[lbo-talk] Re: "Anti-Americanism": define, please

[Michael Pugliese]

    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