Who Hates America? - Paul Street
> TERROR WAR
>
> A Terrorist Recruiting Bonanza
>
> As American armed forces tighten the freshly minted War Criminal George W.
> Bush’s bloody grip on Baghdad, some interesting answers emerge to the question
> of who really “hates America.” Certain obvious and officially acknowledged
> haters come quickly to mind – Saddam Hussein and his supporters and the
> members of al Qaeda and other extremist Islamic terror networks. Other
> “haters” are less officially recognized.
>
> They include a significant share, probably a majority, of the “Arab Street.”
> People in the Middle East have no special love for Saddam, a ruthless dictator
> whose demise is certainly a positive event in and of itself. Still, they are
> outraged by Bush’s brazen, deadly, and illegal invasion of the Arab world and
> don’t take seriously Bush’s claim to be exporting “democracy,” something that
> is in rather short supply in the American homeland. They know that Operation
> Domin
>
> “A Tidal Wave of Hatred for the US”
>
> Contrary to the convenient American “clash of civilizations” thesis, dividing
> the world between Islam and Christianity (the West), however, Bush’s “war”
> (massacre) is also recruiting a significant number of non –Arabs and
> non-Muslims into the “I hate Uncle Sam” club. “There is a tidal wave of
> hatred for the US,” writes Indian novelist and anti-imperial activist
> Arundhati Roy, “rising from the ancient heart of the world. In Africa, Latin
> America, Asia, Europe, Australia. I encounter it everyday,” Roy reports from
> mostly Hindu India:
>>
>> Sometimes it comes from the most unlikely sources. Bankers, businessmen,
>> yuppie students, and they bring to it all the crassness of their
>> conservative, illiberal politics. That absurd inability to separate
>> governments from people: America is a nation of morons, a nation of
>> murderers, they say (with the same carelessness with which they say, “All
>> Muslims are terrorists”)
Suddenly, I, who have been vilified for being
>> “anti-American” and “anti-west,” find myself in the extraordinary position of
>> defending the people of America (Roy, “Mesopotamia. Babylon. The Tigris and
>> the Euphrates,” The Guardian, April 2, 2003
>> <www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/O,2763,927849,00.html
>> <http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/O,2763,927849,00.html> >)
>
> Consider an anonymous e-mail I received last November from an Australian who
> calls himself “Overtones.” “It breaks my heart that all those people died in
> September 11th,” Overtones writes,
>>
>> “but: you Americans are terrorists. I personally cannot think of anyone more
>> heroic than the pilots of those hijacked planes carrying out their suicide
>> missions
You Americans missed the whole point of the attack. It was a cry of
>> pain and desperation for Lord knows how much death, destruction, rape and
>> plunder by American foreign abuse. The arrogance displayed by this policy is
>> breathtaking in its scope and application.
>>
>> Must you Yanks meddle with everything? I know its all done in the name of
>> the almighty dollar and limitless power in the hands of the very few to rape
>> whatever and wherever for their own profit
We have a beautiful little planet
>> here, but not for long if [the White House] is given the freedom to do as
>> they wish. And since you Yanks elected this cretin things have rapidly
>> progressed from pathetic to worse.
>>
>> The attack on the trade towers was a cry of desperation and you not only
>> missed it but are now in the process of fucking over the entire world because
>> of something you Yanks started in the first place
Saddam and Bush are more
>> similar than not [but] as a threat to world peace Bush takes the cake. It is
>> the American exploitation and total disregard for the rest of the world that
>> will plummet the world into a spiral of destruction. Stop the wholesale abuse
>> of the world any way you can my friend because the whole world hates your
>> government. Cooperation, not war! Doesn’t it occur to [Bush et al] that that
>> we cannot stop the world and get off? Bush does not have the capacity or
>> simply common sense and it seems neither do your countrymen.
>
> These angry words were sent across cyberspace five months before Bush pushed
> the buttons to make set the killing chains in motion on America’s rolling
> slaughterhouses of empire.
>
> Mr. “Overtones’” current sentiments about “you terrorist Yanks” are probably
> expressed in accurate if more erudite terms by Greek composer Mikis
> Theodorakis. According to last Monday’s New York Times, in an article titled
> “Anti-Americanism in Greece is Re-invigorated by War,” Theodorakis recently
> called the American people “detestable, ruthless cowards and murderers of the
> people of the world. From now on, I will consider as my enemies those who
> interact with these barbarians for whatever reason.” Theodorakis is probably
> one of the majority of Greeks who report holding “a more positive view of
> Saddam Hussein than of Mr. Bush” and who think “the United States” is “as
> undemocratic as Iraq.” He has many allies across western civilization,
> including a respectable German dentist who has recently announced
>
> September Sympathy Lost: “To Support America is Politically Dangerous”
>
> Bush’s “war” has bred an unprecedented rift with Europe, seen in a growing
> movement there for boycotts against American goods and companies. This rift
> is produced by the “war” and the Bush administration’s contemptuous treatment
> of the United Nations in preparation of the attack. This treatment included
> bugging foreign UN ambassadors’ phones (widely reported everywhere but the US)
> and the provision of blatantly falsified information to justify the attack
> (the US would have done better with Europeans to avoid the pretense of
> interest in serious UN engagement).
>
> European “anti-Americanism” has moved beyond the left to include much of the
> center-right, which traditionally supported the US in the age of the
> (supposed) great Soviet threat. In the post cold war and post 9-11 world,
> imperialist Newsweek commentator Fareed Zakaria notes, “center-right
> [European] parties might still support Washington, but many do so out of
> inertia and without much popular support.” “To support Americe that the people
> of America could not possibly expect to receive anything close to the degree
> of world sympathy they received after 9-11 if they were hit by another
> significant terror attack.
>
> American Government vs. American People – A Waning World Distinction?
>
> America’s foreign critics have long tended to follow Roy’s welcome (for
> antiwar Americans like myself) distinction between America’s government and
> its people, denouncing the policies of the former but generally exonerating
> the latter. But with more than 70 percent of the US population reportedly
> supporting the White House’s butchery in Iraq, we should not be surprised if
> much of the world joins “Overtones” in blurring that great distinction.
> Stories and images of Iraqi civilian deaths are available to Americans, even
> though corporate and state thought police filter out the most provocative
> evidence – the severed civilian bodies and charred remains shown by more
> responsible information sources like the al-jazeera, bombed this week by Uncle
> Sam. The world knows about this availability since it also gets CNN. How
> impressed can Americans expect others to remain over the fact that our outward
> support for our blood-soaked president is based on the false government- and
> media-generated belief that Sa
>
> “They Hate Our Freedom”?
>
> Contrary to the White House and Fox News, rising world sentiment against
> America has little to do with envy and/or resentment of America’s supposed
> glorious internal “freedoms” and “democracy.” There is much that
> non-Americans find disgusting about American society, including its crass
> commercialism – so intense you can’t watch the last minute of a close
> basketball game without seeing at least ten advertisements. Contrary to the
> narcissistic American idea that the world spends significant time ruminating
> on America’s inner life, however, what angers overseas “anti-Americans” most
> is not the nature of America's domestic society but what America does
> externally. And Europeans are not likely candidates to envy or hate supposed
> American “freedom and democracy,” since they generally possess greater degrees
> of social, economic, political and cultural freedom and democracy. Europeans,
> after all, enjoy stronger welfare states, socialized hearica remains unique
> among “modern” industrial states in its refusal to provide its populace
> universal health coverage, something contemplated for occupied Iraq. America
> elevates consumption, entertainment, private experience and spectator-ship
> over active public citizenship, entrenches corporate plutocracy so deeply that
> a majority of its citizens don’t bother to vote, falsely conflates democracy
> with corporate-state capitalism and distributes wealth more unequally than any
> other industrialized state. It reflexively blames the victims of its harsh
> structural inequalities for their presence at the bottom of its steep
> socioeconomic hierarchies.
>
> Homegrown Hatred from the Top Down
>
> As this essay may already suggest, there’s another group that hates America
> with every bit as much passion as an “Overtones.” You’ll never hear in the
> “mainstream” media about this group’s curious and homegrown anti-Americanism,
> however, which flows down from the peaks of homeland hierarchies. For many in
> this group, mostly from the top hundredth (at least) of the American hierarchy
> and strongly represented in the current White House, the terrible jetliner
> attacks of September 2001 have been a gift from heaven, a great “opportunity”
> for domestic as well as imperial conquest. 9-11 has permitted them to launch
> a two-pronged assault on the American population under the cover of the “war
> on terrorism” and a greatly expanded “culture of fear.”
>
> The first prong is an elaborate campaign to redistribute American wealth and
> hence power yet further upward through massive tax cuts precisely calculated
> to overwhelmingly benefit the richest Americans and devastate the nation’s
> ability to meet bwed as un-American, and dissenters can be subjected to
> possible internment. At the core of Bush’s notion of community and
> hyper-patriotism,” Giroux perceptively observes, “is a notion of temporality
> detached from a sense of public deliberation, critical citizenship, and civic
> engagement.” Community, in the Bush-Ashcroft-Fox News view, is stripped of
> democratic and open-ended meanings. It is “embraced through a debased
> patriotism that is outraged by dissent” and focuses its “strongest appeals to
> civic discourse
on military defense, civil order, and domestic security”
> (Henry A. Giroux, The Abandoned Generation: Democracy Beyond the Culture of
> Fear, New York: Palgrove, 2003). Under the rules of the expanded new
> authoritarianism, the most significant things Americans can do to support and
> strengthen their “democracy” besides joining the armed forces is to work hard
> for their boss, make money and go home, watch television and buy commodities.
>
> The two prongs are inseparabican than James Madison, who noted that “the
> fetters imposed on liberty at home have ever been forged out of the weapons
> provided for defense against real, pretended, or imaginary dangers from
> abroad.”
>
> There are a number of supplemental and related ways in which the current
> rightist US regime expresses its deep contempt for ordinary Americans and
> their weak democracy. These include the transparently racist theft of the
> 2000 presidential election, the White House’s refusal to permit a serious
> investigation of 9-11, the closing off of vital public access to White House
> documents, the vicious White House assault on Medicare, and Bush’s cynical
> version of “welfare reform.” The latter increases work requirements and
> promotes marriage as the solution to poverty even as jobs disappear and
> government funding for childcare and job training is slashed to pay for
> airline bailouts and retroactive wealth-fare tax cuts. 9-11 rescued Bush’s
> initially moribund and under-funded education bill, which te House budget
> submissions that elevate imperial conquest far beyond homeland security even
> as the launching of a new military crusade escalates the likelihood of terror
> attacks that may rival and transcend the horrors of 9-11.
>
> When many millions across the world, including more than a million Americans
> took to the streets against the “war” even before it was technically launched,
> Bush and his “posse” dismissed this remarkable outpouring of pre-war antiwar
> sentiment as essentially irrelevant.. Bush refused to directly answer
> reporters’ questions about the reasons for mass opposition to his Iraq policy
> at home and abroad. Following standard White House doctrine, Bush, Rice and
> Rumsfeld lectured us on how fortunate we are to possess the right to protest,
> unlike the people of Iraq. As if this was granted to us by benevolent masters
> and was not a longstanding freedom to be asserted as our birthright. As if
> this birthright was more seriously endangered by Saddam Hussein than by the
> Christion most Americans could not identify on a world map. It did not help
> that America’s inadequately funded schools rarely encourage or permit the sort
> of instruction that would enable citizens to see through the lies of their
> “leaders,” contrary to the mission of free public education (itself under
> attack by Republicans) in America. Once the “war” began, of course, the
> original reasons became irrelevant: “Support Our Troops,” no matter what.
> Thanks to all this, the American people are increasingly joining their
> government on world civilization’s shit list, rightly or wrongly, a
> development that cannot but worsen the chances for preventing the 21st century
> from descending into an orgy of bloodshed.
>
> Ingratitude
>
> It is interesting and instructive to compare this unmentionable homegrown
> “anti-Americanism” with foreign versions of the phenomenon. Unlike the
> overseas variants, the homeland variety is directed without qualification at
> the American people, freedom and democracy. It is partly directed at American
> government, true, but only at one portion – the diminishing part that still
> serves the needs and protects the liberties of ordinary people. Beneath
> disingenuous pseudo-libertarian rhetoric about the superiority of the “free
> market” over the evil public sector, however, it loves another piece of
> American government– the massive and often underestimated part that serves
> wealth and empire.
>
> Unlike the rest of the world’s “anti-Americanism,” the top-down domestic
> version is marked by extreme, ironic gratuitousness. Brutal and unattractive
> as many foreigners’ “racist” anti-Americanism may be, their hostility to
> America makes a certain amount of sense in connection with tangibly brutal
> nildest dreams. It is rooted to no small extent in a sense of guilt over the
> fact that their possession of these assets is based on theft, deception and
> subversion of the principles in whose name they claim to rule. It is also
> based, perhaps, on a nagging sense that the domestic hierarchy and inequality
> that underpins their audacious global project is the Achilles Heel of their
> imperial dreams.
>
>
> Paul Street (pstreet at cul-chicago.org) is the author of “Towards a ‘Decent
> Left’ ?: Liberal-Left Misrepresentation and Selective Targeting of Left
> Commentary on 9-11,” Z Magazine (July/August 2002)
>
> More articles by Paul Street On Iraq </CrisesCurEvts/Iraq/paul_street.htm>
>
>
> * “From Pearl Harbor to the Cold War, into the twilight zone of 21st-century
> nuclear terrorism, if there is a core belief driving the new Pentagon chief as
> he attempts to overhaul US defense strategy, it is that America continues to
> face lethal enemies, and vulnerability is not an option. ‘History teaches us
> that weakness is provocative,’ [Donald] Rumsfeld said on the day President
> Bush appointed him Defense secretary. The native Chicagoan and former
> wrestling champion, known as ‘Rummy’ to friends, views the world as a
> relatively ruthless, Hobbesian place where thugs flaunt - and respect - brute
> force. ‘Those of us from Chicago recall Al Capone's remark that “You get more
> with a kind word and a gun than you do with a kind word alone,” ‘ he quips.”
> Ann Scott Tyson, “Rumsfeld’s World View: A Ruthless Place,” Christian Science
> Monitor, 17 May, 2001.