Among the world’s most visible and widespread phenomena is the palpable, passionate hatred that so many people (including Americans), in so many nations, feel toward the United States. These detractors justify their sentiments on the basis of what they claim is America’s longstanding, and ongoing, legacy of oppression, aggression, exploitation, and racism. The creed of anti-Americanism is founded on the belief that the United States is inherently evil and, consequently, poses a grave threat to the rest of the world.
As University of Virginia professor James Ceasar points out, anti-Americanism originated as a product of European thought but has spread, particularly over the past century, to virtually every region of the earth. Its tenets helped to shape public opinion in pre-World War II Japan (where many in the elite had studied German philosophy), and have influenced contemporary thought in Latin American and African countries (where French philosophy is particularly influential). And of course, as evidenced by the many
fatwahs and
jihads pronounced by radical Islamists against the West, anti-Americanism is a particularly powerful force in the Muslim and Arab world as well.
Among the more candid and well-known mouthpieces of anti-American doctrine is Colorado University professor Ward Churchill, who has asserted that terrorist violence directed against the United States is a morally justifiable response to what he characterizes as the U.S. government’s “rape” and “murder” of other populations all over the globe. “If we want an end to violence,” says Churchill, “especially that perpetrated against civilians, we must take the responsibility for halting the slaughter perpetrated by the United States around the world.” Churchill does not, however, harbor any hopes that America might mend its alleged flaws; rather, he advocates the country's destruction: “I want the state gone: transform the situation to U.S. out of North America. U.S. off the planet. Out of existence altogether.” Toward this end, Churchill candidly endorses further acts of anti-American terror. “One of the things I’ve suggested,” he says, “is that it may be that more 9/11s are necessary.” Lamenting that the terrorism of 9/11 had proved “insufficient to accomplish its purpose” of eviscerating the United States, Churchill wrote, “What the hell? It was worth a try.”
Another prominent voice of anti-Americanism is M.I.T. professor Noam Chomsky, who, over the past four decades, has published many books and pamphlets with a single overriding theme: America is the Great Satan, the wellspring from which flows most of the world’s evil and of humanity’s suffering. In Chomsky’s view, the United States is responsible not only for its own transgressions, but for the bad deeds of others as well, including those of the 9/11 terrorists who struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Chomsky casts those attacks as the desperate, retaliatory, and entirely understandable measures of long-suffering victims of American injustice.
Ever the advocate of America’s enemies, Chomsky once wrote that in the first battle of the post-World War II struggle with the Soviet Empire, “the United States was picking up where the Nazis had left off”; that in Latin America during the Cold War, U.S. support for legitimate governments against Communist subversion led to American complicity in “the methods of Heinrich Himmler’s extermination squads”; that there is “a close correlation worldwide between torture and U.S. aid”; that America “invaded” Vietnam for the purpose of slaughtering its people, and that even after withdrawing its forces from Vietnam in 1975, “the major policy goal of the U.S. has been to maximize repression and suffering in the countries that were devastated by our violence”; that “the pretext for Washington’s terrorist wars [i.e., in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile, Guatemala, Iraq, etc.] was self-defense, the standard official justification for just about any monstrous act, even the Nazi Holocaust”; and that “legally speaking, there’s a very solid case for impeaching every American president since the Second World War. They’ve all been either outright war criminals or involved in serious war crimes.”
With their deep-seeded contempt for the United States, Chomsky and Churchill speak for anti-Americans all over the world.
In this section of DiscoverTheNetworks, the category titled
Understanding Anti-Americanism: Its Nature, Origins, and Goals explores the roots, premises, worldviews, and objectives of modern-day anti-Americanism.
The category titled Domestic Anti-Americanism explores the phenomenon as it is experienced and expressed by people living in the United States. In the article "The America-Haters Among Us," Rabbi Aryeh Spero writes: "They relish reviling and soiling to the world the United States. They will select any triviality and blow it up ... Their demands are irresponsible, inconsistent, indeed dangerous. In fact, not standards at all. From America, they demand everything; from our enemies, nothing." Meanwhile, in "Hating America," interviewee Paul Hollander says: "Anti-Americanism is a sweeping, generalized rejection, a disposition that only partially depends on the actual wrongs the U.S. perpetuates."
The category titled Foreign Anti-Americanism examines the causes and manifestations of anti-Americanism in various regions of the world. In "Anti-Americanism Redux Abroad" (published by The Washington Times), Arnold Beichman traces European anti-Semitism to the fact that Marxism "is still part of West European culture."
The category titled Defending America and Western Civilization responds to the charge that the United States is a force of evil in the world, not only today but also in a historical sense. In "Resisting the Smear of a "Tainted Legacy" (published by TownHall.com), Michael Medved writes: "A nation with no pride in its past will feel little confidence in its future. If citizens look upon the origins of their society with guilt and confusion, they’ll find scant reason to identify with its fate or to repair its shortcomings. The current notion that America’s undeniable power and privilege rest upon shameful foundations poisons our public discourse, embitters the national mood, and paralyzes all efforts for constructive change. We worry over anti-Americanism abroad, but echo its primary charges here at home."
The category titled Anti-Americanism in Academia examines why a significant percentage of U.S. professors detest their home country and make that contempt known to their students. In his October 1, 2001 article, "Why Do They Hate Us?" (published by Capitalism Magazine), Robert Tracinski traces such attitudes to an anti-Enlightenment backlash in the universities: "This outlook has reached rock bottom with today's Postmodernists, who condemn science and reason as oppressive agents of the 'dominant power structure' and scream that it is 'racist' to regard a free society like America as superior to Third World dictatorships. This anti-Enlightenment trend is the reason we now see the spectacle of academic intellectuals allying themselves with the Taliban, arguably the most unenlightened regime on earth."
The category titled Anti-Americanism in Primary and Secondary Education explains how anti-American attitudes and worldviews are transmitted to children in classrooms across the United States.
