A MWC Special Feature

Anti-Americanism: A Clinical Study

Last summer, with France on his mind, the British historian Paul Johnson graced the pages of Forbes Magazine with this trenchant observation: "Anti-Americanism is racist envy" [1]. Lest anyone miss the point, the best-selling author quickly rephrased it in more accessible language: "France is not a democracy." His novel insight could hardly be dismissed as mere anti-Frenchism for the simple reason that the word does not exist. In fact, neither does anti-Polishism, anti-Spanishism, or even anti-Vaticanism. (Each one googles in the single digits—the modern definition of nonexistence.) With over 115,000 Google hits, anti-Americanism stands alone: a living testament to US exceptionalism.

But what is it, anyway? As so often, ingenuousness is of no help. Indeed, if the word were to connote simple, unadorned hostility toward Americans, wouldn't the enslavement of half the population of the Deep South in the mid-19th century constitute its most perfect embodiment [2]? Slavery, lynchings, miscegenation laws... Truly, can anything be more anti-American?

Apparently yes. Google the words anti-Americanism, Jim Crow and you get a paltry 390 hits. Substitute Jacques Chirac for Jim Crow and you rake in a much healthier 5,210 hits. Trade the French president for intellectuals and up you soar to 14,000. Paul Johnson understands: "Anti-Americanism is the prevailing disease of intellectuals today," avers the historian, who, leaving Osama off the hook, proceeds to aim his fire at effete gaggles of Gauloises-puffing café intellectuals. What gives?

In a mildly deranged way, Johnson has a point. Anti-Americanism barks more than it bites. September 11 is the grim exception to the rule that terrorism kills few Americans: rarely more than 20 a year, which is less than lightning [3] [4]. Israel has a rate of terrorist fatalities hundreds of times higher [5]. Sri Lanka, home of the Tamil Tigers, has suffered, on a per-capita basis, the equivalent of one 9/11 every 3 weeks. And this for 20 consecutive years [6].

Granted, numbers alone obscure the central lesson of 9/11, which is its ominous portent for the future: the mythical nuclear suitcase at Penn Station. But to instill fear is no defining feature of anti-Americanism; for, as recent events prove, the residents of Mombasa, Bali, Riyadh, Casablanca, Istanbul, and Madrid are every bit as entitled to their anxieties as New Yorkers are to theirs.

Tempting as it is to dismiss Johnson's focus on diseased intellectuals as merely proof that it takes one to spot one, the reader would be well advised to resist. {mosgoogle right}

We'll always have Paris

Being ground zero for sophisticated, unifying, and reflexive anti-Americanism, France provides a glimpse of the disease at its most distinctive. In two recent books, Jean-François Revel and Philippe Roger have intelligently researched this phenomenon [7] [8]. France does not come off well. Anti-Americanism is diagnosed as a pathological condition of old lineage which feeds on a witch's brew of hypocrisy, resentment, illiberalism, and a deep-rooted aversion to change.

Trudging through its affliction, however, France has remained rather fond of America. A May 2000 SOFRES poll revealed that only 10 percent of its citizens dislike the United States [8]. French anti-Americanism is mostly an elite sport. Quite the opposite of French-bashing stateside, which is the last PC-free zone for hate speech in America and a market-tested crowd pleaser for late-night TV comedy. What the two ethnophobias have in common, however, is a refreshing lack of inhibition. Thus, one could only admire France's Minister of Culture, Jack Lang, for keeping a straight face while calling Spielberg's Jurassic Park a "threat to French identity." (OK, French politics does have its share of dinosaurs.) In perfect counterpoint, the run-up to the war saw Lang's partners-in-neurosis at Fox News vituperate obsessively, hysterically, maniacally, and deliriously about France's "pathetic irrelevance," seemingly oblivious to the contradiction.

The French may be fond of Americans, but over 80 percent of them viscerally reject US lifestyle and customs [9]. Little "racist envy" there. Ominously, signs of a post-Cold War continental drift abound. While a 1988 survey rated power, dynamism, wealth, and liberty as the words most frequently associated with American society, by 1996 the top choices had become violence, power, inequalities, and racism [9]. Granted, the French are not the type to let ignorance of a subject get in the way of an opinion. But French obduracy is not the point. A striking dichotomy between liking Americans and spurning their values is now deeply entrenched in much of Western Europe. Large majorities of Germans, Italians, and British characterize America as domineering, racist, and violent [10]. In March 2003, the percentage of people holding a favorable view of the US was only 48% in Britain, 31% in France, and 14% in Spain [11]. On societal issues such as poverty, gun control, and the death penalty, the continental divide appears beyond bridging. The phenomenon is worldwide. In 34 of 43 countries polled in 2002, a majority of people said they disliked America's influence in their country [12]. In that quarter of humanity called the Muslim world, anti-US hostility is at a fever pitch.

Neocon scholar Robert Kagan's catchy aphorism [13], "Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus," strikes a chord with Europeans, who remember their own Martian phase only too well and feel so relieved to have outgrown it. The poetry of Rumsfeldian power lust tends to get lost in translation. To war-weary Europeans, who've been there and done the imperial power thing before, Kagan's martial fantasies sound perilously premodern, boyishly immature, brazenly anti-feminist, and—as my teenage daughter would say—so last millenium.

Ah, the great cleansing, avenging power of war! Its seductive lure was irresistible in the summer of 1914. On the eve of the war to end all wars, Thomas Mann called the imminent slaughter a moral necessity... "both a purging and a liberation" [14]. A mere three weeks into the war, a quarter-million French soldiers had died. Some purging, indeed. In the spring of 2003, Bush's America, too, felt the cleansing urge and heeded the avenging call. Echoing Mann while kindly sparing us the intestinal metaphor, Andrew Sullivan called the Iraq war "a moral necessity" [15]: 13,000 civilians killed, a Saddam-lite puppet regime, and a fresh resupply of hatred against the United States. Isn't moral clarity beautiful when actions are divorced from their consequences?

Manifest destiny gone global

When President Bush is not busy hailing freedom, he is usually occupied extolling liberty. On the lofty matters of democracy, freedom, and human rights, his administration proudly talks the talk. The walking—as ever the weak link—has gotten alarmingly wobbly. It was once proud and steady: In the wake of World War II, the United States bestrode the globe like a colossus with twice the relative economic clout it enjoys today. Fresh from liberating the world from tyranny, America was universally revered. Where Europe stood for ruin, fascism, and colonization, the US spelled wealth, freedom, and self-determination.

Then came Korea, a nervous draw, followed by Vietnam, a bitter defeat. TIME Magazine captured the navel-gazing torpor with its characterization of the My Lai massacre as an "American" tragedy [16]. (Does that make the Holocaust a "German" tragedy?) America had invaded Vietnam, killed well over two million of its citizens, and then fled. While staring into an abyss of disillusion, many in the Third World began to wonder: Was the colossus the new apostle of freedom or merely the heir to the throne of Western imperialism? That it could be a bit of both was a subtlety lost on the many to whom the sight of white men killing the natives never had more than one meaning. Fighting the scourge of communism was a worthy cause. But at what price? To make up for all of its dictator-propping interventions in Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, Greece, Chile, etc, how many democracies did the US help spawn during the Cold War? Sadly, not a single one. Today, for all his talk of freedom, Bush is busy emulating Saddam by filling graves with dead Shiites. Meanwhile, with 725 bases overseas and troops in 70 percent of the world's countries [17], the US military footprint is large enough to ensure that, for millions around the world, Americans are people in uniform. Rambo's paternity rights are hardly Hollywood's alone.

Which is rather unfortunate, for if there is one nation on earth that has always represented (if not always delivered) liberty and hope for the oppressed of the world, it is America. Brilliance rarely is the first attribute one associates with George W. Bush, but even his detractors must concede that his contribution to the cause of anti-Americanism is a feat of staggering genius [18]. Never has the United States been so alienated from the rest of the world. Why? It's the policy, stupid! Pro-war columnists are wont to attribute the hostility to dark, evil, irrational forces, thus bringing to their diagnosis the full power and sophistication of voodoo medicine. More level-headed observers see the hand of a US leadership trapped in its own delusions, and marrying, against all odds, equal measures of cynicism and naiveté.

Notch this one up in the cynical column. The US has made two new friends: Uzbekistan's Islam Karimov, whose pastime is to boil his opponents to death [19], and Turkmenistan's Saparmurat Niyazov, whose proudest accomplishment is to have renamed the months of the year after himself [20]. Both of these unsavory crackpots are now the beneficiaries of US largesse: the Saddams of tomorrow. Meanwhile, in line with the White House's dismissal of the Geneva Conventions as "quaint," the task of spreading American values in the Arab world landed in the lap of Abu Ghraib Porn & Snuff Film Studios: a temporary commission of lasting consequence. America used to be both hated and feared in the Muslim world. With its aura of invincibility shattered in the plains of Mesopotamia, now it is only hated. Let no one ever say that Bush did not bring a smile to an Arab's face: Osama, today, is crying with joy.

Culture soup for sale

Beethoven and good plumbing are both German, but few have trouble distinguishing between the two. Germany floods the planet with finely engineered machine tools; yet it is the rare auto worker in Detroit who switches on his Siemens auto-feed drilling machine and exclaims: "My, what a fine culture those Germans have!" The world buys German engineering because it's good, not because it's German. Not so with Air Jordans. Watch Nike and Coca-Cola go around the world peddling footwear and sugary water with bubbles as proud emblems of American culture. This conflation of culture, lifestyle, and branding gives Americanization its distinctive flavor. The word could just as well refer to the vibrant hip-hop scene in France, the film-making influence of Martin Scorsese, the architectural impact of Frank Gehry, or the proliferation of MBA programs. But it does not. Not in the popular imagination, anyway.