One of the more unusual aspects of moving to New York has been to find myself playing the role of American apologist whenever I am home in England, on holiday or entertaining guests from abroad.
A few years ago I would have been on the other side of the table, railing against “Bush, the neocons and US foreign policy.” Today, though I am critical of all three, I don’t think the US as a whole should be regarded as the font of all evil and land of the dumb.
Some might say that I have gone local. Perhaps they are right. But it’s not that I think everything America says and does is okay. It’s just that living here, I find myself more inclined towards the view that America is driven by a multitude of factors rather than by a cabal of neocons, Christian evangelicals and “the Jewish lobby.”
America bashing is fine, as long as it’s done with some thought. After all, Europe takes enough of a pummeling over here, much of it undeserved and born of the same ignorance that fuels anti-Americanism in Europe.
But, for me, one of the more alarming opinions I have heard in the last couple of years, often from otherwise rational, intelligent people—many of them good friends—is that the US government was somehow complicit in the September 11 terror attacks.
Is it really so hard to believe that Al Qaeda was capable of flying planes into the World Trade Center and that the resulting fires could have caused the buildings’ collapse?
You have to begin in a very dark place to suspect that people within the US government would connive to help/facilitate an attack on such a scale in their own country in order to provide a pretext for war and personal or financial gain. Then again, when the bogeyman is America or Israel I suppose anything is possible.
A recent story in the New York Times reminded me just how easily people will ignore the stated aims of a particular group in favor of a conspiracy theory that plays to their prejudices and fears.
The story is about a World Wildlife Fund project to conserve an enormous nature reserve on the Rio Negro in Brazil. But, according to the Times, many Brazilians believe it is a covert operation by foreign powers to take over the country’s natural resources:
“This is a new form of colonialism, an open conspiracy in which economic and financial interests act through nongovernmental organizations,” said Lorenzo Carrasco, editor and co-author of “The Green Mafia,” a widely circulated anti-environmentalist polemic. “It is evident these interests want to block the development of Brazil and the Amazon region by creating and controlling these reserves, which are full of minerals and other valuable natural resources.”
Such views are widely held in Brazil, cutting across regional and class lines. In a survey of 2,000 people in 143 cities conducted in person in 2005 by the country’s leading polling organization, Ibope, 75 percent said that Brazil’s natural riches could provoke a foreign invasion, and nearly three out of five distrusted the activities of environmental groups.
[…]The notion that foreigners covet the Amazon has long been widespread in Brazil, fed in part by anxiety about the central government’s tenuous control of the region. Those concerns have been exacerbated in recent years by the Internet, which has become a home for fabricated documents and declarations meant to convince Brazilians that their sovereignty is at risk.
The most notorious example is a widely reproduced map supposedly used in an American middle-school geography textbook. Rife with misspellings and errors of syntax of a type common to speakers of Romance languages like Portuguese, it shows the Amazon as an “international reserve,” and describes Brazilians as “monkeys” incapable of managing the rain forest.
Other spurious documents say that both President Bush and Al Gore made speeches during the 2000 presidential campaign in favor of wresting the Amazon from Brazil. Elsewhere, the documents quote an apocryphal American general, who leads an agency that the Pentagon says does not exist, as saying, “In the event Brazil decides to use the Amazon in a way that puts the environment of the United States at risk, we must be ready to interrupt that process immediately.”
The full story is here.
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Well put and well written!
I get the impression sometimes that “beginning in a very dark place” is not that uncommon in Europe, at least where it concerns the American bogeyman. What is shocking to me is the unbelievably low standard of evidence required to “verify” various evils of the US. Speaks of an utterly desperate need for a bogeyman. Nice blog.
I disagree with you where you write “America bashing is fine, as long as it’s done with some thought. After all, Europe takes enough of a pummeling over here…” First of all “bashing” doesn’t require thought, that’s why it has such hateful and violent undertones. The American hater dehumanizes Americans (as the fascists and Nazis did other minorities) to negate any possibility of moral righteousness from the States, even when that righteousness meant 60 years of peace and prosperity in western Europe. Second, there is little if any criticism of Europe from Americans. In fact, most the US media, academia, Hollywood and others who get the opportunity to climb on a soap box and vent, go out of their way to exonerate europe. What was Gwyneth Paltrow’s latest rant against the United States in which she lauded Britain as superior? The New York Times reads like a virtual travel brochure for Britain, for crying out loud. Try to find something similar in Europe in wich the States are made to look like a theme park full of happy elves. Don’t even bring up the Holocaust at a cocktail party in New York City. Even the Jews will go into rant of how the US is as much to blame as the Germans. Never in history has a nation endured (and taken it rather peacefully, I might add) the most hateful instults hurled at it as America. If you can summarize which nations are good and “evil” based on character–the Europeans who view America as nothing but a wasteland or the Americans who view Europe as “haut couture”–it is the Americans who come out looking not only like the good guys, but as holy saints! 20 years ago an American publishing company published a photo essay coffee table book featuring photos by Americans of Europe. There were windwills, smiling faces, rosey cheeks (lots of white people), fun, love and beauty throughout. Riding on the sucess of the book, the same publishers hired a group of European photographers to take pictures of the US. What did we get? Ghettos, dump yards, abandoned buildings, and other negative images. For me this was very telling about the difference between Americans and Europeans.
Mark. At first, as I was reading your post, I thought stop whining you pathetic sap. But as you proceeded you made some good points. Apart from the war bit. American help came WAY too late. Shamefully so. And Americans take too much credit for the victory, even if it would have been impossible without them. Which we all know, and are all very grateful for.
But you are right. There are a lot of snobs here and in Europe and the anti-American mindset is silly. If there is such a thing as “Americanism” it is and always has been a more positive force than negative, and still shines bright in a world riddled with hateful gangs and bullies.
“a theme park full of happy elves”
I like it.