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Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee
Joined: 25 May 2003
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 Posted: Tue Feb 17, 2009 10:10 pm Post subject: |
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[quote="Captain Corea"]
| Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee wrote: |
ns and French people say that they feel better towards the US now (after the election). I also seem to recall that the US has moved up slightly in global opinion polls.
But more specifically, I'm looking for this quote to be backed up.
| Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee wrote: |
I thought if Bush was gone everything would be okay. I don't understand. |
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Lots of people here and there have been saying it or implying it.
Yes the US was loved before Bush was president in South Korea. There weren't lots of anti US demostrations in Korea before Bush was president.
As for France. Well look at this article from 1999 while Bush was in his first term. Yep it is cause of Bush.
| Quote: |
To Paris, U.S. Looks Like a 'Hyperpower'
Published: FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 1999
PARIS: Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine says that he now defines the United States as a "hyperpower," a new term that he thinks best describes "a country that is dominant or predominant in all categories."
"Superpower," in his view, was a Cold War word that reflected military capabilities of both the Soviet Union and the United States. But now, the breadth of American strength is unique, extending beyond economics, technology or military might to "this domination of attitudes, concepts, language and modes of life."
In a speech on Monday before the Association France-Ameriques, a group promoting friendship between France and the Americas, Mr. Vedrine said that in other times, great dynasties were almost always counterbalanced by other powers.
"Today, that's not the case, and therefore there is this question at the center of the world's current problems," he said.
The remarks were in line with recent attempts by President Jacques Chirac, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin and Mr. Vedrine to draw attention to what France now calls American unilateralism, and to attract other countries to the idea of counteracting it through French-led multilateral initiatives.
Life outside the euro zone proves tough for businesses
Mr. Vedrine described France as a "power of world influence," situated in a category coming immediately after the United States, and including, he declared, "Germany, Britain, Russia, Japan, India, and perhaps others."
Early in the week, in an interview with the weekly newsmagazine L'Express, Mr. Vedrine was asked what could be done "to resist the steamroller," meaning the United States.
"How do you counterbalance these tendencies when they are abusive?" Mr. Vedrine responded, repeating the question.
"Through steady and perservering work in favor of real multilateralism against unilateralism, for balanced multipolarism against unipolarism, for cultural diversity against uniformity.
"None of that will happen automatically and our influence in the world isn't going to grow all by itself. A strategy, a tactic, a method, are necessary. It's possible." |
http://www.iht.com/articles/1999/02/05/france.t_0.php
Thanks for your example Captain . They help me make my case. |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Tue Feb 17, 2009 10:48 pm Post subject: |
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Willfully obtuse, Captain.
________
On the Other Hand: I think you are looking at attention to H. Chavez through a very narrow, if not U.S.-centric, then Daily Show-centric lens, by the way. It occurs to me that you could not, for example, have seen the Chilean left's The Clinic and its treatment of him in late fall 2007 (and indeed at other times). There, they depicted him in King Tut's headwear.
This reminds me of another point: although Chavez claims to speak for "the people," "the people of the world," and especially the Latin American left, he does not. Many in the Latin American left ridicule him. In fact, orthodox Communists such as PCCh's L. Corvalan have long dismissed those who follow the Castro line as "soda-fountain revolutionaries" -- to stress, above all else, their juvenile nature. This includes most Latin American Socialists -- F. Castro, S. Allende, the Sandinistas, and now H. Chavez.
To get a better idea of the conflict, take a closer look at what happened, and who informed whom re: E. Guevara's whereabouts in Bolivia in 1967. Or read M. Vargas Llosa's Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, a far more interesting book than Chavez's clich� N. Chomsky reading list.
American, Canadian, and Western European leftists, when they cheer and/or dogmatically defend crude populists such as Chavez, strike me about the same in political sophistication as Cameron Diaz and her fashionable Mao bag in Lima: at the end of the day, not very well informed at all, although well-versed in easy slogans and other latte-related fads. |
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On the other hand
Joined: 19 Apr 2003
Location: I walk along the avenue
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| Posted: Wed Feb 18, 2009 9:49 am Post subject: |
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Gopher: That's interesting information, thanks. But yes, I've had the impression for a while that Chavez is not universally loved by the Latin American left, even though I didn't know all the specifics that you outline. As far as I know, the Socialist International-affiliated party in Venezuela stands against him, and that would be the political tendency I identify with most closely.
I don't read Spanish, but here's their website. Maybe you can confirm their position on Chavez and his faction.
I don't know how I would have voted on term-limit abolition in Venezuela, since I'm opposed to term limits on principle, but I'm suspicious when a politican proposes constitutional tinkering that benefits him directly. I can't even say for sure that I would have voted for Chavez himself in any election. Like I say, I tend to identify more with the SI parties. |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Wed Feb 18, 2009 12:21 pm Post subject: |
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That is Betancourt's party, On the Other Hand. Different form of Latin American left, a democratic Latin American left. J. Arevalo, J. Arbenz, J. Figueres, R. Betancourt, for example.
You may already know this, but in Latin America, the Socialists and the Maoists go much further to the left than the Communists -- even though the latter remain fragmented along factional lines (Stalinist, Trotskyiest, etc.).
A colleague and I were talking on this theme recently. If, by some bizarre counterfactual circumstance, we could have put the right dream team together to modernize and advance all Latin America and the Caribbean from the postwar period forward, it would have been the American govt, American capital, the Latin American professional officer corps, and all the orthodox Communists there. Equal partners. This excludes fidelismo and its followers as well as the Maoists. It also excludes Latin American oligarchs and conservative parties. In any case, whether they knew it or not, and I am pretty sure they did not, our dream team's interests -- short- and mediumterm but not longterm -- coincided with each other and they would have achieved it.
But they did not do it and they clashed over issues that should have filed away and postponed for the longterm. And partly deriving from this failure, we have slightly annoying anachronisms such as H. Chavez appearing now. Shrug. C'est la vie. |
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On the other hand
Joined: 19 Apr 2003
Location: I walk along the avenue
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| Posted: Wed Feb 18, 2009 12:36 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: |
| If, by some bizarre counterfactual circumstance, we could have put the right dream team together to modernize and advance all Latin America and the Caribbean from the postwar period forward, it would have been the American govt, American capital, the Latin American professional officer corps, and all the orthodox Communists there. |
Interesting vision, and not entirely removed from that of some "pro-globalization" leftists I know.
I am curious: you say you would want "orthodox Communists" in the mix, but would exclude Castro. Does this mean that you don't regard the Moscow-tendency as being orthodox? And if you don't, who do you have in mind as being orthodox among the marxists, and what distinguishes them from the deviationists?
And a question about terminology...
| Quote: |
| even though the latter remain fragmented along factional lines (Stalinist, Trotskyiest, etc.). |
By Stalinist, do you mean the people(like Castro) who were aligned with the old USSR, or do you mean the people who actually revere Stalin the man himself? Because those are usually two different groups. In my experience, most worshippers of Stalin the man are Maoists, or at least part of the general anti-revisionist tendency that broke with Moscow following Khruschev's denunciations of Stalin. |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Wed Feb 18, 2009 1:31 pm Post subject: |
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You seem to assume a close relationship between Fidel Castro and the Soviet Communists. I can tell from this that you have not yet really looked at the Latin American left. Their interests and thus their politics and methods -- especially Khrushchev, Andropov, many others -- clashed with the bearded ones'. Remember: Castro was not a Communist but rather a Socialist, just like S. Allende, the Sandinistas, and H. Chavez today.
Take the Missile Crisis. In the CIA cables at the JFK Library is a report from the Soviet Union that the Russian commander, in charge of the antiair guns Moscow had placed on the island, had fallen from grace and was indeed in prison. During the crisis his superiors ordered him not to fire his guns at any American aircraft, not to provoke a war. Castro, while "inspecting" the guns, saw one tracking a U-2. He asked the Soviet officer which button fired the missile. And the officer showed him. Then he said "this one?" and he pressed it and thus shot down the U-2, hoping to provoke the Third World War. The Soviets later removed those antiair guns and, as I said, imprisoned the commander for the unauthorized firing. This comes from a Communist Party member who was talking openly to someone in CIA's Moscow net. And as I am sure you know, Castro was repeatedly demanding that the Soviets launch a nuclear strike against the United States during the crisis.
Back to political differences, Fidel Castro and E. Guevara in fact went after Latin America's orthodox Communists, that is, those Latin American Communists who followed Moscow's advice and shared its objectives -- starting in Cuba, where they wrote them out of the revolution and replaced them with their foco and rural guerrilla warfare mythology.
This pattern continued all over Latin America -- especially where Bolivian Communists clashed very sharply with Che, contributing to his failure, capture, and execution. And especially in Chile in the 1960s -- where Castro backed the Socialists and Moscow backed the Communists and where they fought against and undermined each other unless they were coming together for elections under various coalitions (FRAP and UP, for example).
They remained more or less as hostile to one another as Moscow and Beijing (or, at another level, Moscow-Hanoi vs. Beijing-Phnom Penh).
Getting back to your question re: terminology: you really ought to read the M. Vargas Llosa novel I recommended to you as a starting point on the very faction-ridden Latin American left. Also, Castro was no Stalinist. "Stalinism" in this context, refers to Stalin's conflict with Trotsky and not to Khrushchev's secret speech or Khrushchev's subsequent conflict with Mao. |
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Captain Corea
Joined: 28 Feb 2005
Location: Seoul
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| Posted: Wed Feb 18, 2009 5:21 pm Post subject: |
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| Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee wrote: |
| Lots of people here and there have been saying it or implying it. |
So you don't have or are unwilling to proved a link.
Got it. |
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Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee
Joined: 25 May 2003
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| Posted: Wed Feb 18, 2009 5:53 pm Post subject: |
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| Captain Corea wrote: |
| Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee wrote: |
| Lots of people here and there have been saying it or implying it. |
So you don't have or are unwilling to proved a link.
Got it. |
Yes the US was loved in South Korea and in France before Bush was president.
got it.
| Quote: |
The Falseness of Anti-Americanism by Faoud Ajami
Pollsters report rising antiericanism worldwide. The United States, they imply, squandered global sympathy after the September 11 terrorist attacks through its arrogant unilateralism.
In truth, there was never any sympathy to squander. Anti-Americanism was already entrenched in the world's psyche a backlash against a nation that comes bearing modernism to those who want it but who also fear and despise it.
America is everywhere," Italian novelist Ignazio Silone once observed. It is in Karachi and Paris, in Jakarta and Brussels. An idea of it, a fantasy of it, hovers over distant lands. And everywhere there is also an obligatory anti-Americanism, a cover and an apology for the spell the United States casts over distant peoples and places.
In the burning grounds of the Muslim world and on its periphery, U.S. embassies and their fate in recent years bear witness to a duality of the United States as Satan and redeemer. The embassies targeted by the masters of terror and by the diehards are besieged by visa-seekers dreaming of the golden, seductive country. If only the crowd in Tehran offering its tired rhythmic chant "marg bar amrika" ("death to America") really meant it! It is of visas and green cards and houses with lawns and of the glamorous world of Los Angeles, far away from the mullahs and their cultural tyranny, that the crowd really dreams.
The frenzy with which radical Islamists battle against deportation orders from U.S. soil? dreading the prospect of returning to Amman and Beirut and Cairo? reveals the lie of anti-Americanism that blows through Muslim lands.
The world rails against the United States, yet embraces its protection, its gossip, and its hipness. Tune into a talk show on the stridently anti-American satellite channel Al-Jazeera, and you'll behold a parody of American ways and techniques unfolding on the television screen. That reporter in the flak jacket, irreverent and cool against the Kabul or Baghdad background, borrows a form perfected in the country whose sins and follies that reporter has come to chronicle.
In Doha, Qatar, Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, arguably Sunni Islam's most influential cleric, at Omar ibn al-Khattab Mosque, a short distance away from the headquarters of the U.S. Central Command, delivers a khutba, a Friday sermon. The date is June 13, 2003. The cleric's big theme of the day is the arrogance of the United States and the cruelty of the war it unleashed on Iraq. This cleric, Egyptian born, political to his fingertips, and in full mastery of his craft and of the sensibility of his followers, is particularly agitated in his sermon. Surgery and a period of recovery have kept him away from his pulpit for three months, during which time there has been a big war in the Arab world that toppled Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq with stunning speed and effectivenessThe United States was "acting like a god on earth," al-Qaradawi told the faithful.
In Iraq, the United States had appointed itself judge and jury. The invading power may have used the language of liberation and enlightenment, but this invasion of Iraq was a 21st-century version of what had befallen Baghdad in the middle years of the 13th century, in 1258 to be exact, when Baghdad, the city of learning and culture, was sacked by the Mongols.
The preacher had his themes, but a great deal of the United States had gone into the preacher's art: Consider his Web site, Qaradawi.net, where the faithful can click and read his fatwas (religious edicts)? the Arabic interwoven with html text? about all matters of modern life, from living in non-Islamic lands to the permissibility of buying houses on mortgage to the follies of Arab rulers who have surrendered to U.S. power.
Or what about his way with television? He is a star of the medium, and Al-Jazeera carried an immensely popular program of his. That art form owes a debt, no doubt, to the American "televangelists," as nothing in the sheik's traditional education at Al Azhar University in Cairo prepared him for this wired, portable religion.
And then there are the preacher's children: One of his daughters had made her way to the University of Texas where she received a master's degree in biology, a son had earned a Ph.D. from the University of Central Florida in Orlando, and yet another son had embarked on that quintessential American degree, an MBA at the American University in Cairo. Al-Qaradawi embodies anti-Americanism as the flip side of Americanization.
A NEW ORTHODOXY
Of late, pollsters have come bearing news and numbers of anti-Americanism the world over. The reports are one dimensional and filled with panic. This past June, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press published a survey of public opinion in 20 countries and the Palestinian territories that indicated a growing animus toward the United States.
In the same month, the BBC came forth with a similar survey that included 10 countries and the United States. On the surface of it, anti-Americanism is a river overflowing its banks. In Indonesia, the United States is deemed more dangerous than al Qaeda. In Jordan, Russia, South Korea, and Brazil, the United States is thought to be more dangerous than Iran, the "rogue state" of the mullahs.
There is no need to go so far away from home only to count the cats in Zanzibar. These responses to the United States are neither surprising nor profound. The pollsters, and those who have been brandishing their findings, see in these results some verdict on the United States itself? and on the performance abroad of the Bush presidency? but the findings could be read as a crude, admittedly limited, measure of the foul temper in some unsettled places.
The pollsters have flaunted spreadsheets to legitimize a popular legend: It is not Americans that people abroad hate, but the United States! Yet it was Americans who fell to terrorism on September 11, 2001, and it is of Americans and their deeds, and the kind of social and political order they maintain, that sordid tales are told in Karachi and Athens and Cairo and Paris. You can't profess kindness toward Americans while attributing the darkest of motives to their homeland.
The Pew pollsters ignored Greece, where hatred of the United States is now a defining feature of political life. The United States offended Greece by rescuing Bosnians and Kosovars. Then, the same Greeks who hailed the Serbian conquest of Srebrenica in 1995 and the mass slaughter of the Muslims there were quick to summon up outrage over the U.S. military campaign in Iraq.
In one Greek public opinion survey, Americans were ranked among Albanians, Gypsies, and Turks as the most despised peoples. Takis Michas, a courageous Greek writer with an eye for his country's temperament, traces this new anti-Americanism to the Orthodox Church itself. A narrative of virtuous and embattled solitude and alienation from Western Christendom has always been integral to the Greek psyche; a fusion of church and nation is natural to the Greek worldview.
In the 1990s, the Yugoslav wars gave this sentiment a free run. The church sanctioned and fed the belief that the United States was Satan, bent on destroying the "True Faith," Michas explains, and shoring up Turkey and the Muslims in the Balkans. A neo-Orthodox ideology took hold, slicing through faith and simplifying history.
Where the Balkan churches? be they the Bulgars or the Serbs? had been formed in rebellion against the hegemony of the Greek priesthood, the new history made a fetish of the fidelity of Greece to its Orthodox "brethren." Greek paramilitary units fought alongside Bosnian Serbs as part of the Drina Corps under the command of indicted war criminal Gen. Ratko Mladic.
The Greek flag was hoisted over the ruins of Srebenica's Orthodox church when the doomed city fell. Serbian war crimes elicited no sense of outrage in Greece; quite to the contrary, sympathy for Serbia and the identification with its war aims and methods were limitless.
Beyond the Yugoslav wars, the neo-Orthodox worldview sanctified the ethnonationalism of Greece, spinning a narrative of Hellenic persecution at the hands of the United States as the standard-bearer of the West. Greece is part of NATO and of the European Union (EU), but an old schism? that of Eastern Orthodoxy's claim against the Latin world? has greater power and a deeper resonance.
In the banal narrative of Greek anti-Americanism, this animosity emerges from U.S. support for the junta that reigned over the country from 1967 to 1974. This deeper fury enables the aggrieved to glide over the role the United States played in the defense and rehabilitation of Greece after World War II.
Furthermore, it enables them to overlook the lifeline that migration offered to untold numbers of Greeks who are among the United States' most prosperous communities. Greece loves the idea of its "Westernness"? a place and a culture where the West ends, and some other alien world (Islam) begins. But the political culture of religious nationalism has isolated Greece from the wider currents of Western liberalism.
What little modern veneer is used to dress up Greece's anti-Americanism is a pretense. The malady here is, paradoxically, a Greek variant of what plays out in the world of Islam: a belligerent political culture sharpening faith as a political weapon, an abdication of political responsibility for one's own world, and a search for foreign "devils."
Lest they be trumped by their hated Greek rivals, the Turks now give voice to the same anti-Americanism. It is a peculiar sentiment among the Turks, given their pragmatism. They are not prone to the cluster of grievances that empower anti-Americanism in France or among the intelligentsia of the developing world. In the 1920s, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk gave Turkey a dream of modernity and self-help by pointing his country westward, distancing it from the Arab-Muslim lands to its south and east. But the secular, modernist dream in Turkey has fractured, and oddly, anti-Americanism blows through the cracks from the Arab lands and from Brussels and Berlin.
The fury of the Turkish protests against the United States in the months prior to the war in Iraq exhibited a pathology all its own. It was, at times, nature imitating art: The protesters in the streets burned American flags in the apparent hope that Europeans (real Europeans, that is) would finally take Turkey and the Turks into the fold. The U.S. presence had been benign in Turkish lands, and Americans had been Turkey's staunchest advocates for coveted membership in the EU. But suddenly this relationship that served Turkey so well was no longer good enough.
As the "soft" Islamists (there is no such thing, we ought to understand by now) revolted against Pax Americana, the secularists averted their gaze and let stand this new anti-Americanism. The pollsters calling on the Turks found a people in distress, their economy on the ropes, and their polity in an unfamiliar world beyond the simple certainties of Kemalism, yet without new political tools and compass. No dosage of anti-Americanism, the Turks will soon realize, will take Turkey past the gatekeepers of Europe.
WE WERE ALL AMERICANS
The introduction of the Pew report sets the tone for the entire study. The war in Iraq, it argues,"has widened the rift between Americans and Western Europeans" and "further inflamed the Muslim world." The implications are clear: The United States was better off before Bush's "unilateralism." The United States, in its hubris, summoned up this anti-Americanism. Those are the political usages of this new survey.
But these sentiments have long prevailed in Jordan, Egypt, and France. During the 1990s, no one said good things about the United States in Egypt. It was then that the Islamist children of Egypt took to the road, to Hamburg and Kandahar, to hatch a horrific conspiracy against the United States. And it was in the 1990s, during the fabled stock market run, when the prophets of globalization preached the triumph of the U.S. economic model over the protected versions of the market in places such as France, when anti-Americanism became the uncontested ideology of French public life.
Americans were barbarous, a threat to French cuisine and their beloved language. U.S. pension funds were acquiring their assets and Wall Street speculators were raiding their savings. The United States incarcerated far too many people and executed too many criminals. All these views thrived during a decade when Americans are now told they were loved and uncontested on foreign shores.
Much has been made of the sympathy that the French expressed for the United States immediately after the September 11 attacks, as embodied by the famous editorial of Le Monde's publisher Jean-Marie Colombani, "Nous Sommes Tous Am�ricains" ("We are all Americans"). And much has been made of the speed with which the United States presumably squandered that sympathy in the months that followed. But even Colombani's column, written on so searing a day, was not the unalloyed message of sympathy suggested by the title.
Even on that very day, Colombani wrote of the United States reaping the whirlwind of its "cynicism"; he recycled the hackneyed charge that Osama bin Laden had been created and nurtured by U.S. intelligence agencies. Colombani quickly retracted what little sympathy he had expressed when, in December of 2001, he was back with an open letter to "our American friends" and soon thereafter with a short book, Tous Am�ricains? le monde apr�s le 11 septembre 2001 (All Americans? The World After September 11, 2001). By now the sympathy had drained, and the tone was one of belligerent judgment and disapproval.
There was nothing to admire in Colombani's United States, which had run roughshod in the world and had been indifferent to the rule of law. Colombani described the U.S. republic as a fundamentalist Christian enterprise, its magistrates too deeply attached to the death penalty, its police cruel to its black population. A republic of this sort could not in good conscience undertake a campaign against Islamism.
One can't, Colombani writes, battle the Taliban while trying to introduce prayers in one's own schools; one can't strive to reform Saudi Arabia while refusing to teach Darwinism in the schools of the Bible Belt; and one can't denounce the demands of the sharia (Islamic law) while refusing to outlaw the death penalty. Doubtless, he adds, the United States can't do battle with the Taliban before doing battle against the bigotry that ravages the depths of the United States itself.
The United States had not squandered Colombani's sympathy; he never had that sympathy in the first place.
Colombani was hardly alone in the French intellectual class in his enmity toward the United States. On November 3, 2001, in Le Monde, the writer and pundit Jean Baudrillard permitted himself a thought of stunning cynicism. He saw the perpetrators of September 11 acting out his own dreams and the dreams of others like him. He gave those attacks a sort of universal warrant: "How we have dreamt of this event," he wrote, "how all the world without exception dreamt of this event, for no one can avoid dreaming of the destruction of a power that has become hegemonic . . . . It is they who acted, but we who wanted the deed."
Casting caution and false sympathy aside, Baudrillard saw the terrible attacks on the United States as an "object of desire." The terrorists had been able to draw on a "deep complicity," knowing perfectly well that they were acting out the hidden yearnings of others oppressed by the United States' order and power. To him, morality of the U.S. variety is a sham, and the terrorism directed against it is a legitimate response to the inequities of "globalization."
In his country's intellectual landscape, Baudrillard was no loner. A struggle had raged throughout the 1990s, pitting U.S.-led globalization (with its low government expenditures, a "cheap" and merciless Wall Street-Treasury Department axis keen on greater discipline in the market, and relatively long working hours on the part of labor) against France's protectionist political economy. The primacy the United States assigned to liberty waged a pitched battle against the French commitment to equity.
To maintain France's sympathy, and that of Le Monde, the United States would have had to turn the other cheek to the murderers of al Qaeda, spare the Taliban, and engage the Muslim world in some high civilizational dialogue. But who needs high approval ratings in Marseille? Envy of U.S. power, and of the United States' universalism, is the ruling passion of French intellectual life. It is not "mostly Bush" that turned France against the United States.
The former Socialist foreign minister, Hubert V�drine, was given to the same anti-Americanism that moves his successor, the bombastic and vain Dominique de Villepin. It was V�drine, it should be recalled, who in the late 1990s had dubbed the United States a "hyperpower." He had done so before the war on terrorism, before the war on Iraq. He had done it against the background of an international order more concerned with economics and markets than with military power. In contrast to his successor, V�drine at least had the honesty to acknowledge that there was nothing unusual about the way the United States wielded its power abroad, or about France's response to that primacy. France, too, he observed, might have been equally overbearing if it possessed the United States' weight and assets.
His successor gave France's resentment highly moral claims. Villepin appeared evasive, at one point, on whether he wished to see a U.S. or an Iraqi victory in the standoff between Saddam Hussein's regime and the United States. Anti-Americanism indulges France's fantasy of past greatness and splendor and gives France's unwanted Muslim children a claim on the political life of a country that knows not what to do with them.
THE BURDEN OF MODERNITY
To come bearing modernism to those who want it but who rail against it at the same time, to represent and embody so much of what the world yearns for and fears? that is the American burden. The United States lends itself to contradictory interpretations. To the Europeans, and to the French in particular, who are enamored of their la�cisme (secularism), the United States is unduly religious, almost embarrassingly so, its culture suffused with sacred symbolism.
In the Islamic world, the burden is precisely the opposite: There, the United States scandalizes the devout, its message represents nothing short of an affront to the pious and a temptation to the gullible and the impressionable young. According to the June BBC survey, 78 percent of French polled identified the United States as a "religious" country, while only 10 percent of Jordanians endowed it with that label. Religious to the secularists, faithless to the devout? such is the way the United States is seen in foreign lands.
So many populations have the United States under their skin. Their rage is oddly derived from that very same attraction. Consider the Saudi realm, a place where anti-Americanism is fierce. The United States helped invent the modern Saudi world. The Arabian American Oil Company? for all practical purposes a state within a state? pulled the desert enclave out of its insularity, gave it skills, and ushered it into the 20th century.
Deep inside the anti-Americanism of today's Saudi Arabia, an observer can easily discern the dependence of the Saudi elite on their U.S. connection. It is in the image of the United States' suburbs and urban sprawl that Saudi cities are designed. It is on the campuses of Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford that the ruling elite are formed and educated.
After September 11, 2001, the Saudi elite panicked that their ties to the United States might be shattered and that their world would be consigned to what they have at home. Fragments of the United States have been eagerly embraced by an influential segment of Saudi society. For many, the United States was what they encountered when they were free from home and family and age-old prohibitions.
Today, an outing in Riyadh is less a journey to the desert than to the mall and to Starbucks.
An academic in Riyadh, in the midst of an anti-American tirade about all policies American, was keen to let me know that his young son, born in the United States, had suddenly declared he no longer wanted to patronize McDonald's because of the United States' support of Israel. The message was plaintive and unpersuasive; the resolve behind that "boycott" was sure to crack.
A culture that casts so long a shadow is fated to be emulated and resented at the same time. The United States is destined to be in the politics? and imagination? of strangers even when the country (accurately) believes it is not implicated in the affairs of other lands.
In a hauntingly astute set of remarks made to the New Yorker in the days that followed the terrorism of September 11, the Egyptian playwright Ali Salem? a free spirit at odds with the intellectual class in his country and a maverick who journeyed to Israel and wrote of his time there and of his acceptance of that country? went to the heart of the anti-American phenomenon. He was thinking of his own country's reaction to the United States, no doubt, but what he says clearly goes beyond Egypt:
People say that Americans are arrogant, but it's not true. Americans enjoy life and they are proud of their lives, and they are boastful of their wonderful inventions that have made life so much easier and more convenient. It's very difficult to understand the machinery of hatred, because you wind up resorting to logic, but trying to understand this with logic is like measuring distance in kilograms�.
These are people who are envious. To them, life is an unbearable burden. Modernism is the only way out. But modernism is frightening. It means we have to compete. It means we can't explain everything away with conspiracy theories. Bernard Shaw said it best, you know. In the preface to 'St. Joan,' he said Joan of Arc was burned not for any reason except that she was talented. Talent gives rise to jealousy in the hearts of the untalented.
This kind of envy cannot be attenuated. Jordanians, for instance, cannot be talked out of their anti-Americanism. In the BBC survey, 71 percent of Jordanians thought the United States was more dangerous to the world than al Qaeda. But Jordan has been the rare political and economic recipient of a U.S. free trade agreement, a privilege the United States shares only with a handful of nations. A new monarch, King Abdullah II, came to power, and the free trade agreement was an investment that Pax Americana made in his reign and in the moderation of his regime.
But this bargain with the Hashemite dynasty has not swayed the intellectual class, nor has it made headway among the Jordanian masses. On Iraq and on matters Palestinian, for more than a generation now, Jordanians have not had a kind thing to say about the United States. In the scheme of Jordan's neighborhood, the realm is benign and forgiving, but the political life is restrictive and tight.
When talking about the United States, Jordanians have often been talking to their rulers, expressing their dissatisfaction with the quality of the country's public life and economic performance. A pollster venturing to Jordan must understand the country's temper, hemmed in by poverty and overshadowed by more resourceful powers all around it: Iraq to the east, Israel to the west, and Syria and Saudi Arabia over the horizon.
A sense of disinheritance has always hung over Jordan. The trinity of God, country, and king puts much of the political life of the land beyond scrutiny and discussion. The anti-Americanism emanates from, and merges with, this political condition. With modernism come the Jews. They have been its bearers and beneficiaries, and they have paid dearly for it. They have been taxed with cosmopolitanism: The historian Isaac Deutscher had it right when he said that other people have roots, but the Jews have legs.
Today the Jews have a singular role in U.S. public life and culture, and anti-Americanism is tethered to anti-Semitism. In the Islamic world, and in some European circles as well, U.S. power is seen as the handmaiden of Jewish influence. Witness, for instance, the London-based Arab media's obsession with the presumed ascendancy of the neoconservatives? such as former chairman of the Defense Policy Board Richard Perle and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz? in the making of U.S. foreign policy.
The neocons had been there for the rescue of the (Muslim) Bosnians and Kosovars, but the reactionaries in Muslim lands had not taken notice of that. Left to itself, the United States would be fair-minded, this Arab commentary maintains, and it would arrive at a balanced approach to the Arab-Islamic world. This narrative is nothing less than a modernized version of the worldview of that infamous forgery, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.
But it is put forth by men and women who insist on their oneness with the modern world. A century ago, in a short-story called "Youth," the great British author Joseph Conrad captured in his incomparable way the disturbance that is heard when a modern world pushes against older cultures and disturbs their peace. In the telling, Marlowe, Conrad's literary double and voice, speaks of the frenzy of coming upon and disturbing the East. "And then, before I could open my lips, the East spoke to me, but it was in a Western voice. A torrent of words was poured into the enigmatical, the fateful silence; outlandish, angry words mixed with words and even whole sentences of good English, less strange but even more surprising.
The voice swore and cursed violently; it riddled the solemn peace of the bay by a volley of abuse. It began by calling me Pig . . . ." Today, the United States carries the disturbance of the modern to older places? to the east and to the intermediate zones in Europe.
There is energy in the United States, and there is force. And there is resistance and resentment? and emulation? in older places affixed on the delicate balancing act of a younger United States not yet content to make its peace with traditional pains and limitations and tyrannies.
That sensitive French interpreter of his country, Dominique Mo�si, recently told of a simple countryman of his who was wistful when Saddam Hussein's statue fell on April 9 in Baghdad's Firdos Square. France opposed this war, but this Frenchman expressed a sense of diminishment that his country had sat out this stirring story of political liberation. A society like France with a revolutionary history should have had a hand in toppling the tyranny in Baghdad, but it didn't.
Instead, a cable attached to a U.S. tank had pulled down the statue, to the delirium of the crowd. The new history being made was a distinctly American (and British) creation. It was soldiers from Burlington, Vermont, and Linden, New Jersey, and Bon Aqua, Tennessee? I single out those towns because they are the hometowns of three soldiers who were killed in the Iraq war? who raced through the desert making this new history and paying for it.
The United States need not worry about hearts and minds in foreign lands. If Germans wish to use anti-Americanism to absolve themselves and their parents of the great crimes of World War II, they will do it regardless of what the United States says and does. If Muslims truly believe that their long winter of decline is the fault of the United States, no campaign of public diplomacy shall deliver them from that incoherence.
In the age of Pax Americana, it is written, fated, or maktoob (as the Arabs would say) that the plotters and preachers shall rail against the United States? in whole sentences of good American slang.
Fouad Ajami is the Majid Khadduri professor at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies and a contributing editor at U.S. News & World Report. |
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/983088/posts
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Wed Feb 18, 2009 6:26 pm Post subject: |
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Joo: you are trying to reason with a self-righteous ignoramus. Does not matter what you tell him.
Got it? |
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Captain Corea
Joined: 28 Feb 2005
Location: Seoul
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| Posted: Wed Feb 18, 2009 8:48 pm Post subject: |
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| Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee wrote: |
| Captain Corea wrote: |
| Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee wrote: |
| Lots of people here and there have been saying it or implying it. |
So you don't have or are unwilling to proved a link.
Got it. |
Yes the US was loved in South Korea and in France before Bush was president.
got it. |
While that's interesting, that's not what I said. For someone so adept at cutting and pasting, I'd expect you to at least be able to quote me right.
Any chance you could back up your statement now about the posters on here with actual evidence?
| Gopher wrote: |
Joo: you are trying to reason with a self-righteous ignoramus. Does not matter what you tell him.
Got it? |
You do know that personal attacks on this forum are a breach of the rules, right?
Why the need for name calling? |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Wed Feb 18, 2009 9:05 pm Post subject: |
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Stop playing games. Stop playing the victim of name-calling as well. You started this when you got in Joo's face on the second page.
People said it. Several of them said it. It was months ago, during the primaries and the election. I do not speak for Joo. But I cannot be bothered to take the time necessary to identify the threads and posters, and then repost them here just because you are claiming to know nothing about this. As I said, I do not think you were paying attention during the primaries and the election.
The variants, once again, include this kind of language: (a) we should elect B. Obama if we want antiAmericanism to stop. The people of the world/the rest of the world want it; (b) said antiAmericanism only existed in response to the W. Bush administration and his foreign policy. The people of the world/the rest of the world made a rational evaluation of the situation and made a rational decision to oppose him, no more no less; (c) for example, the people of the world/the rest of the world, especially the Canadian people, always loved B. Clinton like a rock star...
Do your own research. Find the threads treating the primaries and the elections and read and do not skim through them this time. Let us know when you find it; I will be happy to confirm. |
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Captain Corea
Joined: 28 Feb 2005
Location: Seoul
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| Posted: Wed Feb 18, 2009 10:29 pm Post subject: |
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| Gopher wrote: |
Stop playing games. Stop playing the victim of name-calling as well. You started this when you got in Joo's face on the second page.
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I would not consider this getting in someones face
| Captain Corea wrote: |
| Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee wrote: |
I thought if Bush was gone everything would be okay. I don't understand. |
Who here said that?
Got a quote? |
but calling someone
| Gopher wrote: |
| Willfully obtuse, |
and
| Gopher wrote: |
| a self-righteous ignoramus. |
Seems to qualify.
So once again, I'll ask; why the need for the name calling? I saw Joo make an assertion on this thread. I asked him to back it up. He was either unwilling or unable to do so.
I can't force him to do it... nor can he stop me from asking.
But what I can do is /report you for personal attacks - which are a violation of the terms of service.
Now, can we get past the name calling? |
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Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee
Joined: 25 May 2003
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| Posted: Thu Feb 19, 2009 12:00 am Post subject: |
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| Captain Corea wrote: |
| Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee wrote: |
| Captain Corea wrote: |
| Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee wrote: |
| Lots of people here and there have been saying it or implying it. |
So you don't have or are unwilling to proved a link.
Got it. |
Yes the US was loved in South Korea and in France before Bush was president.
got it. |
While that's interesting, that's not what I said. For someone so adept at cutting and pasting, I'd expect you to at least be able to quote me right.
Any chance you could back up your statement now about the posters on here with actual evidence?
| Gopher wrote: |
Joo: you are trying to reason with a self-righteous ignoramus. Does not matter what you tell him.
Got it? |
You do know that personal attacks on this forum are a breach of the rules, right?
Why the need for name calling? |
| Quote: |
The Falseness of Anti-Americanism by Faoud Ajami
Pollsters report rising antiericanism worldwide. The United States, they imply, squandered global sympathy after the September 11 terrorist attacks through its arrogant unilateralism. |
You asked for a article. Did that.
and then we got U talking about France and South Korea. Two places were the US was not popular.
I provided stuff and you provided examples that helped me out instead of yourself.
Sorry but U don't have any case.
But I like this subject;
| Quote: |
Friday, 9 November, 2001, 16:07 GMT
Anti-US feeling hits Chelsea's Oxford studies
Chelsea: In New York when planes struck
Chelsea Clinton, the daughter of the former US president, says her studies at Oxford University have been overshadowed by anti-American sentiment in the wake of the 11 September attacks.
Ms Clinton, who was in New York when the hijacked airliners struck the World Trade Center, said those events had forever changed her life.
She said that over the summer she had intended to seek out non-Americans as friends when she got to Oxford in October to begin her master's degree in international relations at University College.
But this had changed.
"It's hard to be abroad right now," she wrote in an article for the next issue of New York-based Talk magazine.
Anger
"Every day I encounter some sort of anti-American feeling.
"Sometimes it's from other students, sometimes it's from a newspaper columnist, sometimes it's from 'peace' demonstrators.
"Now I find that I want to be around Americans - people who I know are thinking about our country as much as I am."
She said she was angry at people who questioned America's actions in Afghanistan, but was grateful for all the British support she had received.
In Oxford, other students told BBC News they were surprised by the comments, because they had not detected any particular anti-Americanism.
Welfare concerns
But the university said it understood the difficulties some foreign students were experiencing since 11 September and was trying to help them.
"For young people leaving home, particularly such a country like the States that's not had such a terrible event happen before, inevitably this is going to make separation from friends and family harder," said Dame Fiona Caldicott from the student health and welfare committee.
"But I believe that the systems we have in the colleges are working," she said.
Ms Clinton wrote in her Talk article that she had been with friends in Manhattan when the attacks happened.
She watched on TV as the second plane hit. She tried to phone her mother - New York senator Hillary Clinton - but the line went dead.
'Deafening rumble'
She went outside and walked towards the twin towers in search of a public telephone.
"I remember very little about how I got so far downtown.
"I do remember standing in line at a phone somewhere and hearing a deafening rumble."
The noise was the second tower collapsing.
"We were all crying. We all thought we were literally going to have fire rain down on us - that we were the next target.
"For a brief moment I truly thought I was going to die."
The day's events had changed everything for her.
"I wouldn't have believed I had many innocences left," she wrote.
"I had seen people who had lost everything and everyone they loved to war, famine, and natural disasters." |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/1647176.stm |
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Captain Corea
Joined: 28 Feb 2005
Location: Seoul
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| Posted: Thu Feb 19, 2009 3:26 am Post subject: |
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Sorry Joo, I thin there's been a misunderstanding. I was looking for you to backup your claims about posters on here.
| Quote: |
| Lots of people here and there have been saying it or implying it. |
that...
| Captain Corea wrote: |
| Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee wrote: |
I thought if Bush was gone everything would be okay. I don't understand. |
Who here said that?
Got a quote? |
I was curious about two things mainly
1. Was there a poster (or a number of posters) here that seriously proposed that 'everything would be ok once Bush was out.
and
2. Did any other serious source actually say that as well.
And other than that really odd website about Obama being a god that Gopher linked to, I have yet to really see either of you back up that initial claim - that people (and posters here) have said that everything will be ok if Bush is gone.
| Captain Corea wrote: |
| Gopher wrote: |
| Captain Corea wrote: |
Who here said that?
Got a quote? |
Either you are (a) playing dumb or (b) you only read the threads here superficially. I had exchanges with at least three posters here who were talking exactly like that. |
B sounds closer to the truth.
I have yet to read a serious post on here claiming that Obama will right all wrongs and that nothing bad will happen in his presidency.
Not really wanting to hijack this thread... but I'd love to see which posters claimed that.
Perhaps you and/or Joo could link it for me? |
I think I've been quite civil in this and really not wanting to hijack this thread anymore. If you're not willing to name names, or unable to search it out (and with dave's search function, that's understandible), I'l leave it at that.
I honestly was just curious as to who would actually claim that.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sorry all, back to the Chavez talk. |
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riverboy
Joined: 03 Jun 2003
Location: Incheon
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| Posted: Thu Feb 19, 2009 3:27 am Post subject: |
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In any case, and you misrepresent me too much, above, esp. re: "the Somosas," for me to respond to you and your strawmen in any meaningful way, I accept that you support Chavez or at least approve of his methods. As they say, Riverboy, it takes all kinds.
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Actually I think that Chavez's economic policies are running Venezuela into the groung. I to respect the notion of universal education and healthcare though. In the end the popel should decide without intervention from a certain agency with a history of destabilization.
As far as the strawmen comment. I believe it all happened when you brought up brought up Nicaraugua and Cuba and the people fleeing thise regimes. You asked me if it ever happened in the US. It has happened and it tends to happen when countries undergo revolutions.
I know your intellectuality and historical knowledge surpasses that of most of the posters on this board, and if you want to use certai situation or examples, you should think of both sides to the equztion. Of course you are only concerned about certain more priveleged class of folk I assume. |
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