Posted on 07/20/2003 12:32:57 PM PDT by quidnunc
In the aftermath of the war against Iraq, you will doubtless see more articles in the American press on “Anti-Americanism in Europe.” But what about anti-Europeanism in the United States? Consider this:
To the list of polities destined to slip down the Eurinal of history, we must add the European Union and France’s Fifth Republic. The only question is how messy their disintegration will be. — Mark Steyn, Jewish World Review, May 1, 2002
And:
Even the phrase “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” is used [to describe the French] as often as the French say “screw the Jews.” Oops, sorry, that’s a different popular French expression. — Jonah Goldberg, National Review Online, July 16, 2002
Or, from a rather different corner:
“You want to know what I really think of the Europeans?” asked the senior State Department Official. “I think they have been wrong on just about every major international issue for the past 20 years.” — Quoted by Martin Walker, UPI, November 13, 2002
Statements such as these recently brought me to the United States — to Boston, New York, Washington, and the Bible-belt states of Kansas and Missouri — to look at changing American attitudes toward Europe in the shadow of the Iraq war. Virtually everyone I spoke to on the East Coast agreed that there is a level of irritation with Europe and Europeans higher even than at the last memorable peak, in the early 1980s.
Pens are dipped in acid and lips curled to pillory “the Europeans,” also known as “the Euros,” “the Euroids,” “the ’peens,” or “the Euroweenies.” Richard Perle, now chairman of the Defense Policy Board, says Europe has lost its “moral compass” and France its “moral fiber.” This irritation extends to the highest levels of the Bush administration. In conversations with senior administration officials I found that the phrase “our friends in Europe” was rather closely followed by “a pain in the butt.”
The current stereotype of Europeans is easily summarized. Europeans are wimps. They are weak, petulant, hypocritical, disunited, duplicitous, sometimes anti-Semitic, and often anti-American appeasers. In a word: “Euroweenies.” [Their values and their spines have dissolved in a lukewarm bath of multilateral, transnational, secular, and postmodern fudge.] They spend their euros on wine, holidays, and bloated welfare states instead of on defense. Then they jeer from the sidelines while the United States does the hard and dirty business of keeping the world safe for Europeans. Americans, by contrast, are strong, principled defenders of freedom, standing tall in the patriotic service of the world’s last truly sovereign nation-state.
A study should be written on the sexual imagery of these stereotypes. If anti-American Europeans see “the Americans” as bullying cowboys, anti-European Americans see “the Europeans” as limp-wristed pansies. The American is a virile, heterosexual male; the European is female, impotent, or castrated. Militarily, Europeans can’t get it up. (After all, they have fewer than 20 “heavy lift” transport planes, compared with the United States’ more than 200.) Following a lecture I gave in Boston an aged American tottered to the microphone to inquire why Europe “lacks animal vigor.” (The word “eunuchs” is, I discovered, used in the form “EU-nuchs.”) The sexual imagery even creeps into a more sophisticated account of American-European differences: In an already influential Policy Review article by Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace entitled “Power and Weakness.” “Americans are from Mars,” writes Kagan approvingly, “and Europeans are from Venus” — echoing that famous book about relations between men and women, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus.
Not all Europeans are equally bad. The British tend to be regarded as somewhat different and sometimes better. American conservatives often spare the British the opprobrium of being “Europeans” at all — a view with which most British conservatives, still mentally led by Margaret Thatcher, would heartily agree. And Tony Blair, like Thatcher before him, and Churchill before her, is cited in Washington as a shining exception to the European rule.
The worst abuse is reserved for the French — who, of course, give at least as good as they get. I had not realized how widespread in American popular culture is the old English pastime of French-bashing. “You know, France, we’ve saved their butt twice and they never do anything for us,” Verlin “Bud” Atkinson, a World War II veteran, informed me at the Ameristar casino in Kansas City. Talking to high school and college students in Missouri and Kansas, I encountered a strange folk prejudice: The French, it seems, don’t wash. “I felt very dirty a lot,” said one college student, recalling her trip to France. “But you were still cleaner than French guys,” added another.
Two prominent American journalists, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times and Joe Klein of the New Yorker, back from extensive book tours around the United States, separately told me that wherever they went they found anti-French sentiment — you would always get a laugh if you made a dig at the French. The National Review Online editor and self-proclaimed conservative “frog-basher” Jonah Goldberg, who also can be seen on television, has popularized the epithet quoted above, “cheese-eating surrender monkeys,” which first appeared in an episode of The Simpsons. Goldberg told me that when he started writing anti-French pieces for National Review in 1998 he found “there was a market for it.” French-bashing became, he said, “a shtick.”
Clearly it will not do to throw together neoconservative polemics, Kansas City high school students’ prejudices against French bathroom behavior, remarks of a senior State Department official and senior administration officials, and then label the whole bag “anti-Europeanism.” As a European writer, I would not want to treat American “anti-Europeanism” in the way American writers often treat European “anti-Americanism.”
We have to distinguish between legitimate, informed criticism of the EU or current European attitudes and some deeper, more settled hostility to Europe and Europeans as such. Just as American writers should, but often don’t, distinguish between legitimate, informed European criticism of the Bush administration and anti-Americanism, or between legitimate, informed European criticism of the Sharon government and anti-Semitism. The difficult question in each case, one on which knowledgeable people may reasonably disagree, is, Where’s the dividing line?
We also need to keep a sense of humor. One reason Europeans like to laugh at President George W. Bush is that some of the things he has said — or is alleged to have said — are funny. For example: “The problem with the French is that they don’t have a word for entrepreneur.” One reason Americans like to laugh at the French is that there is a long Anglo-Saxon tradition — going back at least to Shakespeare — of laughing at the French. But there’s also a trap here. Conservative writers such as Jonah Goldberg and Mark Steyn make outrageous statements, some of them obviously humorous, some semi-serious, some quite serious. If you object to one of the serious ones, they can always reply, “but of course I was only joking!” Humor works by exaggeration and playing with stereotypes. But if a European writer were to describe “the Jews” as “matzo-eating surrender monkeys” would that be understood as humorous banter? Of course the context is very different: There has been no genocide of the French in the United States. Yet the thought experiment might give our humorists pause.
Anti-Europeanism is not symmetrical with anti-Americanism. The emotional leitmotifs of anti-Americanism are resentment mingled with envy; those of anti-Europeanism are irritation mixed with contempt. Anti-Americanism is a real obsession for entire countries — notably for France, as Jean-François Revel has recently argued. Anti-Europeanism is very far from being an American obsession. In fact, the predominant American popular attitude toward Europe is probably mildly benign indifference, mixed with impressive ignorance. I traveled around Kansas for two days asking people I met, “If I say ‘Europe’ what do you think of?” Many reacted with a long, stunned silence, sometimes punctuated by giggles. Then they said things like “Well, I guess they don’t have much huntin’ down there” (Vernon Masqua, a carpenter in McLouth); “Well, it’s a long way from home” (Richard Souza, whose parents came from France and Portugal); or, after a very long pause for thought, “Well, it’s quite a ways across the pond” (Jack Weishaar, an elderly farmer of German descent). If you said “America” to a farmer or carpenter in even the remotest village of Andalusia or Ruthenia, he would, you may be sure, have a whole lot more to say on the subject.
In Boston, New York, and Washington — “the Bos-Wash corridor” — I was repeatedly told that even people who know the Continent well have become increasingly indifferent toward Europe since the end of the Cold War. Europe is seen neither as a potent ally nor as a serious potential rival, like China. “It’s an old people’s home!” said an American friend who attended both school and university in England. As the conservative pundit Tucker Carlson remarked in an exchange on CNN’s Crossfire: “Who cares what the Europeans think? The EU spends all of its time making sure that British bologna is sold in kilos not pounds. The whole continent is increasingly irrelevant to American interests.”
When I asked a senior administration official what would happen if Europeans went on criticizing the United States from a position of military weakness, the gist of his response was, “Well, does it matter?”
Yet I felt this claim of indifference was also overstated. Certainly, my interlocutors took a lot of time and passion to tell me how little they cared. And the point about the outspoken American critics of Europe is that they are generally not ignorant of or indifferent to Europe. They know Europe — half of them seem to have studied at Oxford or in Paris — and are quick to mention their European friends. Just as most European critics of the United States fiercely deny that they are anti-American (“don’t get me wrong, I love the country and the people”), so they will almost invariably insist that they are not anti-European.
Anti-Americanism and anti-Europeanism are at opposite ends of the political scale. European anti-Americanism is mainly to be found on the left, American anti-Europeanism on the right. The most outspoken American Euro-bashers are neoconservatives using the same sort of combative rhetoric they have habitually deployed against American liberals. In fact, as Jonah Goldberg himself acknowledged to me, “the Europeans” are also a stalking-horse for liberals. So, I asked him, was Bill Clinton a European? “Yes,” said Goldberg, “or at least, Clinton thinks like a European.”
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at -hoover.stanford.edu ...
Anti-American sentiment in Europe, on the other hand, is a long-established set of cultural and political stances that has proven useful in the past mostly as a convenient dissociation from the grittier and less congenial aspects of opposing the Soviet Union.
Having spent the first half of the 1980s in West Germany, I know that rabid anti-Americanism is nothing new in Europe; Americans just weren't aware of it.
;^)
But why does the parasitic left wish to destroy its host, and thus itself? Because it is self-hating?
You mean they are like...Australians?
My favorite is Eurinals.....
Americans weren't aware of the anti-Americanism rampant in a lot of places, Canada for instance.
Most of us going abroad as tourists dealt almost exclusively with people whose best interests depended on not cheesing off the 'Ummies' who spent lots of money in their businesses.
It wasn't until the aftermath of 9/11 that we gradually began to become aware of how foreigners in various nations abroad really feel about the U.S.
But as WaterDragon pointed out, it is a crossfire for the first time in a long time. I think that reflexive anti-American cant has been such an integral feature of the European cultural continuum for so long and so unopposed, that a sudden avalanche of retaliation comes as a shock to those who have become so accustomed to it as to treat it as a natural environment.
I am in complete agreement with Carthago delenda est concerning the makeup and nature of the "new class." The relation of its denizens to their academic roots is crucial to understanding their conviction that they are, in fact, not only smarter than everyone else but smart enough to succeed in dictating not only the rules of discourse but the rules of behavior as well. Their type of fond reliance on reason - their version of reason, at least - tends to have unpleasant consequences the first time it attempts to con a brute with a club that he is not in charge and that they are. The Cambodian tragedy is a case in point. When that happens this class tends to rely on its own brutes with clubs, safe in the delusion that they, too, will go back in their box once the fighting is over. It is the fond fantasy of a history-ignorant fool and a second-rate intellect.
It is partly our own fault for failing to make a measured response to anti-American agitation in Europe prior to this. The difficulty is that it must be allowed if we are to remain true to our own self-professed principles of free speech, but to ignore it and then to open the firehose once the threshold is reached is a sort of passive-aggressive behavior pattern to which America is often prone. That threshold, IMHO, was 9/11, and much of Europe is to be faulted as well for failing to realize just how much 3000 dead in a flaming atrocity really did change the world, at least for their countrymen.
I can't, on the whole, think of the wave of anti-European expression in the U.S. as anything much more than a long-overdue corrective, however. Not all of the people shouting "Death to America" are deluded group-thinkers who are merely going along with the crowd. Some are our real, bitter enemies, and have been operating unanswered for far too long.
Empowerment. Islam and Communism both appeal to weak, discontented, envious people who want to be in a position to screw their enemies.
Prior to Bush being elected thaere wasn't anything serious to get upset with the Eurodorks over.
There was some sneering and sniping about our support of the death penalty, the Second Amendment and such-like, but nothing that was really a burr under the saddle of the average American.
That changed with 9/11 and anti-Americanism in Europe and elsewhere is on full display and Americans are less willing to overlook it than formerly.
In other words a lot of foreigners are now finding that they're walking on the fighting side of Middle America and they're shocked, absolutely shocked!
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