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Vicissitude
Joined: 27 Feb 2007
Location: Chef School
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 Posted: Sun Jun 03, 2007 8:48 am Post subject: |
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| newintown wrote: |
| Vicissitude wrote: |
| twg wrote: |
| More likely they don;t know about it. About you report the post? |
Well, one way of looking at it is that he IS in fact helping to prove my point. He obviously hates Americans and female Americans especially. I think his kind is quite normal in the UK and it's just one reason why I have no desire to visit the country. |
"you think his kind is quite normal in the UK"  [Yes, I think he's a normal Brit, absolutely]
how judgemental, ignorant and embarrassingly prejudiced are you?
[You think that because I'm calling it like it is? Spinoza is a typical example of an average Brit. I've encountered his kind quite a few times over the past years. I have the experience. So this isn't about prejudice. It's about an observation combined with experiences, which make this a bias. Brits are constantly bad mouthing Americans. I can't tell you how many times I've had Brits offer their empathy saying such things as, "It must be really difficult for you as an American in this day and age with all the America bashing going around. Geez and my country is really bad about that. Personally..." So why the hell would I want to visit a country with a bunch of arrogant, snobs who sit around with nothing better to do than bash Americans and everything to do with America?]
despite being the OP, i would avoid future postings in this thread if i were you. [Why don't you avoid posting on this thread? If you don't like it leave]
you have outed yourself as a fool. [You have no defense so you must resort to personal insults out of defense. That makes you the fool] |
There is a great deal of truth in everything I am saying. Brits will deny the fact that they hate Americans. They'll cover it up (contest it even) and a lot of Americans will be fooled easily because they don't travel much. But not this one! You can't go around bashing Americans left right and center and then turn around and call them your friends because there will be a backlash. Now I've seen plenty of anti-Americanisms from Brits on this board. I've seen a few really nasty ones come on here from Big Bird, especially. They have been deleted by the mods on here. |
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Vicissitude
Joined: 27 Feb 2007
Location: Chef School
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| Posted: Sun Jun 03, 2007 9:31 am Post subject: |
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For anyone out there who is still in doubt about anti-Americanism being high in Europe (especially in the UK) and/or believes this is a result of Bush and his foreign affairs polices, then you need to read this article
| Quote: |
Printer Friendly Version E-Mail This Article
Published on Sunday, January 7, 2001 in the Washington Post
U.S. Bashing: It's All the Rage in Europe
by Martin Kettle
It is hardly a secret that Europeans, along with many other inhabitants of the planet, had a prolonged laugh at America's expense during the aftermath of last year's presidential election. In Europe, those sniggers appear to be part of something that is at once more serious and more sustained: a new form of post-Cold War anti-Americanism that reflects mounting unease with the American capitalist model and its cultural outgrowths.
This phenomenon was already beginning to make itself felt well before the election, over three issues in particular: the death penalty, global warming and national missile defense. For several months, all have generated increasingly bitter headlines against U.S. policies, and all have triggered protest movements in France, Britain, Holland and elsewhere that seem likely to grow in the future.
Here in the United States, none of these issues figured greatly in the election campaign. Nor did the gun culture, another intensively reported aspect of modern America that mystifies and disturbs many beyond its shores. These are issues, however, that many Europeans readily associate with this country, a fact that poses a special challenge for the new president.
The mood against capital punishment is especially strong in France and Italy. The U.S. ambassador to France, Felix Rohatyn, has pointed out that the issue is harming America's standing there. Even in Britain, where public opinion traditionally favors the death penalty, America's ready use of capital punishment has caused widespread anger.
Under the headline "Bush's Shame -- Shock Issue," the left-wing daily tabloid newspaper, the Mirror, devoted no less than the first nine pages of its Nov. 16 issue to a case-by-case examination of the 150 people executed in Texas while George W. Bush was governor, concluding with a much wider editorial comment: "Do we really want a man like him making snap decisions on whether to drop bombs or go to war? Do we really like the idea of his finger on the big trigger? No, we don't." Bush, it continued, "is a thoroughly dangerous, unpleasant piece of work who shouldn't be let anywhere near the White House."
America has become the villain on the issue of global warming, too. Throughout much of Europe, the collapse of November's conference in The Hague on climate change was blamed on the Americans. Rightly or wrongly -- and as an Englishman who has lived in America since 1997, I accept that we Europeans can sometimes seem very pious -- most Europeans believe that while they grapple with sustainability amid limited resources, Americans are simply burning fuel like there is no tomorrow. Europeans believe that no American administration has the gumption to confront American consumers over their fuel consumption habits. The energy crisis in California, widely reported in Europe, is seen as living proof of American energy profligacy.
National missile defense has provided a third rallying point. Not since the United States deployed short-range cruise missiles in western Europe during the mid-1980s has an arms issue so galvanized European opposition, ranging governments as well as protesters against America's efforts to turn itself into what Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser in the Carter administration, acutely describes as a "national gated community."
The European mood of exasperation with the United States was building through much of the past year, but the election energized it still further, producing an astonishingly contemptuous press response across Europe. "Shambles," "Mickey Mouse" and "banana republic" were some of the politer responses. In Britain, the conservative Daily Mail, normally as pro-Republican a newspaper as House Majority Whip Tom DeLay could wish for, asked its readers on the eve of the election: "Will the U.S. really pick Dubya as its next President?"
Americans, as well as those of us Europeans who work here, are going to have to get used to this kind of disdain. For, as Al Gore said too often during the campaign: You ain't seen nothing yet.
From the days of John Winthrop, Americans have liked to imagine their nation as a model for the rest of the world. For many of the intervening 370 years, such a view was both understandable and true -- most recently perhaps when the Berlin Wall fell and communism was swept away in Eastern Europe.
But the city upon the hill is not standing the test of new times. Increasingly, Europeans sense that they exist across a cultural and political gulf from Model America. In what is increasingly a single world, the two continents are drifting farther apart.
Anti-Americanism may seem like a term with an anachronistic ring to it. Unless you live in Baghdad or Havana, there hasn't been much of it around for a good few years. The more contemporary form of anti-Americanism that is creeping, and perhaps even bounding, onto the world stage looks considerably different from its former incarnation. During the Cold War, anti-Americanism was almost always an expression of opposition to the actions of the American state. It was overwhelmingly a response to macro-political issues like American military intervention overseas (preeminently in Vietnam), or U.S. nuclear weapons policy, or America's covert and overt support for a variety of corrupt and brutal dictatorships in all parts of the globe.
That old form of anti-Americanism has largely gone with the wind. American military action overseas can still spark protests, of course, as can U.S. nuclear weapons policy (as the national missile defense project may show), but the scale and intensity of such protests is minuscule in comparison with the mass movements that were provoked by earlier arms issues during the Cold War.
The new anti-Americanism is less focused on external acts of the American state; it is more likely to be triggered by internal things such as the American love affair with the automobile, the cult of the gun or the uncritical assumption that American is always best. In some respects, today's critics are taking issue with the American way of life itself.
In the post-communist world order, in which the United States sees itself as the necessary nation, Americans should not be surprised at such a shift. But Americans should not be indifferent to a growing sense in Europe and elsewhere that there sometimes appears to be one law for privileged America and another law for other countries.
That feeling seems to me to be the common factor in European responses to issues such as global warming and national missile defense. A lot of Europeans simply believe that Americans are too self-absorbed to either know what is happening or to care how the rest of the world sees them. My own e-mail postbag from those who read my coverage of the United States on both sides of the Atlantic certainly bears this out. As one reader from Florida -- she had to be -- wrote at the height of the battle there: "I think it best if you minded your own business there in the U.K. and let us decide our destiny."
But it's our destiny, too, and The Hague conference provided a particularly dramatic example of why such unilateralism is increasingly provocative. Another example lies in the inevitable fate under the new administration of the treaty setting up the International Criminal Court (ICC), which the Clinton administration signed in the last hours of the last day of 2000. The treaty is not legally binding without Senate approval, which is unlikely to be forthcoming because of objections from Republicans.
The outright Republican refusal to participate in the new court -- a position that would place the United States alongside such human rights paragons as Iran, Iraq and Libya, which in other circumstances are dismissed as threats to global stability and order -- sends a barely credible message to post-communist Europe. Underlying this refusal seems to be an American belief that human rights abuses are committed only by other nationals, not by Americans and not by the uncriticizable American military.
There is surely a disjunction here. Universal modern American values supposedly reign supreme alongside American entrepreneurial dynamism. Yet while the rest of the world is struggling to make itself answerable to global legal standards, America is increasingly determined to stand aloof. It's a message that says the United States is happy with double standards.
As I say, the mounting global impatience with these aspects of America predates the rise of President-elect Bush. Some of the hostility applied as much to the Clinton administration as to its successor. But by luck or judgment, Americans have now acquired a president who uniquely embodies many of the interests and assumptions that are helping to feed the growing global alienation from American values and policy. He is an energy unilateralist. He is an opponent of the ICC. He is a defender of the gun culture. He was the governor of the leading death penalty state. He is an advocate of the most far-reaching versions of national missile defense. He was also, of course, the overwhelming beneficiary of a tarnished election.
Bush has a huge job to do if he wishes to reverse the new mood, though it is far from clear whether the new administration really cares about such consequences. Most Americans have barely considered these problems, and many will be inclined to dismiss them. That could be a costly mistake. For Bush's mere arrival in the White House is likely to be the best recruiting sergeant that the new anti-Americanism could have hoped for.
Martin Kettle is Washington bureau chief for Britain's Guardian newspaper.
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This article was printed before Bush took office. It clearly shows that Europe was generally anti-American long before the wars in Iraq. That Europe constantly looks for reasons to feed their hatred and contempt towards America. Although it doesn't directly mention Britain, notice who is the author. Yes, he is British. |
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twg
Joined: 02 Nov 2006
Location: Getting some fresh air...
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| Posted: Sun Jun 03, 2007 9:40 am Post subject: |
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| Big_Bird wrote: |
| Vicissitude is simply one of those sorts who loves feeling offended. |
Half the threads on this board wouldn't exist without that cultural attitude. |
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SPINOZA
Joined: 10 Jun 2005
Location: $eoul
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| Posted: Sun Jun 03, 2007 4:06 pm Post subject: |
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| Vicissitude wrote: |
| twg wrote: |
| More likely they don;t know about it. About you report the post? |
Well, one way of looking at it is that he IS in fact helping to prove my point. |
Back for another thoroughly good ass-whuppin' are we, luvvie? Oh jolly good. I love nothing more than fastening my powerful jaws around a weaker, hapless victim. Like a cat, I toy with, torment my victims before killing them.
I AM in fact helping to prove your point, am I?....well, this would be true if your original point was that I am an aggressive loony who seeks to destroy all that soils the species - especially ugly people who inflict their astounding mingerness and lack of sexual activity out on others. Had your point been that Vicissitude should be stripped, shaved, sterilized and abandoned to a freezing cold basement where IT is to be the recipient of monotonous, cacophonous hectoring....then, yeah, I'd have proved that point beyond any doubt, as if it wasn't already obvious.
Unfortunately, my dear, your point was that in Britain - evidenced by this feeble excuse for journalism - there exists anti-Americanism of proportions where strangers are abused and attacked. Americans ought to be on "red alert" you said, despite that 15 other testimonies from Americans in your own source directly opposed that view. Throughout the thread I've argued that this is not the case, often appealing to evidence in YOUR sources (amongsst other excellent contributions). I�ve also not made one single anti-American comment. If you think I have, then I assume you either cannot read with discernment or think for yourself or both! Personal tirades against moronic individuals, yes, and highly satisfying it was too, but insulting someone for being flabbergastingly stupid, very fat and very ugly, is not anti-Americanism. For example�.you were posting on Saturday night, I see? You�ve got zero social skills, no friends to speak of and have all the sex appeal of a skunk, that�s pretty obvious, but advertising the fact? Heavens.
| Quote: |
| He obviously hates Americans and female Americans especially. |
I obviously hate stupid people who make no effort whatsoever to better themselves via a true understanding of reality. You reek from the fear of living without excuses, standing in the sun alone without all the labels and self-assigned stereotypes, living a bolder, freer, more self-directed life. You are to be pitied.
| Quote: |
| I think his kind is quite normal in the UK and it's just one reason why I have no desire to visit the country. |
A grotesque idiot like you not visiting and hauling your Michelin Man mass down the streets is excellent news for Britain. Maybe applying for a job in a haunted house would be the best use of your talents. |
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Wangja
Joined: 17 May 2004
Location: Seoul, Yongsan
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| Posted: Sun Jun 03, 2007 4:53 pm Post subject: |
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| Vicissitude wrote: |
For anyone out there who is still in doubt about anti-Americanism being high in Europe (especially in the UK) and/or believes this is a result of Bush and his foreign affairs polices, then you need to read this article
| Quote: |
Printer Friendly Version E-Mail This Article
Published on Sunday, January 7, 2001 in the Washington Post
U.S. Bashing: It's All the Rage in Europe
by Martin Kettle
It is hardly a secret that Europeans, along with many other inhabitants of the planet, had a prolonged laugh at America's expense during the aftermath of last year's presidential election. In Europe, those sniggers appear to be part of something that is at once more serious and more sustained: a new form of post-Cold War anti-Americanism that reflects mounting unease with the American capitalist model and its cultural outgrowths.
This phenomenon was already beginning to make itself felt well before the election, over three issues in particular: the death penalty, global warming and national missile defense. For several months, all have generated increasingly bitter headlines against U.S. policies, and all have triggered protest movements in France, Britain, Holland and elsewhere that seem likely to grow in the future.
Here in the United States, none of these issues figured greatly in the election campaign. Nor did the gun culture, another intensively reported aspect of modern America that mystifies and disturbs many beyond its shores. These are issues, however, that many Europeans readily associate with this country, a fact that poses a special challenge for the new president.
The mood against capital punishment is especially strong in France and Italy. The U.S. ambassador to France, Felix Rohatyn, has pointed out that the issue is harming America's standing there. Even in Britain, where public opinion traditionally favors the death penalty, America's ready use of capital punishment has caused widespread anger.
Under the headline "Bush's Shame -- Shock Issue," the left-wing daily tabloid newspaper, the Mirror, devoted no less than the first nine pages of its Nov. 16 issue to a case-by-case examination of the 150 people executed in Texas while George W. Bush was governor, concluding with a much wider editorial comment: "Do we really want a man like him making snap decisions on whether to drop bombs or go to war? Do we really like the idea of his finger on the big trigger? No, we don't." Bush, it continued, "is a thoroughly dangerous, unpleasant piece of work who shouldn't be let anywhere near the White House."
America has become the villain on the issue of global warming, too. Throughout much of Europe, the collapse of November's conference in The Hague on climate change was blamed on the Americans. Rightly or wrongly -- and as an Englishman who has lived in America since 1997, I accept that we Europeans can sometimes seem very pious -- most Europeans believe that while they grapple with sustainability amid limited resources, Americans are simply burning fuel like there is no tomorrow. Europeans believe that no American administration has the gumption to confront American consumers over their fuel consumption habits. The energy crisis in California, widely reported in Europe, is seen as living proof of American energy profligacy.
National missile defense has provided a third rallying point. Not since the United States deployed short-range cruise missiles in western Europe during the mid-1980s has an arms issue so galvanized European opposition, ranging governments as well as protesters against America's efforts to turn itself into what Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser in the Carter administration, acutely describes as a "national gated community."
The European mood of exasperation with the United States was building through much of the past year, but the election energized it still further, producing an astonishingly contemptuous press response across Europe. "Shambles," "Mickey Mouse" and "banana republic" were some of the politer responses. In Britain, the conservative Daily Mail, normally as pro-Republican a newspaper as House Majority Whip Tom DeLay could wish for, asked its readers on the eve of the election: "Will the U.S. really pick Dubya as its next President?"
Americans, as well as those of us Europeans who work here, are going to have to get used to this kind of disdain. For, as Al Gore said too often during the campaign: You ain't seen nothing yet.
From the days of John Winthrop, Americans have liked to imagine their nation as a model for the rest of the world. For many of the intervening 370 years, such a view was both understandable and true -- most recently perhaps when the Berlin Wall fell and communism was swept away in Eastern Europe.
But the city upon the hill is not standing the test of new times. Increasingly, Europeans sense that they exist across a cultural and political gulf from Model America. In what is increasingly a single world, the two continents are drifting farther apart.
Anti-Americanism may seem like a term with an anachronistic ring to it. Unless you live in Baghdad or Havana, there hasn't been much of it around for a good few years. The more contemporary form of anti-Americanism that is creeping, and perhaps even bounding, onto the world stage looks considerably different from its former incarnation. During the Cold War, anti-Americanism was almost always an expression of opposition to the actions of the American state. It was overwhelmingly a response to macro-political issues like American military intervention overseas (preeminently in Vietnam), or U.S. nuclear weapons policy, or America's covert and overt support for a variety of corrupt and brutal dictatorships in all parts of the globe.
That old form of anti-Americanism has largely gone with the wind. American military action overseas can still spark protests, of course, as can U.S. nuclear weapons policy (as the national missile defense project may show), but the scale and intensity of such protests is minuscule in comparison with the mass movements that were provoked by earlier arms issues during the Cold War.
The new anti-Americanism is less focused on external acts of the American state; it is more likely to be triggered by internal things such as the American love affair with the automobile, the cult of the gun or the uncritical assumption that American is always best. In some respects, today's critics are taking issue with the American way of life itself.
In the post-communist world order, in which the United States sees itself as the necessary nation, Americans should not be surprised at such a shift. But Americans should not be indifferent to a growing sense in Europe and elsewhere that there sometimes appears to be one law for privileged America and another law for other countries.
That feeling seems to me to be the common factor in European responses to issues such as global warming and national missile defense. A lot of Europeans simply believe that Americans are too self-absorbed to either know what is happening or to care how the rest of the world sees them. My own e-mail postbag from those who read my coverage of the United States on both sides of the Atlantic certainly bears this out. As one reader from Florida -- she had to be -- wrote at the height of the battle there: "I think it best if you minded your own business there in the U.K. and let us decide our destiny."
But it's our destiny, too, and The Hague conference provided a particularly dramatic example of why such unilateralism is increasingly provocative. Another example lies in the inevitable fate under the new administration of the treaty setting up the International Criminal Court (ICC), which the Clinton administration signed in the last hours of the last day of 2000. The treaty is not legally binding without Senate approval, which is unlikely to be forthcoming because of objections from Republicans.
The outright Republican refusal to participate in the new court -- a position that would place the United States alongside such human rights paragons as Iran, Iraq and Libya, which in other circumstances are dismissed as threats to global stability and order -- sends a barely credible message to post-communist Europe. Underlying this refusal seems to be an American belief that human rights abuses are committed only by other nationals, not by Americans and not by the uncriticizable American military.
There is surely a disjunction here. Universal modern American values supposedly reign supreme alongside American entrepreneurial dynamism. Yet while the rest of the world is struggling to make itself answerable to global legal standards, America is increasingly determined to stand aloof. It's a message that says the United States is happy with double standards.
As I say, the mounting global impatience with these aspects of America predates the rise of President-elect Bush. Some of the hostility applied as much to the Clinton administration as to its successor. But by luck or judgment, Americans have now acquired a president who uniquely embodies many of the interests and assumptions that are helping to feed the growing global alienation from American values and policy. He is an energy unilateralist. He is an opponent of the ICC. He is a defender of the gun culture. He was the governor of the leading death penalty state. He is an advocate of the most far-reaching versions of national missile defense. He was also, of course, the overwhelming beneficiary of a tarnished election.
Bush has a huge job to do if he wishes to reverse the new mood, though it is far from clear whether the new administration really cares about such consequences. Most Americans have barely considered these problems, and many will be inclined to dismiss them. That could be a costly mistake. For Bush's mere arrival in the White House is likely to be the best recruiting sergeant that the new anti-Americanism could have hoped for.
Martin Kettle is Washington bureau chief for Britain's Guardian newspaper.
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This article was printed before Bush took office. It clearly shows that Europe was generally anti-American long before the wars in Iraq. That Europe constantly looks for reasons to feed their hatred and contempt towards America. Although it doesn't directly mention Britain, notice who is the author. Yes, he is British. |
What is especially anti-American in that? It seems like some genuine, low-key questions and comments. |
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eamo
Joined: 08 Mar 2003
Location: Shepherd's Bush, 1964.
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| Posted: Sun Jun 03, 2007 5:41 pm Post subject: |
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| True, the stereotype of Americans as perceived by Britons is of being loud and boorish, but, as I have found out, there is no typical American. They are a vastly different bunch of people. I don't think I have met people of a nationality with as many different characters as Americans. |
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Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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| Posted: Sun Jun 03, 2007 5:43 pm Post subject: |
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| eamo wrote: |
| True, the stereotype of Americans as perceived by Britons is of being loud and boorish, but, as I have found out, there is no typical American. They are a vastly different bunch of people. I don't think I have met people of a nationality with as many different characters as Americans. |
Most of the Americans I have met are cool. Vicissitude is not. |
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dogbert
Joined: 29 Jan 2003
Location: Killbox 90210
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| Posted: Sun Jun 03, 2007 5:46 pm Post subject: |
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| Big_Bird wrote: |
| eamo wrote: |
| True, the stereotype of Americans as perceived by Britons is of being loud and boorish, but, as I have found out, there is no typical American. They are a vastly different bunch of people. I don't think I have met people of a nationality with as many different characters as Americans. |
Most of the Americans I have met are cool. Vicissitude is not. |
DON'T STEP ON THE BABY! |
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Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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| Posted: Sun Jun 03, 2007 5:50 pm Post subject: |
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| dogbert wrote: |
DON'T STEP ON THE BABY! |
Don't worry. He's quite safe. Because he's not an American baby!!!!  |
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dogbert
Joined: 29 Jan 2003
Location: Killbox 90210
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| Posted: Sun Jun 03, 2007 5:54 pm Post subject: |
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| Big_Bird wrote: |
| dogbert wrote: |
DON'T STEP ON THE BABY! |
Don't worry. He's quite safe. Because he's not an American baby!!!! |
ROTFLMAO  |
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spliff
Joined: 19 Jan 2004
Location: Khon Kaen, Thailand
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| Posted: Sun Jun 03, 2007 6:03 pm Post subject: |
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| The OP's thesis is udder manure...Brits love Americans, we are coalition partners and, no American would be that much of a poesy in the first place, IMHO! |
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Vicissitude
Joined: 27 Feb 2007
Location: Chef School
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| Posted: Sun Jun 03, 2007 11:56 pm Post subject: |
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| Wangja wrote: |
| Vicissitude wrote: |
For anyone out there who is still in doubt about anti-Americanism being high in Europe (especially in the UK) and/or believes this is a result of Bush and his foreign affairs polices, then you need to read this article
| Quote: |
Printer Friendly Version E-Mail This Article
Published on Sunday, January 7, 2001 in the Washington Post
U.S. Bashing: It's All the Rage in Europe
by Martin Kettle
It is hardly a secret that Europeans, along with many other inhabitants of the planet, had a prolonged laugh at America's expense during the aftermath of last year's presidential election. In Europe, those sniggers appear to be part of something that is at once more serious and more sustained: a new form of post-Cold War anti-Americanism that reflects mounting unease with the American capitalist model and its cultural outgrowths.
This phenomenon was already beginning to make itself felt well before the election, over three issues in particular: the death penalty, global warming and national missile defense. For several months, all have generated increasingly bitter headlines against U.S. policies, and all have triggered protest movements in France, Britain, Holland and elsewhere that seem likely to grow in the future.
Here in the United States, none of these issues figured greatly in the election campaign. Nor did the gun culture, another intensively reported aspect of modern America that mystifies and disturbs many beyond its shores. These are issues, however, that many Europeans readily associate with this country, a fact that poses a special challenge for the new president.
The mood against capital punishment is especially strong in France and Italy. The U.S. ambassador to France, Felix Rohatyn, has pointed out that the issue is harming America's standing there. Even in Britain, where public opinion traditionally favors the death penalty, America's ready use of capital punishment has caused widespread anger.
Under the headline "Bush's Shame -- Shock Issue," the left-wing daily tabloid newspaper, the Mirror, devoted no less than the first nine pages of its Nov. 16 issue to a case-by-case examination of the 150 people executed in Texas while George W. Bush was governor, concluding with a much wider editorial comment: "Do we really want a man like him making snap decisions on whether to drop bombs or go to war? Do we really like the idea of his finger on the big trigger? No, we don't." Bush, it continued, "is a thoroughly dangerous, unpleasant piece of work who shouldn't be let anywhere near the White House."
America has become the villain on the issue of global warming, too. Throughout much of Europe, the collapse of November's conference in The Hague on climate change was blamed on the Americans. Rightly or wrongly -- and as an Englishman who has lived in America since 1997, I accept that we Europeans can sometimes seem very pious -- most Europeans believe that while they grapple with sustainability amid limited resources, Americans are simply burning fuel like there is no tomorrow. Europeans believe that no American administration has the gumption to confront American consumers over their fuel consumption habits. The energy crisis in California, widely reported in Europe, is seen as living proof of American energy profligacy.
National missile defense has provided a third rallying point. Not since the United States deployed short-range cruise missiles in western Europe during the mid-1980s has an arms issue so galvanized European opposition, ranging governments as well as protesters against America's efforts to turn itself into what Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser in the Carter administration, acutely describes as a "national gated community."
The European mood of exasperation with the United States was building through much of the past year, but the election energized it still further, producing an astonishingly contemptuous press response across Europe. "Shambles," "Mickey Mouse" and "banana republic" were some of the politer responses. In Britain, the conservative Daily Mail, normally as pro-Republican a newspaper as House Majority Whip Tom DeLay could wish for, asked its readers on the eve of the election: "Will the U.S. really pick Dubya as its next President?"
Americans, as well as those of us Europeans who work here, are going to have to get used to this kind of disdain. For, as Al Gore said too often during the campaign: You ain't seen nothing yet.
From the days of John Winthrop, Americans have liked to imagine their nation as a model for the rest of the world. For many of the intervening 370 years, such a view was both understandable and true -- most recently perhaps when the Berlin Wall fell and communism was swept away in Eastern Europe.
But the city upon the hill is not standing the test of new times. Increasingly, Europeans sense that they exist across a cultural and political gulf from Model America. In what is increasingly a single world, the two continents are drifting farther apart.
Anti-Americanism may seem like a term with an anachronistic ring to it. Unless you live in Baghdad or Havana, there hasn't been much of it around for a good few years. The more contemporary form of anti-Americanism that is creeping, and perhaps even bounding, onto the world stage looks considerably different from its former incarnation. During the Cold War, anti-Americanism was almost always an expression of opposition to the actions of the American state. It was overwhelmingly a response to macro-political issues like American military intervention overseas (preeminently in Vietnam), or U.S. nuclear weapons policy, or America's covert and overt support for a variety of corrupt and brutal dictatorships in all parts of the globe.
That old form of anti-Americanism has largely gone with the wind. American military action overseas can still spark protests, of course, as can U.S. nuclear weapons policy (as the national missile defense project may show), but the scale and intensity of such protests is minuscule in comparison with the mass movements that were provoked by earlier arms issues during the Cold War.
The new anti-Americanism is less focused on external acts of the American state; it is more likely to be triggered by internal things such as the American love affair with the automobile, the cult of the gun or the uncritical assumption that American is always best. In some respects, today's critics are taking issue with the American way of life itself.
In the post-communist world order, in which the United States sees itself as the necessary nation, Americans should not be surprised at such a shift. But Americans should not be indifferent to a growing sense in Europe and elsewhere that there sometimes appears to be one law for privileged America and another law for other countries.
That feeling seems to me to be the common factor in European responses to issues such as global warming and national missile defense. A lot of Europeans simply believe that Americans are too self-absorbed to either know what is happening or to care how the rest of the world sees them. My own e-mail postbag from those who read my coverage of the United States on both sides of the Atlantic certainly bears this out. As one reader from Florida -- she had to be -- wrote at the height of the battle there: "I think it best if you minded your own business there in the U.K. and let us decide our destiny."
But it's our destiny, too, and The Hague conference provided a particularly dramatic example of why such unilateralism is increasingly provocative. Another example lies in the inevitable fate under the new administration of the treaty setting up the International Criminal Court (ICC), which the Clinton administration signed in the last hours of the last day of 2000. The treaty is not legally binding without Senate approval, which is unlikely to be forthcoming because of objections from Republicans.
The outright Republican refusal to participate in the new court -- a position that would place the United States alongside such human rights paragons as Iran, Iraq and Libya, which in other circumstances are dismissed as threats to global stability and order -- sends a barely credible message to post-communist Europe. Underlying this refusal seems to be an American belief that human rights abuses are committed only by other nationals, not by Americans and not by the uncriticizable American military.
There is surely a disjunction here. Universal modern American values supposedly reign supreme alongside American entrepreneurial dynamism. Yet while the rest of the world is struggling to make itself answerable to global legal standards, America is increasingly determined to stand aloof. It's a message that says the United States is happy with double standards.
As I say, the mounting global impatience with these aspects of America predates the rise of President-elect Bush. Some of the hostility applied as much to the Clinton administration as to its successor. But by luck or judgment, Americans have now acquired a president who uniquely embodies many of the interests and assumptions that are helping to feed the growing global alienation from American values and policy. He is an energy unilateralist. He is an opponent of the ICC. He is a defender of the gun culture. He was the governor of the leading death penalty state. He is an advocate of the most far-reaching versions of national missile defense. He was also, of course, the overwhelming beneficiary of a tarnished election.
Bush has a huge job to do if he wishes to reverse the new mood, though it is far from clear whether the new administration really cares about such consequences. Most Americans have barely considered these problems, and many will be inclined to dismiss them. That could be a costly mistake. For Bush's mere arrival in the White House is likely to be the best recruiting sergeant that the new anti-Americanism could have hoped for.
Martin Kettle is Washington bureau chief for Britain's Guardian newspaper.
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This article was printed before Bush took office. It clearly shows that Europe was generally anti-American long before the wars in Iraq. That Europe constantly looks for reasons to feed their hatred and contempt towards America. Although it doesn't directly mention Britain, notice who is the author. Yes, he is British. |
What is especially anti-American in that? It seems like some genuine, low-key questions and comments. |
I think you missed the entire point I was trying to make. You see Brits like to vehemently deny that they are anti-American. They say they are against the Bush administration and that is their main reason for spouting their hatred and giving stereotypes of Americans. I'm saying that the Brits hate Americans, they have always hated Americans and that Bush is just a scapegoat. This article helps prove my point. Read the disertation I posted and it proves my point as well. If it weren't Bush (and the war in Iraq) they were using as a cause to hate America/Americans, they'd surely find something else to complain about. Indeed they have. |
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Vicissitude
Joined: 27 Feb 2007
Location: Chef School
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| Posted: Mon Jun 04, 2007 12:42 am Post subject: |
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| spliff wrote: |
| The OP's thesis is udder manure...Brits love Americans, we are coalition partners and, no American would be that much of a poesy in the first place, IMHO! |
This is not a thesis. There is a dissertation that posted a link to on here. I encourage you to read it entirely. Brits do not love Americans. That is absolute nonsense. Sure they are better at masking their hate with supposed 'politeness' but deep down that hatred is definitely there and it's manifested in certain ways:
1.) harshly condemn all American foreign policies, demonize the presidents and basic ideals of the country (i.e. capitalism, freedom etc.).
2.) stereotype the American people in a bad light (i.e. fat, ugly, arrogant, ignorant, loud, obnoxious, rude etc.)
3.) Use slurs against the people and the country (i.e. yankee, Americunt, AmeriKKKan, Dubya, MOB, Septic Tank, SFA, terrorist, Bushy, and so on) Some are used more often that others.
4.) Deny that there is any problem with stereotyping and make it part of mainstream popular banter. Anyone who disagrees with mainstream, is ostracized, ridiculed and questioned.
5.) Popularize media that is portraying the stereotypes and feeding the anti-Americans' propaganda.
6.) Always rise to the occasion to compare Britons 'polite' stereotype with those individual Americans who are least likely to appeal to mainstream society.
7.) Bash, flame and abuse anyone who does not agree with anti-Americanism.
Did I leave anything out?
Last edited by Vicissitude on Mon Jun 04, 2007 12:44 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Wangja
Joined: 17 May 2004
Location: Seoul, Yongsan
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| Posted: Mon Jun 04, 2007 12:44 am Post subject: |
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| Vicissitude wrote: |
| spliff wrote: |
| The OP's thesis is udder manure...Brits love Americans, we are coalition partners and, no American would be that much of a poesy in the first place, IMHO! |
This is not a thesis. There is a disertation that posted a link to on here. I encourage you to read it entirely. Brits do not love Americans. That is absolute nonsense. Sure they are better at masking their hate with supposed 'politeness' but deep down that hatred is definately there and it's manifested in certain ways:
1.) harshly condemn all American foreign policies, demonize the presidents and basic ideals of the country (i.e. capitalism, freedom etc.).
2.) stereotype the American people in a bad light (i.e. fat, ugly, arrogant, ignorant, loud, obnoxious, rude etc.)
3.) Use slurs against the people and the country (i.e. yankee, Americunt, AmeriKKKan, Dubya, MOB, Septic Tank, SFA, terrorist, Bushy, and so on) Some are used more often that others.
4.) Deny that there is any problem with stereotyping and make it part of maintream popular banter. Anyone who disagrees with mainstream, is ostrasized, ridiculed and questioned.
5.) Popularize media that is portraying the stereotypes and feeding the anti-Americans' propaganda.
6.) Always rise to the occasion to compare Britons 'polite' stereotype with those individual Americans who are least likely to appeal to mainstream society.
7.) Bash, flame and abuse anyone who does not agree with anti-Americanism.
Did I leave anything out? |
Jeez, you must be hypersensitive if stuff like that is considered "anti-American". |
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Vicissitude
Joined: 27 Feb 2007
Location: Chef School
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| Posted: Mon Jun 04, 2007 12:53 am Post subject: |
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| Wangja wrote: |
| Vicissitude wrote: |
| spliff wrote: |
| The OP's thesis is udder manure...Brits love Americans, we are coalition partners and, no American would be that much of a poesy in the first place, IMHO! |
This is not a thesis. There is a disertation that posted a link to on here. I encourage you to read it entirely. Brits do not love Americans. That is absolute nonsense. Sure they are better at masking their hate with supposed 'politeness' but deep down that hatred is definately there and it's manifested in certain ways:
1.) harshly condemn all American foreign policies, demonize the presidents and basic ideals of the country (i.e. capitalism, freedom etc.).
2.) stereotype the American people in a bad light (i.e. fat, ugly, arrogant, ignorant, loud, obnoxious, rude etc.)
3.) Use slurs against the people and the country (i.e. yankee, Americunt, AmeriKKKan, Dubya, MOB, Septic Tank, SFA, terrorist, Bushy, and so on) Some are used more often that others.
4.) Deny that there is any problem with stereotyping and make it part of maintream popular banter. Anyone who disagrees with mainstream, is ostrasized, ridiculed and questioned.
5.) Popularize media that is portraying the stereotypes and feeding the anti-Americans' propaganda.
6.) Always rise to the occasion to compare Britons 'polite' stereotype with those individual Americans who are least likely to appeal to mainstream society.
7.) Bash, flame and abuse anyone who does not agree with anti-Americanism.
Did I leave anything out? |
Jeez, you must be hypersensitive if stuff like that is considered "anti-American". |
Oh yes, yes. I forgot
8.) Accuse the citizens of being "hypersensitive" who take offense to: very derogatory slurs; insults to their country/culture/people; being bashed bashed/flamed/abused for being part of the unpopular majority; and, attempt to bring the issue to people's conscience. |
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