 As defined by Revel, hyperterrorism is the rabid anti-Americanism on display in Europe and elsewhere that is based on misinformation and ignorance of what America stands for.
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In the weeks following that fateful September 11, there was an outpouring of sympathy for the United States and the 3,000 dead as a result of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But that sympathy, though welcome, was short-lived and paled before denunciations of America, which grew increasingly loud and very quickly crossed the line into outbursts of anti-Americanism so rabid they defied all reason.
In Brazil, for example, ex-Roman Catholic cleric Leonardo Boff, an exponent of liberation theology writing in a popular newspaper, declared that his only regret was that only one plane had crashed into the Pentagon. It would have been much better, according to Boff, if there had been 25 planes crashing into the building.
At least Boff, despite his shameful hatred for the United States, believed a plane had been involved. Only six months later, in March 2002, Thierry Meyssan published his profoundly mendacious L'Effroyable Imposture [The Terrifying Deception]. Billed as the "first independent inquiry" into the events of 9/11, the left-wing Meyssan claimed to be offering proof that no airplane had crashed into the Pentagon on that fateful day. Rather, Meyssan wrote, it was a truck loaded with a bomb that brought the death and damage that occurred.
And the truck bomb was not guided by Islamic jihadists. Meyssan concluded that Islamists had been unjustly blamed for a bombing that had been carried out as part of a massive disinformation campaign by the U.S. secret services to justify to the American public and the world the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The book was a best seller in France and elsewhere. Meyssan appeared frequently on television to plug his claims. His deeply anti-American message found resonance in Europe and among readers worldwide, even though Meyssan's imaginary truck bomb had no basis in fact: the plane was seen by many as it was flown into the building and his arguments were so transparently false as to be ludicrous.
In a new book, Anti-Americanism [Encounter Books, 176 pp., $25.95], Frenchman Jean-François Revel takes up the subject of the anti-Americanism demonstrated by Boff, Meyssan and many others and shows it to be the unreasoning, nasty and mean-spirited beast that it is.
Author of such highly regarded books as The Totalitarian Temptation and How Democracies Perish, Revel presents anti-Americanism as an unhealthy obsession and a phobia - unhealthy because it is all-consuming, overwhelming everything the anti-American thinks and does. It's unhealthy, too, because it is based largely on misinformation and downright ignorance of what the United States is really like and what it stands for, Revel says. This isn't odd, though, because people often are ill-informed or too lazy to do serious reading and thinking about subjects on which they're nonetheless willing to speak with certainty.
What the true "mystery of anti-Americanism is," Revel writes, is "not the disinformation - reliable information on the United States has always been easy to obtain - but people's willingness to be disinformed." Many abroad want to believe the worst about the United States and don't let the facts or logic stand in the way of their anti-American prejudice.
Why the deep contempt for the U.S.A.? Partly it's due to America's success, Revel contends. "Looking back over the past two centuries, American society has, in the long term, experienced a far more precocious, realistic and continuous dynamic of change than have European societies," he notes, with their "spasmodic upheavals, revolutionary only in appearance, more often than not."
But anti-Americanism isn't just dislike for the richest, most powerful kid on the block. It's much more. For one thing, it's warmed-over, old-fashioned, left-wing hatred of capitalism and liberalism expressed as hate for the world's great exemplar of liberal capitalist success, the United States, with its free-trade policies, its free institutions and free-speech traditions.
"America is the object of their loathing because, for a half-century or more, she has been the most prosperous and creative capitalist society on Earth," Revel argues. He points out that when antiglobalization demonstrators march in places such as Seattle and Washington, they carry posters that not only disparage the United States but also declare the traditional leftist message: "PRIVATIZATION KILLS" and "CAPITALISM KILLS."
But anti-American passions run deeper even than political ideology, and that makes them even more insidious than leftist cant. Revel, for example, doubts that anti-Americanism seriously can be challenged by rational thought and a careful mustering of facts. Overwhelming the anti-Americans with reason, he believes, would be a formidable and perhaps impossible task "doomed to failure, since the disinformation in question is not the result of pardonable, correctable mistakes, but rather of a profound psychological need."
It is this profound psychological need to see the United States bested and denounced that makes anti-Americanism the many-headed monster that it is and accounts for its particular viciousness, according to Revel. The need to denounce America is so deep, for example, that otherwise intelligent people are blind to the contradictions that lie at the very heart of their arguments. Thus the United States is denounced as a land where individualism is rampant and people are pitted against one another in Darwinian competition. At the same time, the United States is said to be a place where conformity is the rule and Americans a people incapable of thinking for themselves.
Even odder is the charge, frequently voiced in Europe these days, that America is a fascist society, "a land that in over 200 years has never known a dictator, while Europe has been busy making troops of them." Indeed, Revel is very harsh on Europeans belittling America while ignoring the beam in their own eye. "And as for Europe," he writes, "let's not forget that we invented the great criminal ideologies of the 20th century, forcing the United States to intervene on our continent twice with her armies. America largely owes her unique superpower status today to Europe's mistakes."
The greatest danger of anti-Americanism is that it blinds many people to the world as it is, Revel avers. Thus anti-American prejudice led European leaders to denounce as stupid and misguided Ronald Reagan's 1987 demand to Mikhail Gorbachev that the Berlin Wall be torn down. But today, a decade-and-a-half later, "it is obvious - especially to citizens of the erstwhile 'satellites' of Eastern Europe - that President Reagan's policies precipitated the disintegration of the gangster regime based in Moscow."
Similarly, anti-Americans denounced President George W. Bush's naming of North Korea, Iraq and Iran as "an axis of evil." His numerous anti-American critics said that Bush's words were stupid, the comments of a cowboy, even though, as Revel notes, "it has been proved that the three countries he named had bought, manufactured, sold or given away weapons of mass destruction, arguably enabling terrorists to obtain them." Far from being a rash or stupid statement, Revel calls Bush's "axis of evil" speech "altogether well thought out and adapted to the new context of hyperterrorism."
Hyperterrorism. It's Revel's word for the enemy America faces now and an enemy that anti-Americans, he argues, refuse to recognize the seriousness of, thinking that by denouncing the United States as the aggressor and putting their own heads deeply in the sand, the threat of hyperterrorism will go away. "So hundreds of thousands of pacifists in the United States and in Europe (notably in Italy)," Revel observes, "demonstrated on Oct. 14, 2001, brandishing banners that said: NO TO TERRORISM. NO TO WAR. Which is about as intelligent" as carrying signs that declare: "NO TO ILLNESS. NO TO MEDICINE."
Revel is eloquent on the great and very real dangers posed by the Islamic fundamentalist terrorists. He warns that Western intellectuals who think that alleviating poverty in the Middle East will bring an end to terrorism are fooling themselves. "Islamic terrorism in general is the offspring of a religious idée fixe and has nothing to do with theories about poverty," Revel argues. "To argue that the only way to combat terrorism is by eliminating economic inequalities between nations is not merely to misjudge the reasons for terrorism; it is above all to evade offering practical resistance to it."
The Islamist hatred of the West is complete and it is based on religion. Doing away with poverty won't bring that hatred to an end, Revel warns. "The radicals reproach Western civilization for contravening the teachings of the Qur'an in its very existence," he notes. There is no compromise that can be reached.
Revel warns that his fellow Europeans and others who indulge in anti-Americanism are like the shepherd boy crying "wolf!" He writes: "By criticizing Americans whatever they do, and on every occasion - even when they are right, we Europeans ... compel them to disregard our objections - even when we are in the right."
It's good advice: anti-Americanism since 9/11 has been so relentless that it would not be surprising for Americans to stop listening. What is amazing is that there still is dialogue at all levels despite the nonstop rhetoric that sees America (personified as the Bush administration) as always in the wrong. Revel accurately compares the contemporary all-pervasiveness of anti-Americanism and the refusal of anti-Americans to listen to any counter argument to "the Great Lie," popular among intellectuals of a generation or two ago, whereby the U.S.S.R. was regarded as a paradise in the making where all of man's rights and needs were satisfied.
"The mechanism of the Great Lie that fences in America on every front, and the rejection of everything that might refute it," Revel says, "evokes the equivalent lie that surrounded the Soviet Union ever since 1917 - not to the detriment, but to the advantage of the Communist empire. Here again, among those who fed from the idealized and falsified images of 'existing socialism,' a sort of mental flyswatter swiped away at facts that were too threateningly real."
Revel's "mental flyswatter" is the perfect image for the way anti-Americans deal with anything that might interfere with their hatred of the United States. His correct assessment is this: "The resentment that leads to the rejection of every idea that comes from America simply because it is American can only weaken countries that take their phobias as guiding principles."
Revel has no patience with anti-Americans who denounce the United States for "unilaterialism" in Iraq and Afghanistan. "Obsessed by their hatred and floundering in illogicality, the dupes [the anti-Americans] forget that the United States, acting in her own self-interest, is also acting in the interest of us Europeans and in the interest of many other countries threatened, or already subverted and ruined by terrorism."
Besides, if America won't do it, who will? "Europe hasn't shown nearly enough inventiveness, organizational talent and adaptive flexibility" to do much of anything in recent decades, Revel argues, and America has stepped into the vacuum left by a Europe "inhibited by ideological prejudices."