Posted on 01/10/2006 6:48:48 AM PST by dukeman
Revel is one Frenchman I respect.
You are mostly spot-on but I must disagree with your last point. They do know what Customer Service means, only to them it is like an oxymoron. When you are the customer you are an A-hole because you distract them from more important things like worrying about health care and holidays. And they know how to service their back side.
Or a Prefecture of Imperial Japan.
Europeans don't hate Americans. They just think they and their socialism is better than our government. Our press has maligned our industry and government so much that the Europeans just buy it. After all, that is all they get from our papers.
They don't questions posed to them like: Health Care costs so much more in Europe than in America, why isn't European health care better than Americas? Why are taxes in Europe so much higher than in America?
They don't like those kinds of questions because it would undermine their comfy "Cradle to the Grave" socialism and the freedoms they don't have.
When Politicians start talking about having taxes like in Europe - Shout out "You mean like 80% taxation"! When they start in on wonderful European Healthcare - "You mean someone else chooses my doctor and I can wait until I croak for care!".
IMO France and many other EU countries hate us because we're not even close to being as socialist as they are, and we're thriving because of it. Europe ~ Lose the communist/socialist mentality, I bet you'll like what comes out of it.
Never discount the primary fact that many people hate other people simply because they are different...or are perceived as being different. Xenophobia is a global phenomenon. That and the fact that nobody likes Number One and you have the genesis of much of the anti-American sentiment. A third ingredient in the toxic anti-Yankee stew is the Marxist mindset of many of the most rabid haters. The religion of Marxism died and they hate that capitalism killed it. We exemplify capitalism. So all this virulent hatred is not hard to understand.
"What's the main difference between a Russian and an American? An American passionately and with all his soul loves his country and his people, and is offended when any foreigner doesn't share his feelings. A Russian in the same way, with his whole soul hates his country and his people, but gets very offended when some foreigner shares his feelings..."
Actually, doesn't this describe the difference between the blue-staters and the red-staters? The liberals have the same feelings about their country as the Russians do about theirs.
Now, Now, Now.....you know full well that the 'person' you indicate as having been American born is spawn of the Devil which does not qualify as being 'American-born'.
"The United States is far from perfect, Revel acknowledges. Nevertheless, he suggests that any criticisms should be directed at real problems, and should not take the form of irrational rantings."The Left, in America and Europe, is irrational--this is the biggest problem that rational, honest, and intelligent people have in dealing with it--and therefore its arguments are reduced to nothing more than irrational rantings.
"...the European Left enjoys its fantasy of America as 'the worst society that ever was.'"Yes, and this dangerous "cartoonish fantasy" is also cherished by the American Left.
This is why the American Left is so virulently anti-American and why it serves so willingly as a fifth column for America's enemies.
And this is why the American Left has found it so easy to form an unholy alliance with fanatical, anti-American Muslims.
So delusional are these people--and so virulent is their hatred of the United States--that they prefer a future dominated by the shariah and virulent Islamic fundamentalism to the continued existence of the United States.
"Europeans' voluntary blindness...renders any American attempts at dialogue fruitless"Yes. And the voluntary blindness of the American Left renders fruitless any attempts at dialogue, by the truthful, intelligent, benevolent, and rational.
The American Left, like the European Left, is lost in a dangerous, destructive anti-American delusion, and this has made the United States--like Europe--dangerously vulnerable to enemies of liberty and democracy, notably radical Islamic fundamentalists.
"Something sick lies at the heart of Western civilization. The democracies that will surely perish will be those who cannot tell the difference between good and evil, survival and ruin, freedom and tyranny."That "something sick" is a dangerous form of decadence that has infected the American and European Left, the U.S. Democrat Party, and the so-called "Liberal" enclaves of America (there is nothing liberal about them). It is a delusion. It serves the purposes of America's most dangerous enemies.
I have this book, it has been out for a while. Just after Sep 11, if memory serves.
Revel really makes his point when he shows that the left believes both "X" and "not X" at the same time, seeing no inconsistency in this; two irreconcilable ideas lashed together by hatred of America.
Yes, but what? If you review the charges, you will find they are exactly those leveled by the philosophers of fascism. If you review European intellectual life, you will find it is saturated with German philosophy of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. If you scratch a postmodernist, you will find Heidegger.
It was all comprehensively smashed at the level of political reality. It was not defeated at the level of philosophic thought. In the US, it can seem incredible that any of it even needs defeating. But it does. The underlying ailment is not in the domain of politics but in that of thought, and the symptoms will recur as long as that remains.
The same, incidentally, is true of our Islamic opponents.
It is necessary to engage at the level of sincere philosophic thought, not mere polemic and ideology, let alone mere politics. And you don't engage with flip dismissals, pretending it can't matter because you don't agree with it. It must be fully understood, its psychic causes sympathetically diagnosed, and answered. Not with admonitions or lectures directed at changing others, but with testimony about the reality of human experience freely offered to the world at large.
I believe that is fully possible. But it has not happened. All the critiques of the core of modern European thought are ideological or shallow, or both. Yes that thought is diseased. But the things being peddled as cures are not directly at the actual problem, but are just panaceas being peddling by the usual suspect sects.
marker
Hmmmmm good..... and lets not forget taking time away from their cell phones or causing them to do something that actually takes ANY effort....
You're right -- too many people continue to see all that as a good idea.
European anti-Americanism is especially galling to Americans because it's like having your own brother knife you in the back. America's relationsip with Europe is more familiar than America's relationship with other countries. One effect of this is that the world listens to European opinion of America when the world forms its own opinion of America. After all, if you want to know something about someone, who better to listen to than his brother?
I witnessed this firsthand recently when speaking with a Chinese graduate student who had just come to America. On his way here, he travelled through Europe and spoke with Europeans about America. They filled his head with all kinds of scary tales and warnings about what America was like. Thanks to the anti-American propaganda that's common in China, he already had bad ideas about the United States, and the Europeans reinforced those bad ideas.
The moral of the story is that Europe is promoting anti-Americanism in the world -- which makes it look a little hypocritical for Europe to justify its own anti-Americanism by saying "well, the world hates America, not just us".
Canada as an example is completely ok.
Canada has a leftwing government and social-welfare model that is similar in many ways to Europe. Canada also has a strong streak of anti-Americanism. There is much that Europe and Canada agree on, so it's not surprising that you would find Canada completely ok.
And if something is hated, than it's not the US itself. Blue Jeans, Country Music, Star Trek and Burgers are fine !
But these things are bits of cultural ephemera, not the US itelf, not anything essential. The US itself is characterized by a unique orientation towards individual liberty, limited government, free markets, competitiveness, excellence, and uncoerced goodness and charity. It's these things that Europe hates.
The EU has it's problems with the US American conservatives.
Naturally, because it's American conservatives who are most interested in preserving the things I mentioned above, the things which Europe hates.
That's the guys running around and asking people not to interact with europeans because they hate America.
The root problem here is that Europeans hate America (not all of them, but many of them). They hate America for the reasons that Jean-Francois Revel writes of. Conservatives merely point this hatred out to people.
Victor Davis Hanson has written several times recently that Europe has lost the good will of most Americans, and I can tell you that he's correct. There has been a distinct shift. I don't think you guys are aware of much Europe has fallen out of favor with the average American over the past four years or so. 9/11 and especially the Iraq war has shown people, even people who don't agree with the war, what a troublesome friend Europe is for us. Their eyes have been opened to the anti-Americanism that Revel has written of since the mid 1980's. This loss of goodwill towards Europe is in response to something that's been part of Europe for a long time. The root problem is yours, not ours.
Is there more to the story? I love to hear the impressions of people who are discovering a new culture (especially ours). Was the student surprised by his experiences in America or hasn't enough time passed?
except maybe the sonar systems of the 688 attac sub class, the 120mm cannon of the m1, optics for missiles, carbon fiber compounds, high tec ceramics, the heckler and koch MP5, leupold optics for sniper rifles, etc but who needs this martial crap anyhow.
chrysler beeing the only 'US American' car maker to plan to expand capacities - since it's german led it works out....
there's billions of examples and if the links are cut the US and certainly to a higher degree the EU economy wouldn't work - but hey - you US guys could do more trade with china - I bet they are kinda more friendly (always smiling).
yeah right I bet you would be better of without these high tec imports and the 10% of the capital coming into your country from muslim countries.
I am not saying we Eu folks would be better of without close relationshsips to the US - noone over here says so.
What I read - espacially in these threads, is that you folks don't care about it much plus you don't like the united nations as such - russia isn't cool either - china is a threat and if you pray to allah you're certainly an enemy...
But there sure is a lot of anti americanism in europe...
At the time I spoke with him (this past September), he had just begun his first semester here. We talked more about political stuff than his personal experiences in America, so I don't have much to tell you about that. But I did pick up a few things from him that were interesting. I don't know how representative he is of most Chinese, but if he is, then 1) The Chinese feel threatened by the United States, but they don't have a deep historical sense of enmity towards the US like they do with Russia and Japan. Their feelings towards the US are very mixed. 2) The Chinese are comfortable with having an authoritarian government. They feel it's a good fit for their culture. It's not so much the socialism in communism that appeals to them but the authoritarianism in it.
And of course as I said before, the Europeans had downloaded the full suite of leftist anti-American junk into his head, so he was full of conspiracy theories about George Bush and Iraq and all that. He had a thousand and one questions for me -- I think I was the first Republican he had had a chance to speak with -- like, did I really think we were doing this to spread freedom and not just for oil? And does George Bush really mean it when he talks about democracy in his speeches?
I think I may have made some headway with him. He seemed to accept my answers without much dispute even though they flatly contradicted the premises of his questions. We were working in the same area that day and he was really quiet and pensive after we spoke. My sense was that I had managed to plant some doubt into his mind and that he was mulling things over. I can imagine him weighing the words of the Europeans against what I said. If there's a followup conversation, it should be interesting.
I esepcially like his insight here: "Europeans in particular should force themselves to examine how they have contributed to that preponderance. It was they, after all, who made the twenty century the darkest in history; it was they who brought about the two unprecedented cataclysms of the World Wars; and it was they who invented and put into place the two most criminal regimes ever inflicted on the human race--pinnacles of evil and imbecility achieved in a space of less than thirty years"
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