Democratic War, Repressive Peace: On Anti-Americanism

Media Times Review ^ | april 2005 | Russell A. Berman

[wgflyer]

... My point here is not to document the litany of obnoxious statements by European intellectuals—eternal life is too short for that—but to identify a feature of the discourse: a willingness to deny reality: the Iraqis are not celebrating, Al-Qaeda did not attack the Twin Towers, the infidels are not in Baghdad. For the issue for anti-Americanism is not facts, to which one might respond critically, but an obsession, an endogenously generated animus....

...It is however, ultimately, not the American actions, but the European incapacity to act that provokes the anti-American rage...

[wgflyer]

This article is old but not dated. My vocabulary was rather challenged in reading it but the man has quite effectively analyzed the enigma of international (and even domestic) ire over America's leadership in world affairs.

[sirchtruth]

Do these people need to see a suitcase bomb go off in their country to understand what's happening? These are the same prickish elites that allowed Hitler to reign.

"Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools..." Romans 1:22

[Clioman]

Hmmm..no mention of the other spectre that's haunting Europe. Since the 1970s, their political impotence has produced nothing more than anti-americanism, much like a college faculty creates vicious quarrels in order to mask its irrelevance. But the Euros' political impotence is becoming social impotence -- the aging Euro intellectuals know, but are loathe to admit, that their societies' lack of progeny is gradually transferring the land to 'others' by default...and that those 'others' despise them.

[wgflyer]

Well put.