Hating America: A History

by Barry Rubin

  The remaining Communists, of course, never changed their view and now even sounded close to the Slavophiles on this issue. The Americans, warned Communist leader Genady Zyuganov in 1996, "are trying to impose on us a style of behavior that does not fit in our character and our uniqueness." But these basic ideas were held far more broadly. Much of the media and even the government began to churn out a systematically anti-American message, including constant accusations of U.S. subversion against Russia.53

  Very specific local factors are also at work in Greece, which provides a good example of how a mixture of historically "good" and "bad" American actions created hostility toward the United States. In the 1940s, the United States helped Greece defeat a Soviet-backed leftist insurgency. The United States was generally popular thereafter, though not among leftists, for having saved Greek sovereignty. But U.S. support for the 1967-1974 right-wing junta made it unpopular in many quarters, especially-ironically-after the United States refused to back an ill-conceived nationalist plot to seize Cyprus. Once the junta was overthrown, the ruling leftist PASOK party-led by a politician who had lived in the United States for many years and was married to an American-promoted antiAmericanism. In the 199os, a new issue arose as the United States opposed Yugoslavia, a traditional Greek ally, over its dictatorship's brutal campaign against the Kosovo Muslims.

  In the long run, then, Greeks were angry at two American actions that supported the Greek right against the left along with two others that opposed Greek nationalism. In the first category was the U.S. effort to stop a Communist takeover and later to support a military dictatorship in Greece, while the latter included a policy of blocking covert Greek aggression against Cyprus and to prevent massacres of Muslims in Kosovo. Thus, anti-Americanism was promoted by both ends of the Greek political spectrum but merged in a generalized patriotic hostility.

  By the post-Cold War 199os, the main Greek anti-American antagonism was Kosovo, and the main target of Greek anger was President Bill Clinton. Among the epithets flung at Clinton in the mainstream Greek media were criminal, pervert, murderer, imposter, bloodthirsty, gangster, slayer, naive, criminal, butcher, stupid, killer, foolish, unscrupulous, disgraceful, dishonest, and rascal. One writer claimed, "Clinton is a miserable little Hitler that Adolph himself would not have made him even deputy commander of an army camp, because [Clinton] is stupid."54

  This barrage of hatred was directed at Clinton's imminent visit to Greece in November 1999. A broad coalition of leftists declared this "representative of American imperialist policy" unwelcome because he would "contaminate the sanctified ... soil of our motherland." Clinton was "a murderer of people, ideals, values, beauty and life," who aspired to be "the lord of the planet." Despite Clinton's apology for past U.S. backing for the junta, violent demonstrations erupted against his visit.-"

  The upsurge of anti-Americanism in the 199os was strong in the Middle East and well under way in Europe before President George W. Bush took office in January 2001, before the terror attacks of September ii, 2001, happened, and before his administration began to talk about attacking Iraq during 2002. Bush's policies certainly further fed foreign suspicions of America-his rejection of a strong international court and environmental agreements, for example-and his personality and how it was perceived played a big role in setting the negative attitude toward him and intensifying it against America.

  Many Americans who didn't vote for Bush also regarded him with disdain, but it would be hard to invent a person more likely than Bush to further inflame already rising anti-Americanism in Europe. Aside from any of his actual policies, he fit many of the main historic negative stereotypes that Europeans and others held about the United States. For a start, he came from Texas, the purported land of the cowboy and death penalty, and had a drawl, which played into European prejudices about cowboys and violent, ignorant, impulsive frontiersmen.

  Definitely not an intellectual and hardly erudite or articulate, Bush appeared in every way a European intellectual's worst nightmare. As a conservative, Bush grated on the left-leaning sensibilities of these same people. Yet, ironically, it was his rejection of a traditionally conservative, realpolitik foreign policy that convinced his European critics that he was a virulent nationalist embarked on a drive for world conquest.

  Whatever its basis in reality, the European image of Bush was drawn and exaggerated from the historical litany of anti-American charges. He was said to be an "ignorant, self-righteous Christian warrior," "smirking executioner," and "Toxic Texan." In this context, European intellectuals thought Bush to be a dangerous fool and madman. His professed religiosity was still another negative that fit the European stereotype of Americans as religious fanatics. And Bush's "just folks" manner was a feature of anti-American derision toward U.S. politicians going back to the early nineteenth century. He also came into office at a time when some Europeans were ready to view the United States as a threat replacing the USSR, and thus some found that "today's Washington has a whiff of Soviet ways; suffocating internal discipline, resentment of even reasoned, moderate opposition, and a refusal to admit even the tiniest error."56

  But even before Bush had a chance to do anything, he was already classified in a hostile manner. When Bush was elected, a Le Monde headline called him the "global village idiot."57 The mass-circulation British newspaper the Daily Mirror, which played up Bush's role as governor in a state that frequently used the death penalty, asked, "Do we really want a man like him making snap decisions on whether to drop bombs or go to war? Do we really like the idea of his finger on the big trigger? No, we don't." Bush, it continued, "is a thoroughly dangerous, unpleasant piece of work who shouldn't be let anywhere near the White House."58

  Yet, ironically, it was his rejection of a traditionally conservative, realpolitik foreign policy that most convinced his European critics that he was a virulent nationalist embarked on a drive for world conquest. Bush's policies, from his early stance on agreements concerning an international court and environmental agreements to the Iraq war seemed to be flaunting and using his nation's power in a way that disregarded European viewpoints. It could be made to appear that this was at last the U.S. drive to world rule so long predicted by anti-Americans and which could be made to seem both logical and possible now that the United States was the world's sole superpower. Of course, this did not mean U.S. policies were necessarily wrong, they were also defined both by events-especially September a-and a lack of European cooperation on key issues as well.

  There was, however, another man more accurately described as a wildeyed extremist ready to use any form of violence to further his own plan for world conquest, Usama bin Ladin. The attacks of September 11, 2001, simultaneously unleashed a wave of pro-American sympathy and antiAmericanism in Europe and everywhere else around the world.

  To put it bluntly, many people, and not just in the Middle East, liked the terrorist assault. Some delighted at the blow against America because it was so evil, and hoped that this was the start of some new form of global revolution. Others, in their voyeuristic revenge, were happy that America was suffering because it was so powerful. Indeed, one hallmark of the anti-American reaction to September a was that it almost always came from people reacting against alleged injuries to others, very few of those who most felt and expressed hatred had suffered directly due to the United States.

  An international poll of opinion makers worldwide two months after September ii found that more than half of those outside the United States agreed that American policies in the world were a major cause of the attacks, and two-thirds agreed with the idea that it was "good that Americans now know what it's like to be vulnerable."59 And, of course, there were also voices within the United States that said the same thing.

  The attitude of either rejoicing in or rationalizing the September 11 attack was an especially powerful one in France. In Paris, right-wingers in the National Front Party drank champagne and cheered while watching the World Trade Center crash down. Elsewhere in that city, some
leftists in the audience heckled a call by Communist Party national secretary Robert Hue for three minutes of silence in memory of the vic- tims.60 Such attitudes were reflected, albeit with more elegance, at the highest levels of the French intellectual and cultural establishment. Prime Minister Lionel Jospin hinted that there was some merited punishment in the attacks.61

  Any such criticism was quite hypocritical, since bin Ladin would have been arguably more "justified" in destroying the Eiffel Tower as revenge for France's energetic backing of Algeria's military regime, a far more active intervention against Islamist rebels than any American involvement in such internal Arab battles. On such matters, there was a European double standard in judging America. No Europeans suggested that their own past colonialism or current interventions proved their societies had an evil character.

  Ironically, the most famous French pro-American statement about September ii demonstrated the broad extent of anti-American hostility in the country. A Le Monde editorial of September 12, by publisher JeanMarie Colombiani, was entitled, "Nous Sommes Tous Americains" (We Are All Americans). In the article he asked, "Indeed, just as in the gravest moments of our own history, how can we not feel profound solidarity with those people, that country, the United States, to whom we are so close and to whom we owe our freedom, and therefore our solidarity?"62 It provoked criticism by many in France as being too sympathetic toward the United States.

  But even in this article, Colombiani suggested that the United States itself created bin Ladin. A few months later, he wrote a book, Tons Americains? Le monde apres le ii Septembre 2001 (Are We All Americans? The World After September ii, 2001), questioning his own earlier thesis and unleashing the usual range of caricatures and charges, many of which had aged far longer than the finest French wines. For him, the United States was a country that violates all the world's laws, glories in the death penalty, and treats its own minorities in a racist fashion. What especially galls him is his vision of America as a fundamentalist Christian state, which is no better than fundamentalist Muslim ones. For him, September 11 clearly changed nothing and taught him nothing.

  The same could be said for Jean Baudrillard, who wrote on November 3, 2001, in Le Monde that the perpetrators of September i1 had acted out his and "all the world['s] without exception" dream of destroying "a power that has become hegemonic.... It is they who acted, but we who wanted the deed."63 Others, like the respected philosopher Jacques Derrida, found September 11 to be a "symptom" of globalization, which itself was an American sin. 64

  Yet such ideas arose from a European view of the United States with no connection to the actual motives of those involved in the attacks. Bin Ladin and his men were not acting as they did to fight globalization but to promote a radical Islamist revolution as a way of forcing their own brand of globalization on the world by force.

  If there was anything further needed to prove the mad eagerness of many to blame September ii on the United States and to create a European ideology justifying an anti-American jihad, it was provided by one Thierry Meyssan, a member of the far-right French lunatic fringe. Meyssan wrote a book entitled L'Effroyable Imposture (The Horrifying Fraud), which claimed that September 11 was in fact a propaganda stunt by American intelligence agencies and the military-industrial complex to justify military intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq.

  This book became a gigantic commercial success in France and other European countries, with Meyssan also being lionized in the Arab world. But even while few in the West-the Arab world was a different storybelieved that the United States faked the attacks, Meyssan's idea that September ii was a mere excuse for advancing the American goal of world domination was widely accepted by anti-Americans in Europe.

  Still, what could be more shocking than the fact that German polls showed that 20 percent of the population-rising to 33 percent among those below the age of thirty-believed the U.S. government might have sponsored the attacks on itself?65 In April 2002, only 48 percent of Germans considered the United States a guarantor of world peace compared with 62 percent who did so in 1993. Meanwhile, 47 percent considered the U.S. war on terrorism as aggressive, with only 34 percent seeing it as justified.66

  The following year, The CIA and September ii, published by a reputable German company and written by former minister of research and technology Andreas von Bulow, suggested that U.S. and Israeli intelligence blew up the World Trade Center from the inside, with the planes being a mere distraction. The motive was an American conservative plot to take over the world. The book was also soon on the best-seller list, as were left-wing American writings that made similar accusations. In June 2003, a German government-run television station broadcast a documentary challenging the American version of September ii. In cover stories with titles like "Blood for Oil" and "Warriors of God," the German newsweekly Der Spiegel described U.S. policy as a conspiracy to control the world fomented and led by the oil industry or Christian right-wingers.67 Not to be outdone, a Stern magazine cover showed an American missile piercing the heart of a dove of peace.68

  While less widespread than in France, partly because leftist intellectuals have less influence there, or Germany, parallel themes were developed in Britain after September ii. Chelsea Clinton, daughter of the former president who was working on her master's degree there, wrote, "Every day at some point I encounter some sort of anti-American feeling."69

  That she felt this way is not surprising when scholars of the caliber of Mary Beard-a Cambridge University academic specializing in the classics, not contemporary affairs-explained, "The United States had it coming.... World bullies, even if their heart is in the right place, will in the end pay the price. "70 Anatole Kaletsky, chief economic correspondent for the Times, claimed, "The greatest danger to America's dominant position today is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is the arrogance of American power. "71

  Mary Kaldor, a professor at London School of Economics, came close to Meyssan's position: "It could be argued that if September ii had not happened, the American military-industrial complex might have had to invent it. Indeed, what happened on September ii could have come out of what seemed to be the wild fantasies of `asymmetric threats' that were developed by American strategic analysts as they sought a new military role for the United States after the end of the Cold War."72

  Mainstream politicians were also driven to crackpot extremes. Member of parliament and former environmental minister Michael Meacher insisted that the September ii attacks were definitely known about in advance by the U.S. government and possibly even planned by America. The U.S. goal was to use this as an excuse to seek to dominate space and cyberspace, overthrow China and Iran, and permanently occupy the Persian Gulf region to secure the globe's oil fields. It was nothing short of "a blueprint for U.S. world domination" using the "bogus cover" of a "so-called `war on terrorism.' "73

  The flavor of such thought can also be gleaned by an extended quotation from Guardian columnist Charlotte Raven, who explained:

  The United States might benefit from an insight into what it feels like to be knocked to your knees by a faceless power deaf to everything but the logic of its own crazed agenda. There's nothing shameful about this position. It is perfectly possible to condemn the terrorist action and dislike the US just as much as you did before....

  If anti-Americanism has been seized, temporarily, by forces that have done dreadful things in its name, there is no reason for its adherents to retreat from its basic precepts. America is the same country it was before September ii. If you didn't like it then, there's no reason why you should have to pretend to now. All those who see its suffering as a kind of absolution should remember how little we've seen that would support this reading. A bully with a bloody nose is still a bully and, weeping apart, everything the US body politic has done in the week since the attacks has confirmed its essential character.74

  In other words, anti-Americanism was too important to leave in the hands of the terrorists. It should return to the control of those responsible
people who recognized that the United States was evil but were not themselves seeking to seize the globe on behalf of radical Islamism.

  Such people were clearly not going to allow the United States to prove itself not guilty of these charges. The supposed proof that the United States was an imperialist aggressor, well before any debate began about a war with Iraq, was that it retaliated against those directly responsible for the attack. Every action in self-defense was taken as proof of their assertions, despite the dignified and determinedly antihysterical American reaction to the September ii attacks, which included a strong rejection of prejudice against any people or religion-as, of course, the critics were doing to the United States-which actually disproved them.

  As for the record of bullying, the United States at this point had spent more than the previous dozen years encouraging democracy in Latin America and a longer period without coercive intervention there. The same point applied to Asia and Africa, where the main U.S. effort was involved in humanitarian missions as in Somalia. In the Middle East, the main evidence for supposed U.S. bullying would have been its leadership of an international coalition against Iraq's aggression in 1991. It had expended extraordinary energy to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict through compromise. In Europe, its involvements had largely been those of leading a multinational effort to protect groups-and Muslim ones at thatin Bosnia and Kosovo.

  Raven condemns the United States for offering its own view of the events as proof that it is allegedly guilty of an imperialist attempt to "control meaning," and she is angry because the United States wanted to go "into a war [against terrorism] that doesn't exist."75 Yet it had been bin Ladin, and his ally the Afghan government, which had declared war on the United States. Before September ii, far from being a bullying state, the United States had done little to respond to that assault. And if no such war existed, what in fact had happened on September ii? Indeed, the true war that did not exist was that purportedly being waged by the United States against the rest of humanity, the phony war of an alleged American drive for world domination.