Reminder, from the only period the CPUSA had a productive contribution to the US Left, "Communism is twentieth century Americanism."
John>...Re: "Anti-Americanism": define, please...
I'll take what, say, F.O. Matthiesson, would have said, in, "American Renaissance." W/O, eliding or forgetting, the genocide against Native Americans, the 2.8 million dead Vietnamese, the 200K of Guatemala, and all the rest of the crimes of our Empire, the better aspects of our culture, civil liberties, etc. are largely the result of leftist and liberal agitation. Which the more curdled cynics on the ultra-left, habitually denigrate.
From the academic left. Chapter I read by Andrew Ross had some useful polemic against overheated "anti-Americanism" post-New Left. Has he been re-reading what Rorty wrote about a previous work of his? http://www.nyupress.org/product_info.php?cPath=&products_id=3568 Anti-Americanism
Edited by Andrew Ross and Kristin Ross ISBN 0814775667 352 pages Cloth Publication date: 9/17/2004
Also available in Paperback
Click to enlarge
"This timely and thoroughly absorbing book is the best, most comprehensive and most critical survey of anti-Americanism available. A thoughtful antidote to the blah blah blah of CNN and network news, Anti-Americanism provides a subtle unpeeling of US global domination and multiple political and cultural responses to it. If you want to understand what the news is calling anti-Americanism, this is the book to read." —Neil Smith, author of American Empire: Roosevelt's Geographer and The Prelude to Globalization
Ever since George Washington warned against "foreign entanglements" in his 1796 farewell speech, the United States has wrestled with how to act toward other countries. Consequently, the history of anti-Americanism is as long and varied as the history of the United States.
In this multidisciplinary collection, seventeen leading thinkers provide substance and depth to the recent outburst of fast talk on the topic of anti-Americanism by analyzing its history and currency in five key global regions: the Middle East, Latin America, Europe, East Asia, and the United States. The commentary draws from social science as well as the humanities for an in-depth study of anti-American opinion and sentiment in different cultures.
The questions raised by these essays force us to explore the new ways America must interact with the world after 9/11 and the war against Iraq.
From the neo-cons: Note, Rubin was active in the anti-Vietnam War MOBE, wrote for The (NY) Guardian. This piece of his , "America's Mid-East Policy: A Marxist Perspective, " http://palestine-studies.org/final/en/journals/issue.php?iid=7&jid=1&vid=II&vol=80 Journal of Palestine Studies Issue 7 (Spring 1973) in his marxist period,, is worth a read. Understanding Anti-Americanism: Its Origins and Impact at Home and Abroad by Paul Hollander
From Publishers Weekly The essays collected here, by political scientists, foreign policy experts and other scholars, cast a skeptical eye on previous accounts of their subject, arguing that true anti-Americanism is an extreme hostility born of, in editor Hollander's words, "a deep-seated, emotional predisposition" to loathe the U.S. rather than one based on rational critique. With varying levels of persuasiveness, each essay isolates a different strand of anti-Americanism in its cultural context of origin. Anthony Daniels paints France as an anxious, judgmental, contradictory former colonial power, threatened by invasive "Anglo-Saxon" (read "American") culture and the English language. Michael Freund analyzes Germany's relation to the U.S. by making detailed reference to 19th- and 20th-century German philosophical thinkers. Patrick Clawson and Barry Rubin argue that Middle Eastern anti-Americanism is spawned more by the scapegoating tendencies of radical Arab nationalism than by U.S. foreign policy. David Brooks, Mark Falcoff and Walter D. Connor suggest a pattern of frustration, failure, bitterness, blame and envy in their essays on Nicaraguan, Cuban and Russian anti-Americanism. A final section on anti-Americanism at home scrutinizes the history of the U.S. Communist Party, Canadian and American feminists' purported moral relativism and anti-Americanism in U.S. popular culture. Because the collection emphasizes anti-Americanism as a vitriolic intellectual construction, some readers may find its tone overly defensive, particularly in relation to American foreign policy. Nevertheless, the sense of cultural contradictions and differing philosophical legacies that the collection conveys is enriching and allows anti-Americanism to be viewed less as a bundle of generalizations and more in terms of the cultural particularity of each country and region.
Hating America: A History by Barry Rubin, Judith Colp Rubin
From Publishers Weekly It's as old as the country itself, argue Barry Rubin, editor of Middle East Review of International Affairs, and journalist Colp Rubin, whose last joint book project for Oxford was Yasir Arafat: A Political Biography. Their nine-chapter chronological tour of the U.S. as hated republic can sometimes feel like little more than a compendium of quotations with filler descriptions—and IDs like "the kindly British novelist Charles Dickens, least snobbish of his nation and defender of the downtrodden in his great novels." But the figures they choose as hostile observers of America and Americans, and the things those observers say, make for a multifaceted national portrait. To take just one example, 19th-century British historian Thomas Carlyle asks a correspondent, "Could you banish yourself from all that is interesting to your mind, forget history, the glorious institutions, the novel principles of old Scotland that you might eat a better dinner, perhaps?" The book starts to feel especially speedy as it tries to represent the 20th and 21st centuries: Islamist Sayyid Qutb; the Eisenhower-era U.S. Information Agency director, George Allen; The Protocols of the Elders of Zion; Baader-Meinhof; Foucault; "a left-wing British journalist"; and Arthur Koestler all make cameos. Long on sound bites and short on in-depth analysis, this book provides entertaining glimpses of a nation that may have invented public relations to combat its own image problem. -- Michael Pugliese