The Mythical (but Sometimes Real) America Europeans Love to Hate
A regular reading of foreign press shows what an ugly picture of America the Europeans have of us. Hardly a day goes by that European intellectuals and politicians, especially the French, don't hammer away at us.
They view our society as one ruled entirely by money. As far as they are concerned the American preoccupation with money eclipses all other values. Family values are a sham, moral and religious values count for nothing, we have no ethics, we are bereft of any real civic sense – everything is just a commodity to be bought or sold.
“The American jungle” of “savage capitalism” are phrases frequently encountered in the European press and they never tire of pointing out that most Americans are in poverty with armies of hungry, out-of-work, oppressed victims everywhere. There is, according to European journalists, a steadily growing gaggle of unemployed indigents and a shrinking number of rich who grow richer by the day from political spoils merciless merchantism. Europeans delight in painting word pictures of chauffeured limousines that glide silent and indifferent through America's decaying ghettoes and crumbling cities.
Europe and America are different, of course. Europeans have in many ways created benefit-rich cradle-to-grave utopias for common workers. In Germany, for instance, it is so hard to fire an employee that companies are just not hiring, This and some of the other workers' percs are creating serious problems for European economies, such as astronomically high unemployment, large national deficits (in contravention of European Union requirements), and other structural problems. Yet Europeans are horrified by incessant claims from their elites that in American there is no safety net, the unemployed have no benefits, there is no retirement program, and no assistance whatever for the poor. Only the lucky few have medical care and America is an extremely ugly place to grow old.
We have a particularly low educational level here, Europeans are told, because college is available only to those who can pay exorbitant tuitions.
It is “common knowledge” in Europe that violence is everywhere in the United States, we have the highest percentage of criminals in the world, and ineradicable racism causes the ghettos to be in a perpetual state of near anarchy. The political cowardice that keeps guns available to all results in frequent slaughters by teenagers of their teachers and fellow students. The legal system is impotent to do anything about rampaging lawlessness because we are paralyzed by legalism, or because we live in a “lawless jungle,” depending on which pundit happens to be speaking at the moment.
The fact is, we Americans have always been a forgiving lot. We tend to overlook honest errors of perception about us. But the barrage of anti-American disinformation is not based in honest mistakes. It is instead the product of cowardly, dishonest, and illogical attempts to cast America as the villain responsible for Europeans' own failures. Nowhere is this more evident than in France.
The crime rate of mythical proportion that Europeans love to beat up on us about actually dropped dramatically from 1985 to 2000. In New York City, for instance, Mayor Rudy Giuliani cut crime in half in just five years. Whether or not he can claim credit for that achievement is arguable but beside the point. What is to the point is that not only did the Europeans seem oblivious to it, they closed their eyes to their own skyrocketing crime rates and rising disorder. In contrast to the halving of the crime rate in New York City, crime doubled in France in the years between 1985 and 1998. And it is rising now at an even faster rate. About this, until just recently, they have been typically mute.
While Giuliani was in office he was the butt of derision in many French newspapers. They referred to him as “Giussolini” (as in the fascist Italian dictator of WWII, Mussolini). It is interesting that reality has finally forced the French Leftists to admit that for the last 20 years their naive optimism (to put it kindly) led them to be too lenient toward antisocial behavior. But even that admission was accompanied by typical French arrogance. “We do not want to follow the American model,” said the French minister of justice Marylise Lebranchu, as they sheepish implemented many of Giuliani's anti-crime methods. For the French and many other European governments, anti-Americanism is little more than an attempt to cover up their own incompetence and social problems.
It is the European view that America will continue to have problems because we take pride in electing only idiots, morons, and simpletons as presidents. Reference is often made to Truman as the Missouri tie salesman, Carter the peanut farmer, Ronald Reagan the second-rate actor, and that “cretin” George W. Bush. Not only are all our presidents nincompoops, but everyone knows that ours is only a sham democracy. This was made manifest in the 1950s, they say, with the McCarthy era excesses which revealed what the United States' Constitution was really all about.
In France's election of 2002 they were humiliated when a radical populist of the extreme right came in second and forced a runoff election with Jacques Chirac. The public reaction to all of this was characterized by a leading French intellectual, Oliver Duhamel: “We are becoming a degenerate democracy just like the United States..” Others railed that they should be careful not to become “fascist like the United States.”
Where do they get off saying those kinds of things about us? Unless my history books were wrong (not an inconceivable possibility), all of the actual dictatorships and totalitarian regimes have been in Europe and elsewhere, never the United States. (Well, okay, maybe the jury is still out on the administration of American President George W. Bush.)
Nevertheless many Europeans sniff at America which they denigrate as primitive, a country where criminals violently rule the streets. They castigate American literature and film as empty, unoriginal, untalented. Yet in France they have placed legal limits on the percentage of American movies that can be shown, evidently because the French people prefer them to the dismal dreck of French cinema. And the translated works of American authors like Henry James, Faulkner, Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, and Poe continue to be top sellers there.
This confusion about American culture is also manifest in Europe's view of U.S. foreign policy. They – especially the mouthy French – accuse us of being withdrawn isolationists on the one hand, or too unilaterally aggressive on the other, depending upon which view suits their purpose at the moment. To show how wet they are, consider statements by the former French foreign minister Hubert Vedrine. According to him it was America's isolationism that caused us to “base her decisions on her own worldview and on the defense of her own interests.” Well! Ain't that a shame! Frankly, Vedrine's vacuous accusation sounds to me more like an excellent description of the policy of de Gaulle and all of his successors.
I was in Europe in the '60s and it was clear from the European press that their opinion of America even then was unfavorable. The reason at that time to hate America was Vietnam, even though Europe was completely reliant upon the U.S. to protect it from the bear of Soviet imperialism. Anti-Americanism was so bad that I gave up trying to speak French when in France and conversed in German instead. For some reason my accent in German sounded more British so they didn't know I was an American and therefore would speak more freely to me.
There were lots of leftists around and they and the majority of intellectuals tended toward communism. So for them anti-Americanism was rational because they identified us predominantly with capitalism. And of course to any good communist, capitalism is evil. While I did not agree with them, I could understand anti-Americanism vis-a-vis their beliefs about capitalism. But what I could not understand was their irrational, absurd acceptance of the most ridiculous mistruths about America. I encountered some who were convinced that the Indian wars continued in the West, that every American owned a Cadillac, that slavery still existed in parts of the deep South and it was legal to lynch Negroes.
Now, almost half a century later, the virulence of anti-Americanism is unabated. After a few phony condolences following the 9/11 attack on New York City, the attack was characterized as a justifiable retaliation for the evil actions of the United States. This evidently started first in the Third World countries that are completely screwed up by their own inept actions, incompetence, and corruption. A few days 9/11 the European press reflected the view of intellectuals and politicians that America had brought all this on herself. True to form, France was in the forefront of this anti-Americanism.
There was a good deal of illogical blather about “root causes.” After all, wasn't it the behavior of the United States that had driven the terrorists to such destructive acts? Weren't we the ones really responsible for making them do it? We were labeled the aggressor, even though more than 3,000 Americans had been murdered by a rich, powerful, multinational terrorist organization. That is more than we lost at Pearl Harbor in 1941, which brought us into WWII just in the nick of time to save France and the rest of the world from Hitler and the Axis.
For many in Europe the United States remains the enemy. The traditional socialists are joined by Islamists, anti-modern Greens, and others who see the United States as a repressive, unjust, racist society whose problems stem from our democratic capitalism. Their illogical tendency to blame America first for any ill in the world stems in part from simple jealousy of American power. It is useless to point out to them that our current hyperpower status is the consequence of Europe's past and present powerlessness. We have had to step in to fill the void left by European inadequacies and their unwillingness to act.
America's power particularly rankles France who has visions of returning to the glory that was theirs in earlier centuries. Without doing anything to earn it, one might add.
The need for America to pull Europe's chestnuts out of the fire did not end with World War II, as we hoped it would. The Europeans are just too ingenuous when it comes to screwing up their world. We had to take charge of the situation in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Macedonia to solve that problem and were thanked afterward by being called imperialists. By the same intellectuals and politicians who piss themselves in fright whenever we even suggest that we might bring home some of our 71,000 troops currently stationed in Europe.
Then there is southeastern Europe, especially that big asylum called Servia. In an act of sheer insanity by the people of Serbia, they elected Slobodan Milosevic and another accused war criminal to a seat in the Serbian Parliament. The former president of what was left of Yugoslavia, Milosevic is on trial for crimes against humanity. European pundits have suggested that Milosevic's election was an act of pure anti-Americanism. Smart, Serbia, really smart. We did a lot for you, Servia. This is the way you repay us?
By what right, one could ask, does Europe continue to vilify and blame us in the United States while we foot the bill for their defense? A defense they have proved unwilling to pay for themselves? America does this sort of thing all over the world, and we are the only ones who can. We single-handedly saved Mexico from economic collapse in 1995. Several times we have stopped China from invading Taiwan. We are mediating between India and Pakistan on Kashmir. We have kicked the Taliban out of Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein is out of power in Iraq. And it looks like there may be a chance of successfully reunifying the two Koreas under a democratic regime.
By contrast, the only thing the European Union has done is send a delegation headed by the Swedish prime minister to grovel before Kim Jong Il, that mad leader of one of the largest totalitarian jails on the planet known as North Korea. It is downright embarrassing to see the way Euro-weenies like to pretend that every leader in the world is really a nice guy just waiting for someone to dialogue with. That is both morally and intellectually wrong and the only way the European Left can absolve themselves is to scapegoat America. They made us out to be the single greatest threat to democracy all during the Cold War, even though it was obvious that that title easily belonged to the USSR and China. (Of course, since George W. Bush was appointed President, America has indeed become the number one threat. Perhaps this is a manifestation of self-fulfilling prophecy.)
A similar dynamic seems to be at play in the war on terror.
It is always an eye-opener for us Americans to realize just how little slack the rest of the world is willing to cut us. An example is the censorship issue following the World Trade Center attack on 9/11 (September 11, 2001, in case you happened to be on another planet at the time). The Arab television network Al-Jazeera and CNN of the US were airing a gloating statement by Osama bin Laden in which he cheered the death of thousands in New York and called for more massacres. According to American and European terror experts it was likely that the video contained coded messages to bin Laden agents relating to future terrorist attacks. Therefore the US administration and Congress requested that such messages not be broadcast.
The caution was legitimate and should have been viewed that way. But it wasn't, not in the rest of the world, and certainly not in Europe where the press went giddy with claims that America was engaging in censorship, suppressing freedom of the press, and generally trampling on the First Amendment. As usual, the French Le Monde led the over-heated pack on October 3 with the breathless headline, “Propaganda Rages in the American Media.”
All that cheese and wine must have a deleterious effect on the human memory because the French seem so easily to have forgotten the strident censorship imposed by the French government during the Algerian War. They could and frequently did confiscate from newspapers and other media anything that might, in the government's terms, “undermine the army's morale.”
And let us not forget the hordes of Muslims who, living in countries that had never known even the faintest whiff of journalistic freedom, felt competent to hold forth as experts on the subject of freedom in tirades against the only country in the world that has never known any serious censorship of the press.
Europeans have now reached a point at which they casually accuse us of fascism. This about a country that has never in its history had a dictator. (Okay, we were getting close with George W. Bush before his rabid-right administration, and its actions, began coming unraveled.) Such accusations are rather tinny when they come from a place like Europe where they have busily produced some of the most egregious examples of dictatorship and inhumane pogroms over the last couple of centuries.
Speaking of pogroms and terror, it is the Islamists (who think themselves divine) who don't mind slaughtering thousands of innocent people in the name of Allah. Like the massacres of Christians in Sudan and Nigeria who rejected that perfect example of twelfth century thinking, the Muslim law of sharia. I'm not aware that the incessantly chattering French intellectuals have had anything to say about that. (Blather-inflated European intellectuals, especially French ones, are like cops, never around when you need them.)
Another tactic often employed by Euro-weenies is the principle of false equivalence. Use of this principle is a tactic that appeals to those who find themselves in one of two circumstances: either they lack the intestinal fortitude to actually make a decision about what is right and confront what is wrong, or they are on the wrong side of an argument they cannot logically win and lack the intellectual honesty to change.
The principle of false equivalence is a form of injustice and I suppose it particularly pisses me off because it has spread to America, especially among third-rate American journalists (which includes far too many of them).
An example of this occurred with the promotion of George W. Bush's second tax cut. Karl Rove (the real evil genius behind the Bush administration) was able, with great effort, to come up with 13 (mostly relatively unknown) economists who, in a Rose Garden press conference, extolled the economics of Bush's tax cut. The next day, Democrats easily assembled four hundred economists, which included ten Nobel Prize winners, who did not support Bush's plan.
Are you with me? Bush scrounges up 13 guys who, as James Carville says, “are probably only supporting the plan because John Ashcroft has pictures of them in compromising positions, and Democrats show up with four hundred economists who actually did their homework in college.” It is important to remember that the Nobel Prize winning economists numbered zero in support of Bush, ten against.
So how did the American press present this? One headline says it all: ECONOMISTS DIVIDED OVER BUSH PLAN. (See James Carville, Had Enough? page 126.) The principle of misplaced equivalence writ large.
A version of this principle was evident in the huge anti-war demonstrations around the world in October of 2001. One of the most frequently seen banners said, “No to Terrorism. No to War.” One European reporter (yes, there are some good ones) pointed out that this was about as intelligent as: “No to Illness. No to Medicine.”
Why is it so easy for so many to forget that on 9/11 it all started in New York, not Kabul. It was in America that thousands of civilians' lives were lost, not Afghanistan. Obviously there are many European humanitarians who believe that civilian casualties are acceptable so long as they are American.
How can these Europeans claim intellectual integrity when they ignore the fact that for over 20 years, beginning in 1980, America was the primary source of humanitarian aid to Afghanistan? That more than 80 percent of World Food Program aid was paid for by us?
Like I said, the rest of the world is unwilling to cut us any slack. Part of that stems from the collapse of the USSR, leaving us the only superpower. Power always breeds resentment, not only in Europe but in the Islamic countries of the Middle East and North Africa where we are incorrectly (mostly) blamed for the existence of Israel.
But whether it is Israel, falling agricultural prices in France, AIDS in Africa, or global warming, it is easier to blame the United States than to accept responsibility for one's own actions. And it is the prevailing mass anti-American hysteria and hatred that prompts fanatics to compensate for their failures by inflicting carnage on the innocent.
It is ironic that some of the wealthiest countries in the world are Muslim, starting with Saudi Arabia, which is known to finance al-Qaeda and other Islamic terrorist organizations. It is religious fanaticism, not poverty, that fosters Islamic terrorism. There is no way that terrorism could improve the lot of backward societies. In fact, Islamists feverishly reject anything that might improve their world: intellectual freedom, critical thinking, acceptance of other cultures, democracy, or equality for women.
The ability to think critically is the most significant absence in the current, prevailing Islamist mentality. Educated (if you could call it that) in madrassas where the only subject is the Muslim religion, they clumsily try to justify their terrorism with the claim that America has long been hostile to Islam. That is, as we used to say back on the farm, pure, unadulterated bullshit!
We in American have been far more tolerant of Muslims than, say, Britain, France, or Russia. They have conquered Muslim countries (American never did that prior to 9/11), and have in fact been pushing Muslim countries around for centuries. And it was in France recently, not in America, that the wearing of headscarves as a religious symbol was banned in French schools. We have certainly never done anything like that, and we have shed our own blood to defend Muslim minorities in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Somalia. We even went to bat for them in Macedonia. And we sure as hell didn't have to pull Kuwait's chestnuts out of the fire during the first Gulf War.
Still they call us the great Satan, despise us, blame us for even being on the soil of Islamist countries. Especially galling is the idea of a moderate and tolerant Islam. That is sheer myth. In truth they believe that the whole world must obey the rules of their religion. On the other hand they have no respect for the religions of others. Even showing such respect would make them apostates which, in that great enlightened bastion of Islamic dogma, would earn them execution.
The Pope supported the placement of a mosque in Rome; no Christian church will ever be built in Mecca. Or anywhere else in Saudi Arabia, for that matter. No one is welcome, either in an Islamic country or anywhere on the face of the planet, who refuses to embrace Islam. The rest of us are infidels in their eyes and we fool ourselves if we think we can negotiate with Muslim fanatics. And unfortunately the more moderate Muslims are keeping mum, refusing to condemn their brethren, and that makes them guilty of terrorism, too.
In France there was dancing in the streets by Muslims following 9/11. Al-Misri, a spokesman for British Muslims, called the attacks on the World Trade Center “legitimate acts of self-defense.” Signs with slogans like, “Islam will Dominate the World” were seen in British demonstrations in October 2001.
And it did not take long for the anti-American Europeans and others around the world to get back into their habits of demonizing the United States. What they don't seem to understand is that criticizing everything we do, on every occasion, regardless of whether we are right or not, only motivates us to disregard them even more. If you are going to blame us for everything, and always take the now-predictable anti-American position no mater what, then we won't bother to consult with you at all.
The pictures of alleged torture at Abu Ghraib, the U.S. military prison in Iraq, elicited a chorus of demands from Europeans and Arabs for an apology. This was accompanied by, once again, the how-dare-you-be-such-barbarians litany of press editorials. But when, in a supreme act of wanton barbarity, Islamists in Iraq beheaded an innocent American civilian, Nicholas Berg, we expected a real hue and cry from around the world, but we heard nothing. Let me tell you something about that thundering silence, folks: it will not be forgotten!
Although it has sometimes seemed like everyone in the world was against us, until recently anti-Americanism was confined to a small section of the elite of Europe (and, of course, the entire Islamic world). They are the Lefties and Euro-weenies who presume to speak for the larger population but who actually do not.
Now, however, there seems to be a deeper distrust and dislike of America seeping down to the lower levels of the European populations. This has been brought about by George W. Bush and his administration's reckless policy of pre-emptive war. (Just how wrong headed this policy has been is the topic of another, or several other, articles.)
So far, it seems, the antipathy of the rest of the world is confined to our government, not the American people in general. One can only hope that the current administration will suffer a resounding defeat in the coming elections in November (2004) and America can once again take the high road. Only when that happens can we get back to business as usual with the ant-America crowd in Europe and elsewhere. Which is to say, them whimpering in the gray distance while we dismiss them for the ignorant patsies they are.
© 2004 Charles E. Henderson, Ph.D.