Loving and Hating America

As I've documented in the past, many leftist teachers teach our youngsters to hate our country. For example, University of Hawaii Professor Haunani-Kay Trask counseled her students, "We need to think very, very clearly about who the enemy is. The enemy is the United States of America and everyone who supports it." Some universities hire former terrorists to teach and indoctrinate students. Kathy Boudin, former Weather Underground member and convicted murderer, is on the Columbia University School of Social Work's faculty. Her Weather Underground comrade William Ayers teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Bernardine Dohrn, his wife, is a professor at Northwestern University School of Law. Her stated mission is to overthrow capitalism.

America's domestic haters have international company. 24/7 Wall St. published an article titled "Ten Countries That Hate America Most." The list includes Serbia, Greece, Iran, Algeria, Egypt and Pakistan. Ranking America published an article titled "The U.S. ranks 3rd in liking the United States." Using data from the Pew Global Attitudes Project, it finds that just 79 percent of Americans in 2011 had a favorable view of Americans, compared with Japan and Kenya, which had 85 and 83 percent favorable views, respectively. Most European nations held a 60-plus percent favorable view of Americans, compared with countries such as Egypt, Pakistan and Turkey, with less than 20 percent favorable views.

An interesting facet of foreigners liking or hating America can be seen in a poll Gallup has been conducting since 2007 asking the questions: "Ideally, if you had the opportunity, would you like to move permanently to another country, or would you prefer to continue living in this country? To which country would you like to move?" Guess to which country most people would like to move. If you said "the good ol' US of A," go to the head of the class. Of the more than 640 million people who would like to leave their own country, 23 percent -- or 150 million -- said they would like to live in the United States. The U.S. has been "the world's most desired destination for potential migrants since Gallup started tracking these patterns in 2007." The United Kingdom comes in a distant second, with 7 percent (45 million). Other favorite permanent relocations are Canada (42 million), France (32 million) and Saudi Arabia (31 million), but all pale in comparison with the U.S. as the preferred home.

The next question is: Where do people come from who want to relocate to the U.S.? China has 22 million adults who want to permanently relocate to the U.S., followed by Nigeria (15 million), India (10 million), Bangladesh (8 million) and Brazil (7 million). The Gallup report goes on to make the remarkable finding that "despite large numbers of people in China, Nigeria, and India who want to migrate permanently to the U.S., these countries are not necessarily the places where the U.S. is the most desired destination. Gallup found that more than three in 10 adults in Liberia (37 percent) and Sierra Leone (30 percent) would move permanently to the U.S. if they had the opportunity. More than 20 percent of adults in the Dominican Republic (26 percent), Haiti (24 percent), and Cambodia (22 percent) also say the same." That's truly remarkable in the cases of Liberia and Sierra Leone, where one-third of the people would leave. That's equivalent to 105 million Americans wanting to relocate to another country.

The Gallup poll made no mention of the countries to which people would least like to relocate. But I'm guessing that most of them would be on Freedom House's list of the least free places in the world, such as Uzbekistan, Georgia, China, Turkmenistan, Chad, Cuba and North Korea.

I'm wondering how the hate-America/blame-America-first crowd might explain the fact that so many people in the world, if they had a chance, would permanently relocate here. Maybe it's that they haven't been exposed to enough U.S. university professors.

College is/was seen as the last opportunity for “educators” to mold, healthy, critical, Liberal Art-oriented minds before being sent out into the real world, no matter what they studied.

The term “critical” was supposed to mean an inquisitive, probing and questioning mind, open to ideas but using the tools of critical, Western (Enlightenment) thought.

Vietnam changed that. The period 1970-1983 saw millions of students growing up in the shadow of extreme criticism and self-loathing.

Anything that reeked of military or patriotism was scorned. It became cool, even for the kids too young to have actually participated in any way with the turbulent Vietnam era, to become anti-establishment and overly critical of everything America stood for or accomplished in the 20th century - hence the revisionist movements reevaluating the Hiroshima event as a uniquely American moral outrage while ignoring the Berlin Airlift or the Marshal Plan.

There are hundreds of examples of this “tearing down” process.

To make a long story short. Academia (along with the media and entertainment industries) went too far encouraging deviant (this principle is gone now) behavior.

At 18, I had a Poli. Sci. Professor who wore a Chairman Mao (green fabric, red star) hat. I thought he was the coolest thing, bucking the system and his colleagues. He was brilliant but he was polluting our minds with terms like “Generous Motors (GM), calling Pres. elect Reagan, “Ronnie Ray-Gun” and rebuking the Justice system by saying, “How much justice can you afford”?

This was one of our role models?? What did we know? We were naive punks, just out of high school, already “softened up” by a similar environment there.

My God, kids enrolled in high school ROTC were viewed as out and out traitors to the system!

So, it became cool to be against all that we stand for.

Kids today I hope, have a wider perspective than we did.

We “Baby-Boomers” were totally brainwashed by CBS news. Vietnam, the Pentagon Papers, Watergate and Nixon's resignation tainted a generation. Many Boomers still carry the seeds of anti-US government and America in their veins.

Eben though I grew up in a Patriotic home with NRA membership, I was still heavily influenced negatively by our environment and lack of values.

I'm wondering how the hate-America/blame-America-first crowd might explain the fact that so many people in the world, if they had a chance, would permanently relocate here.

I love Williams, but its never a good idea to ask a rhetorical question when your not sure of the answer.

There is no dichotomy here - hating one's benefactor, or desired benefactor, is pretty common.

I would find it more surprising if the people in the dirt poor nations Walter named didn't want to immigrate here.

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