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Anti-Americanism Anti-Americanism Jean-François Revel translated from the French by Diarmid Cammell Encounter Books, 2003 176 pp. • $25.95

Of all the great creeds which steered Europeans into disaster in the last century (and the list only begins with Marxism and fascism), only one still survives. But it is thriving, and one does not have to listen very closely in order to hear it: anti-Americanism.

It not only thrives, but has been thriving longer than any of its comparatively short-lived rivals of the last hundred or so years. America was, after all, the place where Britain sent all its unwanted social baggage, starting with its Puritans and eventually running the gamut to include debtors, Quakers, unruly Irish and Scots, unlucky Africans, convicts, and so forth; it was conventional wisdom that no good thing could emerge from this human slag-heap. Nor did the establishment of the new federal Republic in 1787 redeem American reputations. The collapse of the French Republic into Napoleonic dictatorship, and the revulsion from the politics of Enlightenment reason which washed over Europe after Waterloo, made the United States the butt of Romantic scorn. There was no real national identity in America, complained Joseph de Maistre, only a cheap mixture of races and nationalities united solely by the hope of materialistic gain. "The American knows nothing; he seeks nothing but money; he has no ideas," raged the German poet Nichlaus Lenau. America, Heinrich Heine wrote (anticipating Marcuse and the Frankfurt School), was a "gigantic prison of freedom":

Sometimes it comes to my mind
To sail to America
To that pig-pen of Freedom
Inhabited by boors living in equality.1

Never mind that the Americans had to be summoned not once, but twice, to save Europe from self-destruction in the 20th century, and even a third time when Europe seemed unable to save itself from the Soviets. Their thanks for this was to have their role in the war of 1914-1918 dismissed as nothing more than a convenient reinforcement to those great geniuses of the Western Front, Haig and Petain (when in fact the American intervention was, in the words of John Mosier, "absolutely decisive"). Charles de Gaulle derided the Americans who redeemed Paris in 1944 for caring no more "about the liberation of France than did the Russians about liberating Poland." America, said Martin Heidegger, that paragon of Nazi academic form, was katestrophenhaft—the site of cultural catastrophe, an immolation of the mind and spirit, of poetry and thought.2

Not even 9/11 provided much more than a brief interruption to the river of contempt. Yes, France observed three minutes of silence in tribute to the victims of the Twin Towers, and Le Monde proclaimed nous sommes tous Americaines. But five days later the national secretary of the French Communist Party was booed by the convention of the Confederation Generale du Travaile when he called for observation of the three minutes' silence, and (with a perverse even-handedness) the offices of Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front celebrated the fall of the towers on television with upraised glasses of champagne.

A creed this persistent and this virulent must feed on something more than our occasional displays of arrogance, cultural boorishness, and the general sense that the United States has a God-given right to tell the world what it should be doing. The British did the same thing in spades, and so have the Russians, the Germans, and even the French, and yet there is nothing in any of their misbehaviors which has provoked anything so totalizing as the relentless and consuming passions of anti-Americanism. What is it in the American itch which provokes so violent a European scratch?

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