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'Anti-American' has become a thought-killing smear Independence Day is a good time to defend the necessity of real debate Hugo Young Between September 11 and July 4,
this Independence Day in America, I find I've written 22 Guardian columns
devoted one way or another to what grew out of that infamous September moment.
Perhaps it was too many. For sure, these pieces contained their share of
mis-spoken words and fragile judgments. But here was the big subject. It raised
so many issues of global concern, from Euro-American relations, through all the
Blair-Bush encounters, into the Middle East process, on to civil liberties. How
to forestall and suppress global terrorism is the greatest of all contemporary
challenges, subsuming many others about economic and territorial justice on a
grand scale. I've tried to address them as a reporter and analyst, as much as an
opinionated columnist.
Independence Day, however, is the moment to note an unhappy trend. Discourse
and relationships have narrowed not broadened in 10 months. There's a hardening
of tone between Europe and America. I sense trenches being dug. In particular,
it becomes ever more difficult to discuss these colossal problems, rife with
potential for prudent scepticism, in words that don't call forth instant
labelling as to their categoric loyalty or treason. At the beginning, President
Bush stared at the world and said you are either with us or against us. Time
hasn't worked any refinement of his message, rather the reverse. We are all
anti-Americans now, unless we happen to be pro.
Each side has made its contribution to this starkness. The Europeans began
it, with the voices that refused to address what had happened. A seam of
vindictiveness exposed itself. Anti-American paranoia enjoyed its finest hour,
in some quarters, at the hands of Mohammed Atta, the leader of the
plane-bombers.
This lack of empathy, though no longer so pitiless, is still apparent in
Europe. Despite the best efforts of some reporters, the European mind - which
includes the British mind - recoils from what America has embraced. It does not
understand the enormity of what happened not only to New York and Washington but
to the psyche of a once invulnerable nation. Most of Europe still tends to take
its own experience of terrorism as a reason to disdain Americans' over-reaction
to their own taste of it, and I'm speaking of the citizens at least as much as
the political leaders. Ultimately, there's a difference of caring and a want of
rage.
This has led Europeans into some amnesiac generalisations. They speak about
Americans without remembering history, or distinguishing between the people and
the Bush regime. They overlook American generosity both as a world power - which
nation was it that saved the world from German and Soviet tyranny? - and as a
nation of open doors and open hearts. Though the government, even one with a
mandate as doubtful as George Bush's, can be said to be acting for the people,
it seems important to be as careful in vaporising about Americans as about, say,
Jewish or black people. Ethnic monoliths are a curse at every level of humanity.
But some Americans are moving down the same slope. Europeans too are
generalised into infamy by the east-coast zeitgeist. Europe has been smeared as
generally anti-semitic, on the basis of a microscopic number of voters in two or
three countries. Europe is stigmatised as wimpish if not cowardly, because it
does not place the same faith as America in the military response to terrorism.
To some extent, each continent is reacting according to the facts of
geo-politics. Lesser powers have always sparred with great ones, as jealousies
collide. No formerly lesser power knows this better than America. In 1795, John
Adams, on the brink of the presidency of a new country still suffering under the
transatlantic yoke, wrote to his wife Abigail: "I wish that misfortune and
adversity could soften the temper and humiliate the insolence of John Bull. But
he is not yet sufficiently humble. If I mistake not, it is the destiny of
America one day to beat down his pride."
Now that the beating is long done, Europeans have a problem that's acutely
visible at this time. They may never be sufficiently humble, but they should at
least be clear. Neither the most pro- nor the most anti-American European
governments, including this one, are unambiguous about what they want America to
do or be. Sometimes, as in the Middle East and Afghanistan, they want
intervention of a certain kind. Other times, they rail against American
interventionism as if it were an ideological disease. There is justice in the
Pentagon's scorn for a continent that wants America to do the heavy lifting
against terror, while it dithers on the side.
Americans also need to consider some unlearned lessons. In power politics,
the present period cannot be characterised as one of their magnanimous phases.
Donald Rumsfeld is as insolent as John Bull used to be. At the grass roots, the
soil is even more acidulous than it was a little while ago. I judge from the
email responses I've had, often in massive quantities, to some of those 22
columns, almost entirely from the US, where the Guardian website seems to be a
must-read. While it's true that more anti-Bush voices are starting to surface,
the vocal majority have become more inflexible, more righteous and more harshly
scathing of European critics than they were at the turn of the year.
And now we hear their British echoes, from people drawn towards the same
stark analysis. Iraq is being prepared for its role as this generation's
Vietnam. Long before an invasion happens, adamancy is beginning to prevail.
Positions about pre-emption are being pre-emptively demanded: will you be with
us or against us, whatever we choose to do? The question is asked at dinner as
well as at Camp David. To give the wrong answer is to face certain ignominy from
one side or the other, for failing or passing a simplistic loyalty test on an
issue no longer to be treated as amenable to honest argument.
It would be another simplistic error to think these attitudes can be
reconciled. Good will is not enough to bury such visceral differences as exist
on a familiar and lengthening list of issues. The continents are without doubt
drifting apart. They have interests in common, but also interests around which
America, as now led, has the power and the hardness to insist on non-negotiable
policies that we can take or leave. There are few cosy solutions to anything
much, which the allies in the old western alliance will any longer unanimously
sign up to.
But it only demeans things further to pre-stigmatise all debate with the mark
of "anti-American". Some Europeans deserve the label, but very few. Most want to
share in a dialogue where they are listened to, especially when they disagree.
The crisis is far, far too serious for its terms to be entirely coloured by that
convenient, thought-killing smear. The US, I think, will do what it wants
anyway. But I don't think it's anti-American to say so. The real anti-Americans
- anti-worlders, in fact - are those who don't want a serious discussion.
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