[Roundtable] Anti-Americanism - a Frenchman got it right! - Must reading :-)

[Jefferis Peterson]

http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2004/004/10.26.html

A Great article on a newly translated book by a Frenchman who analyzes the
virulent anti-Americanism of Europe. It seems like a must read.

Books & Culture, July/August 2004
 
Durable Contempt
Why anti-Americanism thrives.
by Allen C. Guelzo
 
Excerpt of review: 

Of all the great creeds which steered Europeans into disaster in the last
century (and the list only begins with Marxism and fascism), only one still
survives. But it is thriving, and one does not have to listen very closely
in order to hear it: anti-Americanism.

It not only thrives, but has been thriving longer than any of its
comparatively short-lived rivals of the last hundred or so years. America
was, after all, the place where Britain sent all its unwanted social
baggage, starting with its Puritans and eventually running the gamut to
include debtors, Quakers, unruly Irish and Scots, unlucky Africans,
convicts, and so forth; it was conventional wisdom that no good thing could
emerge from this human slag-heap. Nor did the establishment of the new
federal Republic in 1787 redeem American reputations. The collapse of the
French Republic into Napoleonic dictatorship, and the revulsion from the
politics of Enlightenment reason which washed over Europe after Waterloo,
made the United States the butt of Romantic scorn. There was no real
national identity in America, complained Joseph de Maistre, only a cheap
mixture of races and nationalities united solely by the hope of
materialistic gain. "The American knows nothing; he seeks nothing but money;
he has no ideas," raged the German poet Nichlaus Lenau. America, Heinrich
Heine wrote (anticipating Marcuse and the Frankfurt School), was a "gigantic
prison of freedom":
Sometimes it comes to my mind
 To sail to America
 To that pig-pen of Freedom
 Inhabited by boors living in equality.

.....

A creed this persistent and this virulent must feed on something more than
our occasional displays of arrogance, cultural boorishness, and the general
sense that the United States has a God-given right to tell the world what it
should be doing. The British did the same thing in spades, and so have the
Russians, the Germans, and even the French, and yet there is nothing in any
of their misbehaviors which has provoked anything so totalizing as the
relentless and consuming passions of anti-Americanism. What is it in the
American itch which provokes so violent a European scratch?

Jean-Francois Revel first pondered this in 1970, while he was still reeling
from the collective blows delivered to the stability of the Fifth Republic
by the Prague Spring, the Parisian student riots of 1968, and the Vietnam
calamity. For many years a columnist and editor of L'Express, Revel could
not reconcile the free pass European intellectuals gave to evils on the
Left‹e.g., the brutal suppression of Alexander Dubcek and the Czech
dissidents by the Soviets‹with their fanatical criticism of the American war
in Vietnam, much less with the eagerness with which students of the Sorbonne
threw up barricades, not in praise of liberte, but of dictatorship. Through
all this, America‹"parasitical, murderous, and sick"‹became what Pascal
Bruckner remembered as "the ideal scapegoat." Human capacities for
forgetting the inconvenient, or not-seeing what is as plain as day, were
never on better display.3

It finally came to Revel that anti-Americanism had little to do with what
Americans actually were, and much more with what Europeans were becoming. He
poured his conclusions into three savage indictments of European
self-righteousness: Without Marx or Jesus (1970), The Totalitarian
Temptation (1976), and the almost-despairing How Democracies Perish (1983),
which railed against the indulgent European willingness to excuse the
outrages of the Soviets while weeping over the pecadilloes of the Americans.
He wondered out loud whether democracies have some kind of natural tendency
to embrace their destroyers....

 Revel... suspects that the anti-globalist program is not really about
anti-globalism at all, since in fact the Euro-Left "has always hoped for
globalization, but without the market‹in other words, an ideologically
correct world government." They are supremely "indifferent to the fate of
the underdeveloped countries; what they really want is to destroy the
economies of the developed countries, inasmuch as development and capitalism
are, in their eyes, one and the same." And to the extent that, in their
minds, capitalism is "absolute evil," it is "incarnated and directed by the
United States."

What Revel does not seem to recognize is how much a first principle
anti-Americanism has become for America's own élites...
~~~~~~~~~~~~
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