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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dennis O'Bell who wrote (77251)	2/24/2003 6:40:54 PM
From: Win Smith	Respond to of 281500

I found an excerpt of the Henri Astier article online at newtopiamagazine.net : LET AMERICA COME CRASHING DOWN! Henri Astier in the Times Literary Supplement on Gallic anti-Americanism: "America's 'war on terrorism' and threats against Iraq are often said to have alienated its friends abroad, and squandered the initial sympathy triggered by the September 11 attacks. This may be so -- but it is unclear how many friends America had to begin with and how deep the sympathy ever ran. Across four continents, including 'friendly' Europe, millions regarded the attacks as a fantasy come true. Jean Baudrillard exaggerated only a little when he wrote that 'everyone without exception had dreamt' of such a cataclysm -- adding that al-Qaeda 'did it, but we willed it'. Among French intellectuals, in particular, such wishing of death and destruction on the United States is common, and predates its emergence as a superpower. 'Let faraway America and its white buildings come crashing down', Louis Aragon wrote in 1925. . . . Revel finds that the world's view of America is still obscured by ideological blinkers. In L'Obsession antiaméricaine, he relentlessly exposes instances of US-bashing in newspaper articles, radio interviews and political speeches by the great and the good from Cape Town to Copenhagen, and from São Paulo to Seoul. Revel makes three main points: most -- though by no means all -- criticism of US diplomacy or society does not make logical sense; its purpose is to provide psychological comfort; it is self-defeating. The self-contradictory nature of anti-Americanism is something many of us unthinkingly accept. We are happy to view American society as both utterly materialistic and insufferably religious; it is predominantly racist and absurdly politically correct; Americans are both boring conformists and reckless individualists; US corporations can do whatever they want and are stifled by asinine liability laws, and so on. Revel makes us stop and consider the incoherence of such views. . . . The first sign that the anti-American obsession is at work is the wilful ignorance of available information. America's strengths and weaknesses are analysed in countless books and articles published every year. But these balanced analyses are absent from the accounts of America's social and economic health routinely found in European newspapers. Instead you find blanket condemnation: America is said to be plagued by horrendous inequality and poverty. The fact that US unemployment is chronically low by European standards is ignored, or dismissed by the myth that the extra jobs are menial. But if America is so sick, Revel asks, why are we so worried about its wealth, its technological supremacy and its cultural model? These instances of doublethink, he argues, can only be explained in psychological terms. Anti-American recriminations stroke a society's collective ego by drawing attention away from its own failures. Such weapons of mass distraction are at work, for instance, when a muzzled Arab press spreads the belief that the war on terrorism has placed draconian curbs on the US media. Likewise, Africa's elites like to blame all their continent's ills on the United States, to avoid facing up to their own responsibilities. In 2001, the Organization of African Unity called for a 'Marshall Plan for Africa'. But as Revel observes, Africa has received the equivalent of four Marshall Plans in as many decades. The purpose of European anti-Americanism is to find a reassuring explanation for the Continent's catastrophic loss of status. Europe virtually tried to commit suicide in the twentieth century, and American preponderance is a direct consequence of its self-inflicted wounds. In the space of thirty years, the Europeans triggered two World Wars from which the Americans had to come and rescue them. But rather than face up to this sorry history, Europeans prefer to pose as victims of America's drive for world domination. American 'unilateralism', Revel explains, 'is the consequence, not the cause, of power failures in the rest of the world'. . . ."