[The Montana Professor 14.1, Fall 2003 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]
Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies
New York: The Disinformation Company, 2002
231 pp., $12.95 pb
Paul Trout
English
MSU-Bozeman
This book has a core problem. It wants to sound reasonable and informative about why people in foreign countries hate the United States. And occasionally it does manage to advance modest and legitimate claims grounded in experience and supported by numerical data. Here and there it examines American policies and practices that do need rethinking, such as the pernicious practice of merchandising offensive and appalling productions from Hollywood in Islamic countries.
But the real purpose of this book is not to analyze the complex issue of anti-American hatred. There is no data as to how many people hate America or who they are, and no analysis of whether their hatred is ever excessive or unfounded. Its purpose is, in fact, to justify that hatred. The book is a compendium of every charge leveled at this country by those who hate, loathe, despise, and fear it. The bias of the book is revealed up front when the authors warn readers not to expect any material about "the positive sides of the United States" (6). What makes the book worth reviewing is the insight it provides into the minds of what I call America-phobics, both on and off campus.
To construct a one-sided indictment, the authors must suppress contrary evidence and arguments; interpret events to the detriment of the United States; use hostile images and words; think absolutely, not comparatively; judge America by idealistic standards; leave key terms undefined; appeal to authority or vox populi; argue from misleading analogy, and generally engage in what British educator Robert Thouless called "crooked thinking." The result is an "international bestseller" (cover blurb) that is a study in anti-American dementia.
To justify their anti-American hostility, Sardar and Davies invoke such complex economic and political issues as NAFTA, the WTO, the World Bank, globalism, open markets, international trade laws, and the patenting of human DNA. But their analysis of these complex and still evolving institutions is woefully simplistic and always to the detriment of the United States, and only the United States. Their analysis of almost every economic issues seems based on the assumption that commerce and knowledge-creation are zero-sum games. So, to these authors, the patenting of pharmaceuticals derived from rainforest flora is an expropriation of "ancient knowledge," an outrageous theft of tribal herbs (85). Better to leave these goodies in a juju pouch than to make them available to billions.
Behind their pseudo-analyses of the "evidence" lurks a paranoid view of America, one that recycles charges and prejudices from Nietzsche, Heidegger, and a host of other America-phobics made well before the WTO, the World Bank, or the global international market existed.
Under all the claptrap, Sardar and Davies contend that America is both the object and the source of global hatred because it is violent, arrogant, duplicitous, culturally backward and ignorant, hypocritical, predatory, destructive, and evil. Our hatefulness lies not in misguided or inept economic and political policies but in the malice of our "very nature" (191).
Through globalism, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank, America "decimates the cultures of the world" (135), even pirating the "the DNA of indigenous people" (84). It not only systematically "undermines the efforts of the least developed countries to combat poverty and feed their populations" (76), but is responsible for all the "gross disparities of power, wealth, freedom and opportunity" throughout the world. Even when America acts with good intentions, it inevitably ends up "doing harm to others" (57). In essence, the United States has virtually "declared war" on non-European countries (86). No wonder the world views the United States as a "hostile, inimical perversion," as the first "authentic rogue state," as a "pathological virus" bent on "strangling," "crushing," "killing," and "actually consuming the non-American people of the world" (13, 35, 117-121, 198).
Like other America-phobics, these two authors, in drawing their paranoid picture of the United States, exploit almost every archetype of the "hostile imagination" (Sam Keen, Faces of the Enemy, 1986). Apparently, this is the sort of thinking that leads to "valuable insight" in progressive anti-American circles (Noam Chomsky's cover blurb).
Such ideological, not to say paranoid, thinking necessarily leads to all kinds of intellectual muddles and boneheaded claims. Maybe the most salient muddle is the claim that "loathing for America is about as close as we can get to a universal sentiment in our postmodern times" (195). The authors do not provide a smidgin of evidence to indicate either the extent or depth of this hatred. Worse, if anti-Americanism is a "universal phenomenon" (195), how can the authors also claim that "individuals and communities" throughout the world "all too willing[ly] embrace American culture and values" (65)? Or, that people throughout the world love the "glamour and power of American civilisation itself" (115)?
The claim that hatred of America is the Great Universal is also undermined by the authors' attempt to deconstruct the world-wide popularity of the hamburger. For these two authors, the hamburger is "a particular source of hatred of America" (104). The hamburger, and the culture surrounding it, are equivalent to "biological terrorism," "killing the languages, architecture, film industries, television programming, music and art of most of the developing world" (132). (Talk about paranoia!)
But if the hamburger is so destructive, why do so many people eat them? The only acceptable answer, for these authors, is that people, being dolts, have fallen for the "omnipresent con-trick" (104) "imposed on the world" by hamburger chains (115). But how did the so-called "con-trick" manage to become "omnipresent" in the first place? Could millions of people occasionally prefer hamburgers to "indigenous" foods? This possibility is inadmissible because it would amount to admitting that many millions of people do not love "traditional lifestyles" as much as these two progressive elitists think they should. Such is the book said to be "packed with tightly argued points" by the Times Higher Education Supplement (back cover).
Here's a brief roundup of some more "tightly argued points." After insisting that we are the most hated people on the planet, the authors scoff at our feeling threatened by terrorists (110-111). After insisting that our media have made Americans unreflective and docile, the authors claim that we are "fractured, troubled, increasingly split into sundered communities of ideas and interests" (210). Here are some "Say WHAT???" claims that show the depth of analysis to be found in this screed. There is no "conflict of civilizations" because the conflict between Islam and Christendom "was a product of Christian ideas" (145). The O.J. Simpson trial exposed to the world "the anger that many American people of colour harbour toward their government and their deep scepticism about the fairness of the US legal system" (199-200). HELLO! Blacks cheered when O.J. was acquitted.
Some more silly sweeping unsupported claims that only true-believers will love. "The US government says that it does not kill civilians" (113). No, it says that it does not intentionally kill innocent civilians. "Americans are totally insulated from non-American cultures" (134). "Slavery was a survival from Roman times" (149). "American democracy is exceptionally undemocratic" (109). When compared, no doubt, to the Palestinian Authority or Saudi Arabia. "The ascendancy of the 'hamburger culture' has meant the eradication of indigenous Third World cultures everywhere" (12). If so, then it's too late to complain about it. America's Military Commission "violates every notion of justice known to civilization" (108). Only Israel is "lawless" (160). And so it goes.
For America-phobics, the United States is damned if it does and damned if it doesn't. When fanatic terrorists blew up some UN officials who had refused American protection, America, not the warped Islamic fanatics who exploded the bomb, was blamed for the deaths (AP, 3 September 2003). America is condemned (by these authors) even for trying to prevent nuclear proliferation (112). Whatever the global misfortune, "poverty, war, famine, terrorism," the fault is always America's. This is the doxy of America-phobics. Their single-bullet theory of history provides a programed, stock perspective on every issue. America-phobia foregoes critical thinking in favor of the mental straitjacket of ideology, and "abandons the spirit of open-mindedness that should govern academic inquiry" (Daniel Flynn, Why the Left Hates America, 34).
This book has not convinced me to abandon my Churchillean belief that the United States is indeed the worst country in the world, except for all the others. Appropriately, the book was published by "The Disinformation Company."
[The Montana Professor 14.1, Fall 2003 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]