>The Intellectual Origins Of America-Bashing
>
>By Lee Harris
>
>http://www.policyreview.org/dec02/harris.html
>A specter haunts the world, and that specter is America.
>This is not the America discoverable in the pages of a
>world atlas, but a mythical America that is the target of
>the new form of anti-Americanism that Salman Rushdie,
>writing in the Guardian (February 6, 2002), says “is
>presently taking the world by storm” and that forms the
>subject of a Washington Post essay by Martin Kettle
>significantly entitled “U.S. Bashing: It’s All The Rage In
>Europe” (January 7, 2002). It is an America that Anatol
>Lieven assures us, in a recent article in the London Review
>of Books, is nothing less than “a menace to itself and to
>mankind” and that Noam Chomsky has repeatedly characterized
>as the world’s major terrorist state.
I've interviewed Lieven. He's no radical - he's just a sensible, well-informed liberal who hasn't been caught up in war fever.
>But above all it is the America that is responsible for the
>evils of the rest of the world. As Darius Fo,
Dario Fo. Jesus, the Heritage Fdn types can't get anything straight, can they?
>It is this sort of America that is at the hub of Antonio
>Negri and Michael Hardt’s revision of Marxism in their
>intellectually influential book Empire (Harvard University
>Press, 2000) — a reinterpretation of historical materialism
>in which the global capitalist system will be overthrown
>not by those who have helped to create it, namely, the
>working class, but rather by a polyglot global social force
>vaguely referred to as “the multitude” — the alleged
>victims of this system.
Eh? One of their points is that the system should be taken over precisely by the people who create it, and that a lot of standard left narratives, which see only exploitation and imposition, efface the creativity of the toilers. Why do so many people love to hate this book?
The rest of the essay goes on to discuss Baran and Wallerstein. As fucked up as they are, one of the refreshing things about parts of the right is that they take left ideas and media seriously, even if they get it all wrong.
Doug