'BOMB TEXAS':
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS
OF ANTI-AMERICANISM
Victor Davis Hanson
The Wall Street Journal, January 13, 2003
With this past autumn's discussion in Washington over what to do
about Iraq there arrived also the season of protests. They were
everywhere. In the national newspapers, Common Cause published a
full-page letter, backed by "7,000 signatories," demanding (as if it
had been outlawed) a "full and open debate" before any American
action against Iraq. More radical cries emanated from Not in Our
Name, a nationwide "project" spearheaded by Noam Chomsky and
affiliates, which likewise ran full-page advertisements in the major
papers decrying America's "war without limit," organized "Days of
Resistance" in New York and elsewhere, and in general made known its
feeling that the United States rather than Iraq poses the real threat
to world peace. At one late-October march in Washington, there were
signs proclaiming "I Love Iraq, Bomb Texas," and depicting President
Bush wearing a Hitler mustache and giving the Nazi salute.
In the dock with America was, of course, Israel. On university
campuses, demands circulated to disinvest from companies doing
business with that "apartheid state"--on the premise, one supposes,
that a democratic society with an elected government and a
civilian-controlled military is demonic in a way that an autocratic
cabal sponsoring the suicide-murder of civilians is not.
Writers, actors, and athletes revealed their habitual
self-absorption. The novelist Philip Roth complained that the United
States since September 11 had been indulging itself in "an orgy of
national narcissism," although he also concededIthat immediately
after the fall of the Twin Towers New York "had become interesting
again because it was a town in crisis". Barbra Streisand, identifying
Saddam Hussein as the dictator of Iran, faxed misspelled and
incoherent but characteristically perfervid memos to Congressmen,
while Ed Asner, of sitcom fame, threatened publicly to "lose his
soul" if we went into Iraq. The Hollywood bad boy Sean Penn, not
previously known for harboring a pacifistic streak, demanded that the
president cease his bellicosity for the sake of Penn's children. And
the jet-setting tennis celebrity Martina Navratilova, who fled here
to escape communist repression and has earned millions from corporate
sponsors, castigated the repressive atmosphere of her adopted
homeland.
Harbingers of this sort of derision were, of course, on view a
year ago, in the period right after September 11 and well into the
campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Thus Michael Moore,
currently making the rounds plugging his movie "Bowling for
Columbine" bemoaned the 9/11 terrorists' lack of discrimination in
their choice of target: "If someone did this to get back at Bush,
then they did so by killing thousands of people who did not vote for
him!" Norman Mailer, engagingly comparing the Twin Towers to "two
huge buck teeth," pronounced their ruins "more beautiful" than the
buildings themselves.
Not all the criticism of the American response to terrorist cells
and rogue governments has partaken of this order of irrationality.
But in the year since the slaughter of September 11 there emerged an
unpleasant body of sentiment that reflects a profound and blanket
dislike of anything the United States does at any time. For a while,
The New Republic kept track of this growing nonsense, under the
rubric of "Idiocy Watch," and the talk-show host Bill O'Reilly is
still eager to subject exemplars of it to his drill-bit method of
interrogation. The phenomenon they represent has been tracked daily
by Andrew Sullivan on his Web log and analyzed at greater length by,
among others, William J. Bennett (in "Why We Fight"), Norman
Podhoretz (in "The Return of the 'Jackal Bins,'?" Commentary, April
2002), and Keith Windschuttle (in "The Cultural War on Western
Civilization," The New Criterion, January 2002)I
Some general truths emerge from any survey of anti-American
invective in the context of the present world conflict. First, in
each major event since September 11, proponents of the idea of
American iniquity and Cassandras of a richly deserved American doom
have proved consistently wrong. Warnings in late September 2001 about
the perils of Afghanistan--the peaks, the ice, the warring factions,
Ramadan, jihad, and our fated rendezvous with the graveyard of mighty
armies gone before us--faded by early November in the face of rapid
and overwhelming American victory. Subsequent predictions of
"millions" of Afghan children left naked and starving in the snow
turned out to be equally fanciful, as did the threat of atomic
annihilation from across the border in Kashmir.
No sooner had that theater cooled, however, than we were being
hectored with the supposed criminality of our ally Ariel Sharon.
Cries of "Jeningrad" followed, to die down only with the publication
of Palestinian Authority archives exposing systematic thievery,
corruption and PA-sanctioned slaughter. During the occasional hiatus
from gloomy prognostications about the Arab-Israeli conflict, we were
kept informed of the new cold war that was slated to erupt on account
of our cancellation of the anti-ballistic-missile treaty with the
defunct Soviet Union; of catastrophic global warming, caused by us
and triggering floods in Germany; and always of the folly of our
proposed intervention in Iraq.
That effort to remove a fascist dictator, we are now assured is
destined to fail, proving instead to be a precursor to nuclear war
and/or a permanently inflamed Arab "street." On the other hand, a
successful campaign in Iraq, it is predicted, will serve only to
promote America's worst instincts: its imperial ambition, its
cultural chauvinism and its drive for economic hegemonism (a synonym
for oil). Those who oppose pre-emption warn on Monday that the Iraqi
dictator is too dangerous to attack and shrug on Tuesday that he is
not dangerous enough to warrant invasion. Take your pick: easy
containment or sure Armageddon.
The striking characteristic of such judgments is that they, too,
are wholly at odds with the known facts. Confident forecasts of
American defeat take no notice of what is the largest and
best-trained military in history, and fly in the face of recent
American victories in the Gulf War and Kosovo, both achieved at the
cost of scarcely any American casualties. Alleged American hatred of
Muslims hardly comports with our record of saving Kuwaitis from
fascist Iraqis, Kosovars and Bosnians from Christian Serbs, or
Afghans from Russian communists and then from their own Islamist
overlords, all the while providing billions of dollars in aid to
Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority. It was Jordanians and
Kuwaitis, not we and not Israelis, who ethnically cleansed
Palestinians; Iraqis and Egyptians, not we, who gassed Muslim
populations. And it is to our shores that Muslims weary of Middle
Eastern despotism are desperate to emigrate.
We are talking, largely though not exclusively, about a phenomenon
of the aging left of the Vietnam era and of its various progeny and
heirs; and once upon a time, indeed, the anti-American reflex could
be linked with some rigor to the influence of Marxism. True, that
particular religion is just about gone from the picture these days.
Some of its fumes, though, still linger in the doctrines of radical
egalitarianism espoused by postmodern relativists and
multiculturalists and by now instilled, in suitably diluted and
presentable form, in several generations of college and high-school
students. Hence, for example, the regular put-down of George W. Bush
as a "Manichean"--for could anything be more self-evidently
retrograde than a view of our present conflict as a war of good
versus evil, or anything more simplistic than relying on such
"universal" arbiters of human behavior as freedom, pluralism, and
religious tolerance?
Eschewing any reference to truths of this kind, adherents of
postmodernist relativism assess morality instead by the sole
criterion of power: Those without it deserve the ethical high ground
by virtue of their very status as underdogs; those with it, at least
if they are Westerners, and especially if they are Americans, are
ipso facto oppressors. Israel could give over the entire West Bank,
suffer 10,000 dead from suicide bombers, and apologize formally for
its existence, and it would still be despised by American and
European intellectuals for being what it is--Western, prosperous,
confident, and successful amid a sea of abject self-induced failure.
But all such contradictions are lightly borne. Since, for our
postmodern relativists and multiculturalists, there can be no real
superiority of Western civilization over the available alternatives,
democracy and freedom are themselves to be understood as mere
"constructs," to be defined only by shifting criteria that reflect
local prejudices and tastes. Like Soviet commissars labeling their
closed societies "republics" and their enslaved peoples "democratic,"
Saudi officials assert that their authoritarian desert monarchy is an
"Islamic democracy". In Afghanistan, the avatars of multiculturalism
and utopian pacifism struggled with the facts of a homophobic,
repressive, and icon-destroying Taliban, but emerged triumphant:
According to their reigning dialectic, the Taliban still had to be
understood on their own terms; only the United States could be
judged, and condemned, absolutely.
Our unprecedented affluence also explains much, although its role
as a facilitator has been relatively scanted in most discussions of
anti-Americanism that I have seen. The plain fact is that
civilization has never witnessed the level of wealth enjoyed by so
many contemporary Americans and Europeans. Obesity, not starvation,
is our chief health problem; we are more worried about our 401(k)
portfolios than about hostile tribes across the border.
Homegrown hostility to American society and the American
experiment is hardly a new phenomenon, but in the 19th century it
tended to be limited to tiny and insulated elite circles. Now, it is
a calling card for tens and hundreds of thousands who share a once
rare material splendor. That brilliant trio of Roman imperial
writers, Petronius, Suetonius and Juvenal, warned about such luxus
and its effects upon the elite of their era, among them cynicism,
nihilism, and a smug and crippling contempt for one's own.
For many, today's affluence is also accompanied by an
unprecedented sense of security. Tenure has ensured that tens of
thousands of professors who work nine months a year cannot be fired
for being unproductive or mediocre scholars, much less for being
abject failures in the classroom. [Job] security is the norm. The
combination of guarantees and affluence breeds a dangerous
unfamiliarity with how human nature really works elsewhere. Such
naiveti engenders its own array of contradictory attitudes and
emotions, including guilt, hypocrisy, and envy. Among some of our new
aristocrats, the realization has dawned that their own good fortune
[exists] at the expense of others, if not of the planet itself.
This hurts terribly, at least in theory. It sends some of them to
their fax machines, from where they dispatch anguished letters to the
New York Times about the plight of distant populations. It prompts
others, more principled and more honorable, to work in soup kitchens,
give money to impoverished school districts, and help out less
fortunate friends and family. But local charity is unheralded and
also expensive, in terms of both time and money. Far easier for most
to exhibit concern by signing an ostentatious petition against Israel
or to assemble in Central Park: public demonstrations that cost
nothing but seemingly meet the need to show to peers that one is
generous, fair, caring and compassionate.
This brings us to another element of the new anti-Americanism. All
of us seek status. This naturally selfish drive is especially
problematic for radical egalitarians, who must suppress their own
desire for privilege only to see it pop out in all sorts of strange
ways. I do not mean the superficially incongruous manifestations:
Hollywood actors in jeans and sneakers piling into limousines,
Marxist professors signing their mass mailings with the pompous
titles of their chairs, endowed through capitalist largesse, or the
posh Volvos that dot the faculty parking lot. Rather, I have in mind
the pillorying by National Public Radio of those who say "nucular"
for "nuclear," the loud laments in faculty clubs over the threats
posed to rural France by McDonald's, and all the other increasingly
desperate assertions of moral and cultural superiority in a world
where meaningful titles like earl, duke and marquis are long gone and
in theory repugnant..
Is it because these elite Americans are so insulated and so well
off, and yet feel so troubled by it, that they are prone to embrace
with religious fervor ideas that have little connection with reality
but that promise a sense of meaning, solidarity with a select and
sophisticated group, moral accomplishment, and importance? Is it
because of its very freedom and wealth that America has become both
the incubator and the target of these most privileged, resentful, and
unhappy people? And are their perceptions susceptible of change? If
the answer to the first two questions is yes, as I believe it is,
then the reply to the third must be: I doubt it. The necessary
correctives, after all, would have to be brutal: an economic
depression, a religious revolution, a military catastrophe or, God
forbid, an end to tenure. At least in the near term, and whether we
like it or not, the religion of anti-Americanism is as likely to grow
as to fade.
But it can also be challenged. The anti-Americans often invoke
Rome as a warning and as a model, both of our imperialism and of our
foreordained collapse. But the threats to Rome's predominance were
more dreadful in 220 B.C. than in A.D. 400. The difference over six
centuries was a result not of imperial overstretch on the outside but
of something happening within that was not unlike what we ourselves
are now witnessing. Earlier Romans knew what it was to be Roman, why
it was at least better than the alternative, and why their culture
had to be defended. Later in ignorance they forgot, and in
consequence disappeared. The example of Rome, in short, is an apt
one, but in a way unintended by critics who use passing contemporary
events as occasions for venting a permanent, irrational and often
visceral distrust of their own society. Their creed is really a
malady, and it cries out to be confronted and exposed.
(Victor Davis Hanson, Shifrin Visiting Professor of Military History
at the U.S. Naval Academy, is author of "An Autumn of War" (Anchor).
His article appeared in Commentary, December 2002.)
