The Falseness of Anti-Americanism "(T)he East spoke to me… It began by calling me Pig …"

Foreign Policy ^ | September/October 2003 | Fouad Ajami

[CaptainK]

The "sympathy" was a veneer to mask the glee.

[aculeus]

According to the June BBC survey, 78 percent of French polled identified the United States as a "religious" country, while only 10 percent of Jordanians endowed it with that label. Religious to the secularists, faithless to the devout— such is the way the United States is seen in foreign lands.

A great Ajami article.

[dighton]

Thanks for the ping and post.

[Billthedrill]

The United States need not worry about hearts and minds in foreign lands. If Germans wish to use anti-Americanism to absolve themselves and their parents of the great crimes of World War II, they will do it regardless of what the United States says and does. If Muslims truly believe that their long winter of decline is the fault of the United States, no campaign of public diplomacy shall deliver them from that incoherence. In the age of Pax Americana, it is written, fated, or maktoob (as the Arabs would say) that the plotters and preachers shall rail against the United States— in whole sentences of good American slang.

Very impressive article. I am inclined to agree with this last - "America" has succeeded in becoming overseas what it has always been domestically - an abstraction that is as much a tabula rasa on which both dreams and dreads are projected by those dissatisfied with their present circumstances - i.e., virtually everybody. That, IMHO, is the reason that some French can simultaneously maintain that they hate America but don't hate Americans - not the most coherent of attitudes for those who actually inhabit the place, but perfectly understandable if "America" is treated only as an abstraction and "Americans" as real people.

It is going to be impossible - I hope - to dissociate this abstraction from the reality. When we adopt such a mythos as "America, the Land of Opportunity," for example, there is no way to lose it when to a great degree the place actually is so. Attempting to curry favor by killing the dream may only be accomplished by killing the reality first, and hence killing ourselves, which is not only not the intended outcome, but it won't work - the dream, and hence the hatred, will be the last to go and no one will be the better for it.

I am not optimistic, frankly. If what we have to look forward to a century from now is a fond memory of a Golden Age, it is instructive to read the actual history of those putative Golden Ages of the past - they were all, without exception, happy only in retrospect and by contrast to a less congenial age to follow.