el_profe
1st March 2004, 16:51
Anti-Americanism: An Introduction
by Jean Francois Revel (February 27, 2004)
Summary: The principal function of anti-Americanism has always been, and still is, to discredit liberalism by discrediting its supreme incarnation.
[www.CapitalismMagazine.com]
An excerpt from Anti-Americanism by Jean Francois Revel.
From 1953 to 1969, living in Italy and then in France, I had watched and formed my opinion about the United States through the filter of the European press, which means that my judgment was unfavorable. Europeans at that time saw America as the land of McCarthyism and the execution of the Rosenbergs (who were innocent, we believed), of racism and the Korean War and a stranglehold on Europe itself—the “American occupation of France,” as Simone de Beauvoir and the Communists used to say. And then Vietnam became the principal reason to hate America.
Since the end of the Cold War—with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the liberation of Eastern Europe, and the realignment of a polarized world—it is often said that today’s anti-Americanism derives from the fact that the United States is now the “hyperpower,” a term made fashionable by Hubert Védrine, a French minister of foreign affairs. This interpretation assumes that American hegemony was previously easier to justify, first because it dominated fewer nations and second because it answered to the need to protect against Soviet imperialism. But this doesn’t reflect reality: anti-Americanism was almost as virulent during the period of threatening totalitarianism as it has been after that threat disappeared (in its Soviet version, at least).
Within some democratic countries, a subset of the population, some political parties and the majority of intellectuals, were prone to adhere to Communism, or at least support similar ideas. For this crowd, anti-Americanism was rational, since America was identified 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, and their careful spurning of accurate knowledge of the Communist systems. An irrational anti-Americanism, with a blind rejection of factual and verifiable information about America and its antidemocratic enemies, was even more paradoxical among those sectors of Western opinion—the majority, in fact—who feared and rejected Communism. (At the beginning of the twenty-first century, they are rising above the former prejudice.) On the other hand, the ant-Americanism of the Right and even the extreme Right, as blindly passionate as the Left’s though with a different rationale, is characteristically a French phenomenon.
The European Right’s anti-Americanism stems fundamentally from our continent’s loss during the twentieth century of its six-hundred-year leadership role. Europe had been the powerhouse of enterprise and industry, innovator in arts and sciences, maker of empires—in practical terms, master of the planet. It was sometimes one European country, sometimes another, that took the lead in this process of globalization avant la lettre, but all more or less participated, either in concert or by turns. Today, by contrast, not only has Europe lost the ability to act alone on a global scale, but it is compelled in some degree to follow in the footsteps of the United States and lend support. It is in France that this loss—real or imaginary—of great-power status engenders the most bitterness. As for the anti-Americanism of the extreme Right, it is fueled by the same hatred for democracy and the liberal economy that goads the extreme Left.
As the sixties unfolded, I had begun to be invaded by doubts as to the validity of this reflexive anti-Americanism, which indiscriminately condemned America’s “imperialistic” foreign policy—Soviet imperialism, in contrast, was but philanthropy—and American society. When I traveled to America in the early winter of 1969 to research Without Marx or Jesus, I was astonished by evidence that everything Europeans were saying about the U.S. was false. Over the course of a few weeks I went from the East Coast to the West Coast, with a stay in Chicago along the way. Rather than a conformist society, what I found was one in the throes of political, social and cultural upheaval.
I cut it short cause its a bit long, but you can continue to read part of the indtroduciton here: http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=3498
Its an intersting read, if anyone actually reads the whole thing i would like to hear opinions.
This is a great paragrpah from the introduction:
Or again, however astonishing it may seem half a century later, Soviet propaganda, thanks to its echo chamber in the free but credulous world, succeeded for years in persuading millions of people that it was South Korea that had attacked North Korea in 1950 and not the reverse. Picasso himself signed on to the swindle when he painted Massacre in Korea, which depicts a squad of American soldiers opening fire on a group of women and naked children—thereby demonstrating that artistic genius need not be incompatible with moral ignominy. (The massacres could only have been perpetrated by Americans, of course, since it was well known that any acts that might jeopardize human life were deeply distasteful to Joe Stalin and Kim Il Sung.) Let me mention also for the record the farcical allegation of bacteriological warfare waged by Americans in Korea, a lie made up on the spot by a Soviet agent, the Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett. The astonishing thing is not that it was cooked up, but that even outside Communist circles it could gain a certain credibility—and this in countries where the press is free and it is easy to crosscheck data. The mystery of anti-Americanism is not the disinformation—reliable information on the United States has always been easy to obtain—but people’s willingness to be disinformed.
Anti-Americanism increased tenfold by 1969 as a result of the war in Vietnam. But Europeans, and above all the French, with remarkable unfairness forgot or pretended to forget that the war was a direct offshoot of European colonial expansion in general, and of the French Indochina War in particular. Because France in her blindness had refused to decolonize after 1945; because she had rashly become involved in a distant and protracted war in the course of which she had, moreover, frequently pleaded for and sometimes obtained American help; because France, humiliatingly routed at the battle of Dien Bien Phu, was forced in 1954 to sign the disastrous Geneva Accords, handing over the northern half of Vietnam to a Communist regime that promptly violated the agreements: it was thus unquestionably only after a long series of political blunders and military setbacks on the part of France and the French that the United States was induced to intervene.
This is another great paragraph it says what i have been saying all along all the anti-america commies hate America because it intervens in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, but they get so mad when the USa does not interven in Haiti or in some other conflict that the america-haters want the USA to intervene in.: :lol: :lol:
As an hors d’oeuvre, let me offer a particularly flagrant manifestation of this mentality, on display as I write these lines in September 2001. Until May of 2001, and for some years now, the main grievance against the United States was formulated in terms of the hyperpower’s “unilateralism,” its arrogant assumption that it could meddle everywhere and be the “policeman of the world.” Then, over the summer of 2001, it became apparent that the administration of George W. Bush was less inclined than its predecessors to impose itself as universal lifesaver in one crisis after another—especially in the Middle East, where the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians was heating up alarmingly. From then on the reproof mutated into that of “isolationism”: a powerful country failing in its duties and, with monstrous egocentricity, looking only to its own national interests. With wonderful illogicality, the same spiteful bad temper inspired both indictments, though of course they were diametrically opposed.
by Jean Francois Revel (February 27, 2004)
Summary: The principal function of anti-Americanism has always been, and still is, to discredit liberalism by discrediting its supreme incarnation.
[www.CapitalismMagazine.com]
An excerpt from Anti-Americanism by Jean Francois Revel.
From 1953 to 1969, living in Italy and then in France, I had watched and formed my opinion about the United States through the filter of the European press, which means that my judgment was unfavorable. Europeans at that time saw America as the land of McCarthyism and the execution of the Rosenbergs (who were innocent, we believed), of racism and the Korean War and a stranglehold on Europe itself—the “American occupation of France,” as Simone de Beauvoir and the Communists used to say. And then Vietnam became the principal reason to hate America.
Since the end of the Cold War—with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the liberation of Eastern Europe, and the realignment of a polarized world—it is often said that today’s anti-Americanism derives from the fact that the United States is now the “hyperpower,” a term made fashionable by Hubert Védrine, a French minister of foreign affairs. This interpretation assumes that American hegemony was previously easier to justify, first because it dominated fewer nations and second because it answered to the need to protect against Soviet imperialism. But this doesn’t reflect reality: anti-Americanism was almost as virulent during the period of threatening totalitarianism as it has been after that threat disappeared (in its Soviet version, at least).
Within some democratic countries, a subset of the population, some political parties and the majority of intellectuals, were prone to adhere to Communism, or at least support similar ideas. For this crowd, anti-Americanism was rational, since America was identified 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, and their careful spurning of accurate knowledge of the Communist systems. An irrational anti-Americanism, with a blind rejection of factual and verifiable information about America and its antidemocratic enemies, was even more paradoxical among those sectors of Western opinion—the majority, in fact—who feared and rejected Communism. (At the beginning of the twenty-first century, they are rising above the former prejudice.) On the other hand, the ant-Americanism of the Right and even the extreme Right, as blindly passionate as the Left’s though with a different rationale, is characteristically a French phenomenon.
The European Right’s anti-Americanism stems fundamentally from our continent’s loss during the twentieth century of its six-hundred-year leadership role. Europe had been the powerhouse of enterprise and industry, innovator in arts and sciences, maker of empires—in practical terms, master of the planet. It was sometimes one European country, sometimes another, that took the lead in this process of globalization avant la lettre, but all more or less participated, either in concert or by turns. Today, by contrast, not only has Europe lost the ability to act alone on a global scale, but it is compelled in some degree to follow in the footsteps of the United States and lend support. It is in France that this loss—real or imaginary—of great-power status engenders the most bitterness. As for the anti-Americanism of the extreme Right, it is fueled by the same hatred for democracy and the liberal economy that goads the extreme Left.
As the sixties unfolded, I had begun to be invaded by doubts as to the validity of this reflexive anti-Americanism, which indiscriminately condemned America’s “imperialistic” foreign policy—Soviet imperialism, in contrast, was but philanthropy—and American society. When I traveled to America in the early winter of 1969 to research Without Marx or Jesus, I was astonished by evidence that everything Europeans were saying about the U.S. was false. Over the course of a few weeks I went from the East Coast to the West Coast, with a stay in Chicago along the way. Rather than a conformist society, what I found was one in the throes of political, social and cultural upheaval.
I cut it short cause its a bit long, but you can continue to read part of the indtroduciton here: http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=3498
Its an intersting read, if anyone actually reads the whole thing i would like to hear opinions.
This is a great paragrpah from the introduction:
Or again, however astonishing it may seem half a century later, Soviet propaganda, thanks to its echo chamber in the free but credulous world, succeeded for years in persuading millions of people that it was South Korea that had attacked North Korea in 1950 and not the reverse. Picasso himself signed on to the swindle when he painted Massacre in Korea, which depicts a squad of American soldiers opening fire on a group of women and naked children—thereby demonstrating that artistic genius need not be incompatible with moral ignominy. (The massacres could only have been perpetrated by Americans, of course, since it was well known that any acts that might jeopardize human life were deeply distasteful to Joe Stalin and Kim Il Sung.) Let me mention also for the record the farcical allegation of bacteriological warfare waged by Americans in Korea, a lie made up on the spot by a Soviet agent, the Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett. The astonishing thing is not that it was cooked up, but that even outside Communist circles it could gain a certain credibility—and this in countries where the press is free and it is easy to crosscheck data. The mystery of anti-Americanism is not the disinformation—reliable information on the United States has always been easy to obtain—but people’s willingness to be disinformed.
Anti-Americanism increased tenfold by 1969 as a result of the war in Vietnam. But Europeans, and above all the French, with remarkable unfairness forgot or pretended to forget that the war was a direct offshoot of European colonial expansion in general, and of the French Indochina War in particular. Because France in her blindness had refused to decolonize after 1945; because she had rashly become involved in a distant and protracted war in the course of which she had, moreover, frequently pleaded for and sometimes obtained American help; because France, humiliatingly routed at the battle of Dien Bien Phu, was forced in 1954 to sign the disastrous Geneva Accords, handing over the northern half of Vietnam to a Communist regime that promptly violated the agreements: it was thus unquestionably only after a long series of political blunders and military setbacks on the part of France and the French that the United States was induced to intervene.
This is another great paragraph it says what i have been saying all along all the anti-america commies hate America because it intervens in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, but they get so mad when the USa does not interven in Haiti or in some other conflict that the america-haters want the USA to intervene in.: :lol: :lol:
As an hors d’oeuvre, let me offer a particularly flagrant manifestation of this mentality, on display as I write these lines in September 2001. Until May of 2001, and for some years now, the main grievance against the United States was formulated in terms of the hyperpower’s “unilateralism,” its arrogant assumption that it could meddle everywhere and be the “policeman of the world.” Then, over the summer of 2001, it became apparent that the administration of George W. Bush was less inclined than its predecessors to impose itself as universal lifesaver in one crisis after another—especially in the Middle East, where the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians was heating up alarmingly. From then on the reproof mutated into that of “isolationism”: a powerful country failing in its duties and, with monstrous egocentricity, looking only to its own national interests. With wonderful illogicality, the same spiteful bad temper inspired both indictments, though of course they were diametrically opposed.