through the filter of the
European press--which means my opinion was unfavorable. Europeans at
this time saw America as the land of McCarthyism and the execution of
the Rosenbergs (who we then believed innocent), of racism and the
Korean War, and a stranglehold on Europe itself. Then Vietnam became
the principal reason to hate America. Even during this period when
Europeans completely relied on the United States to protect them
against Soviet imperialism, anti-Americanism was almost as virulent as
it is today.
For European leftists and the majority of intellectuals--who were
likely to adhere to communist ideas--anti-Americanism was rational.
This crowd identified America with capitalism, and capitalism with
evil. What was less rational was their wholesale swallowing of the
most flagrant and stupid lies about American society and foreign
policy, with a concomitant flight from accurate knowledge of the
political systems that the U.S. was battling.
A third of a century later, we witnessed something similar. After the
terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the vast majority of French
people expressed sympathy with the U.S. But there were plenty who
didn't. On September 16, delegates from the Confédération Générale du
Travail, the communist trade union, booed a speaker who called for
three minutes of silence in memory of the murdered Americans.
Followers of Jean-Marie Le Pen on Europe's extreme right celebrated
with champagne in offices of the National Front as they watched
televised images of the Twin Towers collapsing. So gathered together
under the banner of anti-Americanism were all manner of ideological
partisans.
A nadir of intellectual incoherence was achieved. After the first
gushings of emotion and crocodile condolences, the murderous assaults
were depicted as a justified retaliation for evil done by the United
States. It's not so surprising that this was a reaction in many Third
World countries. Here we see the habitual escape hatch of societies
suffering from chronic failure, societies that have completely messed
up their evolution toward democracy and economic growth: Instead of
looking to their own incompetence and corruption as the cause, they
finger the West in general and the United States in particular. And,
after a discreet pause of a few days, claims of American culpability
also surfaced in Europe in the press, among intellectuals, and among
politicians of the Left and the Right--in France above all.
Declarations multiplied demanding that the U.S. not launch a war
against terrorism. A gang of suicidal fanatics, indoctrinated,
trained, and financed by a powerful and rich multinational terrorist
organization, had murdered more than 3,000 Americans, yet it was the
victim who was almost immediately called the aggressor. Shouldn't we
ask about the "root causes" that had pushed the terrorists toward
their destructive acts? Wasn't the United States in part responsible
for what had happened?
Obsessed by their hatred, and floundering in illogicality, Europe's
anti-American dupes completely forget that when the U.S. acts against
terrorists in her own self-interest, she is also acting in the
interest of Europeans, and in the interest of many other countries
threatened, or already subverted, by terrorism.
Today's anti-American disinformation is not the result of pardonable,
correctable mistakes, but of a profound psychological need to make the
U.S. the villain responsible for others' failures.
Take crime, a subject Europeans love to whip the United States over,
while closing their eyes to their own rapidly rising crime levels. The
fact is that during the final 15 years of the twentieth century, crime
diminished dramatically in the United States. In New York City,
Rudolph Giuliani cut crime by half in five years. In Europe, disorder
has skyrocketed. In France, crime and delinquency doubled between 1985
and 1998, and has galloped ahead even faster since then.
Giuliani was mocked in certain French newspapers as "Giussolini." But
after having refused for decades to even recognize the existence of a
crime problem in their country, French Leftists have finally confessed
their "naïve optimism" and leniency toward antisocial behavior. To
finally acknowledge 20 years of error is impressive. Yet the minister
of justice, Marylise Lebranchu, insisted on doing so with the haughty
proclamation that, nonetheless, "The government has no desire to copy
the American model." One has one's pride and one's scruples, after
all. Overwhelmed by their failure to combat the steadily climbing
disorder, and unable to hide from the obvious forever, French
authorities in 2001 were forced to sheepishly adopt many American
methods of crime fighting. Here and elsewhere, anti-Americanism simply
served to cover government incompetence, ideological backwardness, and
social disorder.
For skeptics of democratic capitalism, the United States is, quite
simply, the enemy. For many years, and still today, a principal
function of anti-Americanism has been to discredit the nation that
stands as the supreme alternative to socialism. More recently,
Islamists, anti-modern Greens, and others have taken to pillorying the
U.S. for the same reason. To travesty the United States as a
repressive, unjust, racist society is a way of proclaiming: Look what
happens when modern democratic capitalism is implemented!
This is the message of critics not only in Europe, but also in the
United States itself, where anti-Americanism continues to prosper
among university, journalistic, and literary elites. But in Europe,
these ideological reasons for blaming America first are multiplied by
simple jealousy of American power. The current American "hyperpower"
is the direct consequence of European powerlessness, both past and
present. The United States fills a void caused by our inadequacies in
capability, thinking, and will to act.
Americans might ask themselves what interest the United States could
have in plunging into the bloody quagmire of the Balkans, that
centuries-old masterpiece of Europe's matchless ingenuity. But Europe
found herself incapable of bringing order by herself to this murderous
chaos of her own making. So it devolved upon the United States to take
charge of operations in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Macedonia. The Europeans
thanked the Americans afterwards by calling them
imperialists--although they quake with fright and accuse the Americans
of being cowardly isolationists the moment they make the slightest
mention of bringing their soldiers home.
Certainly America, like all societies, has many defects and deserves
criticism. But the intentional ignoring of facts begins with
sociological preconceptions of the U.S.--the alleged absence of social
protection, the notorious "poverty line," the supposed unemployment
level. The fact that unemployment in the U.S. fell to below 5 percent
in the 1990s, whereas in France it shot up to 12 percent, implied
nothing good about America according to our commentators, who
reassured us with the myth of America's omnipresent minimum-wage jobs!
At the advent of America's 2001 economic slowdown, French newspapers
ran gleeful headlines announcing "The End of Full Employment in the
USA." At the same time, the French government was frenetically heaping
praise on itself for reducing unemployment levels to 8.7
percent--almost twice the American level (not counting the tens of
thousands of the effectively unemployed who in France are artificially
excluded from the statistics). By September 2001, unemployment in
France had already climbed back to over 9 percent.
"The End of the American Economic Dream" was Le Monde's headline when
there was a pause of the practically uninterrupted 17-year period of
U.S. economic growth from 1983 to 2000. In truth, the U.S. has led a
technological revolution without precedent, creating tens of millions
of jobs while absorbing a tremendous population increase (from 248
million in 1990 to 281 million in 2000). All this was but a "dream"?
Americans are regularly reproached for wanting to "impose their
economic and social model" on others. But whenever there is an
economic slowdown, other countries anxiously await an American-led
"recovery."
While the U.S. is vilified and blamed, its financial and military aid
is universally desired. America is the sole power at once capable of
saving Mexico from economic collapse (in 1995), dissuading communist
China from attacking Taiwan (repeatedly), mediating between India and
Pakistan in the matter of Kashmir, and working with some chance of
success toward the reunification of the two Koreas under a democratic
regime. When the European Union sent a delegation, headed by the
Swedish prime minister, to Pyongyang in May 2001, the delegation could
find nothing better to do than grovel before Kim Jong Il, the criminal
chief of one of the last totalitarian jails on the planet.
The fundamental role of anti-Americanism in Europe in general, and
particularly among those on the Left, is to absolve themselves of
their own moral failings and intellectual errors by heaping them onto
the monster scapegoat, the United States of America. For stupidity and
bloodshed to vanish from Europe, the U.S. must be identified as the
singular threat to democracy (contrary to every lesson of actual
history). Thus, during the Cold War, it was dogma among Europeans from
Sweden to Sicily, from Athens to Paris, that the "imperialistic" power
was America, even though it was the USSR that annexed Eastern Europe,
made satellites out of several African countries, and invaded
Afghanistan, even though it was the People's Republic of China that
marched into Tibet, attacked South Korea, and subjugated three
Indochinese countries. A similar dynamic applies today in the war on
terror.
One example of how little credit the U.S. is allowed by the rest of
the world is the way the belief spread, and was quickly accepted as
fact, that the United States was bent on imposing censorship after
September 11.
The Qatar-based television network Al-Jazeera, and subsequently CNN,
had aired a statement by Osama bin Laden in which he gloated over the
thousands killed and called for further massacres. According to both
American and French terror experts, the tirade may have contained
coded messages to "sleepers" in the United States or in Europe
relating to projected terrorist attacks. It seemed prudent for the
U.S. administration and Congress to appeal to television and radio
managers not to broadcast such communiqués.
Such steps ought to have been understood as legitimate cautionary
measures. Instead, a chorus of imprecations was raised around the
world. America had imposed censorship, suppressed freedom of the
press, violated the First Amendment. The feverish Le Monde headline
"Propaganda Rages in the American Media" (October 3, 2001) was
typical.
The legions of Muslims living in countries that have never known
democracy or the slightest whiff of media freedom apparently felt well
qualified to defend these liberties against the only country on the
planet where they have never been suppressed. As for the French, they
have evidently already forgotten how radio and television were subject
to vigilant censorship by the state during the Algerian War, and that
scarcely a week went by without a police raid on some newspaper office
or other to seize printed material that might "undermine the army's
morale."
Other measures adopted after September 11 to thwart terrorist attacks
(similar to those taken in Europe, by the way) raised protests on both
sides of the Atlantic. Surveillance of suspects, access to e-mail and
bank accounts, giving police the right to open car trunks--were
denounced as "totalitarian" by the French League of Human Rights, as
well as American civil liberties organizations. Of course, the
measures were designed precisely to protect democracy from its
totalitarian enemies.
After the 1998 terrorist attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa, Congress
set up a National Commission on Terrorism (NCT) to redefine
anti-terrorist policy. The commission's report emphasized that "the
threat of attacks causing massive loss of human life within our
borders continues to grow." On the report's cover was a photo of the
Twin Towers, as if by premonition. Predictably, a swarm of leagues,
associations, and organizations leapt to block any countermeasures on
the grounds that they would "mortally endanger" civil liberties. A
group representing Arab-Americans bewailed a "return to the darkest
days of McCarthyism." The civil rights chief in the Clinton
administration deplored that Americans of Arab origin were unjustly
fingered by the commission--though there is not a single mention of
Arab-Americans in the NCT report. The resistance was so noisy that the
bill which would have mandated certain security measures was
effectively buried, never to become law--with results we all know.
The fact that defenders of human rights and liberty wouldn't take into
account the right to national defense meant that sensible, foresighted
warnings were dismissed as the racist ravings of hawkish fanatics. How
did this ingenious propensity for suicide entitle Europeans to
brandish slogans denouncing a supposed evaporation of American
liberties? Why is the USA casually accused of "fascism," when it is a
land that has never known a dictator over the course of two centuries,
while Europe has been busy making troops of them?
The American military operation in Afghanistan, the first major
response to September 11, was derided as a specimen of aggressive
unilateralism by global elites, as if no prior event could explain
this "imperialistic" reflex. Europeans--governments and the
public--had generally showed unqualified solidarity with the United
States right after September 11. But important minorities--in the
parties of the Left, the Greens in particular, the enemies of
globalization, and a near majority among European intellectuals--were
quick to exhibit their old fixations. Hostilities really began, they
say, only with the American retaliation. The initial aggression was
simply dismissed by large numbers of people.
A group of 113 French intellectuals launched an appeal against the
"imperial crusade" in Afghanistan: "In the name of the law and
morality of the jungle" (not because 3,000 people had been murdered),
"the Western armada administers its divine justice." Of course, if any
parties in this entire affair believed themselves to be divine, it was
the Islamists--the kind that murders thousands of innocent civilians
in the name of Allah, or the kind that, in Nigeria and Sudan,
massacres Christians for being unwilling to submit to sharia. In two
months alone, several hundred Nigerian Christians were exterminated by
Muslims. Our 113 intellectuals had nothing to say about it.
In the best cases, the Ameriphobes put the jihadists and those who
would resist them on an equal plane, not pronouncing in favor of
either. Hundreds of thousands of pacifists demonstrated on October 14,
2001 brandishing banners: "No to Terrorism. No to War." Which is about
as intelligent as: "No to Illness. No to Medicine." We have seen this
before. In 1939, when the Nazi armies were only months from occupying
Paris, French communists, fixated on the alleged evils of capitalism,
exhorted armaments workers to sabotage their factories and soldiers to
desert their regiments.
Today's unilateralist pacifists condemned the American counterattack
against the Taliban in Afghanistan precisely because it was a
counterattack. The United States, they said, had given in to base
desires for revenge and launched an air assault that would lead
inevitably to the deaths of Afghan civilians. What they should have
done was negotiate a political solution. Well, of course! Democracies
always refuse to negotiate; only sanguinary fanatics are eager to
compromise.
The pacifists deliberately ignored that the purpose of the American
reaction was not revenge but defense--the squelching of future
terrorism. Was it the fault of the United States if Afghanistan was
where the jihadists' mastermind was hiding? The intervention in
Afghanistan, despite all the precautions taken, could not be without
danger to civilians; but when the conflict had first begun on 9/11, it
was in New York, not Kabul, that thousands of civilian lives were
lost. It seems that for some humanitarians, civilian casualties are
indeed acceptable--if they are American.
To avoid being transformed into "aggressors," the Americans would have
had to abstain from any retaliation whatsoever against the
international terror networks. It wasn't the Afghan people who were
targeted, but the Taliban's military installations. Yet after a few
days, all we heard was incessant talk of U.S. air attacks and Afghan
civilian casualties. The statistics so loudly trumpeted by Europeans
were provided by--the Taliban themselves.
And why wasn't it made clear that the United States had been, from
1980 to 2001, the principal supplier of humanitarian aid to
Afghanistan and that 80 percent of the aid distributed by private
charities within the framework of the World Food Program was paid for
by Americans? Because to concede as much would have called for a
modicum of intellectual integrity.
The real cause of September 11 unquestionably lies in the resentment
against the United States, which grew apace after the collapse of the
USSR, and America's emergence as the "sole global superpower." This
resentment is particularly marked in the Islamic lands, where the
existence of Israel, which is blamed on America, is an important
motivator. But the resentment is also more quietly present over the
entire planet. In some European capitals, the sense of grievance has
been raised to the status of an idée fixe, virtually the guiding
principle of foreign policy. Thus the
U.S. is charged with all the evils, real or imagined, that afflict
humanity, from the falling price of beef in France to AIDS in Africa
and global warming everywhere. The result is a widespread refusal to
accept responsibility for one's own actions.
As for the American "hyperpower" that causes Europeans so many
sleepless nights, they should look to their own history and ask how
far they themselves are responsible for that predominance. For it was
they who made the twentieth century into the grimmest in history. It
was they who brought about the two apocalypses of the World Wars and
invented the two most absurd and criminal political regimes ever
inflicted on the human race. If Western Europe in 1945 and Eastern
Europe in 1990 were ruined, whose fault was it? American
"unilateralism" is the consequence--not the cause--of the diminished
power of the other nations. Yet it has become habitual to turn the
situation around and constantly indict the United States. Is it
surprising when such an atmosphere of accumulated hate ends in pushing
fanatics to compensate for their failures by engaging in carnage?
The refrain of German Greens, French organizations like ATTAC,
magazines like Politis, Latin American intellectuals, and African
editorial writers is that anti-American terrorism can be
explained--indeed justified--on the grounds of the "growing poverty"
caused by global capitalism, whose forces are orchestrated by the
United States. The radical Left in the United States has also made
this its rallying cry. The Italian Nobel laureate and novelist Dario
Fo, a literary non-entity, put it bluntly: "What are 20,000 deaths
[sic] in New York compared with the millions caused every year by the
big speculators?"
Of course, the Muslim world includes countries that are among the
wealthiest on the planet (especially Saudi Arabia, which finances
al-Qaeda and other Islamist organizations). Islamic terrorism is the
offspring of religious fanaticism; it has nothing to do with poverty;
and it cannot possibly lead to any improvement in the lot of backward
societies. Islamists utterly reject all measures that might contribute
to improvement: democracy, pluralism, intellectual freedom and
critical thought, equality for women, and openness to other cultures.
In the two months after 9/11, the phobias and fallacies of traditional
anti-Americanism massively intensified. The clumsiest of them was an
attempt to justify Islamist terrorism by claiming that America has
long been hostile to Islam. The United States' actions historically
have been far less damaging to Muslims than those of Britain, France,
or Russia. These European powers have conquered Muslim countries,
occupied and indeed oppressed them over decades and even centuries.
Americans have never colonized a Muslim nation. Americans evince no
hostility toward Islam as such today; on the contrary, their
interventions in Somalia, Bosnia, and Kosovo, as well as the pressure
exerted on the Macedonian government, were designed to defend Muslim
minorities. And the U.S.-led coalition that removed the Iraqi army
from Kuwait during the first Gulf War acted to defend a small Muslim
country against a secular dictator who had used chemical weapons
against Muslim Shiites in the south and Muslim Kurds in the north.
Another myth strenuously maintained since 9/11 is that of a moderate
and tolerant Islam. The dominant idea in the Muslims' worldview, in
truth, is that all humanity must obey the rules of their religion,
whereas they owe no respect to the religions of others. Indeed,
showing such respect would make them apostates meriting instant
execution. Anxious to show tolerance, the Pope encouraged the erection
of a mosque in Rome, the city where Saint Peter is buried. No
Christian church could be built in Mecca, or anywhere in Saudi Arabia,
for that would profane the land of Mohammed. There is no ambiguity
about al-Qaeda-style intentions: It is quite simply to convert the
whole of humanity to Islam by force. Murder and mayhem is justified in
the eyes of the terrorists because it strikes at the infidels who
refuse to embrace Islam. We deceive ourselves if we think we can
negotiate with the al-Qaeda fanatics and their ilk.
The day after 9/11, Le Parisien-Aujourd'hui published an account of
the jubilant atmosphere the previous evening in the eighteenth
arrondissement of Paris, home to a large Muslim community. "Bin Laden
will nail all of you!" was among the more moderate remarks hurled at
passersby who didn't appear to be North African. Or: "I'm going to
celebrate big time tonight! Those guys were real heroes. That'll teach
those American bastards--and all you French are next!" Snippets of
this sort were ignored by almost all media.
A spokesman for British Muslims named al-Misri likewise called the
attacks on the World Trade Center acts of "legitimate self-defense."
Another spiritual authority, Omar Bakri Mohammed, launched a fatwa
commanding the assassination of the president of Pakistan because the
latter had sided with President Bush against bin Laden. "Islam will
Dominate the World" was the slogan on signs held aloft by Islamist
demonstrators of British nationality as they marched in October 2001
north of London. Meanwhile, there was not the slightest whisper of
protest from all those "moderate" Muslims in Britain or France
supposedly opposed to this sort of extremism. The notion that the
"immense majority" of Muslims settled in Europe are peacefully
inclined must be viewed for what it is: a mirage.
Western Europe's antagonism was hardly limited to its Muslim
communities. Stunned by the magnitude of the 9/11 crimes and reduced
to silence by the wave of solidarity with the U.S., even most
long-time America-haters were quiet for a few days. But for a few days
only.
The day after 9/11, the editor of Le Monde, Jean-Marie Colombani, ran
the famous "We Are All Americans" editorial. Hostile reactions to the
piece and the headline were numerous and immediate, both among readers
of Le Monde and on the editorial board. This stemmed from the Left's
disinclination, even right after the massacres in New York and
Washington, to renounce its demonized image of the United States, an
image that it needs all the more since socialism has ended in
shipwreck.
Shortly after 9/11 a French spokesman for the activist group ATTAC
quoted the adage: "He who sows the wind shall reap the whirlwind."
French prime minister Lionel Jospin seemed to be pointing in this
direction when he asked, "What lesson are the Americans going to draw
from what has happened?" The lesson, Jospin indicated, should be for
the U.S. to moderate her unilateralism. For Cardinal Karl Lehmann,
president of the German Bishops' Conference, the lesson to be drawn
from terrorism was that "the West must not seek to dominate the rest
of the world."
Soon, many European elites insinuated that the jihadist attacks had
some moral justification. These anti-American views began to circulate
well before the campaign to dislodge the Taliban kicked off on October
7. The bombing which became the most frequently invoked reason to take
sides against the U.S. had not yet even begun.
One of the most dishonest objections raised against the campaign in
Afghanistan was that Americans had made use of mujahedin during the
Afghans' war of resistance against the USSR. What was so reprehensible
about Ronald Reagan accepting the services of all those willing to
oppose the Soviet Union? Was it necessary to wait until all Afghans
and Saudis had read Montesquieu and converted to Christianity? Imagine
what it would have meant for India, Pakistan, and the Gulf
countries--for all of us--if the Soviets had been able to achieve a
permanent takeover of Afghanistan. There would have been no Gorbachev,
no glasnost, and no perestroika. Coming from the Europeans, who at the
time of the Soviet Afghan invasion quivered with cowardice and debated
only if they should or shouldn't participate in the Moscow Olympics,
this critique has something, one might say, backward about it.
Tens of millions of immigrants have streamed into the United States.
If the picture of America drawn by the European press is accurate,
then those immigrants from all parts of the world were deluded fools.
Why choose the American capitalist jungle with all its evils, rather
than the lands of peace, plenty, and liberty they came from? Why
didn't they write their families and friends basking in the paradises
of Ukraine, Calabria, and Greece warning them of the perils of
poverty, precariousness, and oppression in America?
The success and originality of American integration stem precisely
from the fact that immigrants' descendants can perpetuate their
ancestral cultures while thinking of themselves as Americans in the
fullest sense, sharing basic ideals across racial and ethnic barriers.
In France, the characteristic attitude of newcomers from North Africa,
Turkey, and sub-Saharan Africa is predominantly one of alienation,
confrontation, rejection, and hatred.
As immigration trends suggest, anti-Americanism is not deeply rooted
as a popular prejudice. In Europe, anti-Americanism is much more a
hobgoblin of the political, cultural, and religious elites. According
to a SOFRES survey of May 2000, only 10 percent of French feel dislike
for the U.S. After September 11, according to another poll, 52 percent
of French people interviewed said they had always felt warmly toward
the U.S., against 32 percent who said the opposite. Historian Michel
Winock concludes that "anti-Americanism is not an attitude of the
average French person; it is typical of a certain segment of the
elites."
The great irony of this anti-American obsession is that it aggravates
the evil that it aims to extirpate, namely the go it-alone impulse
famously ascribed to the U.S. By criticizing the Americans whatever
they do, on every occasion--even when they are completely
right--Europeans (we are not alone in this, but we lead the dance)
compel Americans to disregard our objections--even when we are right.
The American reflex, conditioned by the constant avalanche of
anathemas coming at them, causes them to keep thinking: "They're
always blaming us, so why consult them at all? We already know they'll
vilify us."
And so America's enemies and allies alike, valuing animosity toward
the U.S. over influence on her, condemn themselves to impotence. In
the process they strengthen the American superpower.
Jean-Francois Revel, who lives in Paris, is author of How Democracies
Perish, The Totalitarian Temptation, Without Marx or Jesus, and the
new book Anti-Americanism, which will be released in an English
translation in November by Encounter Books.
The Falseness of Anti-Americanism
By Fouad Ajami
"America is everywhere," Italian novelist Ignazio Silone once
observed. An idea of it, a fantasy of it, hovers over distant lands
and peoples. And everywhere there is also an obligatory
anti-Americanism. Witness the duality of the United States as Satan
and redeemer. The same embassies targeted by the masters of terror are
besieged by visa-seekers dreaming of the golden country. It is of
green cards and houses with lawns, far away from the mullahs, that the
crowd in Tehran chanting "marg bar amrika" ("death to America") really
dreams.
The world rails against the United States, yet embraces its
protection, its hipness, the American ways and techniques. In Doha,
Qatar, Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, arguably Sunni Islam's most
influential cleric, delivers sermons on the arrogance of the United
States. Egyptian-born, political to his fingertips, and in full
mastery of his craft and of the sensibility of his followers, he
thunders that the United States has appointed itself judge and jury in
Iraq.
But a great deal of the United States had gone into the preacher's
art: Consider his Web site, Qaradawi.net, where the faithful can click
on his religious edicts in Arabic and HTML. Or what about his way with
television? He is a star of the medium, and Al-Jazeera carried an
immensely popular program of his. That art form surely owes a debt to
the American "televangelists," as nothing in the sheik's traditional
Cairo education prepared him for this wired, portable religion.
And then there are the preacher's children: One of his daughters had
made her way to the University of Texas where she received a master's
degree in biology, a son earned a Ph.D. from the University of Central
Florida, and yet another son embarked on that quintessential American
degree, an MBA, at the American University in Cairo. Al-Qaradawi
embodies anti-Americanism as the flip side of Americanization.
To come bearing modernism to those who want it but who rail against it
at the same time, to represent and embody so much of what the world
yearns for and fears--that is the American burden. To the Europeans,
and to the French in particular, who are enamored of their laïcisme
(secularism), the United States is unduly religious, its culture
suffused with sacred symbolism. In the Islamic world, the burden is
precisely the opposite: The United States scandalizes the devout and
is an affront to the pious. According to a June BBC survey, 78 percent
of French polled identified the United States as a "religious"
country, while only 10 percent of Jordanians endowed it with that
label. Religious to the secularists, faithless to the devout--such is
the way the United States is seen.
Many populations have the United States under their skin. Their rage
is oddly derived from their attraction. Consider Saudi Arabia, a place
where anti-Americanism is fierce. The United States helped pull the
desert enclave out of its insularity and ushered it into the twentieth
century. Today, Saudi cities mimic U.S. suburbs, and their ruling
elites are formed and educated at Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford.
A culture that casts so long a shadow is fated to be emulated and
resented at the same time. The United States is destined to be fixed
in the politics--and imaginations--of strangers even when the country
accurately believes it is not implicated in the affairs of other
lands. People cannot be talked out of this kind of anti-Americanism.
Though Jordan is the recipient of a U.S. free-trade agreement, a
privilege the United States shares only with a handful of nations, 71
percent of Jordanians believe the United States is more dangerous to
the world than al-Qaeda. A sense of disinheritance has always hung
over Jordan, and anti-Americanism emanates from it.
In Greece, hatred of the United States is now a defining feature of
political life. The United States offended Greece by rescuing Bosnians
and Kosovars. The same Greeks who hailed the Serbian conquest of
Srebrenica in 1995 and the mass slaughter of the Muslims there were
quick to summon up outrage over the U.S. military campaign in Iraq.
Greece is part of NATO and of the European Union, but the
ethno-nationalism of Greece spins a narrative of Hellenic persecution
at the hands of the United States.
The aggrieved glide over the role the U.S. played in the defense and
rehabilitation of Greece after World War II. They overlook the
lifeline that migration to the U.S. offered untold numbers of Greeks,
where they now prosper. The malady here is a Greek variant of what
plays out in the world of Islam: a belligerent political culture that,
in an abdication of political responsibility for one's own world,
searches for foreign "devils."
It is regularly argued today that the United States, in its post- 9/11
hubris, summoned up today's anti-Americanism. But these sentiments
have long prevailed in Jordan, Egypt, and France. It was during the
1990s that the Islamist children of Egypt set off for Hamburg and
Kandahar to hatch a horrific conspiracy against the United States. And
it was in the 1990s, during the fabled stock market run, when the
prophets of globalization preached the triumph of the U.S. economic
model over the protected versions of the market in places such as
France, when anti-Americanism became the uncontested ideology of
French public life. Americans were barbarous, a threat to French
cuisine and their beloved language. Wall Street speculators were
raiding their savings.
Much has been made of the sympathy that the French expressed for the
United States immediately after the September 11 attacks, as embodied
by the famous editorial of Le Monde's Jean-Marie Colombani, "We are
all Americans." But Colombani was soon back with a tone of belligerent
judgment and disapproval in his book All Americans? The World After
September 11, 2001. There was nothing to admire in Colombani's United
States, which he described as a fundamentalist Christian enterprise,
its magistrates too deeply attached to the death penalty, its police
cruel to its black population. The United States had not squandered
Colombani's sympathy; he never held that sympathy in the first place.
Colombani was hardly alone in the French intellectual class: On
November 3, 2001, French writer and pundit Jean Baudrillard sketched
the perpetrators of September 11 as acting out his own dreams and the
dreams of others like him. "All the world without exception dreamt of
this event, for no one can avoid dreaming of the destruction of a
power that has become hegemonic…. It is they who acted, but we who
wanted the deed."
It is not "mostly Bush" that turned France against the United States.
Envy of U.S. power, and of the United States' universalism, is the
ruling passion of French intellectual life. Foreign minister Dominique
de Villepin appeared evasive at one point on whether he wished to see
a U.S. or an Iraqi victory in the standoff between Saddam Hussein's
regime and the United States. Anti-Americanism of this sort indulges
France's fantasy of past greatness and splendor, and gives France's
unwanted Muslim children a claim on the political life of a country
that knows not what to do with them.
That sensitive French interpreter of his country, Dominique Moisi,
recently told of a simple fellow countryman who, when Saddam Hussein's
statue fell on April 9 in Baghdad's Firdos Square, expressed a sense
of diminishment that his country had sat out this stirring story of
political liberation. A society like France with a revolutionary
history should have had a hand in toppling the tyranny in Baghdad.
Instead, a cable attached to a U.S. tank had pulled down the statue,
to the delirium of the crowd. It was soldiers from Burlington,
Vermont, and Linden, New Jersey, and Bon Aqua, Tennessee who raced
through the desert making this new history and paying for it.
The United States need not worry about hearts and minds in foreign
lands. If Germans wish to use anti-Americanism to absolve themselves
and their parents of the great crimes of World War II, they will do it
regardless of what the United States says and does. If Muslims truly
believe that their long winter of decline is the fault of the United
States, no campaign of public diplomacy shall deliver them from that
incoherence. In the age of Pax Americana, it is written, fated, or
maktoob (as the Arabs would say) that the plotters and preachers shall
rail against the United States. And they will do so in whole sentences
of good American slang.
Fouad Ajami is the Majid Khadduri professor at Johns Hopkins
University's School of Advanced International Studies. This is
excerpted from the September/October issue of Foreign Policy.
Markku Grönroos
oddball drive of exhaustive pace. You have lost a few more bolts from your
head?
"Hans C. Andersen" <H...@mail1.teledanmark.dk> wrote in message
news:ktgo005ioffa310ie...@4ax.com...
> power that has become hegemonic.. It is they who acted, but we who
Dan Palm
"Markku Grönroos" <ha...@serveri.fi> skrev i meddelandet
news:buhgb9$5h0$1...@phys-news1.kolumbus.fi...
> I know you have been somewhat active before but lately there has been this
> oddball drive of exhaustive pace. You have lost a few more bolts from your
> head?
>
The prescription run out.
D P
Hans C. Andersen
<ha...@serveri.fi> wrote:
>I know you have been somewhat active before but lately there has been this
>oddball drive of exhaustive pace. You have lost a few more bolts from your
>head?
You've got quite a funny name oddball.
.
Dan Palm
Republican cronies)
I would get extremely more pro American if/when a sensible Democrat takes
over the White House.
--
Dan Palm
Scania, Sweden
hodd_...@yahoo.se
Hans C. Andersen
<hodd_...@removethisyahoo.se> wrote:
>Most people I know is not anti USA, just anti-Dubya (and towards he's
>Republican cronies)
>I would get extremely more pro American if/when a sensible Democrat takes
>over the White House.
I am also anti baby Bush. Can't stand him!
Markku Grönroos
Hans C. Andersen
Get to English class.
Napalm Heart
"Dan Palm" <hodd_...@removethisyahoo.se> wrote in message
news:1bzPb.45650$mU6.1...@newsb.telia.net...
"Sensible Democrat" is a contradiction in terms. ;+)
Ken Olson
Clarksville MI USA
Dan Palm
"Napalm Heart" <olsonfam*nospam*@iserv.net> skrev i meddelandet
news:100u7lj...@corp.supernews.com...
I know, I know. They are a bit to right wing for my taste, but still they
are better than the die hard Conservative Republicans.
Euro9
> >> I am also anti baby Bush. Can't stand him!
> >>
> >You much alike.
>
>
> Get to English class.
Why don't you invade his country as well - and force him!
Hans C. Andersen
wrote:
Well if he wants to improve, he needs to take some classes.
Napalm Heart
Interesting that you would say that, as there are many ways that I
find the Republicans to be too far to the Left. There's a lot I don't
like about Bush, but when compared to any of the possible Democratic
candidates and assuming that the realistic choice is between the 2
major USA parties, he's the only rational choice.
My personal political tastes run more toward the Libertarian Party, of
which I am a member.