The Discreet Charm of Anti-Americanism

Twenty years ago, people used to write “No to Communism!” Today, they write “No to America!”

Today, the children of fathers who used to applaud everything American compete against each other to reject everything American. Who do they learn how to be anti-American from? The answer may come as a surprise: from America!

And really: Who could criticize the United States of America better than its own citizens? The director Michael Moore, writer of “Fahrenheit 9/11” and “Bowling for Columbine,” is the best instructor in anti-Americanism under the sun. The best, but not the only one.

Noam Chomsky, Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal have gladly criticized America. The list doesn’t even take into account naturalized immigrants such as Edward Said — a native Egyptian who considered the U.S.’ perspective on the Middle East to be hostage to neocolonial inertia and the Israeli lobby. He was just a couple of years short of seeing that same lobby denounced by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, two American citizens, and Jewish at that.

AMERICAN anti-Americanism is often associated with the left wing of the Democratic Party, but that is not necessarily so. Regarding September 11, for instance, Chomsky did not forgive either the right Bush or the left Clinton. According to him, the attacks against the World Trade Center could not measure up to Clinton’s attack against the pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. “What are Republicans and Democrats?” Susan Sontag’s son, David Rieff, once asked me. “The same party divided on its views on abortion,” he himself answered.*

With respect to 9/11, we could mention Mailer one more time. When the twin towers collapsed, the author of “The Naked and the Dead” said that Americans must give it serious thought and try to understand why so many people around the world hate the United States of America. Mailer himself (he passed away a few years ago) didn’t have a problem using hatred as a personal weapon when he needed to. In one of his letters, he declared that he would prefer to be labeled Bolshevik, anarchist, communist or whatever else you can think of — just not liberal.

The insight that something is wrong with America flooded American pop culture in the 60’s, and it has kept the same course ever since. The perception that there is nothing heroic about dying for your country was born in America during the Vietnam War. Anyone who has seen “Lenny,” “Hair,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Birdy” knows that there is nothing easier and more rewarding than criticizing America. Anti-Americanism among intellectuals has fueled tons of creative biographies and breathed life into many charismatic personalities. Its moment of culmination came when a widely unpopular Republican president moved into the White House. I remember I stopped mentioning Bush’s name in 2007 when, prior to interviewing him in Washington, I got the unified negative, even pitying, reaction of many liberal academics. One of them even told me: “Spit in his face for me, please.”

American anti-Americanism even seizes ground from Europe, itself now in crisis. No wonder! How could the European left wing criticize the U.S. now that its beloved favorite Barack Obama is at the wheel? There were separate attempts, though. Some voices from Le Monde Diplomatique and Die Tageszeitung claimed that Obama is not the person who will dismantle the American Empire, that he pays more attention to race than class and so forth, but this whining noise quickly faded away. The arrows pointed at Obama will become sharper and loaded with more poison only when a German Turk takes over Germany or a French Algerian over France.

Recently, writing about the inevitable American collapse has become fashionable. The mild version of this prediction was given by Thomas Friedman in “The World is Flat.” The harsh version, which I recommend because it is much more entertaining, is authored by Alfred McCoy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who goes above and beyond. According to him, American collapse is not only inevitable but it is already knocking at the door, and it will be spectacular.

That’s what BULGARIAN youngsters read — that’s what they learn. Given that they have watched all the American movies and the best Russian ones — the very opposite of what we have done — it is expectable that they will go against the foremost power, ideology, culture. It may be a paradox, but the global access to information (an American value in its core) has turned against America itself. In the revolt against the “global sovereign,” our kids find a cause, a subculture and maybe their own revolution.

Of course, analysts have since long ago tried to associate hatred of America and the Western world with the flaws of Western civilization. The Dutch writer Ian Buruma labeled the phenomenon “Occidentalism.” In his book, he shows exactly how Occidentalism has been nurtured by Islamist radicals, ex-communists, etc., but primarily by the West’s nagging sense of guilt and its exaggerations of political correctness.

That may be the case, but I find something very attractive in the fact that America is the one cultivating anti-Americanism. Can you picture anti-Sovietism nurtured in the Soviet Union in the time of Brezhnev, a flourishing anti-Iranism in Iran with Ahmadinejad in charge or an anti-Castro movement harbored in Fidel Castro’s nest? In the U.S., though, anti-Americanism grows in favorable conditions. It has its audience and its clientele. Its preachers are not thrown in jail, just the opposite. Some of them may have even heard future presidents’ confessions — as was the case with African-American pastor Jeremiah Wright and his Chicago-based church, which Barack Obama and his family used to visit.

Moreover, anti-Americanism is, in a way, America’s hidden weapon. How could you possibly come up with a valuable criticism of the U.S., when some of its brightest daughters and sons have already come up with it in a brighter way?

*Editor’s note: This quote, accurately translated, could not be verified.