Contributors
Bruce S. Thornton - Contributor

Bruce Thornton is a professor of Classics at Cal State Fresno and co-author of Bonfire of the Humanities: Rescuing the Classics in an Impoverished Age and author of Greek Ways: How the Greeks Created Western Civilization (Encounter Books). His most recent book is Searching for Joaquin: Myth, Murieta, and History in California (Encounter Books). [go to Thornton index]

THE RIGHT BOOKS: Equipping the California Conservative
Anti-Americanism
A Right Books Review: Anti-Americanism by Jean-François Revel
[Bruce S. Thornton] 2/16/04

We moderns fancy ourselves cool rationalists, whose beliefs are more securely founded than the ignorant superstitions of our forebears. Widespread literacy and schooling, access to abundant free information, and a scientific sensibility have combined to create a people whose beliefs are based on reason rather than the irrational passions and delusions of the past.

This self-flattering prejudice, of course, is peculiarly modern and not even half true. For the fact is, many of us are just as driven by gratifying myths, pleasing prejudices, and unexamined received wisdom as were our ancestors. The difference is we don't want to admit it.

This delusion is particularly prevalent among those on the left, for they claim to be the party of reason and empiricism, whereas conservatives supposedly remain in thrall to Christian superstition and neurotic tradition. Yet one of the bloodiest irrational ideologies of the century originated on the left, and many delusions spawned by communism have survived its historical discrediting and continue its malign influence.

One of the most persistent and dangerous is anti-Americanism, an irrational prejudice based not on empirical fact but rather on various psychological, ideological, and sociological dysfunctions. Since 9/11, we have learned that such prejudices can have destructive effects, and so it is useful and timely to have an analysis of this phenomenon from Jean-François Revel, a true rationalist in the classic French tradition.

Revel became prominent in 1970 with his first book, Without Marx or Jesus, which became an international bestseller and drew down upon him the wrath of the fossilized leftists whose cherished dogmas Revel demolished. One of Revel's points in that early book was that the picture of America promulgated in Europe was a self-serving distortion of reality. Thus the most dynamic, truly revolutionary liberal society in history was being willfully misunderstood by those unable to cast off their worn-out ideological categories, who were therefore missing the significance of what was happening in America. Who were you going to believe, Revel challenged them, Marx and Mao or your own eyes?

At one level, Revel's new book is a continuation of that earlier theme, "the intrinsically contradictory character of passionate anti-Americanism," since the "syndrome" hasn't really changed that much, revealing as it does a "deeply rooted habit of mind."

The irrational nature of this "habit" explains the numerous logical contradictions Revel documents. America is simultaneously a mass of rootless, isolated individuals locked in Darwinian struggle, and bovine conformists unable to think for themselves. Or there's the simultaneous criticism of the U.S. for its isolationism, "a powerful country failing in its duties and, with monstrous egocentricity, looking only to its own national interests," and for its "arrogant assumption that it could meddle everywhere and be the 'policeman of the world.'"

As Revel notes, this "habit of mind" has been reinforced, especially in France, by a severe wound to national pride inflicted by the awareness that France is no longer a great power, and that the cultural, economic, and military leader of the world is now a nation of cast-off mongrels whose raucous egalitarianism is a reproach to the sort of elitism that dominates European societies.

Finally, one cannot underestimate the continuing influence of a left still besotted by dreams of the socialist utopia: "The principal function of anti-Americanism has always been, and still is, to discredit liberalism by discrediting its supreme incarnation." Free-market capitalism and liberal democracy, not the communist utopia, have been the driving force of modern history, and those who hate both, whether of the left or the right, must perforce hate the United States. And this hatred has nothing to do with America's behavior and everything to do with mythic longings and irrational resentments.

Revel's book methodically works through the various contradictions, inconsistencies, false knowledge, distortions of fact, "hatreds and fallacies," and sheer ignorance that drive anti-Americanism. His discussion of the European reaction to Bush's decision to pull out of the deeply flawed Kyoto Protocol--an occasion for much weeping and wailing on the part of Americans too quick to swallow European grubby self-interest as lofty disinterested principle--is particularly instructive.

Revel reminds us that in 1997 the Senate unanimously rejected Kyoto, and renewed U.S. support resulted only from Clinton's last minute executive order, a "political hot potato" left for the new president. Given the heavy economic costs the U.S. would have had to pay to meet the Kyoto reductions--costs some of the planet's worst polluters would avoid--Bush pulled out. Europeans were delighted, since their own worsening pollution was ignored even as they castigated the United States. As Revel put it, "The agenda is less about ridding the world of pollution than excommunicating the United States."

European economic and political self-interest, however, isn't the only agenda, though criticizing a greedy U.S. deflects scrutiny from the reluctance of so-called "greens" in Europe to demand cuts in highway speed limits and energy requirements in dwellings -- measures would cost them at the polls. Revel points out that much of what passes for environmentalism is in the service of leftist ideology: this agenda "is to set up the United States, which is to say capitalism, as the supreme culprit, indeed the sole culprit, behind worldwide pollution." For these ideologues--who never criticized the horrific pollution of the communist regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe-- the environment is important only "as an issue to attack liberal societies."

Revel's chapter on the antiglobalism movement is equally insightful. That left-over communists provide much of the dynamic of these protests is evident in the news footage, where one sees numerous red flags, pictures of Che Guevara, and hammer-and-sickles next to Greenpeace's banners: "The youthful antiglobalists are actually superannuated ideologues, revenants from a past of ruin and bloodshed." Despite benefiting from the leisure, surplus income, and freedom to travel that allows them to congregate for their protests, they want to destroy the free markets and liberal societies that make it all possible. Once more, since the U.S. is the premier success story of economic and political liberalism, it comes in for the most vicious attacks. As Revel points out, no one protested when globalization meant subordinating the world and its economies to Marxism: "Globalization is perfectly all right, provided that it's the planned and statist kind."

Worse, the charge that globalization is creating misery in the Third World is patently false: "What the antiliberals refuse to accept is that, on the one hand, the so-called less-advanced peoples are on the whole advancing, and on the other, those who are faltering owe their misfortunes to internal political scourges and not to the world market economy."

The fact is that, in the Third World, average incomes, population, and life expectancies have increased, due in some measure to globalization. Those who are truly concerned about the welfare of the Third World should be demanding more globalization, not less, for the facts on the ground show that economic and political freedom improves people's lives, while statist economies buttressed by autocracies create misery. Just compare South Korea to North Korea, or consider most of Africa, where leftover socialist economic policies and various autocratic thugs continue to cripple the continent's development.

Revel's discussion of the European response to 9/11 is equally illuminating. The thesis that terrorism is a response to poverty and American colonialist or imperialist sins is quickly dispatched for the canard it is. America's actions in the Middle East have been much less damaging than those of Britain, France, or Russia, all of whom conquered Muslim countries and in some cases occupied them for decades. At the same time, Americans intervened in Somalia, Bosnia, Kuwait, and Kosovo in order to free Muslims.

Equally untrue is the myth of a "moderate and tolerant Islam" short-circuited by America's greed for oil and sinister support for Israel. This delusion is contradicted by numerous verses in the Koran, and certainly is not believed by the millions of Muslims worldwide who danced in the streets on 9/11. As for those presumed millions of "moderate" Muslims, where are their voices? As an example of their typical silence, Revel notes that after terrorist bombings in Paris, not a single demonstration of "moderate" Muslims occurred, in contrast to Spain, where a hundred thousand marched in protest of Basque terrorism. As Revel concludes, "Muslim 'tolerance' is a one-way street: they demand it for themselves but rarely extend it to others."

Revel's book relentlessly chronicles the hypocrisy and falsity of much so-called "sophisticated" European opinion about the United States. The caricature of America as a money-grubbing, racist, crime-ridden jungle is quickly addressed with a few facts. While crime in the States was receding in the eighties and nineties, in France it doubled over the same period. Yet despite the success of novel American approaches to reducing crime such as the Broken Windows policy, and despite an admission that leniency towards anti-social behavior only increased crime, the French minister of justice announced, "The government has no desire to copy the American model": "So one sees how anti-Americanism serves as an excuse for government incompetence, ideological backwardness and criminal disorder. We choose well in rejecting the American model, even if our choice leads to shipwreck."

So too with the problem of integrating immigrants into the dominant society. European caricatures of a racist United States balkanized into enclaves of ethnic particularity serve to mask the reality of an increasing, badly educated immigrant population catered to by a growing multicultural industry, with the result that "the French-style policy of favoritism towards a minority has been stretched so far that the authorities find it almost normal that there are several million people living in France who don't consider themselves subject to the laws of the land."

On every issue, Revel's facts and clear thinking dispel the neurotic delusions of anti-Americanism. Globalization does not enforce cultural conformity; rather it fosters a riotous cultural diversity. The French don't flock to Hollywood films because of some nefarious plot on the part of American studios. They go because they like the movies. One by one the received wisdom of anti-Americanism, too frequently aped by self-loathing Americans who tolerate any absurdity as long as it's European, fall by the wayside.

Ultimately, the evidence shows the truth of Revel's insight that anti-Americanism--"selectivity with respect to evidence and indictments replete with contradiction"-- is a tissue of worn-out clichés and stereotypes used by European political and cultural elites to mask their own failures and incompetence, and to indulge their long romance with socialist sirens.

copyright 2004 Bruce S. Thornton

Searching for Joaquin by Bruce S. Thornton

Greek Ways by Bruce S. Thornton

Bonfire of the Humanities by Victor Davis Hanson, John Heath, Bruce S. Thornton

Plagues of the Mind by Bruce S. Thornton

Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality by Bruce S. Thornton

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