Hating America: A History

by Barry Rubin

  Here were several of contemporary anti-Americanism's basic themes. Any support for the United States was subservience, a complaint that combined hurt national pride and a partisan opposition effort to score points against one's own government for doing so. Using the crudest stereotypes of the United States, critics claimed that America was an irrational state lusting for war and world dominance.

  Clearly, the problem here is not just the Iraq War, regardless of how much that specific event inspired expressions of anti-Americanism or seemed to provide proof of its claims, or even the personality of George W. Bush. These attitudes were caught up in traditional views of America, the struggle to maintain one's own national identity, the left's search for some new political doctrine, the snobbishness of an elite that hated mass culture, fear of American power, and many other factors.

  Of course, America had its defenders, in part inspired by the extremism of the critical barrage and not necessarily because of support for the Iraq war. The Italian writer Oriana Fallaci celebrated American impudence, courage, optimism, geniality, and integrity:

  I compliment the respect [the American] has for common people and for the wretched, the ugly, the despised. I envy the infinite patience with which he bears the offenses and the slander. I praise the marvelous dignity and even humility with which he faces his incomparable success, I mean the fact that in only two centuries he has become the absolute winner.... And I never forget that [if the United States] hadn't ... defeated Hitler today I would speak German. Had he not held back the Soviet Union, today I would speak Russian.97

  The British journalist Gavin Esler added that the caricatures of America had exceeded all bounds. He questioned whether there were many Americans who matched the image of fat and lazy, gun-obsessed people who are loud and arrogant and who seek to dominate the world. Observing the daily fare of the British media, Esler pointed out, "Americans are the only people for whom it is acceptable to have negative stereotypes, modern-day Nazis with cowboy boots instead of jackboots." It was a no-win situation for the United States, since if Americans "do nothing about the world's problems ... they are ignorant and isolationist, selfish and gutless," while if they do try to act, "they are arrogant and naive, greedy and bullying."98

  Even in France, there were those who defended the United States. The leading French intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy recorded that whatever one thinks of any specific mistaken policy,

  America does not threaten peace in the world. Peace in the world is threatened by North Korea, Usama bin Ladin, by the Pakistani jihadist groups and maybe its secret services, by the terrorist organizations financed by Saudi Arabia. No, you can't say America threatens the peace of the world without a certain hatred that makes you completely blind and deaf to reality...

  Certainly, America has its faults and has committed its share of tragic errors. But that is not the issue.... Anti-American sentiment we see today, not only in Europe but in the world at large, hates not what is bad in America but what is good.... What they hate is democracy. They hate sexual freedom and the rights of women. They hate tolerance. They hate the separation of religion and state. They hate modernity.99

  What contemporary anti-Americanism really represented, he concluded, was the structuring passion for "the worst perversities of our time," including the contemporary manifestations of fascism, communism, and Islamism.

  Indeed, for two centuries anti-Americanism had always represented something more than merely a critique of the United States, a specific political position in opposition to what that country was seen as representing. At times, the focus might be on a specific policy or feature of American society that might well be worth criticizing.

  Yet there were also long-term themes that were merely applied, often without serious examination, to some current situation. Such an approach might involve an assault on real or purported American values, exaggerated or inaccurate stereotypes about the United States itself, or distortions about the facts or motives regarding U.S. policies. There was also the factor of self-interest on the part of the anti-Americans themselves, who used the doctrine as a weapon to promote the interests of a group, party, or state.

  Despite the effect of contemporary personalities and issues that heightened it still further, the upsurge of anti-Americanism following the end of the Cold War and enhanced by September a was a natural continuation-a fulfillment, as it were-of a trend that can be traced back two centuries.

  AN EXPLICABLE UNPOPULARITY

  Even Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Russian writer who had his own withering and angry criticisms of American society, noted in 1978 how hurtful and apparently inexplicable anti-Americanism could seem. "The United States has shown itself to be the most magnanimous, the most generous country in the world.... And what do we hear in reply? Reproaches, curses. American cultural centers are burned, and the representatives of the Third World [are eager] to vote against the United States."2

  In general, there have been two distinct American responses to this supposedly paradoxical hatred of America. Most commonly, there is a sense of anger and annoyance coupled with curiosity. How could people be so antagonistic to a country of such decent intentions and frequent successes? How can the good side of America at home and the positive things it has done internationally be so ignored? This must arise from hostility to America's basic values such as democracy, free enterprise, and liberty.

  The alternative view is that the hatred is deserved, a result of bad American policies. For this group, the criticisms are generally accurate, though perhaps exaggerated. Indeed, much of the ammunition for contemporary anti-Americanism-so clearly visible in European bookstores and publications-comes from the statements and writings of U.S. citizens who dislike many aspects of their own country.

  Consequently, the debate over anti-Americanism's meaning and what to do about it has been structured between these two conceptions. In the former case, the response has been to fight (with words or other means) those who attack America while trying to explain the country's case better. The contrary position is that changing U.S. policies will inevitably dissipate antagonism. While both arguments have many valid things to say, this values-versus-policy debate is ultimately sterile, simultaneously marked by extreme partisanship and the omission of far too many factors that better explain anti-Americanism.

  Neither school of thought pays serious attention to the structural and political uses of anti-Americanism or to its historical development. The United States has been hated neither solely because of its nature nor due to its deeds. To begin with, both American policy and values must be interpreted by others. Why do some put the most negative possible light on these things? In other words, anti-Americans may deride policies and values in ways that so distort them as to transform both into made-up stereotypes and monsters. The opposition, then, is not to the American values and policies that actually exist but to the stupid or evil things they appear as in these caricatures.

  If the problem is American policies, then why has anti-Americanism been so continuous over time, repeating the same false claims in dramatically different circumstances? If the problem is American values, then why is it that those supporting relatively similar values, notably in Europe, are often the most hostile? The story of anti-Americanism recounted in this book raises many other points, showing that neither of these two largely ahistorical approaches accounts for the facts.

  If there is any central factor explaining the power, durability, and multiple variations of anti-Americanism, it is one that has existed going back to the birth of the United States and even earlier: America has always been perceived as a unique society that provides a potential role model for others and is a likely candidate to be the globe's dominant force in political, economic, social, and cultural terms.

  Were this not true, anti-Americanism would have been unnecessary or at least thoroughly unimportant. If the United States was just another country, one's attitude toward it mattered little and that nation required no special attention. But
if America represented a different way of life and a system that might prove the basis for the world's future, that was a matter of the greatest importance that demanded the most intense scrutiny and passion.

  There were three ways that anti-Americans thought the United States would become the main force to shape human civilization and how others lived; these go back as far as 1750, long before the word "globalization" was ever invented:

  First, the United States would seem so attractive to foreign observers due to its innovations and success that others would copy it.

  Second, American culture, technology, products, and ideas would spread actively throughout the world so as to become everywhere pervasive.

  Third, U.S. military and economic power would dominate other countries directly, an idea that was strongly in evidence in anti-American thinking before the United States had much influence on the international scene.

  Despite the differing emphases of various individuals, movements, and countries, these three factors were virtually always present. By the twentyfirst century, they seemed omnipresent. The long-held prophecy of America's centrality to the world's future seemed to be coming true. On this point, the European and Middle East perspectives are surprisingly close. In 2004, the percentage of those believing that the United States sent forces into Iraq in order to dominate the world was 53 percent in France, 47 percent in Germany, 55 percent in Pakistan, 6o percent in Morocco, and 61 percent in Jordan.3

  Only this belief in the idea that America presented a unique threefold threat to the world can explain why anti-Americanism became a consistently important idea in history when there was never any coherent doctrine of anti-Britishism, anti-Frenchism, anti-Russianism, or anti Germanism. These other countries had actively sought global hegemony, aggressively exported their cultures, built empires, started wars, and killed people around the planet. Yet no one felt the need to write thousands of books and articles to try to decipher their inner nature as a unique phenomenon. No political movements developed for which antagonism to these individual states was a central principle. No bodies of thought or ideologies were required to prove why one of these specific nations embodied a dangerous or perverted nature.4

  In contrast, through the decades, as new schools of thought and issues succeeded one another, political leaders, cultural figures, and intellectuals had to adopt a view of America in line with their principles and consistent with what they wanted to do in their own countries. These groups then tried to persuade a wider audience to endorse their negative view of what America was offering and their own program for doing better than that.

  Many other issues, of course, were also involved, though they often revolved around this central proposition. But anti-Americanism has been at its height when and where it was a useful political tool wielded by those whose interests were different or antagonistic to those of the United States. Thus, anti-American doctrine has historically been most powerful when sponsored by dictatorial regimes-Communist, fascist, Arab nationalist, and Islamist alike-which not only have a more or less rigorous state control of ideas and institutions but also are dominated by an ideology that saw itself as an alternative and rival to what the United States did and represented.

  One problem for the school that says that anti-Americanism is merely a response to policy is that the attributes of American society and U.S. policy were often distorted-frequently, willfully so-out of all relationship to reality. Ignorance and honest misunderstanding were part of this picture but so was the deliberate manipulation of antagonistic groups pursuing their own interests.

  Such an approach allowed these ruling elites in ideologically based dictatorships to deny that their country's real main enemy was their own governments. Instead, they were able to incite their people demagogically to support the regime in a supposed life-and-death struggle with U.S. imperialism. They argued that underdevelopment was not a result of their own mistakes or policies, nor was any major domestic change needed. Once the heavy hand of American imperialism was removed, rapid progress would be easy. In the meantime, anyone advocating liberal reforms, democracy, or human rights could be accused of acting as U.S. agents and subverting the nation's self-defense.

  Anti-Americanism, then, is often a reflection on the nature of antiAmericans themselves-their worldview, deeds, and goals. They, not the United States, are often seekers of world conquest, apologists for dictatorship, distorters of truth, haters of the other, enemies of freedom, those holding onto privilege in their own societies, and defenders of a cultural elitism that serves their interests.

  If one views the United States as irredeemably hostile and evil, anything it does will simply be interpreted within that context. Specific U.S. policies, whatever objection to them existed on their own merits, were merely symptoms of that country's aggressive intent, growing power, difference from one's own nation's worldview, and inferior nature.

  In the late 1940s, Sayyid Qutb, a key architect of Islamism and Middle Eastern anti-Americanism, wrote of a U.S. intention to destroy Islam through spiritual and cultural colonialism. Any appearance to the contrary was merely intended to confuse Muslims about "the true nature of the struggle" and to extinguish "the flame of belief in their hearts.... The Believers must not be deceived, and must understand that this is a trick."5 A half-century later, in justifying the September ii attacks, the Saudi cleric Hammoud al-'Uqla al-Shu'aybi explained, "America is an [infidel] state that is totally against Islam and Muslims."6

  The determination to find in America what is inferior and disliked is one revealing sign of anti-Americanism. It came into play whenever a given U.S. policy, for whatever reasons, became controversial. For example, did Europeans or Arabs oppose the United States over war with Iraq because they believed the action was an attempt to steal oil, enslave Muslims, and take over the world? Or did they think that America simply misunderstood the best manner to deal with the challenges presented by Saddam Hussein's regime and there were better ways to do so? These were both arguments against the war in Iraq, but the first is antiAmerican and the second is not.

  But just as the policy-oriented school of explaining anti-Americanism has its problems, so does the values-determinant one. After all, the question remains why certain specific aspects of America are selected for disdain even by those who support a given concept-say, democracyin general.

  The dictatorships that sponsor anti-Americanism may hold values far from those of the United States, but the democracies of Western Europe are not so different from American society in many ways. Are, for example, French values really so profoundly different from those of the United States? Certainly, the basic concepts of democracy were often questioned in the nineteenth century, but this has not been true for a long time in Western societies at least.

  The answer is found in the specific ways, often details, in which American characteristics represent unwelcome potential trends for other countries. Anti-Americanism arose, then, because even when characteristic American practices or institutions were shared by others, the United States was accused of going too far or in the wrong direction. It was the uniquely American adaptations of common Western ways that drew antagonism. In this sense, the United States is not hated because it is democratic but because American democracy is said to be too extreme or lacking the balance of a properly sophisticated elite. America is not reviled due to its "free-enterprise" economy but from a conviction that it has a dictatorial and soulless system with a culture considered to be junkridden and anti-intellectual. These claims may be wrong or right, exaggerated or distorted, but the aspects of America most often defined as negative are those the complainant wants to avoid in his own country.

  Another part of the answer is that the main critique against America reflects an overall distaste for the general direction of societal evolution over the last two centuries. The key aspects include an unchecked democracy with the less educated masses having too much power, the loss of authority by the intellectual and cultural elite, workers made conservativ
e by material privileges, the male/female balance out of whack, too rapid change and too little respect for tradition, a propensity to violence, an obsession with gadgets, a domination of machinery and technology, plus much more. As a result, in the contemporary world, modernization, globalization, industrialization, and Westernization are often just used as alternate names for Americanization.

  At the same time, the real or supposed features of the critique can vary widely, sometimes even coming from opposite directions. As an American journalist put it:

  Fanatical Muslims despise America because it's all lapdancing and gay porn; the secular Europeans despise America because it's all born-again Christians hung up on abortion.... America is also too isolationist, except when it's too imperialist. And even its imperialism is too vulgar and arriviste to appeal to real imperialists. ... To the mullahs, America is the Great Satan, a wily seducer; to the Gaullists, America is the Great Cretin, a culture so self-evidently moronic that only stump-toothed inbred Appalachian lardbutts could possibly fall for it.... Too Christian, too Godless, too isolationist, too imperialist, too seductive, too cretinous.7

  This is no exaggeration. Polls show, for example, that to secular Europeans, America is a religious country (78 percent of the French in one survey), while to Muslims, America is an atheistic land (only io percent of Jordanians thought it religious)." The bottom line for one determined to be anti-American is that whatever you don't like, that is what the United States represents.