Fashionable anti-Americanism

Open Democracy has some thoughts on anti-Americanism.

So let’s rework this: anti-Americanism that breeds terrorism and tyranny is a major problem for us all and one the United States of America must fully address; anti-Americanism that doesn’t result in suicide missions is not America’s problem, it’s the problem of its moron perpetrators – though it benefits nobody good. Non-Americans that find comfort in blaming America for all the world’s ills – poverty, war, environmental destruction, the death of high culture, their own pitiful inadequacies – suffer for such fatuous bunkum. Their own houses rot as they drone on at dinner parties and terrorist camps about American “crimes against humanity”. The rhetoric of Osama bin Laden is curiously similar to that of Harold Pinter (though notably less profane). Pinter, I hazard a guess, is less dangerous.

They are all morons, but the difference is that America can and should ignore the dinner guests. They pose no threat. Especially not an intellectual one. The philosophy of “damn you if you do, damn you if you don’t” is not worthy of serious contemplation. Insularly isolationist or intensely imperial, America is castigated for both, often by the same people. This is what’s technically known as a no-win situation. “The illogicality at base consists in reproaching the United States for some shortcoming, and then for its opposite,” writes Jean-Francois Revel in his aptly-titled Anti-Americanism . “Here is a convincing sign that we are in the presence, not of rational analysis, but of obsession.”

Many of those who say America does not live up to its own ideals and rhetoric would surely be the first to protest if it did. If America invades and “liberates” Iraq, they say, it should also invade and liberate North Korea, Burma, China, Zimbabwe, etcetera. I’d love to see their reaction if America took up the challenge. Yes, America talks a good game – but this should be celebrated, and, yes, held to account. As it stands, though, whether the “indispensable nation”, the “universal country”, the “last, best hope”, the “shining city upon a hill”, the “global policeman”, the “lone superduperpower”, the “empire in denial” or Jefferson’s “empire of liberty”, the US plays the traditional lead role of the world’s whipping-boy. We might suppose this is inevitable. C’est le prix du pouvoir (as Jacques Chirac might put it).

Read the whole thing.
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