Hating America: A History

by Barry Rubin

  Similarly, the authors concluded in orthodox Marxist fashion that while American technology and industry produce "ideal things which make life easier, social conditions do not let the American earn enough money to buy these things."27 There is much talk about other mainstays of the anti-American social critique: the horrors of commercialism, advertising everywhere, and the sale of products that consumers might not really need.

  Yet despite the negative attributes of advertising that produced consumer demand, the production of a wide range of consumer goods did provide workers with the money to buy things. This was a central aspect of American success that Marxists mistakenly ignored because it contradicted their idea that the workers would be inevitably impoverished. Advertising might be annoying and demeaning, but it also paid the bills for those on the automobile assembly lines. Only people who already had the basic necessities of life could think of buying frivolous things.

  The American political system also had to be thoroughly discredited. It was not enough to please their masters for Ilf and Petrov to writewhatever they personally believed, of course, is another matter in all these cases-that American democracy was a sham. They had to insist that the system required its people be constrained and unhappy. Americans might be fooled into thinking they had a right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness, "but the possibility of actually enjoying [these things] is exceedingly dubious. This right is in too dangerous proximity with the money vaults of Wall Street."28

  Ilf and Petrov predicted that America would soon collapse. It was "capable of feeding a billion people, but cannot feed its own population. ... It has everything needed to create a peaceful life for its people, yet ... the entire population is in a state of unrest." The end was, no doubt, near.29

  During World War II, when the United States was the Soviet Union's ally and main supplier of aid, it was the USSR, however, that was in danger of collapse and badly in need of all the American productivity it had earlier ridiculed. Even then, though, the theme of Soviet propaganda was still anti-American, stressing the need to remember that America was not a real friend and there should be no gratitude for its help. In 1942, Stalin reminded his subjects that no Soviet citizen should ever forget that America was a capitalist country, and thus hostile and decadent 30

  As would be so often true at other places and times, the basis of antiAmericanism in the USSR was not a hurt or outraged response to U.S. policy but an attempt to benefit the sponsoring regime or movement. Not only did anti-Americanism mobilize the people around their own dictators but it also discouraged them from seeing the very American achievements they might want to emulate at home. As Winston Churchill so wisely said in March 1949, the "Kremlin fears the friendship of the West more than its enmity."''

  Once the Cold War began, of course, these themes of suspicion and hostility were greatly simplified. The USSR, the Communists, and their supporters insisted that one bloc led by the USSR represented everything good, and the other headed by the United States promoted everything bad. As so often happened, the only world power in history that did not seek global conquest was the one most often accused of that sin. Nevertheless, this claim about America's ambitions was accepted by many Western and Third World intellectuals. Even such productive and wellintentioned policies as the post-World War II rebuilding and democratic reform of Europe and Japan were portrayed as a cynical attempt to turn those countries into colonies. This was at the same time that the USSR was unleashing a reign of terror and demanding total subservience in Eastern Europe, where it was the dominant power.

  In somewhat modified form, other anti-Americans simply put the two sides on an equal basis, accepting Soviet claims about the United States without necessarily liking the USSR. A good example of this was a letter written by the British philosopher Bertrand Russell to an American acquaintance in 1956 in the midst of the Cold War: "Mankind is divided into two classes: those who object to infringements to civil liberties in Russia, but not in the United States; and those who object to them in the United States, but not in Russia.... The fundamental fallacy ... is this: "A and B hate each other, therefore one is good and the other is bad." From the evidence of history, it seems much more likely that both are bad."32

  Alongside the Soviet Union's anti-American condemnations regarding U.S. foreign policy was its offensive against American culture, whose rising influence seemed to threaten bringing global political influence in its wake. It was the first battle in what would decades later become the struggle over "globalization."

  The Soviet state and the many parties, front groups, cultural organizations, and intellectuals that it controlled or influenced went on the offensive beginning in 1947 to block the advance of American culture. The effort had so much appeal to many European intellectuals because it blended perfectly with the older ideas they held regarding American culture as alien, inferior, and mass-oriented. An endless stream of Communist-influenced articles, speeches, and resolutions warned against the subversive onslaught, which in the USSR itself extended to the dangers of American capitalist architecture, jazz, and ballroom dancing.33 In 1947, Soviet artists were mobilized for the most systematically coordinated anti-American campaign in history.

  At times of more "normal" hostility, Soviet propaganda would sometimes distinguish between "progressive" and "reactionary" aspects of American culture, while at times of extreme hostility-as in the early Cold War years-all American writers, including non-Communist leftists, were seen as evil. If the socialist Upton Sinclair was merely a man without honor and the independent leftist John Dos Passos a renegade, Thornton Wilder was an outright fascist and John Steinbeck a Wall Street lackey.34

  In an article, charmingly entitled, "Dealers in Spiritual Poison," the USSR's greatest film director, Serge Eisenstein, wrote that while he liked Americans personally, their movies-like Going My Way and Anna and the King of Siam-made attractive the poison of indifference and the delusions of class harmony in a sugar coating of patriotism, sentimentality, and humor, a sure proof that bourgeois culture was opium for the masses 35

  Of course, Eisenstein's own analysis requires analysis. Eisenstein had directed great films, but his own talent had been stymied by Stalin and the system he had to uphold if he was to survive. Hollywood has been accused of many sins, but executing directors or sending them to forced labor camps is not one of them. In addition, of course, he selected films that could be portrayed as mere froth. But even Hollywood could send worthwhile messages. Going My Way was a moving rendition of the spiritual comforts of religion and a plea for tolerance toward Catholics in a largely Protestant America, while the story of the tutor for the Thai king's children might have caricatured Third World cultures but also taught respect for them and the belief that they could achieve progress.

  Such products of American mass culture can be easily ridiculed-and far sillier examples are easily found. From the point of view of Soviet or Western European critics, however, even songs and dances transmitted American culture that, in turn, carried a set of values and attitudes toward life deemed objectionable. Moreover, the popularity of such products with the masses was the very point that made these books, films, or songs so dangerous politically and so horrifying for people who, despite their leftist ideologies, were elitist and patriotic on cultural issues.

  In general, then, the USSR portrayed American culture as a tool for world conquest. Thus, Soviet Music magazine warned that the American music industry not only was dominated by greedy capitalists (which was true) but also culturally deprived its listeners (which was arguable). "All attempts to engulf the world with the scanty products of the venal American muse are nothing but frontier ideological expansion of American imperialism, propaganda for reactionary-obscurantist misanthropic ideas," it maintained .16

  The powerful international appeal of American culture made it the equivalent of the atomic bomb as a Cold War asset for gaining influence and winning admiration. Its power was enhanced by the fact that, unlike the atomic bomb, Soviet scientists could no
t discover-or steal-the secrets of duplicating it. After all, it was much easier to find rhymes for "love" than it was for "tractor."

  Rather than compete with far less attractive alternative cultural products, the USSR focused on warning about the American ones. In fulfilling the regime's orders during this 1940s campaign, Konstantin Simonov wrote a play, The Russian Question, which was later made into a film. The story is about two naive Soviet scientists, who are devoted to humanism and international scientific cooperation. American spies who pretend to have similar values steal their medical breakthroughs and sell them to a large company for a big profit. When the Soviet scientists go on trial, one recants and is forgiven by Stalin, and the other refuses and is only punished by losing his job.37

  Soviet writers over the following decades were urged to produce similar works. Viktor Konetskii, in his 1977 novel about Soviet sailors, shows them repelled by America's "polluted environment" and domination by the Mafia. In a revival of the degeneracy theory, even American trees are dirty and shabby. The author was so enthusiastic that he described the German luxury car Mercedes-Benz as a cheap, poorly built Americanmade auto.38

  Analyses of American literature were also used to serve this purpose. In a 1980 meeting of the Union of Soviet Writers, for example, the literary critic Leonid Novichenko appealed to his colleagues to combat professionally "American imperialism's aggressive militaristic designs."39 One of many such studies concluded that Mario Puzo's novel about the Mafia, The Godfather, showed that this criminal organization was just imitating other U.S. institutions, a form of fascism backed by the country's government. A Soviet critic concluded that American novels proved that the United States "is directed at the suppression and subjugation of the individual to the interests of the state [and] the anti-human interests of business and profits."40

  Occasionally, as Soviet Communism lost its self-confidence in the post-Stalin era, the picture of the United States was sometimes tempered-at least inside the ruling elite-by admissions of American success. After his 1959 visit to the United States, Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev told a top-level meeting of the Communist Party Central Committee, "In America, communism has already been built. There everyone lives well. Everyone has his home, car, bank savings, etc." Subsequently, Khrushchev insisted on including the famous slogan "Catch up to and surpass America" in the 1961 party program 41

  In its international propaganda, however, there was no change from the 1930s up to the time when the Soviet Union collapsed. The Soviets perfected, for example, the art of systematic anti-American propaganda based on disinformation. An item of Western origin (perhaps planted originally by Soviet agents, inaccurately quoted, or from a marginal source) would provide "credible" evidence of some American misdeed. The United States was blamed for every dastardly act, and the motives for its policies were portrayed as devious or disreputable.42

  The United States was said to be escalating the arms race, provoking conflict, introducing sinister new weapons, forcing allies to buy expensive weapons, using foreign aid as blackmail to gain concessions, and spread ing lies about the USSR. It was constantly accused of interfering against progressive movements or subverting other countries.43 There were, of course, times when these charges were true. But whatever wrongs the United States committed were greatly multiplied, deepened, and portrayed as more deliberate, while any good actions were ignored or distorted.

  Whole fleets of completely false allegations were continually launched. One series of Soviet articles, "Bosses without masks," depicted America as controlled by money-hungry billionaires who engineered the assassination of President John Kennedy.44 Other campaigns charged that the AIDS disease was developed by the Pentagon as a "killer virus ... in order to obtain military superiority. "41

  The United States was portrayed in the Cold War's last decade as being as ugly in its policies at home as it was abroad. It was a vicious, exploitative society whose main features included high unemployment, racial discrimination, abject poverty and excessive wealth, demoralization and material deprivation among the poor, unaffordable education and health care, rampant crime, antisocial behavior involving drugs and pornography, mistreatment of workers, large numbers of political prisoners, and no real democracy. To discourage defections, Soviet emigrants there were portrayed as miserable and unsuccessful, a tactic identical to that employed by Prussia two centuries earlier to reduce emigration or by Dostoyevsky a century before to defend the czarist regime.46

  Despite its overlay of Marxist rhetoric-full of talk about "imperialism" and "capitalism"-the themes and complaints of official Soviet antiAmericanism continued to be quite close to that purveyed by far more conservative Europeans. For example, it was often claimed, as one antiAmerican book put it, "The important thing in America is money, regardless of how it was come by."47 Despite fitting the Communist view of "capitalist" society, this statement reflects the consensus nineteenthcentury anti-American view as well.

  Geopolitical competition between the United States and the USSR, largely fictional in earlier years but quite real during the Cold War, brought criticism of many specific American policies in the world, yet that sense of rivalry had also been a common theme in British, French, and German anti-American writings for decades.

  The main difference between the USSR's version of anti-Americanism and earlier anti-Americanism elsewhere was that the Soviet variety was officially dictated, not just the individual attempts of people to express themselves or inform fellow citizens. Moreover, these works had to be purely anti-American. Unlike in Western Europe, they could not be balanced by other, favorable accounts or even by minor positive statements within a largely critical work. Another distinction is that Soviet antiAmericanism was a product manufactured for export to convince people in other countries to believe negative things about the United States in order to further the Soviet regime's interests.

  The goal, as a U.S. government study put it, was to show the United States as a "doomed, decadent, inherently evil society opposing all progressive change ... to persuade others that it is not a model for their own countries."48 This denial of the United States as being a good example for other countries was the oldest anti-American theme of all.

  Of course, this propaganda ran up against a largely favorable view of the United States among many Europeans, especially the masses. Ironically, a great deal of positive sentiment and the diminution of anti-Americanism during the Cold War was due to the fact that Europeans saw the United States as defending them from the USSR's aggression and an unpleasant future living in a Soviet-style state. Occasionally, even Soviet propaganda admitted that most people believed living standards were higher in the United States. As one book written at the height of state-sponsored Soviet anti-Americanism put it: "The common conception of American life among Europeans [is a belief] that in the United States everyone lives in a state of economic security and confidence of the future [and] that American youth grows up carefree and happy."49

  It is easy to laugh at the extremes of Communist propaganda about the United States or view it as totally ineffective. Nevertheless, it did have a tremendous agenda-setting influence on the European and Third World left, which meant a large proportion of the intellectual and cultural elite that shapes other people's views. The main claims made by the Soviets, though also featured in earlier European anti-Americanismthat America was seeking global political and cultural domination and that America was responsible for many global problems-became far more widely accepted around the world a decade after the USSR's collapse. This was the Soviet Union's posthumous revenge on the Cold War's victor. Obviously, U.S. foreign actions and domestic situations contributed to this perception, but it was the way these events were inter preted and distorted that broadened hostility from specific complaints to a more general condemnation of the United States.

  Another important feature of Soviet anti-Americanism was that it showed how useful a tool this was for a regime or for an opposition seeking to gain power. Anti-Americanism
was a demagogic gold mine for mobilizing people behind a nationalist dictator or revolutionary cause. As a result, anti-Americanism was transformed from a matter of largely intellectual interest into being one of the world's most important political tactics.

  Fascism made a parallel, though less important, contribution to all these aspects of anti-Americanism. It, too, sought to offer Europe an alternative future to the "American" one feared by so many. Despite a greater emphasis on racism and anti-Semitism, the Nazis and their sympathizers drew many of their ideas from past European aristocratic and romantic anti-Americanism. For example, German fascist antiAmericanism focused on the usual claims that America was characterized by excessive materialism, a low cultural level, soullessness, degenerate pragmatism, and excessive power for women. In short, America represented everything negative in "modern" life and, even worse, was seeking to remake the world in its own dreadful image.

  While fascist ideology in its explicit form was mostly discredited after 1945 and never had the global reach of its Soviet rival, it would be wrong to underestimate its lasting impact. Equally, despite fascism's special features and ultimate defeat, its ideas about America-even if on no other issue-would also be echoed in the later views of many in Europe and the Middle East who seem to be of a totally different political hue.

  Although racialist thinking was common in nineteenth-century Europe, the originator of this doctrine as a systematic ideology was the Frenchman Arthur de Gobineau, who lived from 1816 to 1882. He applied this idea to the United States in his Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races. Originally, Gobineau wrote, Anglo-Saxon Aryans had controlled America, but the admission of so many immigrants, who Gobineau called "a mixed assortment of the most degenerate races of olden-day Europe," had destroyed the country. Among these inferior peoples, he included the Irish, Italians, and-ironically-lower-class Germans. "It is quite unimaginable that anything could result from such horrible confusion but an incoherent juxtaposition of the most decadent kinds of people."50