The Intellectual Origins Of America-Bashing

Policy Review, No. 116 ^ | Dec. 2, 2002 | Lee Harris

[beckett]

The Intellectual Origins Of America-Bashing

By Lee Harris

A specter haunts the world, and that specter is America. This is not the America discoverable in the pages of a world atlas, but a mythical America that is the target of the new form of anti-Americanism that Salman Rushdie, writing in the Guardian (February 6, 2002), says “is presently taking the world by storm” and that forms the subject of a Washington Post essay by Martin Kettle significantly entitled “U.S. Bashing: It’s All The Rage In Europe” (January 7, 2002). It is an America that Anatol Lieven assures us, in a recent article in the London Review of Books, is nothing less than “a menace to itself and to mankind” and that Noam Chomsky has repeatedly characterized as the world’s major terrorist state.

But above all it is the America that is responsible for the evils of the rest of the world. As Darius Fo, the winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize for literature, put it in a notorious post-September 11 email subsequently quoted in the New York Times (September 22, 2001): “The great speculators [of American capitalism] wallow in an economy that every years kills tens of millions of people with poverty [in the Third World] — so what is 20,000 dead in New York? Regardless of who carried out the massacre [of 9-11], this violence is the legitimate daughter of the culture of violence, hunger and inhumane exploitation.”

[beckett]

Looong article, but a very worthwhile and interesting read, IMHO.

[Rain-maker]

Thanks...el bumpo.

Interesting analogies on how Marxism failed, and how the 9-11 attack did the opposite of its intended effect upon us.

This Article is from Standford's Herbert Hoover(Republican) Institute by the way.

[Hobsonphile]

Intellectual development ping!

[tictoc]

Bump!

[general_re]

Good article. Very good article. Sadly, if demonstrating the internal inconsistencies of the left were enough to stop them, they would have died a quiet death a long time ago.

And the second thing that comes to mind is remembering my reaction when I first started reading about Wallerstein's world-systems theory years ago - I laughed out loud. And then, a little bit later on, when I realized how many people were taking that junk seriously, I was suddenly very, very afraid for the future... ;)

[beckett]

Harris wrote another article that garnered a lot of attention not long after 911, Al-Qaeda's Fantasy Ideology. Apparently he kind of burst out of nowhere, but has shown his chops in the incisive, erudite and unique manner in which he explains the world.

Funny that you bumped this post today, because I was just thinking about some of Harris's observations of the Left last night while watching part two of The American Experience's Chicago on PBS. I sat staring in icy fury as the filmmakers spent almost 40 minutes lionizing the bomb-throwing anarchists of the Haymarket Riot of 1886, attempting to turn that relatively little known event into the definitive moment in post Civil War 19th century America. Naturally "robber-baron" Marshall Fields (a fiendish department store owner!) was the devil incarnate of the entire episode.

So it seems post-marxist ideologues, bereft of the historical necessity of their vision for the future, console themselves by revising the past.

[general_re]

I sat staring in icy fury as the filmmakers spent almost 40 minutes lionizing the bomb-throwing anarchists of the Haymarket Riot of 1886, attempting to turn that relatively little known event into the definitive moment in post Civil War 19th century America. Naturally "robber-baron" Marshall Fields (a fiendish department store owner!) was the devil incarnate of the entire episode.

Glad I missed it - some years ago, I read Ray Ginger's book "Altgeld's America" (now thankfully out of print), which had much the same spin on it. I nearly threw the book out of a fourth floor window, so I probably would have done damage to my TV. Lucky I didn't have the book handy, or I'd have killed two birds with one stone ;)

So it seems post-marxist ideologues, bereft of the historical necessity of their vision for the future, console themselves by revising the past.

I once asked - on a Marxist newsgroup, no less - how much one was allowed to revise and extend Marx, and generally drift away from him, before you could no longer legitimately call youself a Marxist. Not surprisingly, nobody was willing to commit to much of a firm answer...

[MattAMiller]

Fantasy ideology has dominated the left for a long time now. I think Post-Modernism can be seen as it's first triumph. Intellectuals claimed it would "allow them to rethink the world more radically." What it really did was allow them to indulge their fantasies.

[beckett]

Fantasy ideology has dominated the left for a long time now.

Yup. I'd say since round-about the time Rousseau's Noble Savage appeared.