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Wall Street Journal
AT WAR
'Bomb Texas'
The psychological roots of anti-Americanism.
BY VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
Monday, January 13, 2003
With this past autumn's discussion in Washington over what to do about
Iraq there arrived also the season of protests. They were everywhere.
In the national newspapers, Common Cause published a full-page letter,
backed by "7,000 signatories," demanding (as if it had been outlawed) a
"full and open debate" before any American action against Iraq. More
radical cries emanated from Not in Our Name, a nationwide "project"
spearheaded by Noam Chomsky and affiliates, which likewise ran full-page
advertisements in the major papers decrying America's "war without
limit," organized "Days of Resistance" in New York and elsewhere, and in
general made known its feeling that the United States rather than Iraq
poses the real threat to world peace. At one late-October march in
Washington, there were signs proclaiming "I Love Iraq, Bomb Texas," and
depicting President Bush wearing a Hitler mustache and giving the Nazi
salute.
In the dock with America was, of course, Israel: On university campuses,
demands circulated to disinvest from companies doing business with that
"apartheid state"--on the premise, one supposes, that a democratic
society with an elected government and a civilian-controlled military is
demonic in a way that an autocratic cabal sponsoring the suicide-murder
of civilians is not.
Writers, actors, and athletes revealed their habitual self-absorption.
The novelist Philip Roth complained that the United States since
September 11 had been indulging itself in "an orgy of national
narcissism," although he also conceded, reclaiming his title as the
reigning emperor of aesthetic narcissism, that immediately after the
fall of the Twin Towers New York "had become interesting again because
it was a town in crisis"--a fleeting, final benefit to connoisseurs of
literature from the death of thousands.
Barbra Streisand, identifying Saddam Hussein as the dictator of Iran,
faxed misspelled and incoherent but characteristically perfervid memos
to Congressmen, while Ed Asner, of sitcom fame, threatened publicly to
"lose his soul" if we went into Iraq. The Hollywood bad boy Sean Penn,
not previously known for harboring a pacifistic streak, demanded that
the president cease his bellicosity for the sake of Penn's children.
Traveling abroad, the actress Jessica Lange pertly announced: "It makes
me feel ashamed to come from the United States--it is humiliating." And
the jet-setting tennis celebrity Martina Navratilova, who fled here to
escape communist repression and has earned millions from corporate
sponsors, castigated the repressive atmosphere of her adopted homeland,
a country whose behavior is based "solely on how much money will come
out of it."
And so forth. Harbingers of this sort of derision were, of course, on
view a year ago, in the period right after September 11 and well into
the campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Thus Michael Moore,
currently making the rounds plugging his movie "Bowling for Columbine"
and a sympathizer of Not in Our Name, bemoaned the 9/11 terrorists' lack
of discrimination in their choice of target: "If someone did this to get
back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who did
not vote for him!" Norman Mailer, engagingly comparing the Twin Towers
to "two huge buck teeth," pronounced their ruins "more beautiful" than
the buildings themselves.
In the London Times, the novelist Alice Walker speculated whether Osama
bin Laden's "cool armor" might not be pierced by reminding him of "all
the good, nonviolent things he had done." There was the well-known poet
who forbade her teenage daughter to fly the American flag from their
living-room window, the well-known professor who said he was more
frightened by the speech of American officials than by the
suicide-hijackers of 9/11, and the well-known columnist who decried our
"belligerently militaristic" reaction to the devastation of that day.
Not all the criticism of the American response to terrorist cells and
rogue governments has partaken of this order of irrationality; serious
differences, responsibly aired, are also to be found, including in
newspaper ads. But in the year since the slaughter of September 11
there emerged an unpleasant body of sentiment that has little or nothing
to do with the issues at hand but instead reflects a profound and
blanket dislike of anything the United States does at any time.
For a while, The New Republic kept track of this growing nonsense by
Western intellectuals, professors, media celebrities, and artists under
the rubric of "Idiocy Watch," and the talk-show host Bill O'Reilly is
still eager to subject exemplars of it to his drill-bit method of
interrogation. The phenomenon they represent has been tracked daily by
Andrew Sullivan on his Web log and analyzed at greater length by, among
others, William J. Bennett (in "Why We Fight"), Norman Podhoretz (in
"The Return of the 'Jackal Bins,' " Commentary, April 2002), and Keith
Windschuttle (in "The Cultural War on Western Civilization," The New
Criterion, January 2002), the last of whom offers a complete taxonomy of
schools and doctrines.
And yet the sheer strangeness of the overall enterprise, not to mention
its recent proliferation and intensification, would seem to merit
another look.
Some general truths emerge from any survey of anti-American invective in
the context of the present world conflict. First, in each major event
since September 11, proponents of the idea of American iniquity and
Cassandras of a richly deserved American doom have proved consistently
wrong. Warnings in late September 2001 about the perils of
Afghanistan--the peaks, the ice, the warring factions, Ramadan, jihad,
and our fated rendezvous with the graveyard of mighty armies gone before
us--faded by early November in the face of rapid and overwhelming
American victory. Subsequent predictions of "millions" of Afghan
children left naked and starving in the snow turned out to be equally
fanciful, as did the threat of atomic annihilation from across the
border in Kashmir.
No sooner had that theater cooled, however, than we were being hectored
with the supposed criminality of our ally Ariel Sharon. Cries of
"Jeningrad" followed, to die down only with the publication of
Palestinian Authority archives exposing systematic thievery, corruption
and PA-sanctioned slaughter. During the occasional hiatus from gloomy
prognostications about the Arab-Israeli conflict, we were kept informed
of the new cold war that was slated to erupt on account of our
cancellation of the anti-ballistic-missile treaty with the defunct
Soviet Union; of catastrophic global warming, caused by us and
triggering floods in Germany; and always of the folly of our proposed
intervention in Iraq.
That effort to remove a fascist dictator, we are now assured (most
tediously by Anthony Lewis in the New York Review of Books), is destined
to fail, proving instead to be a precursor to nuclear war and/or a
permanently inflamed Arab "street." On the other hand, a successful
campaign in Iraq, it is predicted, will serve only to promote America's
worst instincts: its imperial ambition, its cultural chauvinism (a k a
hatred of Muslims and Arabs), and its drive for economic hegemonism (a
synonym for oil). Those who oppose pre-emption warn on Monday that the
Iraqi dictator is too dangerous to attack and shrug on Tuesday that he
is not dangerous enough to warrant invasion. Take your pick: easy
containment or sure Armageddon.
The striking characteristic of such judgments is that they, too, are
wholly at odds with the known facts. Confident forecasts of American
defeat take no notice of what is the largest and best-trained military
in history, and fly in the face of recent American victories in the Gulf
War (where, at the time, Anthony Lewis likewise predicted quagmire and
disaster) and Kosovo, both achieved at the cost of scarcely any American
casualties.
Alleged American hatred of Muslims hardly comports with our record of
saving Kuwaitis from fascist Iraqis, Kosovars and Bosnians from
Christian Serbs, or Afghans from Russian communists and then from their
own Islamist overlords, all the while providing billions of dollars in
aid to Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority. It was Jordanians
and Kuwaitis, not we and not Israelis, who ethnically cleansed
Palestinians; Iraqis and Egyptians, not we, who gassed Muslim
populations. And it is to our shores that Muslims weary of Middle
Eastern despotism are desperate to emigrate.
Is there a consistent theme here? We are talking, largely though not
exclusively, about a phenomenon of the aging left of the Vietnam era and
of its various progeny and heirs; and once upon a time, indeed, the
anti-American reflex could be linked with some rigor to the influence of
Marxism. True, that particular religion, at least in its pristine form,
is just about gone from the picture these days. Some of its fumes,
though, still linger in the doctrines of radical egalitarianism espoused
by postmodern relativists and multiculturalists and by now instilled, in
suitably diluted and presentable form, in several generations of college
and high-school students. Hence, for example, the regular put-down of
George W. Bush as a "Manichean"--for could anything be more
self-evidently retrograde than a view of our present conflict as a war
of good versus evil, or anything more simplistic than relying on such
"universal" arbiters of human behavior as freedom, pluralism, and
religious tolerance?
Eschewing any reference to truths of this kind, adherents of
postmodernist relativism assess morality instead by the sole criterion
of power: Those without it deserve the ethical high ground by virtue of
their very status as underdogs; those with it, at least if they are
Westerners, and especially if they are Americans, are ipso facto
oppressors. Israel could give over the entire West Bank, suffer 10,000
dead from suicide bombers, and apologize formally for its existence, and
it would still be despised by American and European intellectuals for
being what it is--Western, prosperous, confident, and successful amid a
sea of abject self-induced failure.
One is bound to point out that as a way of organizing reality, this
deterministic view of the world suffers from certain fatal defects,
primarily an easy susceptibility to self-contradiction. Thus, a roguish
Augusto Pinochet, who executed thousands in the name of "law and order"
in Chile, is regarded as an incarnation of the devil purely by dint of
his purportedly close association with the United States, while a
roguish and anti-American Castro, who butchered tens of thousands in the
name of "social justice" in Cuba, is courted by congressmen and
ex-presidents even as Hollywood celebrities festooned with AIDS ribbons
sedulously ignore the thousands of HIV-positive Cubans languishing in
his camps. Kofi Annan gushes, Chamberlain-like, of Saddam Hussein,
"He's a man I can do business with," while the ghosts of thousands slain
by the Iraqi tyrant, many of them at his own hand, flutter nearby; for
this, the soft-spoken internationalist is lionized.
Few have exploited the contradictions of this amoral morality as deftly
as Jimmy Carter, who can parlay with some of the world's most odious
dictators and still garner praise for "reaching out" to the
disadvantaged and the oppressed. As president, Mr. Carter evidently
was incapable of doing much of anything at all when tens of thousands of
Ethiopians were being butchered; but as chief executive emeritus, he has
managed to abet the criminal regime of North Korea in its determination
to fabricate nuclear bombs and lately, having been rewarded with the
Nobel Peace Prize for peace, has brazenly attempted to thwart a sitting
president's efforts to save the world from the Iraqi madman.
But all such contradictions are lightly borne. Since, for our
postmodern relativists and multiculturalists, there can be no real
superiority of Western civilization over the available alternatives,
democracy and freedom are themselves to be understood as mere
"constructs," to be defined only by shifting criteria that reflect local
prejudices and tastes. Like Soviet commissars labeling their closed
societies "republics" and their enslaved peoples "democratic," Saudi
officials assert that their authoritarian desert monarchy is an "Islamic
democracy"--and who are we to say them nay? ("To my ear," the New York
Times columnist Nicholas Kristof helpfully explains, "the harsh
[American] denunciations of Saudi Arabia as a terrorist state sound as
unbalanced as the conspiratorial ravings of Saudi fundamentalists
themselves.") In Afghanistan, the avatars of multiculturalism and
utopian pacifism struggled with the facts of a homophobic, repressive,
and icon-destroying Taliban, but emerged triumphant: According to their
reigning dialectic, the Taliban still had to be understood on their own
terms; only the United States could be judged, and condemned,
absolutely.
As for the roots of elite unhappiness with America, this is a subject
unto itself. It would hardly do to reduce everything to a matter of
psychology: a whole class of unhappy individuals motivated by resentment
over the failure of their society to fulfill their own considerable
aspirations. Nor does it quite satisfy to say more globally, and
theoretically, that they suffer at several removes from the paradoxes of
the radical Enlightenment: the unquestioned belief that sweet reason
alone, in the hands of its proper acolytes, and yoked to commensurate
powers of coercion, can remake the world. But we need not discount
other and much simpler factors--like the law of the pack.
As in the medieval church or among Soviet apparatchiks, the pull of
groupspeak is always strong among compliant and opportunistic elites.
For today's intellectuals, professors and artists, being on the team
pays real dividends when it comes to tenure, promotion, publication,
reviews, lecture invitations, social acceptance and psychic
reassurance. And the dividends are compound: One is a lockstep member
of one's crowd and one enjoys the frisson of dissidence, of being at
variance, but always so comfortably at variance, with one's benighted
fellow citizens.
Our unprecedented affluence also explains much, although its role as a
facilitator has been relatively scanted in most discussions of
anti-Americanism that I have seen. The plain fact is that civilization
has never witnessed the level of wealth enjoyed by so many contemporary
Americans and Europeans. Vast groups are now able to insulate
themselves from the age-old struggle to obtain food, shelter and
physical security from enemies both natural and human. Obesity, not
starvation, is our chief health problem; we are more worried about our
401(k) portfolios than about hostile tribes across the border.
What does this have to do with the spread of anti-Americanism?
Homegrown hostility to American society and the American experiment is
hardly a new phenomenon, but in the 19th century it tended to be limited
to tiny and insulated elite circles (see the writings of Henry Adams).
Now, it is a calling card for tens and hundreds of thousands who share a
once rare material splendor. That brilliant trio of Roman imperial
writers, Petronius, Suetonius and Juvenal, warned about such luxus and
its effects upon the elite of their era, among them cynicism, nihilism,
and a smug and crippling contempt for one's own.
An ancillary sort of unreality has emerged in modern Western life
alongside the reduced need to use our muscles or face physical threats.
In a protected world, Saddam Hussein comes to seem little different from
a familiar angry dean or a predictably moody editor, someone who can be
either reasoned with or, if necessary, censured or sued. In this
connection, it is not surprising that those most critical of America are
not the purported victims of its supposedly rapacious capitalist
system--farm workers, car mechanics or welders--but more often those in
the arts, universities, media and government who have the time and
leisure to contemplate utopian perfection without firsthand and daily
exposure to backbreaking physical labor, unrepentant bullies or
unapologetically violent criminals. For such people, the new prosperity
does not bring a greater appreciation of the culture that has produced
it but rather enables a fanciful shift from thinking in the immediate
and concrete to idle musings of the distant and abstract.
For many, today's affluence is also accompanied by an unprecedented
sense of security. Tenure has ensured that tens of thousands of
professors who work nine months a year cannot be fired for being
unproductive or mediocre scholars, much less for being abject failures
in the classroom. In government at every level, job security is the
norm. The combination of guarantees and affluence, the joint creation
of an enormous upper-middle class, breeds a dangerous unfamiliarity with
how human nature really works elsewhere, outside the protected realm.
Such naiveté engenders its own array of contradictory attitudes and
emotions, including guilt, hypocrisy, and envy. Among some of our new
aristocrats, the realization has dawned that their own good fortune is
not shared world-wide, and must therefore exist at the expense of
others, if not of the planet itself.
This hurts terribly, at least in theory. It sends some of them to their
fax machines, from where they dispatch anguished letters to the New York
Times about the plight of distant populations. It prompts others, more
principled and more honorable, to work in soup kitchens, give money to
impoverished school districts, and help out less fortunate friends and
family. But local charity is unheralded and also expensive, in terms of
both time and money. Far easier for most to exhibit concern by signing
an ostentatious petition against Israel or to assemble in Central Park:
public demonstrations that cost nothing but seemingly meet the need to
show to peers that one is generous, fair, caring and compassionate.
As if that were not hypocrisy enough, those who protest against global
warming, against shedding blood for oil, or against the logging of the
world's forests are no less likely than the rest of us to drive SUVs,
walk on hardwood floors and lounge on redwood decks. Try asking someone
awash in a sea of materialism to match word with deed and actually
disconnect from the opulence that is purportedly killing the world and
its inhabitants. Celebrity critics of corporate capitalism neither
redistribute their wealth nor separate themselves from their
multinational recording companies, film studios, and publication
houses--or even insist on lower fees so that the oppressed might enjoy
cheaper tickets at the multiplex. Jessica Lange and Alec Baldwin so
hate George W. Bush that they threaten to leave our shores--promises,
promises.
An even less appetizing quality of the new privileged is their palpable
and apparently unassuageable envy. Intellectuals and people in the arts
are perennially surprised--no, outraged--to find that corporate managers
and Rotary Club businessmen, with far less education and infinitely less
taste than they, make even more money. To the guilt they feel over what
they have is therefore added fury at those who not only have more but
seem to enjoy it without a necessary and concomitant sense of shame.
Worse yet, because America is still a plutocracy where riches and not
education, ancestral pedigree or accent bring status, it can be galling
for a sensitive professor of Renaissance literature to find himself
snubbed at dinner parties by his own university's president in favor of
the generous but (shall we say) less subtle owner of a chain of Taco
Bells. From there it is but a step to seeing the face of that same
smiling and unapologetic plutocrat before him whenever he gazes upon the
likeness of George W. Bush or Richard Cheney.
This brings us to another element of the new anti-Americanism. All of
us seek status in accordance with what we feel we have accomplished or
think we know. This naturally selfish drive is especially problematic
for radical egalitarians, who must suppress their own desire for
privilege only to see it pop out in all sorts of strange ways. I do not
mean the superficially incongruous manifestations: Hollywood actors in
jeans and sneakers piling into limousines, Marxist professors signing
their mass mailings with the pompous titles of their chairs, endowed
through capitalist largesse, or the posh Volvos that dot the faculty
parking lot. Rather, I have in mind the pillorying by National Public
Radio of those who say "nucular" for "nuclear," the loud laments in
faculty clubs over the threats posed to rural France by McDonald's, and
all the other increasingly desperate assertions of moral and cultural
superiority in a world where meaningful titles like earl, duke and
marquis are long gone and in theory repugnant. "Axis of evil? Totally
banal," scoffed Felipe Gonzalez, the former prime minister of Spain, not
long before his own country swaggeringly recaptured an uninhabited and
rather banal piece of rock that had been briefly snatched by Morocco.
The superciliousness of the educated knows no end, and may even betray a
final anxiety. One million bachelor's degrees are awarded in this
country each year, but under the new therapeutic curriculum there is
little to guarantee that any of the holders of these certificates can
spell a moderately difficult English word or knows which dictator
belongs to which enslaved state. And what is true of students is too
often true as well of their pretentious professors, as can be seen
whenever Noam Chomsky pontificates about war ("Let me repeat: the U.S.
has demanded that Pakistan kill possibly millions of people . . .")
and in place of references to historical exempla or citations from the
literature raves on with "as I have written elsewhere," "there are many
other illustrations," "as would be expected," "it would be instructive
to seek historical precedents," "as leading experts on the Middle East
attest," and all the other loopholes and escape clauses that are the
mark not of a learned intellectual but of a calcified demagogue.
But who has time to acquire expertise or exhibit patience with human
frailty? The innate limitations of mortals matter little to our
irritated utopians, nor can moral progress ever be rapid enough to keep
up with a definition of perfection that evolves as quickly as the
technology of cell phones. That Afghanistan a mere year after the fall
of the Taliban is not yet as tranquil and secure as New England proves
that our postbellum efforts there are not much better than the Taliban.
"No one," asserts Edward Said, "could argue today that Afghanistan, even
after the rout of the Taliban, is a much better and more secure place
for its citizens." No one?
That we once aided Saddam Hussein is a supposedly crippling fact of
which we are reminded ad nauseam, as if, not before but after the Gulf
War, France, Russia and Germany did not proceed to sell him the
components for weapons of mass destruction, or as if we ourselves did
not once give the Soviets a third of a million GMC trucks to thwart
Hitler, only to see them used in the Gulag. But in the perfect world of
America's critics, if Barbra Streisand can fly to Paris in four hours
and fax her scrambled thoughts in seconds, and if Gore Vidal from his
Italian villa can parse sentences better than the president of the
United States, then surely we are terminally culpable for not having
solved the globe's problems right now.
Is it because these elite Americans are so insulated and so well off,
and yet feel so troubled by it, that they are prone to embrace with
religious fervor ideas that have little connection with reality but that
promise a sense of meaning, solidarity with a select and sophisticated
group, moral accomplishment, and importance? Is it because of its very
freedom and wealth that America has become both the incubator and the
target of these most privileged, resentful, and unhappy people? And are
their perceptions susceptible of change?
If the answer to the first two questions is yes, as I believe it is,
then the reply to the third must be: I doubt it. The necessary
correctives, after all, would have to be brutal: an economic depression,
a religious revolution, a military catastrophe or, God forbid, an end to
tenure. At least in the near term, and whether we like it or not, the
religion of anti-Americanism is as likely to grow as to fade.
But it can also be challenged. The anti-Americans often invoke Rome as
a warning and as a model, both of our imperialism and of our
foreordained collapse. But the threats to Rome's predominance were more
dreadful in 220 B.C. than in A.D. 400. The difference over six
centuries, the dissimilarity that led to the end, was a result not of
imperial overstretch on the outside but of something happening within
that was not unlike what we ourselves are now witnessing. Earlier
Romans knew what it was to be Roman, why it was at least better than the
alternative, and why their culture had to be defended. Later in
ignorance they forgot what they knew, in pride mocked who they were, and
in consequence disappeared.
The example of Rome, in short, is an apt one, but in a way unintended by
critics who use passing contemporary events as occasions for venting a
permanent, irrational and often visceral distrust of their own society.
Their creed is really a malady, and it cries out to be confronted and
exposed.
Mr. Hanson is Shifrin Visiting Professor of Military History at the
U.S. Naval Academy and the author most recently of "An Autumn of War"
(Anchor Books). This article appeared in the December issue of
Commentary.
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It was as if an intellectual Iron Curtain of highly sophisticated
mendacity had been erected in anticipation of the fall of the actual
Iron Curtain in order to forestall any prospect of a moral
reckoning. With the idea of truth reduced to the status of a mere
social constuct--and thus dismissable as a malign instrument of
power-- history itself had been rendered absurd. Our culture was no
longer in command of the moral intelligence that was needed to
measure the scale of human suffering and loss that had been incurred
as a consequence of eighty years of totalitarian terror. We can
only hope that the price to be paid for such a self-willed ignorance
and complacency will not be as high in this century as it was in the
last. ~ Hilton Kramer, _Twilight of the Intellectuals_
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