On Anti-Americanism: The Resources And Persistence Of A Political Myth

Michael Pugliese debsian at pacbell.net
Tue Apr 16 12:59:46 PDT 2002


Tismaneanu has written widely on Eastern and Central European

politics. See his chapter on Romanian "Communism" ala Ceausescu

in, "The Stalinist Legacy, " edited by Tariq Ali. And, "The Crisis

of Marxist Ideology in Eastern Europe. The Poverty of Utopia."

London/NY: Routledge, 1988.

Michael Pugliese

On Anti-Americanism: The Resources And Persistence Of A Political

Myth

By Vladimir Tismaneanu

The period of relative calm that was characteristic of the 1990s

-- in spite of the conflicts in the Balkans and the Gulf War

-- has come to an end. Far from having ended, as Francis Fukuyama

(1992) predicted in a moment of euphoric Hegelian elan, history

continues to be haunted by neuroses, fantasies, and political

myths. Ideological tensions have not exhausted themselves, and

the new political and economic spasms have deep origins in not

so new collective anxieties and anguishes. Ethnocentric tribalism,

racism, rationalized by intellectuals with pretensions of national

saviors, clerical and militaristic populism are rampant at this

beginning of a new century and millennium. The age of extremes,

which British historian Eric Hobsbawm regarded as the hallmark

of the 20th century (1996), an era inaugurated by World War I

and concluded with the collapse of the European Leninist regimes

during the revolutions of 1989-91, sends its alarming prolongations

into the new century.

The liberal revolution and the rise of a planetary open space

have generated both immense hopes and excruciating fears. Not

everybody is happy in this emerging globalized space (Shafir,

2001, pp. 410-411): from the French farmers to the Polish peasants,

from the neo-anarchist movements to the Latin American neo-Bolivarian

nationalists, we are witnessing the resurrection of romantic

anticapitalist sentiment. Old nostalgia related to the agrarian-pastoral

visions of the organic community have made a comeback -- this

time under the banner of the struggle against the new inequalities

provoked by "market fundamentalism." Ironically, this term entered

the political and economic debates thanks to American financier

and social thinker George Soros, himself one of the main promoters

of the new civic globalism (Soros, 1998). As I anticipated in

some of my earlier analyses, the post-Marxist age, the aftermath

of the redemptive political-secular messianism, including their

ultimate expression, communism, is dominated by a feverish search

for a new set of values, or, better said, for a new axis mundi.

Political myths respond precisely to these collective uncertainties,

and intellectuals are more often than not those who articulate

these utopian expectations and impulses (Tismaneanu, 1998). Some

of these myths, including those referring to global civil society

and democratization as inexorable engines of modernity, serve

the affirmation of a world based on rationality and intercultural

dialogue. They help us come to terms with a political and symbolic

universe that favors diversity and pluralism and opposes self-absorbed

forms of monistic determinisms (Bauman, 1995). Other myths, however,

are imbued with vindictive passions and energies. They stem from

the failure to find explanations for and solutions to the growing

marginality experienced by the denizens of the peripheral areas

of the new globalism. To mention but one example among many:

Indian novelist Arundhati Roy has become one of the most vocal

critics of the U.S. in its attributed posture of driving force

of Western neo-imperialism (see Dugger, 2001).

A new world system has been emerging for the last two decades,

dominated not only by the globalization of information and markets,

but also by the universalization of the classical principles

of liberal democracy, especially the sovereignty of the individual.

The United States -- as the symbol of this new globalism -- makes

it the target of enduring anti-imperialist resentment. For reasons

that need thorough analyses, America and its closest allies among

the Western advanced democracies have become the target of political,

psychological, and terrorist attacks with catastrophically tragic

consequences. In spite of countless soothing declarations, dictatorial

regimes from countries like Iran, Iraq, Syria, Cuba, etc., perceive

America's hegemonic position within the post-Cold War international

political, military, and economic system as a threat to their

very survival. One thing needs to be clear: it is not the defense

of local cultural and religious identities that harbors this

anti-American resentment, but the fear that in a world emancipated

from absolutist constraints the old forms of domination -- justified

via religious or ideological mythologies -- will fall apart.

To the extent that globalization means the universal expansion

of American mass culture, there are sufficient reasons to defend

and assert the local identities. On the other hand, one needs

to remember, there is no strategic plan meant to impose this

expansion. It is a spontaneous phenomenon, driven both by market

forces, consumerism, and mimetism, and it is linked to the general

decline of high culture in mass societies. But American values

mean much more than fast food chains and Hollywood. In a famous

book, political philosopher Hannah Arendt demonstrated that the

main distinction between the French and the American revolutions

lie in their paramount guiding principle: equality for the former,

liberty for the latter (Arendt, 1985). More recently, a similar

position -- inspired by Arendt's seminal volume -- has been taken

by the former Polish dissident Adam Michnik, one of the most

profound thinkers on post-Communist evolutions (see "Intellectuals

and Social Change," 1992, pp. 621-627). Once again, I hasten

to add, we deal with political myth, not with fiction or chimera.

By myths I understand the symbolic narratives that motivate,

organize, and mobilize actions of political communities. Their

force, as authors like Ernst Cassirer (1946, pp. 47-48) and Isaiah

Berlin (1982, pp. 318-319) showed, depends on their credibility,

not on their truthfulness. From this perspective, nationalism

-- especially in its primordialist-fundamentalist versions --

is a political myth opposed to the cosmopolitan dimension of

liberal democracy. Nationalism stakes on sentiments of dignity,

wounded pride, psychological vulnerability, and social alienation.

It is equally related, as Yugoslav writer Danilo Kis memorably

wrote in a tragically illuminating essay (1995), to the paranoid

attempts to explain historical defeats and setbacks. Conspiracy

theories abound in this type of fantasy-ridden compensatory discourses.

As of the writing of this essay, important figures in the Muslim

world's mass media unabashedly maintain that behind the terrorist

attack on 11 September were not the Islamic mystical revolutionary

extremists, but the Israeli secret service. The disgraceful and

long-since debunked slanders that form the perfidiously anti-Semitic

pamphlet "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" have resurfaced

in forms only slightly refurbished. More than ever, the liberalism

that the civilized world can oppose to these explosions of resentment

is one of lucidity and skepticism: one rooted in the awareness

of the threats that we have confronted and will continue to confront,

including the proliferation of movements inspired by hatred,

fanaticism, and unswerving rejection of pluralist modernity (see

Hollander, 2001).

Communism and Fascism, in their traditional incarnations, have

failed. The same cannot be said about the psycho-ideational structures

that made their rise possible. There is a primordial form of

radicalism that cannot be effectively opposed with quotations

for the philosophers of the Enlightenment. The struggle of the

foreseeable future will oppose those who defend, at any price,

the vision and practices of an open society, and their opponents,

recruited from the most diverse countries and social zones. Contrary

to Samuel Huntington's initial (1991) approach, the "clash of

civilizations" is a divide within each political culture, East

and West. Whether we like it or not, we are living in an age

of acute ideological warfare. To resume a statement attributed

to Leon Trotsky, it is irrelevant whether we are interested in

war. What matters is that the war is interested in our lives

and us. Indulging in sophistries about culpability, denying the

basic contradiction between civilization and barbarism, looking

for the culprits among the victims and not among the authors

of terrorist atrocities, means simply to close our eyes to the

mortal threats to the very destiny of the democratic world, as

U.S. political scientist Benjamin Barber recently argued in an

interview with the French weekly "L'Express" (20-26 September

2001).

Thus, the 11 September catastrophe has revived a very important

discussion on the presence of the anti-American political myth

in the ideological structures (intellectual "dispositiffs," to

use Michel Foucault's terminology), inspiring fundamentalist

terrorist movements. Without understanding the motivations of

these fanatic sects there will be no way for a comprehensive

and systematic response to their terrible challenge (it is symptomatic

that for weeks, the title of "The New York Times" special section

dealing with the war on terrorism and its consequences has been "A Nation Challenged" -- a formulation quite different from the

almost universal media reference to "America Strikes Back.").

In his discourse to the U.S. Congress delivered in the aftermath

of the terrorist attack, President George W. Bush correctly pointed

out the connection between the extremist ideologies inspiring

these movements of "true believers" and the 20th century's totalitarian

disasters. Indeed, we deal with the same type of one- dimensional

thought, obsessed with conspiracies and impregnated with eschatological

ardor. In both of these incarnations, religious and secular,

fundamentalism erases the separating line between the City of

Man and the City of God. It promises immediate redemption through

the destruction of all the presumably corruptive and perverting

factors.*

Years ago, Venezuelan political thinker Carlos Rangel published

a book (1976) that needs to be carefully reread. He traced the

road "from the virtuous savage to the good revolutionary." Later,

the same author dwelt at length on the radical hostility to liberal

values among both Western and Third World elites (Rangel, 1982).

The main idea in the earlier volume was that the behind the frantic

revolutionism of Latin America's radical left one could detect

a painful inferiority complex generated by the political and

economic success of the United States. Even now, the partisans

of Colonel Hugo Chavez, the populist president of a country rebaptized

the "Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela," do not hesitate to question

the terrorist nature of the activities undertaken in the 1970s

and 80s by Ilich Ramirez, the notorious Carlos "the Jackal."

Nobody denies the fact that we live in a world of glaring economic

contrasts. Rangel's argument, however, was that the causes of

both success and failure are to be found within one's own country,

not outside its borders. It is not North America's fault for

the Argentine debacle in the 20th century, but rather the Peronista

populist demagoguery, and the failure of the home elites to seriously

address the challenges of modernity and to accept the spirit

of capitalism, including its less convenient consequences. It

is much easier to promise the pie in the sky to the "descamisados"

of this world, the celebrated wretched of the earth, than to

organize economic and political life in accordance to the principles

of a free and open society. Never ever did populist radicalism

offer more than what Max Weber once called "sterile excitation"

(Weber, 1957, p. 115). The attacks on "mondialism" coming from

the anti-American Left and the Right attached to the values of "Blut und Boden" (blood and soil) have one common denominator:

the angst, the fear provoked by the dislocations of modernity,

the rise of the middle class (bourgeoisie), and the dissolution

of traditional forms of state and religious control over citizens.

Hence the fascination exerted by leftist -- in fact neo-Leninist

-- theories of dependency on the ideologues of the radical Right

(in Russia, Hungary, Romania).

The anti-American mythology consists of constellations of emotions,

attitudes, sentiments and vaguely structured ideas that reject

pluralism, the state of law, modern secular humanism, and freedom

as a self-constitutive value. Communism and Fascism have opposed

these principles on behalf of holistic visions, which claimed

to propose revolutionary alternatives to liberal modernity. They

were themselves forms of modernity, but structurally different

from the experiment that made its historical debut with the Renaissance

and has culminated in the vision of a world emancipated from

any form of absolutism. Without any doubt, the anti-American

myth is most powerful in non-democratic societies. There are

of course anti-American outbursts in Europe and Asia, but the

virulence and vehemence of the myth are particularly notable

in closed societies-secular despots (Cuba, Syria, Iraq) or theocracies

(Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan). Anti-Americanism, as a political

myth, conjures up the image of a "soulless" country (the U.S.)

enslaved by the God of money. In this demonology, America means

thirst for profit, mercantilism, cupidity, plutocracy, militarism,

imperialism, and all the rest. And, of course, as in the Nazi

(or Stalinist) scenarios, the power of the money (banks) means

the power of the international Jewry and its accomplices. The

myth ignores the fact that for decades America has been the main

source of humanitarian aid for the underprivileged nations. It

does not matter, in this hallucinatory amalgam, that the U. S.

military had no other reasons to intervene in Somalia but to

stop the local warlords from completely exterminating their unfortunate

population. And, again, it is irrelevant, within the mythological

framework, that America intervened in Kosova in 1999 to prevent

the regime of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic from completing

the macabre, anti-Muslim, Albanian ethnic-cleansing operations.

The outraged reactions among exponents of some traditions that

feel threatened by the invasion of modernity express panic created

by an undesired contact with values that subvert presumably sacred

hierarchies and order. In the 1960s, a famous Iranian writer,

Jalal Al-e Ahamad, deplored the cultural disease that had allegedly

infected the urban intellectual milieus. To describe this malady

he proposed the term "Westoxication." Two decades later, Iran's

Ayatollah Khomeini started his own war against this "pathology,"

imposing a theocracy that claimed to be immune to the siren songs

of liberal democracy. In the fall of 2001, the most wanted terrorist

of all time, Osama bin Laden, proclaims as the ultimate reason

for his actions the presence of the American ("infidel") troops

in Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden announces that we have entered a new

era of religious warfare against the "crusaders" (read Christians)

and the Jews. Obviously, the Arab world's hostility to Israel

is linked not only to historical-territorial issues. The ultimate

cause for this adversity is that Israel is a democratic and prosperous

society, despite the absence of natural resources comparable

to those held by its Arab neighbors. In its radical versions,

at the extreme left and right of the political spectrum, anti-Americanism

is synonymous with anti-Semitism and anti- Zionism. Explicitly

or implicitly, it repudiates the foundations of Judeo-Christian

morality in the name of completely opposed norms. The result

is the shaping (indeed the invention) of a tradition of victimhood,

sacrifice, martyrdom, and sacred duty to kill in the name of

the ultimate sacred goals. The end, once again, sanctifies the

means.

The anti-American myth is present not only among the intellectual

elites in the Arab countries, or, more generally, in the Third

World. It can be encountered, under various populist disguises,

even in highly sophisticated Western circles, including the U.S.

Immediately after the 11 September attacks, famous historian

Paul Kennedy maintained, during a debate at Yale University,

that it is the military, diplomatic, cultural, and economic power

of the United States that provokes adversarial and resentful

reactions. Things are, of course, much more complex than these

disembodied ideological schemes (see Hartocollis, 2001, as well

as Sciolino, 2001, for a generally thoughtful and informative

discussion of the anti-American reactions linked to envy, anguish,

and resentment). Anti-modern nihilism includes, but is not limited

to, anti- Americanism: its origins are related to the zealot

mentality of the true believer and the regimented fanaticism

of charismatic-salvationist movements. For the members of such

groups death is the ultimate sacrifice on behalf of an alleged

heroic cause. The fanatic cannot accept the modern world with

its real perplexities and risks. He does not find in its satisfactions

a sufficient reason for life. The ultimate cause, the destructive

exorcism bound to defeat what appears to him as a crooked universe

provides the true believer with an exhilarating "ratio moriendi."

In spite of its inner logical contradiction and shocking historical

simplifications, anti- Americanism is credible precisely because

it appeals to the infrarational zones of the collective psyche,

especially in disconcerted societies, among marginal and frustrated

social strata -- including the Islamicizing, disenchanted post-Marxist

intelligentsia of the Arab world (see Keppel, 1991). What the

members of Bin Laden's terrorist cells have in common with the

Italian Red Brigades, or the Baader-Meinhoff "Red Army Faction,"

or the Russian nihilists of the 19th century (Sergei Nechayev,

Andrei Zhelyabov, Sofia Perovskaya), or the mystical revolutionaries

of Romania's Iron Guard, or the Nazi and Bolshevik ideological

maniacs, is the horror toward a world of risk and free competition

of values. For them, there is only one truth, revealed in the

dogma they cherish.

The liberal West and those who share its values reject precisely

this exclusive, intolerant monism, proposing a political order

based on tolerance, moderation, and recognition of individual

rights. At this moment, whatever reservation one may have toward

the historical experiment called the United States, anti-Americanism

has become synonymous with anti-humanism. It is hard to make

any prediction regarding the denouement of the ongoing struggle.

The only thing we can safely say is that the struggle oppose

those who favor a world based on tolerance and diversity to the

exponents of a destructive radicalism whose hatred for the West

is just a rationalization of tormenting inferiority complexes.

Anti-systemic fundamentalism, not patriotism, is the source of

this aggressive revolt against the internationalization of the

world. This fundamentalism is not a negation from within or an

attempt to creatively transcend the many forms of existing injustice.

It is rather an effort to abolish all the principles of the imperfect

liberal modernity in the name of a terrifyingly perfect, fully

controlled world. Anti-Americanism is the main ideological ingredient

of the ongoing revolution against bourgeois, liberal modernity.

*The author wishes to acknowledge the illuminating comments by

the distinguished Israeli sociologist Samuel N. Eisenstadt on

the essence of modern fundamentalism, religious and secular alike.

Vladimir Tismaneanu is professor of government and politics,

University of Maryland at College Park.

SOURCES

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Penguin Books).

Bauman, Z., 1995, Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality

(Oxford: Basil Blackwell).

Berlin, I., 1982, Against the Current: Essays in the History

of Ideas (New York: Penguin Books).

Cassirer, E., 1946, The Myth of the State (New Haven: Yale University

Press).

Dugger, C.W., 2001 ,"An Indian Novelist Turns Her Wrath on the

U.S.," in " The New York Times," 21 November.

"L'Express" (Paris), 2001.

Fukuyama, F., 1992, The End of History and the Last Man (London:

H. Hamilton).

Hartocollis, A., 2001, "Campus Culture Wars Flare Anew Over Tenor

of Debate After the Attacks," in "The New York Times," 30 September.

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(London: Routlege and Kegan Paul).

People's attention is scarce. Do not abuse it.

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