Anti-ism

Froemr editor of Die Zeit, Josef Joffe writes in The American Interest magazine:

"It is impossible to make a Norwegian say that Americans are intelligent", notes a Norwegian author of a book on anti-Americanism. Asked whether it didn't mean "anything that 70 percent of the Nobel Prize winners in history have been Americans", he responds: "No, it does not help. Even if all Americans were professors, we would call them stupid." Why? "Because by speaking negatively about them, we elevate ourselves. It confirms that we are the opposite. We Europeans have refinement, culture, and intellectual life. To think this way raises our image of ourselves."

The litany continues. America gorges itself on fatty fast food, wallows in tawdry mass entertainment, starves the arts and prays only to one God: Mammon. Instead of subsidizing what is serious and high-minded, as do the Europeans, the United States ruthlessly sacrifices the best of culture to pap and pop—never mind the Metropolitan Opera, MoMA and the world's leading research universities. Although these schools are much admired, the compliment is routinely followed by, "But they are for the rich and well-connected, only." Like all such anti-Americanisms, the myth is promulgated in blissful (or willful) ignorance of the fact that Harvard, Stanford and the like subsidize 60 percent of their students with loans and grants, while Ph.D. students normally have both tuition and living expenses paid for by the university. Even though this complaint is routine lore in Germany, German data show that despite open admission and no tuition aid, 85 percent of all German students are middle-class and higher.

More poignant still is its’ vintage fron Vienna in 1999:

The posters grew increasingly threatening: 'USA = Nazi', . . . '1939 = Hitler, 1999 = Bill Clinton; Jews = Then, Serbia = Now'. . . . Replicas of the United States Flag were all over the rally, many with a swastika covering the blue and white corner. . . . It was clear this was more than a political statement; it was a war against our country's mentality.

And some wonder why Americans ignore and even sometimes detest European views: Sarajevo is closer to Paris than New York is to Saint Louis, and European let a genocide continue for almost a decade waiting for people to cross an ocean to end it, and yet they’ll stand there and call anyone else the epithet that Europe made famous as the cost of 52 million dead. They call Americans “Nazis”, and conceal their view from their own obsessive delusions which give them license to blame others.The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)