Oderint Dum Metuant
Attributed to the Roman poet Lucius Accius. "Let them hate, as long as they fear". Used by Caligula and right on the money. Who cares about polls?
Posted on 07/07/2003 12:39:47 AM PDT by faithincowboys
BY FOUAD AJAMI July 3, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT
America is unloved in the alleyways of Nablus and Karachi, and in the cafes of Paris: The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press came forth last month with news of anti-Americanism in foreign lands. Its Global Attitudes Project, directed by the pollster Andrew Kohut, and chaired and advised by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, told us that the "bottom has fallen out" of support for America in the Muslim world, that the rift has widened between Americans and Europeans. From 20 countries, pollsters returned with what they took to be evidence of a growing animus toward the U.S. Only 1% of Palestinians think "favorably" of the U.S.; the numbers are not much better in Jordan and Pakistan. Turkey, once reliably anchored in the Pax Americana, is now of a piece with its neighbors: only 15% of Turks now report positive views of the U.S. Leave the Muslim lands behind, and this anti-Americanism has infected other places and peoples--all the way from South Korea, where American power underpins Korean security, to France and Russia.
Americans ache to be loved in foreign places, and now the world denies us. But a mix of partisanship and naiveté runs through this survey. Consider this leading question and the trail it opens: What's the problem with the U.S.?, the pollsters ask. Is it "mostly Bush," or "America in general," or both? Not surprisingly, President Bush is the culprit in France and Germany (74% attribute their anti-Americanism to him).
What does all this mean? What are we to make of the hatred in Egypt, for instance? Vast American treasure has been invested there, thousands of that crowded country's citizens have made it to America's shores and escaped destitution. But we are never benevolent in Egyptian eyes, and a kind of generalized anger toward America has taken hold there. "Nations follow the religion of their kings," an Arab expression has it. The anti-Americanism of Egypt is the malignant strain that leaders wink at. You can't rail against Hosni Mubarak; so anti-Americanism is the permissible politics. Where the dream of modernism atrophies, as it has in Egypt, and a culture of abdication settles in, a people are easy prey to any doctrine that absolves them of responsibility for their own world. Anti-Americanism is the placebo. There is no need in a culture of this kind to ask the crowd for consistency, to query the academic who does well by American foundation grants why he harbors such hate for America. The Pew pollsters fall for a legend and an evasion that those who rail against America often put forth to pretty up their anti-Americanism: It is not individual Americans they hate, but the United States! This is pure sophistry, but the pollsters report it as credible sentiment.
Consider Turkey next. It is odd among the Turks, this anti-Americanism. In their modern history, the Turks have been serious and empirical, not given to the cluster of sentiments that give anti-Americanism its potency in France or among the intellectuals of the Third World. Years ago, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk pointed Turkey westward, gave it a dream of renewal and self-help, and distanced it from its Arab-Muslim hinterland. But that was then, and now Kemalism has come apart. The secular, modernist dream in Turkey has cracked; and anti-Americanism blows Turkey's way from the Arab lands, and from Brussels and Berlin.
The fury of the Turkish protests against America's war plans in Iraq had a pathology all its own. It was nature imitating art: The Turks burning American flags, superimposing swastikas on portraits of President Bush, went at it, it seemed, in the hope that Europeans (real Europeans, that is) would take Turkey into the fold. The American presence had been benign and benevolent in Turkey. Americans have been Ankara's advocates in the European councils of power, and have been free of the Turkophobia just beneath the surface of European life. But suddenly this relationship that served Turkey so well was no longer good enough. The "soft" Islamists (there is no such thing, we should know by now) hacked at the Pax Americana; secularists averted their gaze and let stand this new anti-Americanism. Pollsters calling on the Turks found a people in distress, their economy on the ropes, their polity in an unfamiliar world beyond the simple certainties of Kemalism.
Running through the Pew survey is the explicit assumption that it had been better for America before the "unilateralism," and our campaign in Iraq: We called up this anti-Americanism. But leave the false empiricism of these numbers, and there is nothing new in Amman, and Cairo, and Paris. No one said good things about America in Egypt in the 1990s, either. It was then that the Islamists of Egypt had taken to the road, to Hamburg and Kandahar, to hatch a monstrous conspiracy against the U.S. And it was then, during our fabled stock market run, when globalizers were celebrating the triumph of our economic model over the protected versions in places like France, when anti-Americanism became the uncontested ideology of French public life. We were barbarous, a threat to their cuisine, to their language. Our pension funds were acquiring their assets. We executed too many criminals. All this during a decade when we were told that we were loved abroad.
Much has been made of the sympathy that the French expressed for America in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, and of the speed with which America presumably squandered that sympathy. Much has been made of that editorial in Le Monde, "Nous Sommes Tous Americains"--We Are All Americans--penned after Sept. 11. But it took the paper precious little time to revoke the sympathy it had expressed on Sept. 12. To maintain France's sympathy, and that of Le Monde, we would have had to turn the other cheek to al Qaeda, and engage the Muslim world in some high civilizational dialogue. Anti-Americanism flatters France, and gives its unwanted Muslims a claim on the political life of a country that knows not what to do with them.
"America is everywhere," Ignazio Silone once observed. An idea of it, a fantasy of it, hovers over distant lands. In the days that followed the attacks of Sept. 11, a young Palestinian gave expression to the image America holds out in places where its shadow falls: the boy passing out sweets in celebration of America's grief wondered aloud as to the impact of the bombings on his ability to get a U.S. visa. He felt no great contradiction. He had no feeling of affection or loyalty for the land he yearned to migrate to. He grew up to the familiar drums of anti-Americanism. He had implicated America in his life's circumstances. You can't reason with his worldview. You can only wish for him deliverance from his incoherence--or go there, questionnaire in hand, and return with dispatches of people at odds with American policies. You can make foreigners say the sort of things about America you wanted to say yourself. It is an old literary trick. Everyone knew that Montesquieu's "Persian Letters" were indeed Parisian letters, a writer's device to chronicle France's foibles in the early 18th century. His "Persians," Rhedi and Usbek, spoke of France. It is our American pollsters we hear speaking to us through those Turks and Arabs and Frenchmen who, on cue, were ready to speak of America's alienation from the rest of the world.
Attributed to the Roman poet Lucius Accius. "Let them hate, as long as they fear". Used by Caligula and right on the money. Who cares about polls?
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