Vicious Anti-Europeanism Roils the US

[Theobald]

Vicious Anti-Europeanism Roils the US

Paul Gottfried

For several years now, but especially since the terrorist attacks on 11 September, the establishment American Right has been conducting a sneer campaign against Europe and Europeans. George Bush’s visit to Germany, France and Italy has done nothing to curb it. On the contrary: the very fact that Bush chose Berlin as the venue in which to hint that he has abandoned any immediate plans for a military strike against Iraq will have intensified the American Right’s resentment of the Euroweenies. If the hawks don’t get their war, they will almost certainly lay much of the blame at the feet of the cynicism and cowardice — and pathological anti-Semitism — of Europe.

There are traditional conservatives in America who are sympathetic to Europe. But the Right that now calls the shots in the United States and has the ear of the President is by no means traditionally conservative. It is neo-conservative, and puts its message across in such powerful organs of opinion as Rupert Murdoch’s Weekly Standard, the National Review and the Wall Street Journal. What unites the neo-cons is the belief in the moral need for an American empire and a deep distrust of Europeans, who might obstruct this enterprise.

Underlying the neo-con case against Europe is the sometimes petulant conviction that Europeans do not understand democracy and are therefore indisposed to join wholeheartedly in a global struggle against terrorists. This is updated Manichaeism and is epitomised by Bush’s warning that those who are not for his war against terrorism must be against it, and are thus legitimate targets of anti-terrorist action.

France is the country most despised by the Euro-haters, in spite of the strong bonds that existed between the infant Unites States and France; indeed, America would never have achieved her independence had it not been for French military might — and reckless French expenditure. Jonah Goldberg, a senior editor of National Review and a television conservative celebrity, has an especially low opinion of the people he has called the ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’. On 26 April he observed, ‘France is still a menagerie of left-wing jackassery. Le Pen’s strong showing just increased the biodiversity a bit.’ France’s absurd political system, moreover, would be a danger to democracy, if the US were to follow anything so grotesque. Late last year, Goldberg, already annoyed that Europeans were not falling into line behind American foreign policy, said that Europeans could be ‘jerks’. He explained that he was using the term ‘to describe a broad coalition of self-hating intellectuals and effete bureaucrats who have either abandoned their national identities out of embarrassment (as in Germany) or are using a new European identity as a Trojan Horse for their own cultural ambitions (i.e., the French and Belgians)’. Furthermore, added Goldberg, Europeans had so much more to feel ashamed about than do Americans: ‘America really doesn’t have a colonial past like Europe’s. Sure we kicked Latin Americans a bit, but that hardly amounts to running whole countries for centuries.’

An even smarmier National Review hand, Victor Davis Hanson, expressed his unhappiness in February at the unprecedented level of hostility voiced towards America by an array of European intellectuals. Hanson blames this hostility on envy (one of the chief vices of Europeans, according to the American Right), on aristocratic socialism, and on the sheer incapacity of Europeans to grasp the magnitude of American virtue. Envy is a vice that it is impossible to quantify, but Europeans whom I know insist that they do not envy the United States. Some, indeed, pity her. As for the charge of socialism — that’s a bit rich coming from the citizen of a country where the average family of four pays about 40 per cent of their earnings in taxes, and where a highly centralised federal government wields more power than ever.

But it is in the matter of American virtue that Hanson most clearly reveals his condescending attitude. This virtue, he argues, was made manifest in the disinterested way in which a million American soldiers stopped the bloodletting in the first world war, although two decades later deviant states in Europe forced the US to enter another European struggle. But the US, like the Europeans, was a sanguinary belligerent in the Great War and helped to draft the punitive postwar peace that had something to do with later European hostilities.

In the case of the second world war, Hanson insists that ‘all [European countries occupied by Nazi Germany] were liberated only due to the efforts of muscular and unsophisticated Americans’. That is typical of the arrogant, ahistorical rhetoric of much of the American Right. It is an insult to the British, French, Polish and other troops fighting in the West.

The Weekly Standard, meanwhile, never ceases to urge the American executive to browbeat Europeans into moral submission. Two senior editors, Robert Kagan and William Kristol, consider that American dominance of Europe is necessary because America has a moral mission to bring democratic values to the rest of the world, while making common cause with other exemplary democracies, particularly Israel and occasionally Great Britain. European opposition to American expansion is not something that the Weekly Standard finds acceptable; and one of the most comprehensive investigations of this problem has come from another senior editor, Fred Barnes, who last week explained, as his headline had it, ‘Why Bush has given up on Europe’. Paraphrasing Kristol, Barnes notes, ‘America is nationalist, religious, and martial, while Europe is post-nationalist, post-Christian, and pacifist. Unlike the decayed Europeans, America, especially President Bush, believes that the nation state is the main actor in world affairs.’

The charge that the Europeans are wimps runs in tandem with the charge that Europeans are right-wing fascist thugs. In the days following the first phase of the French présidentielle, on 21 April, when it looked as if the ‘extreme right’ nationalist Le Pen was riding high, almost all of the establishment conservative columnists in the US were foaming against the extreme rightists, who supposedly incarnated European nationalist traditions. In the Washington Post George Will and Charles Krauthammer both blamed European conservative nationalists for the atmosphere leading to the vandalism committed against Jewish sites in Belgium and France. On 2 May, Will called attention to ‘Anti-Semitism’s Boom’ in the Old World. ‘Since 1945 Europe produced the truly remarkable phenomenon of anti-Semitism without Jews,’ he wrote. Citing the ‘watery anti-Semitic populism’ of Le Pen and the criticism by some European leaders of Ariel Sharon’s military occupation of Palestinian towns, Will prepared his readers for the worst: ‘European anti-Semites, driven by totally irrational hate, attacked Israel, because with so many Jews “concentrated in one place” it was possible to resume the eradication of world Jewry.’

A few days earlier, Krauthammer had contrasted America’s preference for ‘morality over realpolitik’ and its ‘principled support for Israel’ with France’s love of nuance and contempt for simplisme. ‘What we are seeing,’ maintained Krauthammer, ‘is pent-up anti-Semitism, the release — with Israel as the trigger — of a millennium-old urge that powerfully infected and shaped European history. What is odd is not the anti-Semitism of today but its relative absence during the past half-century. That was the historical anomaly. Holocaust shame kept the demon corked for that half-century. But now the atonement is passed. The genie is out again.’ So much for those who disagree with the self-proclaimed American voices of morality! Calling them Nazis and gutless pacifists is the way in which our visible Right deals with Europeans who question their foreign policy.

Most of our right-wing columnists, in the aftermath of April’s French election, enlisted the French Premier Lionel Jospin to rally his pro-democratic leftist troops to le grand escroc, Jacques Chirac, to save France from the supposed fascist and Holocaust-denier Le Pen. Having done extensive research on Le Pen, I find no evidence that he is a négationniste — as opposed to someone who tactlessly reacted to being baited by a leftist journalist in 1987 — when he described the Nazi Holocaust as a detail of the second world war. Le Pen has since regretted saying this, and has always supported the Gaullist position on the German occupation of France. By contrast, Jospin, addressing the French National Assembly on 12 November 1997, doggedly refused to recognise the crimes of Stalin, lest he offend the communists in his coalition. As a further expression of his democratic moderateness, Jospin proclaimed the Bolshevik Revolution as one of the great events of our century.

American neo-conservatives pretend to mourn the passing of European nation states. They cannot be sincere in this. The last thing they want Europeans to be is nationalistic, at any rate in a way that is incompatible with American interests. With the exceptions of the US and Israel (and a compliant Britain), neo-conservatives fear and detest nation states and are willing to ally with the Left to keep nationalists, particularly those associated with the anti-immigration European Right, from getting to first base. Not that these critics believe in an American nation state in any traditional sense. What they want is an embattled American empire carrying out their wish list.

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[Strengthandhonour]

Good article I must say. It is also interesting to see how Europeans are portrayed in the American media. I remember some show, they said "That guy looks like a gross European guy". They also always make jokes about the French, Sometimes the Germans and Italians too.

[Gil]

and pathological anti-Semitism — of Europe.

Which means:

Europe = Pathological anti-semitism

USA = Pathological Retardness

[Aeternitas]

Vicious Anti-Europeanism Roils the US

And vicious Anti-Americanism roils Europe

[Faísca]

Well, we don't like them, and they don't like us.

Fine by me.

[Phlegethon]

Yankees will get what they deserve, and sooner than they think.

[Aeternitas]

The favourite argument of the anti-European American is that European anti-americanism stems from jealousy and inferiority complexes. So then... what about American anti-europeanism?

[Gil]

I confess I envy the americans, their polluting SUV's, their hot college frat girls with STD's and the brain capacity of a lemur, their whorish cheerleaders, their crime-ridden cities, their mixed culture, their support of negroids no matter what the cost, their imperialistic view of the world.... need I say more?

[Phlegethon]

Let's hear it for niggerball and drive-ins!

[Theobald]

Originally Posted by Manji

Europe = Pathological anti-semitism

This is funny because their African-Americans are far more anti-Semitic than any European people.

This is evidently a legacy of last century political events. Look at 19th century US of America for example, there was difficultly a non-European country more pro-European than it was at the time, even if occasionally anti-British.

This text from Walt Whitman summarizes fairly well which were the cultural values mainstream Americans wanted to instill into the American people back then. Did they start distancing from us because they wanted to invent their very own culture and values?


III. Notes Left Over
4. British Literature

TO avoid mistake, I would say that I not only commend the study of this literature, but wish our sources of supply and comparison vastly enlarged. American students may well derive from all former lands—from forenoon Greece and Rome, down to the perturb’d medieval times, the Crusades, and so to Italy, the German intellect—all the other literatures, and all the newer ones—from witty and warlike France, and markedly, and in many ways, and at many different periods, from the enterprise and soul of the great Spanish race—bearing ourselves always courteous, always deferential, indebted beyond measure to the mother-world, to all its nations dead, as all its nations living—the offspring, this America of ours, the daughter, not by any means of the British isles exclusively, but of the continent, and all continents. Indeed, it is time we should realize and fully fructify those germs we also hold from Italy, France, Spain, especially in the best imaginative productions of those lands, which are, in many ways, loftier and subtler than the English, or British, and indispensable to complete our service, proportions, education, reminiscences, &c.… The British element these States hold, and have always held, enormously beyond its fit proportions. I have already spoken of Shakspere. He seems to me of astral genius, first class, entirely fit for feudalism. His contributions, especially to the literature of the passions, are immense, forever dear to humanity—and his name is always to be reverenced in America. But there is much in him ever offensive to democracy. He is not only the tally of feudalism, but I should say Shakspere is incarnated, uncompromising feudalism, in literature. Then one seems to detect something in him—I hardly know how to describe it—even amid the dazzle of his genius; and, in inferior manifestations, it is found in nearly all leading British authors. (Perhaps we will have to import the words Snob, Snobbish, &c., after all.) While of the great poems of Asian antiquity, the Indian epics, the book of Job, the Ionian Iliad, the unsurpassedly simple, loving, perfect idyls of the life and death of Christ, in the New Testament, (indeed Homer and the Biblical utterances intertwine familiarly with us, in the main,) and along down, of most of the characteristic, imaginative or romantic relics of the continent, as the Cid, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, &c., I should say they substantially adjust themselves to us, and, far off as they are, accord curiously with our bed and board to-day in New York, Washington, Canada, Ohio, Texas, California—and with our notions, both of seriousness and of fun, and our standards of heroism, manliness, and even the democratic requirements—those requirements are not only not fulfilled in the Shaksperean productions, but are insulted on every page. 1

I add that—while England is among the greatest of lands in political freedom, or the idea of it, and in stalwart personal character, &c.—the spirit of English literature is not great, at least is not greatest—and its products are no models for us. With the exception of Shakspere, there is no first-class genius in that literature—which, with a truly vast amount of value, and of artificial beauty, (largely from the classics,) is almost always material, sensual, not spiritual—almost always congests, makes plethoric, not frees, expands, dilates—is cold, anti-democratic, loves to be sluggish and stately, and shows much of that characteristic of vulgar persons, the dread of saying or doing something not at all improper in itself, but unconventional, and that may be laugh’d at. In its best, the sombre pervades it; it is moody, melancholy, and, to give it its due, expresses, in characters and plots, those qualities, in an unrival’d manner. Yet not as the black thunderstorms, and in great normal, crashing passions, of the Greek dramatists—clearing the air, refreshing afterward, bracing with power; but as in Hamlet, moping, sick, uncertain, and leaving ever after a secret taste for the blues, the morbid fascination, the luxury of wo.… 2

I strongly recommend all the young men and young women of the United States to whom it may be eligible, to overhaul the well-freighted fleets, the literatures of Italy, Spain, France, Germany, so full of those elements of freedom, self-possession, gay-heartedness, subtlety, dilation, needed in preparations for the future of the States. I only wish we could have really good translations. I rejoice at the feeling for Oriental researches and poetry, and hope it will go on.