Red, White, and Bruised
By Alan Dowd

Over the last few years, the media have created the distinct impression that the anti-American attitudes now visible (and quite audible) in various parts of the Earth are something new. Some blame it on George Bush’s foreign policy. Others say it’s a natural byproduct of the U.S.-led war on terror. The deeper reality is that anti- Americanism is as old as America itself. It didn’t begin on Bush’s watch, and it won’t end any time soon.

Researcher Barry Rubin reports that “the first clear statement of anti-Americanism” can be traced back to a predictable source: France. According to Rubin, a French lawyer named Simon Linguet warned in the 1780s that “the dregs of Europe... would build a dreadful society in America, create a strong army, take over Europe, and destroy civilization.”

There were competitive feelings about America on the other side of the Channel as well. Adam Smith’s 1776 assessment of Britain’s breakaway North American colonies was that they were “employed in contriving a new form of government for an extensive empire which will become one of the greatest and most formidable that ever was.”

More commonly, European elites took the opposite view— arguing that America was inherently deficient and hopelessly inferior to Europe. “Various continental and British scientists,” notes Austrian journalist Michael Freund in Understanding Anti-Americanism, “warned of the degenerative effects of the New World on plants, animals and human beings.” James Ceaser of the University of Virginia makes the same point reporting that by the eighteenth century it was widely accepted that “all living things in the Americas were not only inferior to those found in Europe but also in a condition of decline.”

Early anti-Americanism was expressed in more than just pseudo-science. France held the nascent American republic in such low regard that it demanded bribes from American diplomats seeking to negotiate with Paris. A quarter century after Americans ratified their Constitution, Britain was still flouting American sovereignty by seizing U.S. ships and forcing their crews into service on British vessels.

Of course, this transatlantic antipathy flowed both ways. Our ancestors dismissed Europe as “the Old World”—decaying and dying. George Washington’s contempt bled through at the close of his Presidency: “Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none or a very remote relationÉ. Our detached and distant situationÉenables us to pursue a different course.” Some of his successors would not be so polite; Dwight Eisenhower dismissed the French as “a hopeless, helpless mass of protoplasm.”

Those insane Americans

Whether or not Linguet was the first exponent of anti-Americanism, he wouldn’t be the last. America’s favorite Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, was anything but anti-American. Yet some of his assessments reflected nascent anti-American feeling among his European class. One chapter in Democracy in America blandly titled “Some Reflections on American Manners” concludes that “the effect of democracy is not exactly to give men any particular manners, but to prevent them from having manners at all.”

Foreshadowing his twenty-first-century countrymen, Tocqueville wrote with concern about religious fervor in America. “In the midst of American society, you meet with men full of a fanatical and almost wild spiritualism, which hardly exists in Europe,” he observed. “Religious insanity is very common in the United States.” Thus, long before George Bush described how Jesus changed his heart, Europeans were obviously dumbfounded by American religiosity.

Perhaps the most famous French slur on the United States came in the early twentieth century, when prime minister Georges Clemenceau sneered that “America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.” Viewed against the two world wars birthed in Europe after Clemenceau’s statement, which ended with 65 million dead, Clemenceau’s swipe might have been better directed at his side of the Atlantic. America’s armies would indeed sail across the Atlantic to take over the continent—twice—but they did so to save Europeans and their civilization, not to destroy them.

While the French are the undisputed world leaders in anti- Americanism, they have had plenty of company. Ceaser reminds us that nineteenth-century German poet Heinrich Heine called America “that pig-pen of freedom, inhabited by boors living in equality.” Other German poets like Nikolas Lenau mocked America as a land bereft of ideas and meaning. According to Freund, “a new wave of anti-Americanism” in Germany was sparked by that nation’s defeat in World War I.

Anti-American sentiment also surfaced in nations that fought alongside America. Toward the close of World War I, British philosopher Bertrand Russell compared the U.S. Army to the machinery of a police state. During World War II, Charles de Gaulle nursed a deep resentment against FDR for treating him, in the words of British writer Anthony Daniels, “with the same disdain that Stalin displayed toward the pope when he asked how many divisions he had.” According to Daniels, “This was a slight de Gaulle... communicated very clearly to his countrymen.”

By the 1950s, with the Cold War underway, anti-Americanism reached new heights. Some of it was bankrolled and fomented by Moscow; some of it came voluntarily and freely. Washington’s hardball response to the USSR’s reckless missile gambit in Cuba triggered yet another wave of anti-American feeling in Europe. Europeans insisted that the U.S. had dragged them “uncomfortably close to annihilation without representation,” in historian Walter LeFeber’s clever phrase, and leaders like de Gaulle grew ever more indignant and independent.

The Vietnam War swelled the anti-American wave into a tsunami. After a lifetime of Yankee-hating rants and stunts, Bertrand Russell set up a mock war crimes tribunal to condemn America for its role in Vietnam. He concluded that Americans in Southeast Asia were “as bad as the Nazis.” This animosity led to active slights, large and small. In 1973, western Europe’s leaders were near unanimous in denying air-space access to American planes trying to resupply Israel amidst its fight to defend itself during the Yom Kippur War. Several years later, President Reagan’s determination to win the Cold War fueled apocalyptic anti-American wailing throughout Europe.

The negative Nineties

Even in those halcyon days after the Berlin Wall fell, much of the world remained less than pleased with the United States. Historian David Halberstam has pointed out that Europeans and others disliked even the non-threatening Bill Clinton. According

to Halberstam, some world leaders saw Clinton “as the embodiment of something they disliked greatly about America—the smug, remote superpower whose attitude on most things was ‘don’t call us, we’ll call you, and by the way, we’ll make the important decisions.’” After all, he unilaterally broke the U.N. arms embargo in the former Yugoslavia and secretly sent weaponry to the outgunned Bosnian Muslims over Europe’s objections. He refused to sign the landmine treaty, balked at the International Criminal Court (until the eleventh hour of his Presidency), and in his final five years in office launched strikes at no fewer than five countries (Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq, Serbia, and the Sudan).

It was Madeleine Albright—Clinton’s Secretary of State, not Bush’s—who called America “the indispensable nation.” Foreign leaders bristled when she defended American unilateralism by claiming that the United States “stands taller and therefore can see further” than other nations. It’s no wonder that the French coined the derisive term “hyperpower” during the Clinton years. As Johns Hopkins professor Fouad Ajami recalls, it was during the 1990s, without any help from George Bush, Gitmo, or the Iraq War, that “anti-Americanism became the uncontested ideology of French public life.”

Historian Paul Hollander also traces the latest revival of anti-Americanism to the early 1990s. He characterizes it as a backlash against the American supremacy that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union. With only one superpower left, Washington was bound to be blamed for all the problems on Earth, rather than only half of them. According to Hollander, other factors that have fanned anti-Americanism include globalization and the consequent spread of modernity, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, and even the President’s personality, “permeated as it is with a macho, cowboy image.”

Yet the most vicious and violent expression of anti-Americanism in history—the attack of September 11, 2001—was conceived and mapped out years before anyone ever caught a glimpse of George Bush’s cowboy boots. Recall that Osama bin Laden issued his fatwa condemning America and calling on Muslims “to initiate a guerilla warfare” against the United States and “the kuffar [unbelievers] in every part of the world” back in the mid 1990s.

Get used to it

People who hate America will find their own rationalizations for their animus—without much consistency or attachment to fact: Secular Europe disdains America for its “religious fanaticism” while Muslim fanatics curse America’s decadent Godlessness. Islamists charged the U.S. with being at war with Islam at a moment when the United States had just finished defending Muslim Kuwait, Muslim Saudi Arabia, the Muslim Shiites and Kurds of Iraq, starving Somali Muslims, and the suffering Muslims of Bosnia and Kosovo (after the E.U., the Arab League, and other interested parties decided essentially to avert their gaze).

This is not to dismiss anti-American sentiment as irrelevant or beneath America’s concern. Nor is it to absolve the United States from any role in the spread of anti-American attitudes. But there is relatively little Washington can do to check an anti- Americanism that is longstanding, usually irrational, and often rooted in envy. Consider French intellectual Jean Baudrillard: “How we have dreamt of this event,” he howled just weeks after Manhattan’s 9/11 maiming. “For no one can avoid dreaming of the destruction of a power that has become hegemonic.”

America’s soldiers were still in their barracks when these words were spoken, so no one can blame sentiments like these on America’s actions during the war on terror. In fact, it’s more accurate to describe the war on terror as a byproduct of anti- Americanism than the reverse. After all, it isn’t only cafe radicals like Baudrillard who dream of America’s destruction—so do mass-murderers like bin Laden.

Alan Dowd is a TAE contributing writer