Why They Hate Us, Volume 73, Chapter 26, etc.
Though none of them actually rejoiced about the death and destruction which was involved, there were a lot of people in Europe and even in America who secretly were glad that we were attacked in September of 2001. They viewed the US as something of a renegade, full of itself, even cocky. They hoped that the attack would deflate the American ego, make Americans feel vulnerable and alone, and cause America to realize that it needed to join in with the various international post-national political initiatives that it seemed to steadfastly refuse to support, such as the Kyoto accords and formation of the International Criminal Court. The leftist Poohs hoped that the American Tigger would become less bouncy.
Such people then watched with rising horror as the opposite took place. Americans came to care even less about world opinion, and came to feel not only more confidence but also a rising determination to do what was necessary even if it had to be done without any assistance from anyone else and even if everyone else opposed it. Tigger steadfastly refused to be debounced.
See, what was supposed to happen was that in the aftermath of the attack, America was supposed to be convulsed in a nationwide orgy of self-examination and self-recrimination, where it would come to realize all the awful things it had done and to accept that it was arrogant, overbearing, and just generally not a very nice bunch of people. And a newly-humbled American public would then cease to embrace all those stupid ideas like the right to keep and bear arms, and the right to say whatever you feel like, and instead join the growing world consensus in the creation of a new Utopia.
America was supposed to meditate on why they hate us. Unfortunately for them, we did consider it and came to the conclusion that they hate us because they're a bunch of incompetent losers who are shamed by our success.
James Woolsey wrote:
The day after former president Clinton gave a speech at Georgetown University?in which he implied, although did not exactly state, that one cause of the attack on the United States was a payback, in a sense, for slavery and the mistreatment of the American Indians ? I was in a taxi in Washington. Rather than reading about opinion polls, I talk to cab drivers in Washington. My favorite subset of cab drivers in Washington is the elderly, African-American, long-term resident of the District, and I had one of those. As I got into the car, he said,
?Did you see that speech President Clinton gave yesterday??
I said, ?I saw the press reports on it this morning.?
He asked, ?What did you think??
I said, ?Well, parts of it were okay, I guess.? But I said, ?I?m not real sure this is all about slavery and the Indians.?
And he said, ?Yeah, these people don?t hate us for what we?ve done that?s wrong. They hate us for what we do that?s right.?
No, no, no. Wrong answer. America was supposed to dwell on its sins and not its virtues. It was supposed to be intimidated, hesitant, uncertain. It was supposed to realize that they hate us because we're evil.
We were supposed to purge our souls ? and our foreign policy ? of sin. We sure as hell weren't supposed to go grind the Taliban into dust, and then start looking for other targets to beat up. Without that essential first step of acknowledging our sin, we could not truly solve the problem, since it was actually the US itself which was the problem. And so it is that as this nation has proceeded on its path of dealing with its enemies, the leftists continue to rail on our evil and horrible past. As Andrew Sullivan put it most pithily,
Their argument about where we should go from here is essentially, "We shouldn't be here in the first place."
Which is, as Megan McCardle points out , ultimately a useless comment. And yet, the effort continues. Attempts are made to point out how anti-American sentiment rises in the rest of the world, in hopes that Americans will finally become concerned and, at long last, engage in that long overdue orgy of self-recrimination and self-doubt, and somehow it never seems to happen. And the reports become ever more emphatic; as they hope that we'll truly embrace the question, Ask yourselves why they hate you!!! Damn it, why the hell won't you ask yourselves that question?
There's no barbed wire on America's border with Canada. But there is a new chill in relations. The United States has lost friends here during the past year - and around the world.
The US is attempting to counter the ill-will with glossy commercials produced by a former advertising executive now working for the State Department. ...
But even in the US, it is realised that the country's incredible cultural, economic and military power might be garnering fear instead of respect.
Broader criticism of the US is phrased politely, but Canadians complain of increasing arrogance and aggression in US foreign policy.
Canada, even Canada, now hates you, America! Doesn't that matter to you?
But doesn't the mall with its blandness and its sameness represent everything that people hate and fear about America, I asked social commentator Joe Queenan.
"What people are really afraid of is not that blandness will take over the world, but that really cool stuff is going to take over the world," Mr Queenan said.
Most Americans don't understand why the rest of the world doesn't want to be cool like them, he added.
Americans would like the rest of the world to back them on everything from accepting their cultural institutions to invading Iraq, Mr Queenan said.
But if the rest of the world does not back the US, Americans will do what they want anyway, he said, adding: "Americans are going to get their way. Right, wrong or indifferent."
That remarkable combination of American power - economic, cultural as well as military - must be unique in world history.
Somehow, for most Americans, the significance seems to be passing them by.
So, who's Joe Queenan? Here's a bibliography of online work by him. I don't suppose I need to point out that he's a regular contributor to The Guardian and The New York Times ? Or that this BBC article also prominently features a reference to the Pew Research Center, which has for a long time been engaged in trying to prove to Americans that (you guessed it) we should be asking ourselves why they hate us?
I think most Americans actually do understand the significance, but we attach a different interpretation to it than these people would like. Queenan is right about one thing: we've never been particularly susceptible to peer pressure and we're sure as hell not going to start now, with what's happened to us.
One of the reasons is that Americans generally have finely tuned bullshit detectors, and are pretty good at seeing through exaggeration and lies. (We are, after all, exposed to so damned much of both in advertising and political rhetoric; bullshit detectors are a survival trait in the Age of Silicon.)
This is particularly nice: Most Americans don't understand why the rest of the world doesn't want to be cool like them. The problem with that is that the rest of the world, for the most part, does "want to be cool like them."
The reason that the European chattering classes speak out against the infiltration of American culture is not because no one there likes it, but because too many of them do like it. Some French demonstrate against the building of McDonald's restaurants, but if no one in France wanted to eat that food, the restaurants would go out of business. The reason for the demonstrations is precisely that such restaurants succeed because people do want to eat there. The elite around the world speak out against American culture because their own people prefer our stuff to their own.
And one of the reasons that the Arab Traditionalists have lashed out violently against us is that we're seducing their children with our music, our clothes, our Barbie Dolls, and especially our attitudes about things like personal freedom and individual choice.
But another and perhaps more critical point is that during wars, there are always radical changes in attitudes everywhere. It's an inevitable part of war, and it doesn't necessarily have any long term significance, and even if it did, it's simply part of the price that has to be paid for winning.
That's assuming it's really happening, and I'm not so sure that there's anything like as much polarization as you'd think. America has always been an easy target for criticism, in part because it's such a big target, and in part because it tended to ignore such criticism so it was safe. (Hell, we're our own biggest critics.) Indeed, one of the biggest reasons there's been so much public criticism of the US in the last year is precisely that we're so impervious to it, so it's very low risk. (It takes a hell of a lot for that to reach the point where it makes our attitude toward someone become a lot cooler, though recently a few have managed to cross that line.)
Continued (re Canada specifically) at: denbeste.nu |
