After Doombama: Mapping the Former United States

Splitting the US by FacebookThe United States has been trying to fragment ever since it was founded as a patchwork nation in the late 18th century. It has never truly been one homogeneous nation of persons sharing the same religion, the same educational level, the same ethnicity, the same class, or the same outlook. Outsiders sometimes tried to take advantage of the internal divisions. The British Empire never expected the US to last so long, and took many active steps to hasten its disintegration -- to the point of siding with the Confederacy in the US Civil War.Russian Wishful Thinking
The most powerful disuniting and disintegrating force the US has faced since 1865 is undoubtedly the presidency of Barack Obama -- the president sworn to defend a constitution that he hates. Mr. Obama's most potent weapon against the US is economic doom, created via exponential debt.
The Obama - Pelosi regime is taking budget deficits to an unprecedented level. It is difficult to visualise the end result of this exponential "snowballing" train wreck of deficits -- slippery mixed metaphors cannot even touch it.
Mexican Wishful Thinking
Videogame SimulationsA fragmentation of the US is not impossible. Although Vermont and Louisiana were both explored and developed by French settlers, it is difficult to see them as part of the same country at times. Alaska has little in common with California. Mississippi and Minnesota may be connected by one river, but they are worlds apart in many ways.Holding the 50 states (57?) together has always been a monumental task -- even for presidents who actually loved the United States and the US Constitution. Imagine how difficult the task will be in the aftermath of a president whose young mind was imprinted with a hatred of the US, and who has managed to leverage that animosity -- concealed behind a thin veneer of aloof "cool" -- into the power to frac and crack at the heart of the republic to his heart's content?

The US is experiencing many powerful fragmentary forces as a result of immigration policy, as a result of affirmative action neo-tribalist faux multiculturalism, as a result of a culture war that simmers when it doesn't burn outright, and as a result of a media and academia that genuinely appears to wish to create greater schisms and divides.

Doombama -- as instantiated in the Obama - Pelosi reich -- has another three to seven years of havoc to wreak upon the American citizen and taxpayer. No one knows what will remain at the end of that time. Draw your own map.

European Anti-Americanism--A Study in Media Bigotry

This video gives a fascinating glimpse into Euro-media instigated anti-American attitudes in Europe. Even though the US saved Europe three times in the 20th century from hot and cold wars, and continues to provide an expensive defensive umbrella over all of Europe, European media continues to successfully promote anti-Americanism among Europeans.

The American media has not covered this rather egregious display of Euro-media bigotry, but published book accounts and blog accounts describing the bias are common.

Much more at David's Medienkritik

It is sad to see a continent turning on a nation that has spilled so much blood to protect its freedoms. What is so perverse about this media-inspired and driven hatred of America, is the imminent threat to Europe from another direction altogether--Islamist jihad and imperialist supremacy. If the Europeans do not wake up to this threat, and stop wasting so much time and energy generating imaginary phantom threats from across the Atlantic, there may not be a free Europe for many decades longer.

Anti-Americanism: An Interesting, and Very Old, Phenomenon

It is always fascinating to listen to people describing their hatreds. America hatred is old, and dates back multiple decades or more in Europe and the third world.

Anti-American sentiment in Europe originated with the discovery of America, the study of the Native Americans, and the examination of its flora, fauna, and climate. The first anti-American theory, the "degeneracy thesis," portrayed America as a regressive and culturally bankrupt continent. The theory that the humidity and other atmospheric conditions in America physically and morally weakened both men and animals was commonly argued in Europe and debated by early American thinkers such as Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson.

In 1768 Cornelius de Pauw, court philosopher to Frederick II of Prussia and chief proponent of this thesis, described America as "degenerate or monstrous" colonies and argued that, "the weakest European could crush them with ease."[16]

The theory was extended to argue that the natural environment of the United States would prevent it from ever producing true culture. Paraphrasing Pauw, the French Encyclopedist Abbé Raynal wrote, "America has not yet produced a good poet, an able mathematician, one man of genius in a single art or a single science."[17] (So virulent was Raynal's antipathy that his book was suppressed by the French monarchy.)

....[a] Nazi propaganda poster address[ed] the Dutch public in 1944 with the words: "The USA are supposed to save European culture". The image utilize[d] a number of themes, some of which (racism, use of excessive force, American culture and the influence of Judaism) are still in use within some varieties of modern anti-Americanism.

The French Revolution created a new type of anti-American political thought, hostile to the political institutions of the United States and their impact upon Europe. Furthermore, the Romantic strain of European thought and literature, hostile to the Enlightenment view of reason and obsessed with history and national character, disdained the American project.

The German poet Nikolaus Lenau encapsulated the Romantic view, "With the expression Bodenlosigkeit (rootlessness), I think I am able to indicate the general character of all American institutions; what we call Fatherland is here only a property insurance scheme."

With the rise of American industry in the late nineteenth century, intellectual anti-American discourse entered a new form. Mass production, the Taylor system, and the speed of American life and work became a major threat to some intellectuals' view of European life and tradition.

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, "The breathless haste with which they (the Americans) work - the distinctive vice of the new world - is already beginning ferociously to infect old Europe and is spreading a spiritual emptiness over the continent."

Source

If you are an American traveling to Europe or the UK, you might be surprised at some of the personal hostility you may face.

European elites tend to look at Americans as a subcivilized mass, whose function is to be obedient consumers in a system run by big business. The role of competition in U.S. economic life--and in every other aspect of life--is ignored, because competition is something Continental Europeans like to keep to a minimum and under careful control.

Although Americans are seen as highly materialistic consumers, they are also despised and feared for their spiritual interests, their participation in religious worship and their subscription to creeds of morality. Europeans see no inconsistency in their condemnation of the U.S. for being at one and the same time paganly unethical and morally zealous.

The truth is, any accusation that comes to hand is used without scruple by the Old World intelligentsia. Anti-Americanism is factually absurd, contradictory, racist, crude, childish, self-defeating and, at bottom, nonsensical. It is based on the powerful but irrational impulse of envy--an envy of American wealth, power, success and determination. It is an envy made all the more poisonous because of a fearful European conviction that America's strength is rising while Europe's is falling.

Source

Several experiences of an American ex-pat in London reported in the British press stirred up a hornet's nest of comments--which tended to reinforce the truth of what her narration.

Typical British pub banter is one thing, says Christian Cox, but the "pure hatred" she says is directed at her for being American is really starting to wear her down.

The former model moved to London a year ago, where she is setting up her own business, and has been surprised at how some people have reacted to her nationality.

Ms Cox, 29, says she has been called, among other things, "terrorist", "scum", "low life", and feels that she is constantly being held to account for the actions of President Bush and for US foreign policy.

This is despite the fact that she doesn't agree with the war in Iraq and didn't vote for Bush.

Source
Reading the comments accompanying the article suggests that many Britons have indeed become intellectually brittle and intolerant. This is unfortunate, given the imminent threat from muslim immigrants that the UK is currently facing. Perhaps a great deal of the blame for English intolerance should be placed at the feet of the British press.

Had the USSR won the cold war, rather than the western world, I suspect that criticism of the USSR would be muted, out of fear of retribution. No one fears retribution from the US, for although the US is wealthy and powerful, historically it has tended to rescue Europeans, not attack them.

This America hatred bears watching. It was there long before Bush and will be there long after Bush. As long as it does not affect the actions of European governments beyond occasional condemnations and non-binding resolutions, there should be no problem. If it rises to the level of an all-out trade war, things could get rather dicey.

There is a slowly rising undercurrent of anti-Europeanism in reaction to perceived anti-Americanism. Eventually, if the reciprocal hatred is allowed to escalate too far, a trade war may be the least of concerns.

Europeans are finding it more difficult to manage healthy economies at the same time as they try to maintain burgeoning social welfare demands. Further, Europeans are under siege from immigrants who are suceptible to barbarian, anti-liberal ideas originating from a militant, imperialist, supremacist religion. Anti-americanism may serve as a useful diversion from the more serious problems that Europeans face. Think of it as an ideological methamphetamine.

Hating America: New Olympic Sport?

If one grows up in Canada, it can be easy to learn to hate america, almost as much as palestinian children learn to hate jews and Israel. It is almost a reflex. It is interesting to observe how someone who moves to Europe from the US might be swayed by anti-americanism there, might reflexively come to adopt some of the same prejudice of his hosts. Bruce Bawer moved to Europe from the US in 1988, and started drawing comparisons. After discussing personal anecdotes, Bawer moves to reviewing recent anti-american popular publications that are selling well in Europe.

Bawer quotes briefly from Mark Heertsgard's "In the Eagle's Shadow" and concludes that:

America, in short, is a mess—a cultural wasteland, an economic nightmare, a political abomination, an international misfit, outlaw, parasite, and pariah. If Americans don’t know this already, it is, in Hertsgaard’s view, precisely because they are Americans: “Foreigners,” he proposes, “can see things about America that natives cannot. . . . Americans can learn from their perceptions, if we choose to.” What he fails to acknowledge, however, is that most foreigners never set foot in the United States, and that the things they think they know about it are consequently based not on first-hand experience but on school textbooks, books by people like Michael Moore, movies about spies and gangsters, “Ricki Lake,” “C.S.I.,” and, above all, the daily news reports in their own national media. What, one must therefore ask, are their media telling them? What aren’t they telling them? And what are the agendas of those doing the telling? Such questions, crucial to a study of the kind Hertsgaard pretends to be making, are never asked here. Citing a South African restaurateur’s assertion that non-Americans “have an advantage over [Americans], because we know everything about you and you know nothing about us,” Hertsgaard tells us that this is a good point, but it’s not: non-Americans are always saying this to Americans, but when you poke around a bit, you almost invariably discover that what they “know” about America is very wide of the mark.

....Yes, there’s much about the American news media that deserves criticism, from the vulgar personality journalism of Larry King and Diane Sawyer to the cultural polarization nourished by the many publishers and TV news producers who prefer sensation to substance. But to suggest that American journalism, taken as a whole, offers a narrower range of information and debate than its foreign counterparts is absurd. America’s major political magazines range from National Review and The Weekly Standard on the right to The Nation and Mother Jones on the left; its all-news networks, from conservative Fox to liberal CNN; its leading newspapers, from the New York Post and Washington Times to the New York Times and Washington Post. Scores of TV programs and radio call-in shows are devoted to fiery polemic by, or vigorous exchanges between, true believers at both ends of the political spectrum. Nothing remotely approaching this breadth of news and opinion is available in a country like Norway. Purportedly to strengthen journalistic diversity (which, in the ludicrous words of a recent prime minister, “is too important to be left up to the marketplace”), Norway’s social-democratic government actually subsidizes several of the country’s major newspapers (in addition to running two of its three broadcast channels and most of its radio); yet the Norwegian media are (guess what?) almost uniformly social-democratic—a fact reflected not only in their explicit editorial positions but also in the slant and selectivity of their international coverage.3 Reading the opinion pieces in Norwegian newspapers, one has the distinct impression that the professors and bureaucrats who write most of them view it as their paramount function not to introduce or debate fresh ideas but to remind the masses what they’re supposed to think. The same is true of most of the journalists, who routinely spin the news from the perspective of social-democratic orthodoxy, systematically omitting or misrepresenting any challenge to that orthodoxy—and almost invariably presenting the U.S. in a negative light. Most Norwegians are so accustomed to being presented with only one position on certain events and issues (such as the Iraq War) that they don’t even realize that there exists an intelligent alternative position.

Things are scarcely better in neighboring Sweden. During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, the only time I saw pro-war arguments fairly represented in the Scandinavian media was on an episode of “Oprah” that aired on Sweden’s TV4. Not surprisingly, a Swedish government agency later censured TV4 on the grounds that the program had violated media-balance guidelines. In reality, the show, which had featured participants from both sides of the issue, had plainly offended authorities by exposing Swedish viewers to something their nation’s media had otherwise shielded them from—a forceful articulation of the case for going into Iraq.4 In other European countries, to be sure, the media spectrum is broader than this; yet with the exception of Britain, no Western European nation even approaches America’s journalistic diversity. (The British courts’ recent silencing of royal rumors, moreover, reminded us that press freedom is distinctly more circumscribed in the U.K. than in the U.S.) And yet Western Europeans are regularly told by their media that it’s Americans who are fed slanted, selective news—a falsehood also given currency by Americans like Hertsgaard.

Bawer moves through a long line of authors who write scathingly about the US, who obviously hate america and have many friends and sympathizers. Then he moves to an immigrant to america who tells a different story:

Dinesh D’Souza seeks not to encourage or explain anti-Americanism but to counter it by answering the question posed in his book’s title: What’s So Great about America?13 D’Souza, a former Reagan aide and longtime fixture at right-wing think tanks, reminds us that many of the Third World societies that leftists such as Hertsgaard and Hutton affect to admire are (hello!) fiercely reactionary. Indeed, D’Souza makes it clear that his own conservative moral perspective owes much to the traditional cultural values of his native India. “The critics of America,” he asserts—referring not to European socialists but to reactionary Muslims—are “onto something.” Their critique, he says, is moral in character, and D’Souza (a Catholic) gives little indication of disagreeing with their moral criteria, including their equation of morality with religious orthodoxy. “The West,” he proposes, “is a society based on freedom whereas Islam is a society based on virtue.” How about: Islamic societies enforce stifling Koranic notions of virtue, and punish infractions with brutal Sharia justice, while democratic societies do not presume to dictate individual moral convictions? D’Souza shares the Islamic view that “there is a good deal in American culture that is disgusting to normal sensibilities.” (He never tells us what he means by “normal”—and one is not sure one wishes to know.) Muslims, he notes, “say our women are ‘loose,’ and in a sense they are right.” (Yes, if by “loose” you mean that they have the same sexual freedom as men; it’s called “equal rights.”) The father of a young daughter, D’Souza says he has “come to realize how much more difficult it is to raise her well in America than it would be . . . to raise her in India.” (Yes, if by “raise her well” you mean—oh, never mind. You get the idea.)

Despite America’s lack of virtue, however—all the “crime, drugs, divorce, abortion, illegitimacy, and pornography” (given his track record, the omission of homosexuality from this list is surprising)—D’Souza chooses the U.S. over India. Why? Because “I know that my daughter will have a better life if I stay. I don’t mean just that she will be better off; I mean that her life is likely to have greater depth, meaning, and fulfillment in the United States than it would in any other country.” For he’s come to see that there’s “something great and noble about America”: namely, the fact that in the U.S., you’re “the architect of your own destiny.” He tries, not with undivided success, to distinguish between the founding American principle of self-determination (good) and the narcissistic do-your-own-thing mentality of the 1960s (not so good). As an example of the former, he movingly describes how his talk of feeling “called to be a writer” and of wanting “a life that made me feel true to myself” baffled his Indian father; as an example of the latter, he unfeelingly mocks a young man with “a Mohawk, earrings, a nose ring, tattoos” who waited on him at a Starbucks and whom D’Souza dismisses as “a specimen.” Not a pretty performance.

Then Bawer moves to Jean Francois Revel's "Anti American Obsession:"

Item by item, Revel refutes the European media’s picture of America. Poverty? An American at the poverty level has about the same standard of living as the average citizen of Greece or Portugal. (Indeed, according to a recent study by the Swedish Trade Research Institute, Swedes have a slightly lower standard of living than black Americans—a devastating statistic for Scandinavians, for whom both the unparalleled success of their own welfare economies and the pitiable poverty of blacks in the racist U.S. are articles of faith.) Crime? America has grown safer, while the French ignore their own rising crime levels, a consequence of “permanent street warfare” by Muslim immigrants “who don’t consider themselves subject to the laws of the land” and of authorities with “anti-law-and-order ideologies.” Revel contrasts France’s increasingly problematic division into ethnic Frenchmen and unassimilated immigrants with “America’s truly diverse, multifaceted society,” pointing out that “the success and originality of American integration stems precisely from the fact that immigrants’ descendants can perpetuate their ancestral cultures while thinking of themselves as American citizens in the fullest sense.” Bingo. (Most Americans, I think, would be shocked to realize how far short of America Europe falls in this regard.)

Media? Revel recalls that when he first visited the U.S., he “was struck by the vast gulf that separated our [French] state-controlled television news services—stilted, long-winded and monot- onous, dedicated to presenting the official version of events—from the lively, aggressive evening news shows on NBC or CBS, crammed with eye-opening images and reportage that offered unflinching views of social and political realities at home and American involvement abroad.” (Take that, Mr. Hutton.) He also observed a difference in the populace: “whereas in France people’s opinions were fairly predictable and tended to follow along lines laid down by their social role, what I heard in America was much more varied—and frequently unexpected. I realized that many more Americans than Europeans had formed their own opinions about matters—whether intelligent or idiotic is another question—rather than just parroting the received wisdom of their social milieu.” True: by Western European standards, I’ve come to realize, Americans are very independent thinkers.

To Revel, the tenacity of European anti-Americanism, despite historical developments that should have finished it off once and for all, suggests “that we are in the presence, not of rational analysis, but of obsession”—an obsession driven, he adds, by a desire to maintain public hostility to Jeffersonian democracy. The European establishment, Revel notes, soft-pedals the fact that Europeans “invented the great criminal ideologies of the twentieth century”; it defangs Communism (at “the top French business school,” students think Stalin’s great error was to “prioritize capital goods over . . . consumer goods”); and it identifies the U.S., “contrary to every lesson of real history . . . as the singular threat to democracy.” Revel’s vigorous assault on all this foolishness might easily have been dismissed in France (or denied publication altogether) but for the fact that he’s a member of that revered symbol of French national culture, the Académie Française.

The bulk of Bawer's article discusses the many recent books detailing the evils of america, and why america should be hated and feared far more than any threat from violent muslim fanatics or expansionist nationalist China with its puppet dictators. He discusses where this hatred and fear of america came from and why it is a virtual inevitability regardless of the foreign policy actions of the US government. Read the whole thing.

Hat tip: Donald Sensing's One Hand Clapping.