"We are taught to believe in Washington as the font of freedom and democracy, when the policy of successive US administrations has fostered the exact opposite."
Uncle Sam, hatred and hypocrisyWhy Do People Hate America?
By Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies
Icon Books, $21 (pb) REVIEW BY DAVE RILEY
If you have ever wondered why the United States (“America”) is hated around the world, then maybe you did come down in the last shower.
This question has been asked more frequently and publically since the terrorist attacks on New York's twin towers in September, 2001. Many writers have been asking it. Gore Vidal has addressed this question; so too have Richard Neville and John Pilger.
Everyone basically comes to the same conclusion as to why Uncle Sam is no longer the ant's pants. While these works analyse what the US government does offshore, they don't tackle the question of how it thinks.
Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies' book, Why Do People Hate America?, does. Sardar and Davies try to expose the logic of US expansionism as it is embraced and rationalised within US cultural discourse.
The authors' arguments are a little forced sometimes, but as an attempt to comprehend the ideology of the most powerful nation-state that has ever existed on Earth, Why Do People Hate America? has a lot to offer the novice objector.
At the core of our relationship with America is the massive contradiction between what the US state publicly advocates in the way of justice and freedom, and its day to day political and economic practice around the world.
We are taught to believe in Washington as the font of freedom and democracy, when the policy of successive US administrations has fostered the exact opposite.
So we hate because we hate hypocrisy. Uncle Sam is anything but what he says he is. Let's not shy away from how sick everyone's relationship is with the vision the US promotes — it is the quintessential capitalist ideal.
We taste its fruits through television and films, we are offered its chattels as the doorway to happiness and, despite ourselves, we are recruited to the same addictions.
We are all “Americanised”. This is an enticing argument. The package referred to as “America” is hated for — as Sardar and Davies try to explain — a variety of reasons that are ontological, existential and cosmological.
So the US, in their assessment, ceases to be a thing — a pattern of economic and social relationships driven by its own logic — and becomes instead an archetype occupying people's heads.
So when we hate, we hate for these reasons. Hatred of America is supposed to be a problem of thinking that we must try to transcend. Much as I appreciate the authors' rich insights into how the US orchestrates its own view of itself, we are left with nothing or no-one tangible to blame.
If there is an America of ideas packaged for friend and foe alike, where does it live? What sustains it? What makes the America we have grown to hate tick? Maybe we should really be asking: “Why America chose to be hated?” From Green Left Weekly, August 27, 2003.
Green Left Weekly
"The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth becomes the greatest enemy of the state."
- Dr. Joseph M. Goebbels - Hitler's propaganda minister
