Posted on 10/16/2004 11:34:42 AM PDT by quidnunc
Hating America is not new. Nor does it have much to do with the unpopularity of George Bush. Instead, primordial emotions like envy, resentment, and self-loathing explain why the world’s elites damn Americans for who they are and what they represent rather than what they actually do. Criticism of American policies and culture is fair game, but not hysterical venom. Left unsaid is why millions flock to our shores and still more emulate our society if it is so abjectly awful as writers, artists, politicians, and journalists attest.
Paul Hollander has spent much of his distinguished career pondering those questions and has now brought together a distinguished team of investigators to attempt a systematic study of this strange phenomenon. What the 18 assembled authors conclude is both fascinating and depressing. Most of the social problems of twentieth-century modernity itself — from urban crime and the destruction of traditional landscapes to the shedding of tradition and the laxity of morals — is attributed to the radically democratic and popular culture of the United States.
Indeed, it is almost as if people hate what they have become, aping American slang and informality and then decrying the erosion of global etiquette. Scapegoating America allows one in the concrete to enjoy jeans, birth-control pills, antibiotics, and video games, even while damning in the abstract the purveyor of both junk and life-saving appurtenances.
Hollander’s team also cites a variety of more recent developments that have accentuated the traditional and deductive dislike of the United States. The fall of the Soviet Union meant that one superpower was now responsible for all the major crises in the world, and could not be balanced by playing it off one against another.…
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at victorhanson.com ...
Why? Envy.
FYI
The common hatred the unsuccessful have for the successful.
Here is a good question for thought... IF the World has hated us for generations .... Why does the World support Kerry as President....
They know Kerry will bring us down and they are licking their chops hoping beyond hope that enough Americans can be bought by George Soros and the progressive left anarchists.
Amazing. This is one of the best-written, best researched, thought-out articles I've ever read on anti-Americanism, both at home and abroad.
They hate us because we are the only superpower and because we are the wealthiest nation by a wide margin. There is nothing we can do about it. It's inevitable. It's human nature for the rest of the world to hate us. Besides, since when do nations conduct foreign policy to get other nations to like them? It's stupid. Do the French care what others think? Does anybody like the France?
ping for later
They could have what we have if only they were willing to work for it...
when someone has a gun to your head and threatens you, your family and friends the very last thing you AFTER YOU KILL HIM IS WONDER WHY.....
God Bless my beautiful America, for all the bad, we are still the greatest nation in the world. I have seen many different countries all over the world and nothing compares to this great nation...........What an honer to serve her........
The reason they hate America is because they are envious. Also, because they are totalitarianists themselves and they hate freedom and capitalism.
Most interesting to me are the Americans (United States natural born citizens)that hate the USofA. Why?
" Does anybody like the France?"
No.
I'm optomistic that most of them don't really hate America... I think most leftists are leftists because they align themselves with some social agenda that means a lot to them (read Abortion, Gay rights), and then they get swept up into believing all the leftist foriegn policy propoganda spewed by the likes of Moore, Soros, et cetera.
America "Eff Yeah"!
*optimistic*
as Dash-hole would say, us American infidels are just "winners of life's lottery".
ping (gonna buy that book)
You're both right. In socializt europe there's no real incentive to work hard because the extra money you make just goes to pay taxes. In the totalitarian middle east the regimes won't free the people because they fear them. In the plutocratic Latin and South America they keep the people down to line their pockets.
In all cases the rulers encourage hatred of America because we are the Great Scapegoat -- they distract the peoples from their own failings by pointing to us as the focus of all evil.
It's projection, just like what Kerry and the rats do.
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