Jonathan Tepperman: Anti-Anti-Americanism (NYT Book Review)
Jonathan Tepperman, in he NYT (12-12-04):
WITHIN months of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, the global surge of sympathy for the United States began to ebb. Before the invasion of Iraq, London's Sunday Times reported that equal numbers of Britons ranked Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush as the top threat to world peace. In France, a book claiming that Washington itself had sponsored the 9/11 attacks became a huge best seller, and in Germany a full 20 percent of the population endorsed this view.
Three years and two wars later, attitudes toward America have hardened still further. A worldwide poll taken last March found that the United States' favorability ratings have fallen to critical levels, dropping precipitously in most West European countries and to 5 percent in Jordan. Meanwhile, in October, a columnist in The Guardian mused on the coming presidential election, ''John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr. -- where are you now?''
When a columnist for a leading newspaper of a leading American ally seems openly to call for the assassination of a sitting president (the day after the election, Britain's Daily Mirror ran the headline, ''How Can 59,054,087 People Be So Dumb?''), it's time to start worrying.
Of late, a whole shelf of books has been published attempting to explain why people hate America so much. These works fall roughly into two categories: left-wing attacks on the United States, and attacks from the right on those who attack it. Think of the first group as the anti-Americans, and the second as the anti-anti-Americans. Just about all these two factions can agree on is that anti-Americanism, in one form or another, is almost as old as the country itself -- and that it has recently grown a lot worse.
Consider first the views of the antis. Americans -- as the Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier recently suggested in his inventive but maddening movie ''Dogville'' -- are, by turns, materialistic, ignorant, rapacious and brutal. Arundhati Roy, the Indian author of one good novel and many peevish essays, complains in her strident broadside, ''An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire,'' that the United States suffers from a ''self-destructive impulse toward supremacy, stranglehold, global hegemony'' and is led by a genocidal coward who manipulates a craven press to do his bidding.
In less hysterical terms, the Washington-based British scholar Anatol Lieven laments (in his well-written and well-researched ''America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism'') that Americans are excessively religious and nationalistic; worse, they seem determined to inflict their Old Testament values on the rest of the world. It's the ''self-congratulatory guff'' of this civilizational mission (in the words of Will Hutton, another British writer and the author of the cranky ''Declaration of Interdependence: Why America Should Join the World'') that drives many of the anti-Americans around the bend; if only the United States would act more like other countries -- especially those in kinder, gentler, more cosmopolitan Europe, Hutton says -- much of the resentment would dissipate.
There is something to such arguments, at least the more moderate ones. It's not hard to see why the puritanical moralism of the United States and its vigorous pursuit of self-interest rubs both secular Europeans and impoverished Muslims the wrong way.
The problem with the anti-Americans' complaints, however, is that they are often undermined by bad faith. Some of the critics have never even bothered to visit the United States. And even those who have (like Hutton) or who live here (like Lieven) frequently sound as though they haven't and don't. When Hutton fulminates that national democracy in the United States has descended to the level of ''pre-Enlightenment Europe,'' it becomes hard to take the rest of his charges seriously. And Lieven undermines his otherwise lucid writing when he insists that there is little tolerance for dissent in American public discourse. Has he not seen ''Fahrenheit 9/11'' or visited a newsstand lately? The venom and inaccuracy of such charges suggest that the anti-Americans are motivated by something more basic than disagreements over policy or the personality of a particular president.
Also disturbing is the way many of these writers emphasize America's relationship with Israel. There's nothing wrong with complaining about Washington's strategy in the Middle East; reasonable people can disagree. But one should be skeptical of a writer like Lieven who refers to the pro-Israel lobby as having an ''iron grip'' on Washington or who labels a contemporary pro-Israeli Lebanese-American writer an ''Arab Josephus'' -- a comparison (to Flavius Josephus, the Hellenized Jewish historian of the ancient world often known for his cowardice and treachery) that manages to combine several layers of racial condescension in two words. Such language is not new; anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism have run together at least since the 1930's, when French writers denounced the avaricious United States as ''Uncle Shylock.'' But the modern anti-Americans would serve themselves better by taking care to untangle the two.
Enter the anti-antis, who seize on these faults to mount a spirited counteroffensive. Three new books lead the charge: ''Hating America,'' a richly detailed if pedestrian chronicle of anti-Americanism through the ages by Barry and Judith Colp Rubin (two conservative Middle East experts); ''Understanding Anti-Americanism: Its Origins and Impact at Home and Abroad,'' a collection of polemical essays examining the phenomenon around the world, edited and introduced by Paul Hollander (a professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Massachusetts and himself the author of a book entitled ''Anti-Americanism''); and, the most idiosyncratic of the three, the wildly discursive and undisciplined ''Anti-Americanism,'' by Jean-Francois Revel, a rare pro-American member of the French Establishment, who fills in the picture from Paris.
The three books are united by rage at America's enemies -- with a venom that mirrors the anti-Americans' own. In none of them, however, has the excess of spleen produced clarity, fair-mindedness or nuance.
The anti-antis reject their opposites' claim that the problem with America is its behavior or its president. Instead, they argue, America-bashing derives from more fundamental sources: the resentment of once-great societies eclipsed by Yankee upstarts, and of those unable to participate in America's bounty. As Revel writes, much of European ''anti-Americanism stems fundamentally from our continent's loss during the 20th century of its 600-year leadership role''; Bernard Lewis, writing about the Arab world, has made virtually the same claim. In Revel's terms, ''the principal function of anti-Americanism has always been, and still is, to discredit liberalism by discrediting its supreme incarnation,'' an argument that echoes President Bush's line that ''so long as we hold dear to our freedoms, the enemy will hate us, because they hate freedom.'' Or as Hollander puts it, ''The deepest and broadest source of anti-Americanism . . . is the aversion to (or, at best, ambivalence about) modernity, which the United States most strikingly represents.'' Add to this a few other ingredients -- ''a romantic as well as Marxist anti-capitalism . . . the personal and cultural problems peculiar to intellectuals; the specter of standardization and homogenization associated with the spread of American mass culture'' -- and the picture starts to seem complete.