This is another very interesting new book that I picked up today. From what I can tell, jew Barry Rubin and jew Judith Rubin do a first class job in exploding the myth that the neoconservatives are responsible for the anti-Americanism which has been pervasive in Europe for several generations now. There was a thread on The Phora the other day about John J. Miller and Mark Molesky's book Our Oldest Enemy: A History of America's Disastrous Relationship With France. I bought that book the other day and have since read through it. It was actually a very good book. It was a real eye opener. Anyway, I will use this thread to post and repost some excerpts from both of these recent books.

Fables of Deconstruction

"Mistaken ideas always end in bloodshed, but in every case it is someone else's blood. That is why some of our thinkers feel free to say just about anything."
--Albert Camus

In September 1949, the steamship S.S. Jamaique made its way across the Indian Ocean, through the Red Sea and the Mediterranean to the French port of Marseilles. Among its passengers were twenty-one Cambodian scholarship students bound for France and an education in useful trades. One of their number, a sweet-tempered, polite youth of provincial origins named Saloth Sar, was destined for Paris and courses in radio electricity. Although Sar managed to supply himself in his first year, he took no examinations and eventually lost his scholarship. In 1952, he returned to Cambodia having achieved no formal degree. During more than three years in the French capital, however, Sar would experience a profound political transformation that would have momentous consequences for his country and the world. For in the smoky bars and cafés of Paris's Latin Quarter, he became a Communist and almost certainly joined the ranks of the French Communist Party. It was an ideological commitment from which he never strayed.

By April 1976, Sar had become the leader of the so-called Democratic Kampuchea and had embraced a new revolutionary pseudonym: Pol Pot. The genocide that would ravage his tiny country of seven million people had been in full swing for many months. In all, one million men, women, and children would be executed and another million would succumb to starvation and disease in the nightmarish work camps of the world's newest "Utopia."

The evil dream of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge comrades -- most of them former schoolteachers who had also studied in Paris, including three Ph.D.s from the Sorbonne -- was to orchestrate a "total" revolution. By razing Cambodian civilization to the ground and returning it to the "Year Zero," the Communists believed they could achieve a level of ideological purity that would surpass their revolutionary predecessors in the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea.

The country's downfall was swift and tragic. Once it was clear that the United States would not intervene, the Khmer Rouge pounced on the weakened Cambodian government of right-wing nationalist Lon Nol -- and made prophets of those who saw disaster in America's retreat.

Whole cities were emptied of their inhabitants. In Phnom Penh, the entire population of two million was evacuated in a few harrowing days. Suspected mothers of the enemy class, the bourgeoisie -- and this included anyone who could read or owned a watch (or evne had a tan line on his wrist) -- were singled out and killed. Children were ordered to murder their parents and teachers. Because bullets were precious commodities, the Khmer Rouge asphyxiated many victims by placing plastic bags over their heads. Others were clubbed to death or doused with gasoline and set ablaze.

Arguably the lowest and saddest moment in American foreign policy, the tragedy in Cambodia not from the effects of American bombing (as some have suggested), but rather from America's failure to live up to its multiple responsibilities in the region, perhaps the most important of which was keeping Communist forces from taking control of their allies' civilian populations. "South Vietnam and Cambodia," President Richard Nixon would write, "were worthy of our help -- and the three million people who were killed in the war's aftermath deserved to be saved." But the greatest guilt must surely fall on the killers themselves, who not only carried out the genocide but spent years in their jungle hideouts meticulously planning their murders.

Where did the Khmer Rouge find their inspiration? To be sure, the legacies of their Asian forerunners in totalitarianism, Mao Tse-Tung and Kim Il Sung, helped guide them. But the Khmer Rouge were more interested in theory than experience, and it was in Paris -- as much the City of Theory as the City of Light -- that they had found their true direction. The radically charged climate that dominated the intellectual world of France in the late 1940s and 1950s had a powerful and lasting impact on the minds of these impressionable young Asian revolutionaries. It was in Paris that the first, most important, and most violent ideological influences took root -- and it was in Paris that anti-Americanism gained the intellectual pedigree it has enjoyed ever since the end of the Second World War.

It is a tragic fact of history that Pol Pot and his comrades studied in Paris at a time when the French Communist Party was arguably the most Stalinist in Europe. Why the intellectuals of France, a country that had just been liberated from a totalitarian power, fell so precipitously and passionately under the spell of another terrible tyranny is a question for the ages. The self-described heirs of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment found themselves slavish worshipers at the altar of a despotism that had carried out a bloody purge of its own elite, committed genocide in the Ukraine, the North Caucasus, and Kazakhstan (in which up to seven million people died), and erected a vast network of prison camps to house its political prisoners, including many artists and intellectuals. The crème of the Parisian intelligentsia -- those who came from the best families and had gone to the best schools and universities -- looked not to Churchill or Franklin Roosevelt or even their countryman, Charles de Gaulle, for political inspiration. Instead, they turned to the mass murderer Joseph Stalin. All the while, the Cambodians were taking careful notes.

It was certainly understandable that the French cultural elite would turn their back on the Right after the crimes of Vichy. Moreover, many were impressed by the sacrifices and triumphs of the Red Army. Still, the head-first swoon of the French intellectuals for everything Stalinist must be characterized as one of the great moral and intellectual lapses of the twentieth century.

It was during this fateful period that Sar and his comrades found themselves in Paris. Here, in private reading groups (or those sponsered by the Communist-controlled Khmer Student Association), they would have been exposed to French translations of such works as Lenin's On Imperialism, Marx's Das Kapital, and Stalin's History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Indeed, many of the strategies employed by the Khmer Rouge during their four-year rampage of forced collectivization and political purges came right out of the Stalinist playbook. In addition to the seminal texts of Communist thought, the young Cambodian students also read and absorbed the anti-colonial works of Martinique-born Frantz Fanon, author of the bloodthirsty classic The Wretched of the Earth.

One of the great preoccupations of French intellectual life in this period was the importance of revolutionary violence as an instrument of positive social change -- an astonishing idea in the wake of two world wars. Humanisme et terreur was the fitting title of philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty's representative work on 1947. Such notions had their original roots in the ideology of the Terror during the French Revolution and later in the highly influential anarcho-syndicalist manifesto of Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence. A former engineer from Normandy, Sorel is a pivotal figure in the history of revolutionary thinking. His combustible mixture of dangerous ideas helps to illuminate much of what went wrong in the twentieth century. Originally a Marxist, he combined the nihilism and anti-rationalism of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche with a fervent call for the violent overthrow of the existing order. A great admirer of both Mussolini's fascism and Lenin's bolshevism, he was the first to formulate the image of a revolutionary elite leading the masses to smasn the corrupt world of the bourgeoisie. His was a barbaric appeal to the vanity, arrogance, and misanthropy of modern intellectuals (and future totalitarian leaders) on both the Left and Right.

Another of Pol Pot's chief influences was Rousseau. Unlike many of his fellow eighteenth-century philosophes, who believed that society could be civilized through the gentle and gradual application of laws and manners, Rousseau considered society to be so irredeemably corrupt that it needed to be completely razed to the ground before it could be built again. The violence of the French Revolution was a direct outgrowth of this belief. The most bloodthirsty Jacobins were almost worshipful of Rousseau. They even removed their prophet's body from his grave and reburied it in the Pantheon, next to the great men of French history. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, however, had almost no interest in the symbolism of political power. In their zeal to perfect the art of annihilation, they left few tangible monuments to their short, unforgettable reign, except, of course, for the endless piles of bleached bones that still dotted the killing fields of Cambodia years after they were driven from power.

Pol Pot was not the ony tyrant to find inspiration in the "Ville Lumiere." In 1918, a young man named Nguyen Sinh Cung traveled to Paris and spent six years there. "I am eager to learn and serve France among my compatriots," he wrote on a job application. Like Saloth Sar, he joined the French Communist Party and began writing for several left-wing and nationalist papers, including L'Humanité, the French Communist daily. Thereafter, Ho Chi Minh -- as he came to be known -- turned into a professional revolutionary. Although he would always have a soft spot for the beauty of Paris, he rage against the French for their brutal colonial rule in Vietnam led him to found and direct a regime many times more despotic than that of his former masters.

Southeast Asia is not the only part of the world that can trace a horrific political pedigree to Paris. The founders of the Middle Eastern Ba'athist Party that instituted secular police states in Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Hafez al-Assad's Syria were also educated in the French capital. In the late 1920s and early 1930, Syrian citizens Michel Aflaq, Salah al-Din Bitar, and Zaki Arsuz attended the University of Paris at the Sorbonne, where they imbibed the fashionable Marxism that spread through Europe during the global depression. "We came to socialism," Aflag and al-Din Bitar would write in 1944, "by way of thought and science and found ourselves before a new, masterly, and fascinating explanation for all the political and social problems which harass the world generally and from which we Arabs particularly suffer." Although Aflaq later declared himself anti-Western, his ideological debt to France is clear. The radical socialism he and his peers had learned in Paris would combine with fascist concepts from Vichy -- concepts that entered the Arab world during the Second World War through the French-controlled territories of Syria and Lebanon.

France became a vital conduit for the importation of ideas from Nazi Germany to the Middle East, including violent anti-Semitism, virulent anti-Americanism, and strident nationalism. Indeed, the first significant political act of the Syrian Ba'ath Party was its support for the 1941 pro-German coup in Iraq. Although the British and Free French eventually drove the Vichy French and Germans out of Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq, these noxious ideas would remain a central feature of Ba'athist ideology.

Not only did the postwar French intellectuals prepare the tainted broth from which future despots would drink, their poisoned leftism also inspired them to invent modern anti-Americanism -- a scourge that continues to cloud the judgment of governments and citizens the world over. While many French in 1945 felt indebted to America for liberating their country, most intellectuals seemed plagued with a deep and seething resentment. The virus of anti-Americanism was not unknown in other parts of Europe after the war, but the French variety was particularly nasty. And, with much of Europe in ruins, France had emerged by default as the continent's cultural leader.

To be sure, French anti-Americnanism has a long history, going back to the eighteenth century. The earliest versions labeled the new land as materialistic and culturally backward. Even nature was not exempt. It was a matter of observable fact, said French scientists, that things in the New World were simply inferior to those in the Old. In 1768, one such "scientist," Cornelius de Pauw, wrote that America's dogs actually lacked the ability to bark. Two decades later, while living in Paris, Thomas Jefferson became embroiled in a debate with George Louis Leclerc, the Comte of Buffon, then considered the greatest living naturalist. Buffon insisted that North America contained fewer species than Europe and that they were smaller in size. "In these melancholy regions," he wrote,

nature remains concealed under her old garments, and never exhibits herself in fresh attire; being neither cherished nor cultivated by man, she never opens her fruitful and beneficent womb . . . The air and the earth, overloaded with humid and noxious vipers, are unable either to purify themselves, or to profit by the influence of the sun, who darts in vain his most enlivening rays upon this frigid mass, which is not in a condition to make suitable return to his ardor.Jefferson tried to persuade Buffon that French intellectuals were quite capable of producing their own "humid and noxious vapors." To refute Buffon's theories, he asked his friends back home to weigh and measure North American animals and send him the data. James Madison responded with information of weasals and woodchucks. General John Sullivan, who had quarreled with the French admiral at Newport during the American Revolution, shippd him the skin and boiled bones of a huge moose.

The French myth of American inferiority, however, was not confined to the animal kingdom. "The United States, this republic born yesterday, full of stiffness and Puritan sadness, with its mores so monotonous and so cold, has none of the national memories that lend so much charm and color to our old Europe," wrote the Marquis de Cuisine. "That country lacks a past, no monument, no traditions. There, all is serious, cold, and dry." The Abbé Raynal sponsered an essay competition based on the question "Has the discovery of America been useful or harmful to the human race?" Raynal took the negative view -- and Jefferson referred to his notions as the "effusions of an imagination in deliris."

There have been, of course, a handful of French intellectuals who did admire the United States. But Tocqueville's Democracy in America was virtually ignored in France until the 1960s, and those French readers who knew of it could not resist casting their own anti-American views onto the book. "Our debate," concluded a contemporary after reading Tocqueville's work,

is not with this hideous gathering of aristocratic bourgeois and bourgeois aristocrats who proclaimed so loudly Christian freedom, and rebelled against the Motherland not to pay a few extra pennies on a pound of tea; this bunch of slave-drivers who speak of fraternity and equality, and engage in shameful traffic of human flesh; a people of ignorant shopkeepers and narrow-minded industrialists, who do not hae on the whole surface of their continent a single work of art . . . who do not have in their libraries a single science book not written by the hand of a foreigner; who do not have a single social institution not patterned after an ancient one, and constituting a flagrant rebuttal of the Christian principle it pretends to emulate.Whereas many early criticisms of America were tame or even comical, postwar French anti-Americanism would assume a more sinister cast. In the 1920s and 1930s, the rhetoric grew increasingly strident as France felt more and more culturally threatened by the American colossus. Works such as Robert Aron and Arnaud Dandieu's Le Cancer Américain (1931) and Georges Duhamel's America, the Menace (1931) led the way. For Duhamel, the United States was an "industrial dictatorship," an "ant-heap" that threatened the cultures of the world. For Aron and Dandieu, American "industrial and banking supremacy" was a veritable cancer on the "life of the age."

The tenor of the anti-Americanism intensified as French self-loathing reached a fever pitch in the immediate aftermath of the war. As the French reflected on how quickly their army had melted away in 1940 and confronted the cruel reality that so few had actually been part of the Resistance, their normally bloated egos were deflated. "Seen from a distance," said René Etiemble, "we are just forty million losers." In the opinion of journalist and author Jean-François Revel, the postwar French hatred of America was based in part on the demoralizing realization that they had been culturally eclipsed:

The most humiliating kind of defeat is the cultural defeat. It is the only defeat one can never forget, because it cannot be blamed on bad luck, or on the barbarism of the enemy. It entails not only acknowledgement of one's weakness, but also the humiliation of having to save oneself by taking lessons from the conqueror -- one must simultaneously hate and imitate.Hatred of America was clearly a reflection of the French intellectuals' ideological commitments -- most of all, their enthusiasm for the Soviet Union. Many resented the United States for literally standing in the way of the westward advance of Stalin and the Red Army; the Russians, in their view, had just "liberated" half of Europe. Others believed the Soviet Union had no intention of engaging in any future military action. "I have looked," said Jeal-Paul Sartre in the early 1950s, "but I just can't find any evidence of an aggressive impulse on the part of the Russians in the last three decades."

To the intellectuals, the Communist world was simply more legitimate than the West. The wish to believe in a modern-day Utopia was so strong that reality in any of its recognizable forms was casually jettisoned. Whereas Georges Sorel had seen the need for "myths" -- the socialist revolution, the General Strike, et cetera -- with which revolutionary elites could manipulate and incite the masses, the new Marxist intellectuals actually believed in them. Since the Enlightenment, religious faith had been replaced for many intellectuals with a belief that revolution could usher in a new age of perfection.

Believing in the possibility of Utopia was so psychologically important that they defended and praised beastly regimes in a slavish style that became a hallmark of Cold War leftism. "Our friendship with Russia," wrote Simone de Beauvoir, "was marked by no reticence whatsoever; the sacrifices of the Russian people had proved that the leadership incarnated their will." According to Sartre -- perhaps the most famous philosopher of the twentieth century -- the Soviet citizen was not muzzled by the state, but actually enjoyed the fullest freedoms in criticizing his country. We may not fully understand the manner of his protests, he argued, but that does not mean that they do not exist. In fact, the Soviet citizen "criticizes more frequently and effectively than us." Ordinary Russians did not travel, he once said, not because of their own government's totalitarian restrictions, but because they simply had no desire to leave their lovely country. He was even more admiring than Mao -- a man responsible for some 65 million deaths, more than anyone in history.

"Incredibly, what Sartre said mattered. A short, stocky, ugly little gnome of a man, he ruled over the intellectual life of France like a rock star. As a cultural icon and "moral voice," his beliefs corresponded to many of the trends and nostrums held dear by the Western intellectual elite. Indeed, he strove mightly to lead the way. Anyone interested in understanding the darkest chapters of French influence on the twentieth century must first come to grips with Jean-Paul Sartre's tawdry, self-promoting, and ultimately violent legacy.

Like the Khmer Rouge, Sartre was a devotee of Frantz Fanon. He reveled in Fanon's defining belief that it is only through murderous violence that the citizens of the Third World can achieve their ends. After 1952, when he fully embraced Marxism, Sartre could say shamelessly that he found Communist violence "admirable." Sartre would travel the globe with his long-suffering companion in ideological mischief, Simone de Beauvoir, serving up praise to both Communist states and petty dictators of the developing world. Although they certainly were not the first intellectuals to pander to despots, their doggedness in this regard made Moscow, Hanoi, and Havana must-see stops on the left-wing travel circuit. "The country which has emerged out of the Cuban Revolution," he absurdly proclaimed, "is a direct democracy." Ideological legitimacy increased with every new Red Star on one's passport.

Sartre in fact cared little for the unfortunate masses who lived under the thumb of the murderous regimes who received his boundless praise. When Eastern Europe was gripped with a slew of highly publicized show trials (Laszlo Rajk and Cardinal Mindszenty in Hungary, Koci Xoxe in Albania, and others), Sartre famously said nothing. He was livid, however, when Julius and Ethel Rosenberg received the death penalty in the United States for giving nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union: "The execution of the Rosenbergs . . is a legal lynching which has covered a whole nation with blood and proclaimed once and for all [America's] utter incapacity to assume the leadreship of the Western World." When the great Catholic intellectual François Mauriac called on Sartre to condemn the persecution of Jews behind the Iron Curtain, Sartre responded with chilling words: "The problem of the condition of the Jews in the People's Democracies," he said, "must not become a pretext for propaganda or polemic." It was the anti-Communists whom Sartre truly could not bear. "An anti-Communist is a dog," he once said, "I don't change my views on this, I never shall."

From a philosophical perspective, Sartre's support for Marxist doctrine made little logical sense. Sartre was an "Existentialist" -- that is, he purported to believe in a philosophy of radical individualism. In Sartre's view, the individual found himself alone in an amoral world and therefore had to make conscious and willful attempts to fashion a valid and courageous existence. At first glance, this would seem the very opposite of Communism, which stressed rigid state control and the suppression of individual liberty. But Sartre knew that Communism was not merely trendy; it was a monolithic presence in French postwar intellectual life, the "unsurpassable philosophy of the times." And Sartre, like so many French intellectuals, would never allow himself to be perceived as out of step with the times. Even if he ran the risk of logical contradiction, Marxism would be made to fit his system.

Late in life Sartre did express some second thoughts about Soviet tyranny, but he never gave up his virulent hostility toward the United States. "America has rabies," he wrote in a 1953 essay. "Let us sever all our links with her, or else we shall get bitten and become rabid." Although he was never known to have returned a royalty check to his American publishers, he did turn down an invitation to speak at Cornell University, explaining that his friends in the Third World would not have appreciated his visiting the "enemy." Not only did he harbor a hatred of the American government and its policies, he displayed a thoroughgoing contempt for American culture and its citizens. In America, he wrote:

There are great myths of happiness and freedom, of triumphant motherhood . . . There is the myth of equality and there is "segregation," the myth of freedom, and the dictatorship of public opinion . . .There are pretty little clean houses, white-washed apartments with a radio, a rocking chair, a pipe in its case and there are the occupants of those apartments who after dinner leave rocking chair, wife, pipe, and children behind and get drunk all by themselves in the bar next door. Nowhere maybe will one find such a gap between people and myths, between life and the collective representation of life.By the end of his life, Sartre had become somewhat marginalized by the new wave of French postmodern thinkers. Yet his legacy of anti-Americanism lived on among intellectuals who stressed the moral equivilance of the United States and the Soviet Union. "There exist two distinct forms of totalitarianism, very different in their effects, but equally fearsome," wrote Alain de Benoist. "The Eastern variety imprisons, persecutes and mortifies the body, but at least it does not destroy hope. Its Western counterpart ends up creating happy robots. It is an air-conditioned hell. It kills the soul."

Not all French intellectuals shared in this hostility, however. Political scientist Raymond Aron was born the same year as Sartre (1905), but he took a decidely different position on Communism and its network of police states. A liberal in the best sense -- one of the relatively few France has produced -- Aron rejected the nihilism and relativism of his peers. Above all else, he believed in "the power of the man who makes himself by assessing his place in the world and in making choices. Only thus can the individual overcome relativity through the absoluteness of decision, and only thus can he take possession of the history that he carries within him and that becomes his own." In the aftermath of the Second World War, Aron supported the North Atlantic alliance against the Soviet Union and attention, in his great work, The Opium of the Intellectuals, to the delusions of those who had swallowed the Marxist religion whole. Iconoclast Jean-François Revel surprised Western audiences with his spirited defense of American civilization and politics in Without Marx or Jesus (1970), his compelling accounts of the Communist threat in the West in The Totalitarian Temptation (1976) and How Democracies Perish (1983), and his cogent critique of the global hatred of the United States in Anti-Americanism (2002). Following the lead of historians like Alain Bescanon, Stéphane Courtois and his colleagues would attempt to make amends for the irresponsibility of their countrymen with the publication of their magisterial compendium of Communist crimes, The Black Book of Communism (1997). Unfortunately, these bright lights have been all too few.

Irrational anti-Americanism continues to thrive in many parts of the world, and its rhetoric is strikingly familiar. With the fall of the Soviet Union, America has become for many people the world's one true menace -- and it is the French intellectuals of the postwar era who bear much of the responsibility for this viewpoint. Indeed, the stain that France's flirtation with totalitarianism and anti-Americanism has left on Western culture undoubtedly will remain for many years. Lionel Trilling was correct in 1952 when he said that "the commanding position of Stalinism in French cultural life . . . makes the artistic and intellectual leadership of France unthinkable." Today, the French have largely and conveniently forgotten their past infatuation with the Soviet dictator. But their attempt to reclaim their long-lost cultural leadership have been nothing short of disastrous.

One of the saddest realities of French intellectual life during the Cold War was that so many of the country's leading thinkers supported the Soviet Union even after its true nature was widely known. Years before the French publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago in 1973, events in the East had dramatically revealed the despotic nature of Communism. From the violent suppression of democratic uprisings in Berlin (1953) and Hungary (1956), to the spectacle of the Eastern European show trials and Khruschev's famous Politburo speech denouncing Stalin's crimes, the evidence of Communist tyranny was there for all to see.

What did the French intellectuals do when the evidence of Communist crimes mounted and the human toll of totalitarianism became clear? Did they repent? Did they lend their pens and their intellects to the cause of freedom around the world?

Sadly, they did none of these things. Desperate to avoid confronting the past, they fled into the obscure realm of language theory and created an ingenious concoction that would become known as Postmodernism. In this sense, the linguistic plague that made its way from France to the English-speaking world began with an act of moral cowardice. The French retreat into abstraction, into the murky thickets of structuralism, deconstruction, and postmodern language games -- scourges that have wreaked so much havoc in college classrooms and faculty lounges -- was preceded by a wholesale French withdrawal from the great moral questions of the day. Fleeing the immoral into the arms of the impenetrable, the French intellectuals attempted to refashion or even disavow reality through a new-fangled interpretation of language. Unable to rule the world, the French sought to negate it. Unfortunately, the American academic mandarins who were supposedly guarding the ivory walls not only failed to drive the Gallic barbarians away, they invited them in for wine and cheese.

The roots of postmodernism, or La Nouvelle Critique, can be found in what has been called structuralism, a mode of thought grounded in the respectable academic contributions of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. Following a long tradition of Western language theory, Saussure based his theories on the somewhat self-evident observation that each language divides reality in different ways. One is born not merely into a language, he argued, but into a way of thinking. Beneath the actual words and phrases of a language, there exists an unconscious structure of relations (made up of "signs") of which the speaker is largely unaware. Levi-Strauss would extend these insights into the discipline of anthropology, arguing that beneath the exteriors of human society lay a complex structure of unconscious habits and beliefs, many of which were based on the structural interrelations of a system of binary oppositions (man-woman, raw-cooked, etc.)

In the work of these pioneers, a slew or radical critics saw their opening. Among the first was literary critic Roland Barthes and his generation of Marxist theorists, who would argue that book was merely a product of its time and place rather than an exposition of an individual author's thoughts and intentions. Most authors, after all, were members of the bourgeoisie -- and, as every good Marxist knows, the thought of such people is largely (or wholly) determined by the class structures in which they exist. "Language, narrative, structure," wrote intellectual historian J.G. Merquior, "does the willing that we, in our beloved naivete, insist on crediting people (real or imaginary) with . . ." The author was dead, and with him, free will. The French had killed him.

With Jacques Derrida, we have the culmination of the whole illogical chain: Deconstruction. As the gods of Communism lay dying, the only path left was one of complete and utter destruction. And Derrida was the perfect arsonist. All texts, discovered the French philosopher-turned-literary-critic, when placed under scrutiny, reveal fatal contradictions that lead inevitably to their unraveling. Because words are assigned arbitrary meanings (pace Saussure) and because language was constantly changing, meaning of any kind could never be fixed and therefore determined. "Literature," wrote American Marxist literary critic Frank Lentricchia, "is inherently nothing; or it is a body of rhetorical strategies waiting to be said."

Few did more to spread the new deconstructive gospel in the United States than Paul de Man. "The relationship between truth and error that prevails in literature cannot be represented genetically," wrote the Belgian literary mandarin and former Yale professor, "since truth and error exist simultaneously, thus preventing the favoring of one over the other." The text, in short, was dead -- along with the entire Western tradition of finding reason and meaning in language. Only the critic remained.

Having denounced their old occupation of analyzing and explaining literature as the product of human inspiration, the critics now threw off their long servitude and fashioned a new and infinitely more satisfying role for themselves. With the author and text lying dead in a ditch, the critics found themselves suddenly liberated, free to turn their lectures and monographs into rap sessions on their own narrow interests, obsessions, and neuroses. "No longer," wrote leading American exegate Stanley Fish, "is the critic the humble servant of texts whose glories exist independently of anything he might do." Who cares what Shakespeare thought of love when oen can hear an aging dinosaur in tweed opine on what the symbolism of the phallus really means to him? In one fell swoop, the once great field of literary criticism was reduced to a cacophany of professors exposing their own ideological entrails.

Truth be told, Derrida had not really subverted the entire Western metaphysical tradition, as he and his gullible followers had claimed. The flaws of deconstruction are easily exposed. How can one articulate a theory arguing that communication is impossible? In the words of literary scholar George Watson: "It is a contradiction to say that nothing can be said, and a multiple contradiction to say it at length." . . .

What is truly shocking is that after all they had done to tarnish their credibility in the preceding decades, French intellectuals still found a wide audience on American college campuses. When the French took the linguistic and cultural plunge, American professors followed closely behind. Apparently afraid of being left with their feet planted on terra firma, they dove into the darkest and most polluted waters in search of the mystique of French ideas. One of their favorite French postwar intellectuals was the historian Michel Foucault, who aimed to subvert what he saw as the Western myths of rationality, progress, and freedom. . . .

In the end, deconstruction claimed the minds of an entire generation of American literary critics and professors. It was the last manifestation of the French avant-garde impulse, and it appealed to both lazy academics and their students who wished to become cutting edge literary theorists without having to perform the drudgery of mastering the weighty Western canon. The prestige of deconstruction has declined since its high-water mark in the 1980s and 1990s, perhaps due more than anything else to the fact that it had become part of the new establishment and was, therefore, no longer "cutting edge." Yet the avant-garde impulse, born in France and exported to America, remains a potent and perilous force in modern culture.

"The French, however, had other ideas. Almost from the start, they erected trade barriers against certain products, such as American movies -- in this instance, restoring a law from Vichy and foreshadowing a form of cultural protectionism that would intensify over the decades. Worse still, France remained blind to the lessons of Versailles. As the United States and Britain moved to democratize their defeated enemy, the French made endless (and familiar) pleas to sever the Ruhr from Germany and internationalize the Rhineland. General Lucius Clay, the U.S. military governor in Germany, admitted that he had found it easier to deal with the Soviets than the French.


In spite of such disagreements, the United States remained in its commitment to rebuild France and the ruined economies of Western Europe. The most ambitious initiative was the Marshall Plan, announced by Secretary of State George Marshall in 1947. Anxious not to repeat the mistake of disengagement after the First World War, the United States donated more than $13 billion to the cause of European renewal between 1948 and 1952. With the exception of West Germany, which had been completely devastated, no country benefited more than France. Over an eight-year period, it received $5.5 billion from the United States and began to transform itself from a nation of rural farmers into a nation with a fully modernized economy.

But the Marshall Plan was about more than mere economics -- it was also about preserving political freedom. After the war, powerful Communist parties surfaced in the democracies of Western Europe, and nowhere were they more threatening than in France, whose Communist Party boasted more than five million members. Stalinist to their core, the French Communists took orders from Moscow, and their rise posed enormous difficulties for democratic France as it tried to reclaim its republic. In the national elections of 1945, they received 25 percent of the vote. In 1946, Charles de Gaulle resigned his premiership rather than participate in a government in which Communists controlled some of the most important ministries. In Washington, the situation was considered so dire that Truman authorized a plan to mobilize U.S. troops in the event that the French Communists carried out a successful coup. . .

Whereas the British left a legacy of self-government, high-quality education, and real economic development in many of their former colonies, the French improved few of the places where they imposed their authority. In Haiti, slaves had revolted against conditions that were crueler than anything known in the United States. French Guiana, which remains a colony today, was little more than a dumping ground for unwanted criminals. Nicknamed "the dry guillotine" because of the grim fate that awaited those sent there, it is chiefly known nowadays for the fact that the notorious Devil's Island lies off its shore.

"Yet the desire for an empire had become such an integral part of the national psyche that the French remained committed to retaining their colonies in order to salve their wounded postwar pride. France can "only be a great power so long as our flag continues to fly in all the overseas territory," said government minister Jean-Jacques Juglas." In the early years of the Cold War, this determination would cost the French dearly in Vietnam. Later on, it would cost the United States as well.

During the Second World War, President Roosevelt had been a sharp critic of France's brutal and corrupt rule in Southeast Asia. The French had imposed crushing burdens on an impoverished people. "Taxes, forced labor, exploitation," said Ho Chi Minh of the French, "that is the summing up of your civilization." There were hideous tales of individual terror. Vo Nguyen Giap, the general who would crush the French at Dien Bien Phu and later confound the United States, lost most of his family to French viciousness. His young wife had been imprisoned, strung up by her thumbs, and beaten to death.

The French tried to control every aspect of Vietmanese life and governance. There were as many French civil servants in Indochina as there were in British India, even though the native population was only one-fifteenth the size. France's expectations of the people it ruled were frequently absurd. Schoolchildren in Vietnam were required to recite phrases from textbooks that began: "Our ancestors, the Gauls . . ." The French liked to claim they were lifting up the masses -- they spoke of a high-minded mission civilisatrice -- but eight years after Napoleon III ordered the French into Vietnam, 80 percent of the population remained illiterate. "Anything must be better than to live under French colonial rule," Roosevelt had said.

In 1940, Japanese forces had invaded Vietnam and left the internal administration to French Vichy rulers, just as the Germans had done in France. Soon, an indigenous resistance movement under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh arose. Like many idealistic students from the Third World, Ho had coverted to Communism in the café's of Paris and believed that Marxism would liberate his people from colonial rule. His hybrid ideology combined nationalism and totalitarianism -- an all-too-familiar mix in the twentieth century and fully reminiscent of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao. Initially, Ho received aid from the United States for his fight against the Japanese. He believed that after the war the Americans would help him convince the French to abandon Indochina and grant independence to Vietnam.

Roosevelt was of two minds. Realizing that France "has milked it for one hundred years" in Southeast Asia and left its inhabitants "worse off than they had [been] in the beginning," he recoiled at any plan to "further France's imperialistic ambitions." He proposedan international trusteeship for Indochina, with the region falling under the authority of the United Nations and eventually earning sovereignty. But he also recognized that any push to remove a colony from French domination had to be weighed against the rising specter of Communism in France itself.

Roosevelt's successor, Harry S. Truman, had fewer qualms about French colonialism. As America's first Cold War president, he chose to support French aims in Vietnam, believing them necessary for France to repair its shattered national pride. The imperatives of geopolitics called for the United States to commit itself to the French program. This meant rejecting its former ally Ho. By the end of 1946, guerilla warfare had broken out.

In retrospect, the most effective strategy for thwarting a Communist takeover of Vietnam would have been for France to accept some version of Roosevelt's trusteeship plan. But French pride made this impossible and only energized Ho's movement, which merged its Communist ideology with the powerful patriotism of the Vietmanese people. "The Vietminh appeal," said one State Department official "is land, education, and a chance to shoot Frenchmen. It is difficult to match that platform." Even as they stared at defeat, the French remained inflexible. Their military operations in Vietnam stumbled along and required extensive U.S. support. The events of the late 1940s only strengthened American resolve against Communism as Moscow tested atomic weapons and sponsered uprisings in Burma, Indonesia, Malaya, and the Phillippines. Although these insurgencies eventually failed, the fear of Communist dominance in Asia was real, especially after the loss of China and the standoff in Korea.

By 1954, the United States was paying for 80 percent of French expenses in Vietnam. To secure this funding, France had repeatedly blackmailed American defense plans for Western Europe. Most notably, it threatened to block the creation of the European Defense Community, which at the time was viewed as crucial to West Germany's reintegration into Europe. (In the end, the French parliament refused to ratify the EDC, effectively killing it.)

Much might have been differentif the French had listened to Roosevelt's counsel a decade earlier. "Roosevelt's proposal had a certain eccentricity of detail," wrote the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., "but it was founded in realism and wisdom, and, if its essence had been carried out, the world might have been spared much bloodshed and agony." But because of the French failure in Indochina, the United States was forced to take responsibility for the region and guarantee the borders of the non-Communist South.

As France lost one colony, others were beginning to throw off the Gallic yoke. In November of 1954, Algerian insurrectionists began an eight-year struggle for independence. France soon devoted half a million soldiers to suppressing them, the largest force the country had ever committed overseas. Yet no amount of manpower seemed able to contain the Algerian desire for self-determination. France found the experience maddening. Whereas Vietnam was on the other side of the planet, Algiers was just across the Mediterranean from Marseilles. Almost a million European settlers lived in the colony and many of them considered Algérie française an integral part of la France. Losing it would be an especially painful blow to national pride.

As Algeria was slipping out of French control, Morocco and Tunisia gained sovereignty for themselves -- in large measure because France did not have the military capacity to fight for more than one colony at a time. Then, in 1956, another crisis erupted in North Africa that inflicted further damage to Franco-American relations. Looking for ways to finance the Aswan Dam, Egyptian strongman Gamal Abdel Nasser seized on the idea of nationalizing the Suez Canal. France and Britain ahd financial stakes in the canal and planned with Israel to take it back through military force. Eisenhower was furious. He had not been consulted -- possibly because he felt that in the long term the best way to deal with a prima donna like Nasser was with indifference. In his view, negotiations held a better chance of securing international use of the canal than violence.

When Israel launched the initial attack on October 29, Eisenhower could barely contain his rage: "Damn it, the French, they're only egging the Israelis on -- hoping somehow to get out of their own North African troubles [in Algeria]. Damn it . . . we tried to tell them they would repeat Indochina all over again in North Africa."

Those were some excerpts from Miller's book. Here are some excerpts from Rubin's book.

...the myth that the neoconservatives are responsible for the anti-Americanism which has been pervasive in Europe for several generations now.

The word "neoconservative" hasn't been around several generations so how could neoconservatives possibly have taken several generations worth of blame for anything, let alone anti-Americanism?

Preface

When writing a book, an author often has the sensation of being surrounded by that topic. In the case of anti-Americanism that experience was particularly strong. As the twenty-first century began it seemed as if the amount of criticism the United States was receiving around the world was matched only by the quantity of passionate debate about why this was happening. Almost every day brought more evidence that anti-Americanism was an omnipresent global phenomenon.

Yet as this project was being conceived the situation should have been the opposite. The United States had attained victory in the Cold War against communism, which had begun immediately after it had done the same thing in a war against fascism. Moreover, there has been the September 11, 2001, attack on America, the single most horrific terrorist attack in world history. Although the event itself showed the extent of anti-Americanism in the Middle East, the United States on September 12 should have been at the height of its global popularity, praised, appreciated, and sympathized with around the world, whatever undertone of reasonable criticism also existed.

Nevertheless, in the aftermath of September 11, although many in the world did sympathize with America, the response of others was that the United States somehow deserved it. That there could be such hatred after the death of so many of their fellow citizens was a shock to many Americans. The displays of hatred only increased as America sent troops to Afghanistan and then fought a war in Iraq.

Certainly, images of the American flag and effigies of the U.S. president being burned throughout the Middle East were disturbing, yet not new. But in Europe, which Americans considered their strategic ally and cultural partner, signs of this hatred were especially disturbing. The German chancellor used demagogic criticism of America to win an election, while one of his top aids likened the U.S. president to Hitler. In France, a book claiming that September 11 was a propaganda stunt by American intelligence agencies and the military-industrial complex to justify world conquest became a best seller. Even in Britain, America's closest friend, a former cabinet minister claimed that the United States was planning to dominate space, cyberspace, and just about everything else.

Almost without exception, both the critics and those defending America viewed this outpouring of anti-Americanism as unprecedented, as the result of contemporary or at least recent events. But the tone of such rhetoric would not have been at all surprising for Americans living a century or two earlier. Only by understanding the historical development -- and powerful continuity -- of anti-Americanism can one comprehend it as a contemporary issue.

The American expatriate Henry James, who had little love for his native country, once mused, "It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world."

But given the historical evidence it was hard to see how Americans could feel otherwise. Indeed, even before it was a country, America was being harshly criticized. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin spent much time and creative energy trying to prove to Europeans that their country was not inherently barbaric. There were always many intellectual figures in Europe who could not resist the facile put-down of America: "I am willing to love all mankind, except an American," said the British author Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century. The respected British historian Thomas Carlyle in 1850 merely found Americans "the greatest bores ever seen in this world."

The French statesman Georges Clemenceau said that "America is the only nation in history which, miraculously, has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization," while Oscar Wilde, who would agree with Clemenceau on little else, declared, "America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between." Decades later the British writer George Bernard Shaw jeered: "An asylum for the sane would be empty in America."

This book in no way seeks to suggest that all criticism of America constitutes anti-Americanism or is invalid. One reason why it is important to examine the history of this debate is to see what can be learned about the real defects of the United States, as well as ways to communicate its virtues better. Similarly, those governments, classes, groups, ideologies, and individuals who have held anti-American views can be better understood by investigating the reasons for these attitudes.

In this book we have carefully defined anti-Americanism as being limited to having one or more of the following characteristics:


An antagonism to the United States that is systemic, seeing it as completely and inevitably evil.
A view that greatly exaggerates America's shortcomings.
The deliberate misrepresentation of the nature or policies of the United States for political purposes.
A misrepresentation of American society, policies, or goals which falsely portrays them as ridiculous or malevolent.
We have restricted our discussion to anti-American views held by non-Americans (or in a few cases to Americans who lived abroad for so long as to become virtually a part of this category). Otherwise, the issues that must be dealt with more properly fall into the sphere of domestic political and partisan debate.

Of course, opposition to specific American actions or policies is easily understandable and may well be justifiable, but anti-Americanism as a whole is not. The reason for this conclusion is that the United States is not a terrible or evil society, whatever its shortcomings. It does not seek world domination and its citizens do not take pleasure in deliberately injuring others.

There are many occasions when decisions inevitably have drawbacks and bad effects. There are equally many time when mistakes are made. But here is where the line can be drawn between legitimate criticism and anti-Americanism.

One of our most important conclusions is that there has been a historical continuity and evolution of anti-Americanism, coinciding with the development of the United States, changes in other societies, and the world situation. We have detected five phases in this process.

The first phase (Chapter 1) began in the eighteenth century, when America was a little-understood place who society was still under construction. At this time, criticism focused on the idea that it would be difficult or impossible to create any civilization there due to environmental conditions.

The second phase, from around 1800 to 1880 (Chapter 2), was characterized by the idea that the United States was already demonstrably a failed society, ruined by democracy, equality, and other dangerous experiments. Its system was said to be so unworkable that no one else should view this new society as a model.

The third phase, from the 1880s to the 1930s (Chapter 3), took place when America's growing size, power, and economic might showed that it could no longer be described as a failure. Then, however, there was a growing fear abroad that the bad American model -- populist democracy, mass culture, industrialization, and so on -- might in the future take over the world and change the way of life of others in a dangerous and negative manner.

In this context, Chapter 4 discusses how the twentieth century's two main counter-ideologies -- communism and fascism -- dealt with the American challenge. Chapter 5 dieals with the specific forms of anti-Americanism taking place in Latin America.

By the fourth phase, from the end of World War II in 1945 to the end of the Cold War by 1990 (Chapter 6), the fear of American domination was moved from the future to the present. The United States was supposedly in the process of taking over the world. During this phase, the Middle East (Chapter 7) became increasingly conscious of the United States and anti-Americanism became an important phenomenon there.

Finally, in the current phase (Chapter 8), those who hold anti-Americanism views see the U.S. domination, both as a great power and as a terrible model for civilization (as the centerpiece of globalization, modernization, and Westernization), to be an established fact. That is why it is the most angry and most widespread exemplification ever seen. Moreover, hatred was intensified by a new doctrine that claimed that America's higher level of development was at everyone else's expense and, by the same token, the relative failures of others to duplicate this success was due to America's many sins.

Chapter 9 analyzes anti-Americanism in the twenty-first century, also summing up the book's main arguments and conclusions.

Finally, it is important to note the spirit in which this book is written. Our goal has been to produce a useful work of analysis and narration rather than one of preordained ideological content. Most of the conclusions were developed by the authors in the course of examining the evidence. There is nothing innately "liberal" or "conservative," left or right, about the line of reasoning used in this book. Rather than take sides in an ongoing partisan debate, the books tries to suggest the need for a totally new framework for understanding this vital issue.

The word "neoconservative" hasn't been around several generations so how could neoconservatives possibly have taken several generations worth of blame for anything, let alone anti-Americanism?It has been my experience that there are many who subscribe to the naive view that contemporary anti-Americanism is a product of the little neoconservative adventure in Iraq. But that is not the case at all, as anyone who goes back into history and examines the roots of the phenomena can clearly see. There has been widespread hatred of the United States in Western Europe for several generations now, especially in France.

But what is even more revealing is the fact that America's current degeneracy is generally not an indigenous outgrowth of its own culture. The United States has traditionally been one of the most racialist countries in the world. The real cause of America's racial decline can be traced back to Europe -- to the sick destructive ideas that Europeans have entertained in the twentieth century that have since been exported to the United States by European immigrants.

Europeans like to pride themselves on how great their culture is and how they have been corrupted by the United States. But has this really been the case? Or has it been just the other way around? We can easily take a look at 20th century Western European culture, everything from queer theory to postmodernism to the avant-garde to good old fashioned communism.

It has been my experience that there are many who subscribe to the naive view that contemporary anti-Americanism is a product of the little neoconservative adventure in Iraq. But that is not the case at all, as anyone who goes back into history and examines the roots of the phenomena can clearly see. There has been widespread hatred of the United States in Western Europe for several generations now, especially in France.



First of all, countries resent the excessive power of other countries and the USA has excessive power. People resent cops and we are the world's policeman, so we are naturally resented by the world. And there are some very good reasons for other countries resenting us such as the Vietnamese Adventure. Vietnam was criminal, and many resentful countries were delighted to point this out.

First of all, countries resent the excessive power of other countries and the USA has excessive power.The French resent more than anything else their own loss of influence in the world. That is not a neoconservative view either. Buchanan has made the same argument in numerous articles. The Gaullists are the French counterparts of the neoconservatives in the United States. They are simply using anti-Americanism as a guise to advance their own naked interests in the EU, which they have always sought to dominate.eople resent cops and we are the world's policeman, so we are naturally resented by the world. This ignores the fact that a lot of what is being said today about the United States is nothing new. Even during the isolationist era the very same criticisms were everywhere, as the gallery shall soon see.And there are some very good reasons for other countries resenting us such as the Vietnamese Adventure. Vietnam was criminal, and many resentful countries were delighted to point this out.That is another interesting topic in its own right. It was France that got us into the Vietnam adventure in the first place. Ho Chi Minh was one of our allies in World War 2 but we turned our back on him to prop up French colonialism. We did this because we were afraid the French Communist Party might triumph in France itself. But you are right. The Vietnam adventure was none of our business. We never should have went over there. We shouldn't be paying attention to France today either.

During more than three years in the French capital, however, Sar would experience a profound political transformation that would have momentous consequences for his country and the world. For in the smoky bars and cafés of Paris's Latin Quarter, he became a Communist and almost certainly joined the ranks of the French Communist Party. It was an ideological commitment from which he never strayed.

This is refuted by Loung Ung's autobiography. From a dutch translation:

The Khmer Rouge was founded in the sixties by a group around Pol Pot. They splitted off from the communist party because that party was according to them no "authentic representative" of "the Khmer people". Many of the founders of the Khmer Rouge were students in Europe in the years before. There they had become admirers of the writings of the nineteenth century German "völkische" nationalist Fichte, who was also an important source of inspiration to the nazi's. Fichte's ideals of a strong and closed state, combined with a self-sufficient agrarian "völkische" community, became the starting point of Khmer politics as was written in their basic document "The Kampuchean economy, aspects of its future development".

... the sick destructive ideas that Europeans have entertained in the twentieth century that have since been exported to the United States by European immigrants...

Interesting. Can you elaborate?

Fascism made a parallel, though less important, contribution to all these aspects of anti-Americanism. It, too, sought to offer Europe an alternative future to the "American" one feared by so many. Despite a greater emphasis on racism and anti-Semitism, the Nazis and their sympathizers drew many of their ideas from past European aristocratic and romantic anti-Americanism. For example, German fascist anti-Americanism focused on the usual claims that America was characterized by excessive materialism, a low cultural level, soullessness, degenerate pragmatism, and excessive power for women (Fade: LOL as soulless as an empty European church). In short, America represented everything negative in "modern" life and, even worse, was seeking to remake the world in its own dreadful image.

While fascist ideology on its explicit form was mostly discredited after 1945 and never had the global reach of its Soviet rival, it would be wrong to underestimate its lasting impact. Equally, despite fascism's special features and ultimate defeat, its ideas about America -- even if on no other issue -- would also be echoed in the later views of many in Europe and the Middle East who seem to be of a totally different political hue.

Although racialist thinking was common in nineteenth-century Europe, the originator of this doctrine as a systematic ideology was the Frenchman Arthur de Gobineau, who lived from 1816 to 1882. He applied this idea to the United States in his Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races. Originally, Gobineau wrote, Anglo-Saxon Aryans had controlled America, but the admission of so many immigrants, who Gobineau called "a mixed assortment of the most degenerate races of olden-day Europe," had destroyed the country. Among these inferior peoples, he included the Irish, Italians, and -- ironically -- lower-class Germans. "It is quite unimaginable that anything could result from such horrible confusion but an incoherent juxtaposition of the most decadent kinds of people."

America was not a new or young nation that created its own people, Gobineau wrote, but simply the refuge for Europe's human dregs, who took advantage of the greater freedom there to behave worse. Its ethnic eclecticism and rootless population ensured that it would be a violent, unstable society dominated by mob rule (Fade: LMAO quite unlike Red Berlin or the Paris Commune). This was almost word for word identical to an idea put forward by the French lawyer Simon Linguet a century earlier, as well as a reflection of many other early critics of the United States. Alfred Rosenberg, National Socialism's official philosopher, would write similarly in 1933 that by giving rights to all -- and especially by extending them to African-Americans after the Civil War -- the United States doomed itself to be without a coherent people (volk) such as existed in Germany (Fade: Speaking of coherent peoples, since when had there ever been a coherent German nation before the 1870s?)

Yet while racialism seemed to be fascism's most obvious contribution to the anti-American cause, it also developed a far more lasting, though less totally original, idea. Gobineau argued that the United States as the unrestrained "monster" that Europe created from its own modernist vision. True, Gobineau agreed with a thousand precursors that immigrants to America who sought "the temple of virtue and happiness were sorely disappointed." He realized that America represented the logical development of potential European trends. It was, as one author summarized his work, Europe on fast forward.

As we have seen, this belief that the American example was actually transforming the world became the most important new development in late-nineteenth-century anti-Americanism. The United States was not merely a joke or a disappointment but by its example and power actually threatened the way of life of everyone else. Like the classical monster, Cerberus, America had three heads: it was a sinisterly successful example that invited imitation, a seductively attractive culture that indirectly spread its poison everywhere, and a powerful state that could take over other countries directly through military and economic means. The official optimism of Communism -- which maintained its own victory was inevitable -- prevented it from fully accepting the implications of this idea.

The gloomier conservatives were much more worried about this American danger because they were also readier to believe that the UNited States would succeed in ruining the world. Moeller van den Bruck, the German rightist who coined the phrase "Third Reich," felt that the rise of America was transforming the West in the wrong direction. Such ideas would later influence a large portion of the left, as it lost its own faith in the triumph of socialism, and of the Third World, which had a better sense of its own weaknesses.

A clear and comprehensive sense of this menace was provided by the profascist German philosopher Martin Heidegger. He warned that America represented humanity's greatest crisis in that it represented alienation, a loss of authenticity, and an impediment to spiritual reawakening (Fade: Yet it was Heidegger who was the grandfather of postmodernism!) In lectures given in 1935 and published in 1953, he claimed that America was rotting German society from within, reshaping its whole use of language and worldview into a materialistic, alienated, inhuman one. Implicitly, this was a critique of American pragmatism, which was said to restrict knowledge to mastering reality and turning people into objects.

Precisely like the German and French romantic critics of America a century earlier, Heidegger declared that American society rejects history and nationhood. It is the dictatorship of pragmatism, technology, and mass society, a monstrous nonbeing, thoughtlessly stumbling about and trying to annihilate what it cannot understand. America represents homelessness, uprootedness, and the absence of the poetic. In contrast, Germany was a rooted society with a coherent people, connected to the poetic in life. The historican confrontation between these two countries, he predicted, would be nothing less than a struggle for the soul of humanity (Fade: Very amusing how rooted Germany had one of the largest Communist parties in the world before WW2).

Interesting. Can you elaborate?That was a reference to what is known today as 'deconstruction'. It was also Martin Heidegger in his later writings who pioneered the infatuation with 'otherness' and 'diversity' that is so widespread in American intellectual circles today.

This paralleled Soviet views on the subject. The Communist-fascist debate was in no small part about which ideology and country -- the USSR or Germany -- was better able to provide an alternative future to the dreadful one offered by America.

Heidegger, like people of very different political views in other decades, defined America as the embodiment of the type of modern society that Europe -- and, in their own ways, the Middle East and Latin America -- wanted to reject. It is characterized by "dreary technological frenzy" and the "unrestricted organization of the average man." There is too much change. It is a place where "a boxer is regarded as a nation's great man; when mass meetings attended by millions are looked on as a triumph." (Fade: The Nazis, of course, had no such mass meetings)

Yet perhaps boxers didn't make such bad heroes compared with the one who Heidegger thought was Germany's "great man" in 1935, Adolf Hitler. It was that dictator who addressed mass meetings attended by many thousands, where he was hailed as the solution to Germany's problems. And it was the Nazi regime Heidegger supported that carried out "unrestricted organization of the average man" far beyond anything Americans could conceive. By 1953 -- or 2003 -- though, Heidegger's anti-American sentiments could be passed off as rather mainstream European critiques of American consumer culture.

While aspects of Heidegger's criticism come from romantic antecedents, others were virtual transcriptions of nineteenth-century conservative complaints. Thus, it is not only the corruption of the masses but also the devaluation of the elite that makes him disapprove of America. In the United States, he wrote, "Intelligence no longer meant a wealth of talent . . . but only what can be learned by everyone, the practice of a routine, always associated with a certain amount of sweat and a certain amount of show." The mediocre masses rule and enforce conformity, reveling in the destruction of everything creative. "This is the onslaught of what we call the demonic (in the sense of destructive evil)."

Just as the Communists often called America fascist, Heidegger and other profascists viewed America as being akin to the USSR. But to him, the United States was worse, and more dangerous, "because it appears in the form of a democratic middle class way of life mixed with Christianity." Thus, while Communism could never win the allegiance of the masses and transform the world, America might succeed in doing so. Indeed, this idea that America was remaking the world in its image would be the basis of post-Communist, twenty-first-century anti-Americanism.

Of course, German fascists did not forget to mix the hatred of America with the hatred of Jews, another feature of anti-Americanism that would reappear -- and on the left, no less -- a half-century after the German Reich's collapse. Who else but the Jews could prosper in and promote such a destructive, rootless, and even demonic society? And who else but the Jews would be the masterminds behind the U.S. drive for world conquest?

In his 1927 book, Jewish World Domination?, Otto Bonhard promoted a theory that America was merely a Jewish front. Alfred Graf Brockdorff said America was degenerating as a result of the Jews, who were best able to exploit the corruption engendered by its democratic institutions. In a best-selling book on the subject in the 1920s, the pro-Nazi Adolf Halfred sounded identical to a leftist critic of America in tracing its ethos to a combination of "Puritan ethic" and "crafty business practice," typified by "the preacher who is an entrepreneur" and "the businessman with God and ideals on his lips." The apparant high morality of Wilson's foreign policy was actually "world peace with Wall Street's seal of approval."

Once in power, the Nazis would put this idea into even cruder terms, as in a 1943 declaration that behind everything in America stands the "grotesque fear of the wandering Jew, who sees it as nothing less than a precursor in the implementation of its ancient and never-abandoned plans to rule the world." Yet when Giselher Wirsing, in his 1942 book about America, Der maßlose Kontinent (The Excessive Continent), wrote that "Uncle Sam has been transformed into Uncle Shylock," he was only stealing a phrase employed as the title of a popular French book more than a decade later. The anti-Semitic feeling of anti-Americanism neither began nor ended with the German fascists.

Equally, there was much moe to the fascist critique of America than hatred of the Jews. The same Nazi text that spoke of wandering Jews who controlled the United States also accused America of imperialism in phrases indistinguishable from those of Marxists. The United States had "robben other states of their rightful possessions with lies and deceptions, violence and war" and "murdered hundreds of thousands of Indians." Wirsing, who spoke of Uncle Shylock, also said that America was ruled by a Puritan-Calvinistic plutocracy that sought world conquest out of greed. As many later Europeans would agree, he claimed that Europe was only acting in self-defense in opposing American interests and ambitions.

The dangerous yet seductive decadence of American culture was another theme that fascists shared with the Communists and other European anti-Americans. In a brochure on the evils of Americanism published in 1944 by the elite Nazi SS organization, jazz was seen as a Jewish weapon to level "all national and racial differences, as liberalism has done throughout the world."

Another cultural theme taken from the nineteenth century was the European attribution of American decadence to the belief that women were too powerful there. Rosenberg said that the "conspicuosly low level of culture" was a "consequence of women's rule in America." Females were said to foster excessive materialism because they encouraged men to earn and spend money. The loss of masculinity was linked to the replacement of aristocratic by bourgeois values. Halfeld said that American men seriously believed that women have a "moral, aesthetic, and intellectual advantage." It damaged their "creative intelligence" and offered a model that threatened to spread to the rest of the world with dangerous results.

Of course, the final authority of the German fascist view on America was Hitler himself, and he had strong views on the subject. While earlier in his career he had admired America's technological development and its supposed domination by Aryans, Hitler reversed these views very strongly. Like Stalin, he believed that the United States was on the verge of collapse in the 1930s, weakened by democracy and a loss of racial pride.

Most of his ideas seemed to be taken from a century of European anti-American stereotypes. "What is America," Hitler told a friend, "but millionaires, beauty queens, stupid records and Hollywood?" Its corrosive appeal was so great that even Germans would succumb to America's decadence if they lived there: "Transfer [a German] to Miami and you make a degenerate out of him -- in other words -- an American." The idea of immigrant degeneration was, of course, the main theme of German anti-Americans a century earlier. Americans, Hitler continued, were spoiled and weakened by luxury, living "like sows though in a most luxurious sty," under the grip of "the most grasping materialism," and indifferent to "any of the loftiest expressions of the human spirit such as music."

At a 1933 dinner party in his home, when a guest suggested that he seek America's friendship, Hitler responded that "a corrupt and outworn" American system was on its deathbed. It was Americans' greed and materialism that had brought about their failure. He defined the problem in virtually Marxist terms, arguing, as Lenin had, that since the Civil War, "A moneyed clique . . . under the fiction of a democracy" ruled the country. As a result of the crisis of the Depression, Hitler, like Stalin, claimed that the United States was on the verge of revolution that, in his version, would result in German Americans seizing power." The main difference was the Nazi substitution of race for class as their category of analysis.

At the dinner party, Hitler's Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels chimed in to agree with his boss: "Nothing will be easier than to produce a bloody revolution in . . . America. No other country has so many social and racial tensions . . . is a medley of races. The ferment goes on under a cover of democracy, but it will not lead to a new form of freedom and leadership, but to a process of decay containing all the disintegrating forces of Europe."

But whether or not America collapsed, Hitler thought that the United States would be no threat in a war because Americans were cowards and military incompetants who during World War I had "behaved like clumsy boys. They ran straight into the line of fire like young rabbits." Even in the midst of World War II, as U.S. military and industrial might was beginning to destroy his empire, Hitler did not acknowledge that mistake. In 1942, he called America "a decayed country, with problems of race and social inequality, of no ideas . . . My feelings against America are those of hatred and repugnance." It was "half-Judaized, half Negrified . . . How can one expect a state like that to hold together -- a state where 80 percent of the revenue is drained away from the public purse -- a country where everything is built on the dollar."

This underestimation of America's internal coherence and external strength was a mistake that not only Stalin and Hitler but also many later dictators would make, often to their own detriment. It is important to understand that whatever their different thoughts on the subject, Hitler's and Stalin's views on America were fairly typical of those which had been conveyed by mainstream European anti-Americans for a century.

Of course, their disdain was focused to some degree on all Western democratic countries, yet the United States was portrayed as the worst, most extreme case of the malady to be combated. For example, Hitler could say -- even as he made war on Britain and France -- "I feel myself more akin to any European country, no matter which . . . I consider the British state very much superior [to America]." When his deputy, Martin Bormann, gave him a tainted copy of a 1931 book satirizing the United States, [i]Juan in America by the Scotsman Eric Linklater, Hitler said, "When one reads a book like this about them, one sees that they have the brains of a hen!" Sounding like a left-wing French intellectual, Hitler added of the Americans: "I grant you that our standard of living is lower. But the German Reich has two hundred and seventy opera houses -- a standard of cultural existence which they . . . have no conception. They have clothes, food, cars and a badly constructed house -- but with a refrigerator. This sort of thing does not impress us. I might, with as much reason, judge the cultural level of the sixteenth century by the appearance of ."

His Italian fascist counterparts had strikingly similar views, seeing America as a machine-centered, urbanized society with lax moral attitudes and a low level of culture. During the 1930s, most of the fifty-one books on America published in Italy portrayed life there in the usual anti-American terms. People lived in hellish cities under the thumb of machines, a parody on European civilization. In 1938 and 1939, Emilio Cecchi, a leading journalist and sympathizer with fascism, wrote a series of articles collected as [i]Bitter America that threw in all the contradictory cliches about American life, simultaneously said to be puritanical and conformist but also pagan, individualistic, and respecting no taboos, and said to be violent but putting security before anything else. Americans were compared in their behavior to sheep and machines.

Like Hitler and many other anti-Americans, Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini explained that he had great sympathy for America's people but not for its government. "Under the guise of democracy it was really just a capitalistic oligarchy, a plutocracy." As for American culture, he criticized, "awful cocktails, feet on the tables and chewing gum." Regarding U.S. foreign policy, it was the worst form of imperialism ever, not merely wanting to gain power over others but to change the existing societies into one that would lower "human intelligence and dignity all over the world."

Communist and fascist anti-Americanism were distinctive from earlier approaches by being so systemic and state-sponsered, while they were also different from each other in certain emphases. Yet their definite continuity with historic European anti-American ideas and themes was remarkably strong.

Moreover, they posthumously helped shape the anti-American views held by many in Europe and the Third World into the twenty-first century. Communism and fascism saw America as the main external threat to their societies, as culturally subversive, as a revial to their ambitions, and as the main alternative system that they must battle for directing the world's future. Later, European leftists and Middle Eastern Arab nationalists or Islamists would take over these basic concepts and copy that style of propaganda, often without realizing it.

Originally, anti-American ideology had suggested that America could never produce an advanced society or that the United States had already failed. Later, it raised the alarm that this deplorable and degenerate country represented something threatening and evil. But now the transition had been made to the highest stage of anti-Americanism: that the United States as indeed responsible for most of the world's evil and was trying to take it over entirely.

Was Heidegger an emigrant to the United States? I hadn't been aware of that. Or perhaps you are referring to acolytes who were. Can you provide names?

Concerning deconstuction, it's my understanding that this concept is usually attributed to Jacque Derrida. Do you consider him to have been an immigrant also? And also a Western European? Or perhaps again, it might be followers you have in mind. Names would be useful.

I must say that Derrida and Heidegger would be extremely strange bedfellows if indeed such a liaison were your proposition.

Was Heidegger an emigrant to the United States? I hadn't been aware of that. Or perhaps you are referring to acolytes who were.
Feel free to read the actual posts I made above. The issue was dealt with above in some detail and several major sources were cited. But anyway, I will repost it for your benefit.

"Sadly, they did none of these things. Desperate to avoid confronting the past, they fled into the obscure realm of language theory and created an ingenious concoction that would become known as Postmodernism. In this sense, the linguistic plague that made its way from France to the English-speaking world began with an act of moral cowardice. The French retreat into abstraction, into the murky thickets of structuralism, deconstruction, and postmodern language games -- scourges that have wreaked so much havoc in college classrooms and faculty lounges -- was preceded by a wholesale French withdrawal from the great moral questions of the day. Fleeing the immoral into the arms of the impenetrable, the French intellectuals attempted to refashion or even disavow reality through a new-fangled interpretation of language. Unable to rule the world, the French sought to negate it. Unfortunately, the American academic mandarins who were supposedly guarding the ivory walls not only failed to drive the Gallic barbarians away, they invited them in for wine and cheese.

The roots of postmodernism, or La Nouvelle Critique, can be found in what has been called structuralism, a mode of thought grounded in the respectable academic contributions of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. Following a long tradition of Western language theory, Saussure based his theories on the somewhat self-evident observation that each language divides reality in different ways. One is born not merely into a language, he argued, but into a way of thinking. Beneath the actual words and phrases of a language, there exists an unconscious structure of relations (made up of "signs") of which the speaker is largely unaware. Levi-Strauss would extend these insights into the discipline of anthropology, arguing that beneath the exteriors of human society lay a complex structure of unconscious habits and beliefs, many of which were based on the structural interrelations of a system of binary oppositions (man-woman, raw-cooked, etc.)

In the work of these pioneers, a slew or radical critics saw their opening. Among the first was literary critic Roland Barthes and his generation of Marxist theorists, who would argue that book was merely a product of its time and place rather than an exposition of an individual author's thoughts and intentions. Most authors, after all, were members of the bourgeoisie -- and, as every good Marxist knows, the thought of such people is largely (or wholly) determined by the class structures in which they exist. "Language, narrative, structure," wrote intellectual historian J.G. Merquior, "does the willing that we, in our beloved naivete, insist on crediting people (real or imaginary) with . . ." The author was dead, and with him, free will. The French had killed him.

With Jacques Derrida, we have the culmination of the whole illogical chain: Deconstruction. As the gods of Communism lay dying, the only path left was one of complete and utter destruction. And Derrida was the perfect arsonist. All texts, discovered the French philosopher-turned-literary-critic, when placed under scrutiny, reveal fatal contradictions that lead inevitably to their unraveling. Because words are assigned arbitrary meanings (pace Saussure) and because language was constantly changing, meaning of any kind could never be fixed and therefore determined. "Literature," wrote American Marxist literary critic Frank Lentricchia, "is inherently nothing; or it is a body of rhetorical strategies waiting to be said."

Few did more to spread the new deconstructive gospel in the United States than Paul de Man. "The relationship between truth and error that prevails in literature cannot be represented genetically," wrote the Belgian literary mandarin and former Yale professor, "since truth and error exist simultaneously, thus preventing the favoring of one over the other." The text, in short, was dead -- along with the entire Western tradition of finding reason and meaning in language. Only the critic remained.

Having denounced their old occupation of analyzing and explaining literature as the product of human inspiration, the critics now threw off their long servitude and fashioned a new and infinitely more satisfying role for themselves. With the author and text lying dead in a ditch, the critics found themselves suddenly liberated, free to turn their lectures and monographs into rap sessions on their own narrow interests, obsessions, and neuroses. "No longer," wrote leading American exegate Stanley Fish, "is the critic the humble servant of texts whose glories exist independently of anything he might do." Who cares what Shakespeare thought of love when oen can hear an aging dinosaur in tweed opine on what the symbolism of the phallus really means to him? In one fell swoop, the once great field of literary criticism was reduced to a cacophany of professors exposing their own ideological entrails.

Truth be told, Derrida had not really subverted the entire Western metaphysical tradition, as he and his gullible followers had claimed. The flaws of deconstruction are easily exposed. How can one articulate a theory arguing that communication is impossible? In the words of literary scholar George Watson: "It is a contradiction to say that nothing can be said, and a multiple contradiction to say it at length." . . .

What is truly shocking is that after all they had done to tarnish their credibility in the preceding decades, French intellectuals still found a wide audience on American college campuses. When the French took the linguistic and cultural plunge, American professors followed closely behind. Apparently afraid of being left with their feet planted on terra firma, they dove into the darkest and most polluted waters in search of the mystique of French ideas. One of their favorite French postwar intellectuals was the historian Michel Foucault, who aimed to subvert what he saw as the Western myths of rationality, progress, and freedom. . . .

In the end, deconstruction claimed the minds of an entire generation of American literary critics and professors. It was the last manifestation of the French avant-garde impulse, and it appealed to both lazy academics and their students who wished to become cutting edge literary theorists without having to perform the drudgery of mastering the weighty Western canon. The prestige of deconstruction has declined since its high-water mark in the 1980s and 1990s, perhaps due more than anything else to the fact that it had become part of the new establishment and was, therefore, no longer "cutting edge." Yet the avant-garde impulse, born in France and exported to America, remains a potent and perilous force in modern culture."

Concerning deconstuction, it's my understanding that this concept is usually attributed to Jacque Derrida.
What is known today as postmodernism can be traced back to its origins in postwar France to the later writings of Martin Heidegger. Charles Murray defines postmodernism as:

"By contemporary intellectual fashion, I am referring to the constellation of views that come to mind when one hears the words multicultural, gender, deconstruct, politically correct, and Dead White Males (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_White_Males). In a broader sense, contemporary intellectual fashion encompasses as well the widespread disdain in certain circles for technology and the scientific method. Embedded in this mind-set is hostility to the idea that discriminating judgments are appropriate in assessing art and literature, to the idea that hierarchies of value exist, hostility to the idea that an objective truth exists. Postmodernism is the overarching label that is attached to this perspective."

Deconstruction, from which critical race theory was ultimately spawned, made its way from France to Western Europe and ultimately to the United States in the 60s and 70s. Some info on that here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstruction

Can you provide names?
Sure. Paul de Man is perhaps the most notable disseminator of deconstruction in the United States.

"During the period between the late 1960s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960s) and the early 1980s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980s) many thinkers influenced by deconstruction, including Derrida (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Derrida), Paul de Man (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_de_Man), Geoffrey Hartman (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Geoffrey_Hartman&action=edit), and J. Hillis Miller (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Hillis_Miller), worked at Yale University (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yale_University). This group came to be known as the Yale school (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yale_school_%28deconstruction%29) and was especially influential in literary criticism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_criticism), as de Man, Miller, and Hartman were all primarily literary critics. Several of these theorists were subsequently affiliated with the University of California Irvine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California_Irvine)."

Do you consider him to have been an immigrant also? And also a Western European? Or perhaps again, it might be followers you have in mind. Names would be useful.
Paul de Man was a Belgian.
Paul de Man (1919 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1919)-1983 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983)) was a deconstructive (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstruction) literary critic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_criticism) and theorist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_theory). He was born in Belgium (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgium) and after World War II (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II) taught in the United States (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States). He was a close friend of Jacques Derrida (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Derrida) and applied his theories of deconstruction (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstruction) to literary criticism.

De Man is best known for subtle readings of romantic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism) poetry and philosophy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy) (The Rhetoric of Romanticism) and dense short essays on various literary and philosophical topics. The essay "The Resistance to Theory," which explores the task and philosophical bases of literary theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_theory), was commissioned and then refused by the Modern Language Association (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Language_Association) for an introductory volume on literary study. The essay argues that the widespread and polemical resistance to theory is, in fact, a resistance to reading itself, a resistance to the use of "language about language."

De Man's influence on literary criticism was for many years mostly through his many influential students, though recently his work has become more widely read.

A controversy arose in the late 1980s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980s), when, after de Man's death, his articles for a collaborationist Belgian newspaper during the war were rediscovered. The volume Responses : on Paul de Man's wartime journalism (edited by Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz, and Thomas Keenan; Nebraska, 1989) collects many articles from de Man's students, colleagues, and contemporaries about the articles' discovery and the ensuing controversy.

I must say that Derrida and Heidegger would be extremely strange bedfellows if indeed such a liaison were your proposition.
It is not a strange proposition to anyone who is familar with the subject.

Precursors
Deconstruction has significant ties with much of Western philosophy; even considering only Derrida's work, there are existing deconstructive texts about the works of at least many dozens of important philosophers. However, deconstruction emerged from a clearly delineated philosophical context:


Derrida's earliest work, including the texts that introduced the term "deconstruction," dealt with the phenomenology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology) of Edmund Husserl (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Husserl): Derrida's first publication was a book-length Introduction to Husserl's The Origin of Geometry, and Speech and Phenomena, an early work, dealt largely with phenomenology.
A student and prior interpreter of Husserl's, Martin Heidegger (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Heidegger), was one of the most significant influences on Derrida's thought: Derrida's Of Spirit deals directly with Heidegger, but Heidegger's influence on deconstruction is much broader than that one volume.
The psychoanalysis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoanalysis) of Sigmund Freud (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmund_Freud) is an important reference for much of deconstruction: The Post Card, important essays in Writing and Difference, Archive Fever, and many other deconstructive works deal primarily with Freud.
The work of Friedrich Nietzsche (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche) is a forerunner of deconstruction in form and substance, as Derrida writes in Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles.
The structuralism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuralism) of Ferdinand de Saussure (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_de_Saussure), and other forms of post-structuralism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-structuralism) that evolved contemporaneously with deconstruction (such as the work of Maurice Blanchot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Blanchot), Michel Foucault (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault), Louis Althusser (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Althusser), Jacques Lacan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Lacan), etc.), were the immediate intellectual climate for the formation of deconstruction. In many cases, these authors were close friends, colleagues, or correspondents of Derrida's.

Some more interesting commentary here on French culture. Nothing is more ridiculous than to see the French of all people attribute their own degeneracy to other nations. The French literally pioneered degeneracy as a way of life -- the avant-garde.

"Financial difficulties and health probelms had persuaded Mark Twain to take his family to Europe for five years in the 1890s. Why he chose to spend the majority of that time in Paris is unclear in light of the strongly negative (but humorous) impressions that gushed forth from his pen. "The race consists of human beings and the French," he wrote. "There is a Moral sense and many nations have it. Also there is an Immoral sense. The French have it." "Scratch a F[rechman] & you find a savage . . . a F[rechwoman] & you find a harlot." To him, the "French are the connecting link between man & the monkey"; they "have bestialities which are unknown in civilized lands." Reflecting on France's history, he noted its inhabitants' penchant for "burning and slaughtering people." France, he wrote, has "two chief traits -- love of glory & massacare.)

Weary of French claims of cultural superiority, Twain believed that the United States could actually boast the more impressive civilization. "I can't describe to you," he wrote to a friend, "how poor & empty & offensive France is, compared to America." In an 1895 essay, he asked:

What would . . . France teach us? Railroading? No. France knows nothing valuable about railroading. Steamshipping? No. French steamboating is still of Fulton's date -- 1809. Postal Service? No. France is a back number there. Telegraphy? No, we taught her that ourselves. Journalism? No. Magazining? No, that is our own specialty. Government? No; Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, Nobility, Democracy, Adultery -- the system is too variegated for our climate. Religion? No, not variegated enough for our climate. Morals? No, we cannot rob the poor to enrich ourselves.
America, he noted, is a pioneer in those areas that lead to the development of personal freedom: laws, fundamental equality, women's rights, and technological progress. In other words, Americans should not allow the French to condescend to them and their country. Nevertheless, Twai refused to abandon hope for all the French. France, he believed, "is capable of being raised to quite a fair sort of civilization by the right of Am[erican] & Eng[lish] missionaries. [But] the Am[erican]s we have established there are not of the right sort, for they ape & admire the natives."

While Twain's fulminations can be attributed to a mile-wide misanthropic streak that finds expression throughout his work, there was more than a little truth to his critique. By the last decades of the nineteenth century, France had slid into a state of obvious moral decay. In the aftermath of France's shocking military debacle in 1870, the country may have yearned for revenge, but it clearly had lost confidence in itself. In the words of the German ambassador to Paris in 1886: "The wish that there may be one day a holy war is common to every Frenchman; but the demand for its speedy fulfillment is met with a shake of the head." Instead the French turned to pleasure in order to forget. Paris became a frivolous whirlwind of cabarets, absinthe, prostitutes, and culinary excess. Moral codes were loosened; Parisian life was, for those who could afford it, one giant, degenerate soirée.

While some decried this sorry state of affairs, others reveled in it, creating a whole conception of life around the idea of decadence. In order to escape the dreary world of petty bourgeoisie concerns, the true decadent would attempt through the contemplation of beauty or the ingestion of narcotics to reach a rarefied state of sensation. Everything outside a morbidly self-absorbed subjectivity, except that which could provide pleasure, was soundly rejected. And already, the United States served as a convenient symbol for all that deserved condemnation. In the opinion of the protodecadent Charles Baudelaire, the United States was to blame for corrupting so much of the modern world. To him, America was "Gargantuan and yet naive . . . totally confident in her material, unpredictable, and almost monstrous growth . . [with] a primitive faith in the omnipotence of industry . . . [and] almost no consideration whatsoever for spiritual things." His words would express a fascinated horror with which many of the French view America today.

Yet France has hardly been remiss in producing its own sordid cultural exports. Around the middle of the nineteenth century, France unleashed a powerful and volatile force into European culture -- the idea of the avant-garde. Combining the romantic cult of the artist with a radical critique of existing and past traditions, the avant-garde ideal would not only transform the world of art but also exert a considerable influence on totalitarian political ideologies. Originating in the French Middle Ages, the term took on its modern meaning of a radical rupture with the past during the French Revolution. In subsequent decades, the term would filter through the hands of Charles Fourier and Saint-Simon, who bought sought to create a utopian state in the radical tradition of Jean Calvin and his Jacobin heirs. From there, it would go on to infect the realm of aesthetics.

Just as the French revolutionaries had sought to overthrow the existing political order, so the new aesthetic vanguard sought to overthrow all existing rules, forms, and conventions in the realm of art. To be sure, the avant-garde impulse is responsible for many of the great artistic achievements of the modern era -- Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and Abstract Impressionism, as well as the many forms of literary modernism. But the successful exemplars of this new modern outlook -- Monet, Manet, van Gogh, Cézanne, and Matisse, as well as Picasso, Eliot, de Kooning, Kafka, and Shönberg -- were not essentially nihilistic. However innovative and novel their work might at first appear, they first mastered artistic traditions before breaking with them, and they always retained a keen sense of their relation to the past.

The other strand of the avant-garde was more destructive. Indeed, it would attempt to pulverize the entire ediface of Western art. The "newcomers," French poet Arthur Rimbaud had written, "are free to condemn the ancestors." Rimbaud, the first of what historian Jacques Barzun calls the French Abolitionists, sought to bring about a clean slate in the real of culture by the use of coarse language and disorienting rhetoric. An anarchist is politics and aesthetics, Rimbaud would pave the way for writers such as Alfred Jarry, who not only created one of the most offensive characters in literature in his play Ubi Roi (King Turd) but was equally obnoxious in real life. With a powdered face and a highly affected falsetto, Jarry would wander the streets of Paris, occasionally pulling a revolver from his pocket and firing blanks at terrified bystanders. The avant-garde imperative of shocking the bourgeoisie had reached its literal, twisted apothesis.

From here, the path of this destructive impulse became clear. In the word of the twentieth-century Dadist Marcel Duchamp, everyday objects ("ready-mades") were "nominated" as legitimate art beside authetic masterpieces. In the urinal that Duchamp exhibited under the name "Fountain," we see the tawdry culmination of much of what went wrong with modern art in the last century. Today, completely unteethered from the moorings of tradition, much of contemporary art must been either eye-poppingly trivial or shockingly repulsive to be noticed.

It should therefore come as no surprise that Lenin used the term avant-garde to describe his vision of a revolutionary elite intent on wiping away all political and economic foundations of the state. The Italian Futurists' own destructive understanding of art and politics would help pave the way for Fascism."

Fascism made a parallel, though less important, contribution to all these aspects of anti-Americanism. It, too, sought to offer Europe an alternative future to the "American" one feared by so many. Despite a greater emphasis on racism and anti-Semitism, the Nazis and their sympathizers drew many of their ideas from past European aristocratic and romantic anti-Americanism. For example, German fascist anti-Americanism focused on the usual claims that America was characterized by excessive materialism, a low cultural level, soullessness, degenerate pragmatism, and excessive power for women (Fade: LOL as soulless as an empty European church). In short, America represented everything negative in "modern" life and, even worse, was seeking to remake the world in its own dreadful image.

While fascist ideology on its explicit form was mostly discredited after 1945 and never had the global reach of its Soviet rival, it would be wrong to underestimate its lasting impact. Equally, despite fascism's special features and ultimate defeat, its ideas about America -- even if on no other issue -- would also be echoed in the later views of many in Europe and the Middle East who seem to be of a totally different political hue.

Although racialist thinking was common in nineteenth-century Europe, the originator of this doctrine as a systematic ideology was the Frenchman Arthur de Gobineau, who lived from 1816 to 1882. He applied this idea to the United States in his Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races. Originally, Gobineau wrote, Anglo-Saxon Aryans had controlled America, but the admission of so many immigrants, who Gobineau called "a mixed assortment of the most degenerate races of olden-day Europe," had destroyed the country. Among these inferior peoples, he included the Irish, Italians, and -- ironically -- lower-class Germans. "It is quite unimaginable that anything could result from such horrible confusion but an incoherent juxtaposition of the most decadent kinds of people."

America was not a new or young nation that created its own people, Gobineau wrote, but simply the refuge for Europe's human dregs, who took advantage of the greater freedom there to behave worse. Its ethnic eclecticism and rootless population ensured that it would be a violent, unstable society dominated by mob rule (Fade: LMAO quite unlike Red Berlin or the Paris Commune). This was almost word for word identical to an idea put forward by the French lawyer Simon Linguet a century earlier, as well as a reflection of many other early critics of the United States. Alfred Rosenberg, National Socialism's official philosopher, would write similarly in 1933 that by giving rights to all -- and especially by extending them to African-Americans after the Civil War -- the United States doomed itself to be without a coherent people (volk) such as existed in Germany (Fade: Speaking of coherent peoples, since when had there ever been a coherent German nation before the 1870s?)

Yet while racialism seemed to be fascism's most obvious contribution to the anti-American cause, it also developed a far more lasting, though less totally original, idea. Gobineau argued that the United States as the unrestrained "monster" that Europe created from its own modernist vision. True, Gobineau agreed with a thousand precursors that immigrants to America who sought "the temple of virtue and happiness were sorely disappointed." He realized that America represented the logical development of potential European trends. It was, as one author summarized his work, Europe on fast forward.

As we have seen, this belief that the American example was actually transforming the world became the most important new development in late-nineteenth-century anti-Americanism. The United States was not merely a joke or a disappointment but by its example and power actually threatened the way of life of everyone else. Like the classical monster, Cerberus, America had three heads: it was a sinisterly successful example that invited imitation, a seductively attractive culture that indirectly spread its poison everywhere, and a powerful state that could take over other countries directly through military and economic means. The official optimism of Communism -- which maintained its own victory was inevitable -- prevented it from fully accepting the implications of this idea.

The gloomier conservatives were much more worried about this American danger because they were also readier to believe that the UNited States would succeed in ruining the world. Moeller van den Bruck, the German rightist who coined the phrase "Third Reich," felt that the rise of America was transforming the West in the wrong direction. Such ideas would later influence a large portion of the left, as it lost its own faith in the triumph of socialism, and of the Third World, which had a better sense of its own weaknesses.

A clear and comprehensive sense of this menace was provided by the profascist German philosopher Martin Heidegger. He warned that America represented humanity's greatest crisis in that it represented alienation, a loss of authenticity, and an impediment to spiritual reawakening (Fade: Yet it was Heidegger who was the grandfather of postmodernism!) In lectures given in 1935 and published in 1953, he claimed that America was rotting German society from within, reshaping its whole use of language and worldview into a materialistic, alienated, inhuman one. Implicitly, this was a critique of American pragmatism, which was said to restrict knowledge to mastering reality and turning people into objects.

Precisely like the German and French romantic critics of America a century earlier, Heidegger declared that American society rejects history and nationhood. It is the dictatorship of pragmatism, technology, and mass society, a monstrous nonbeing, thoughtlessly stumbling about and trying to annihilate what it cannot understand. America represents homelessness, uprootedness, and the absence of the poetic. In contrast, Germany was a rooted society with a coherent people, connected to the poetic in life. The historican confrontation between these two countries, he predicted, would be nothing less than a struggle for the soul of humanity (Fade: Very amusing how rooted Germany had one of the largest Communist parties in the world before WW2).

But Germany was very much Anti-Jew in 1932, that was good.
If America had been as much against the jews, do you think WW II would have happened?

Didn't the Jews orchestrate WW II?

But what caught my eye was this assertion:

...the sick destructive ideas that Europeans have entertained in the twentieth century that have since been exported to the United States by European immigrants.

Just who were these immigrants?

As far as I am aware, Heidegger, Derrida and de Man did not emigrate to the United States.

What were the ideas and who were the immigrants?

Just who were these immigrants?
Postmodernism is just one example. The destruction that Frans Boas did to American anthropology is another. Degler also attributes Boas's ideas to the radical German leftist culture exemplified in 1848.

As far as I am aware, Heidegger, Derrida and de Man did not emigrate to the United States.
I never suggested that Heidegger and Derrida immigrated to the United States. But it is nonetheless very true that radical European leftists affiliated with their ideas have been immigrating to the United States and finding employment in our universities. From there they have managed to corrupt American intellectual life, as Kaufmann explains in some detail in his book The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America.

What were the ideas and who were the immigrants?
Lets see. Postmodernism and critical theory amongst others.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Marcuse

Herbert Marcuse (July 19 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_19), 1898 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1898) – July 29 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_29), 1979 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979)) was a prominent German (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germans)-American (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyphenated_American) philosopher (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy) and sociologist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology) of the Frankfurt School (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School).
Herbert Marcuse was born in Berlin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin), served as a soldier in the First World War (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I) and then participated in the aborted socialist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism) Spartacist uprising (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spartacist_uprising), which was ultimately crushed by the forces of the Weimar Republic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar_Republic). After completing his Ph.D. thesis at the University of Freiburg (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Freiburg) in 1922 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1922), he moved back to Berlin, where he worked as a bookseller. He returned to Freiburg (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freiburg) in 1929 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1929) to write a habilitation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habilitation) with Martin Heidegger (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Heidegger). In 1933 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1933), since he would not be allowed to complete that project under the Nazis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazis), Marcuse began to work at the Frankfurt (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt) Institute for Social Research (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Social_Research) and, along with Max Horkheimer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Horkheimer) and Theodor Adorno (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Adorno), became one of the major theorists of the Frankfurt School (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School).

He emigrated (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emigration) from Germany that same year, going first to Switzerland (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland), then the United States (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States), where he became a citizen in 1940 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1940). During World War II (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II) he worked for the US Office of Strategic Services (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Strategic_Services) (forerunner of the CIA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA)), analyzing intelligence reports about Germany (1942-45-51).

In 1952 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1952) he began a teaching career as a political theorist, first at Columbia University (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_University) and Harvard (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard), then at Brandeis University (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandeis_University) from 1958 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958) to 1965 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1965), where he was professor of philosophy and politics, and finally (already retirement-age), at the University of California, San Diego (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California%2C_San_Diego). He was a friend and collaborator of the historical sociologist Barrington Moore, Jr. (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Barrington_Moore%2C_Jr.&action=edit) and of the political philosopher Robert Paul Wolff (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Paul_Wolff). In the post-war period, he was the most explicitly political and left-wing member of the Frankfurt School, continuing to identify himself as a Marxist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxist), a socialist, and a Hegelian (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hegelian).

Marcuse's critiques of capitalist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist) society (especially his 1955 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1955) synthesis of Marx and Freud (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freud), Eros and Civilization (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Eros_and_Civilization&action=edit), and his 1964 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964) book One-Dimensional Man (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-Dimensional_Man)) resonated with the concerns of the leftist student movement in the 1960s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960s). Because of his willingness to speak at student protests, Marcuse soon became known as "the father of the New Left (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Left)" (a term he disliked and rejected). His work heavily influenced intellectual discourse on popular culture (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_culture) and scholarly popular culture studies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_culture_studies). He had many speaking engagements in the US and Europe in the late 1960s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960s) and in the 1970s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970s). He died on July 29 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_29), 1979 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979), after having suffered a stroke during a visit to Germany. Second-generation Frankfurt School theorist Jürgen Habermas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%FCrgen_Habermas) cared for him during his final illness.

As I said before, the sickness which plagues American intellectual life today is largely of European vintage.

Postmodernism is just one example. The destruction that Frans Boas did to American anthropology is another. Degler also attributes Boas's ideas to the radical German leftist culture exemplified in 1848.

url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Marcuse"]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Marcuse[/url]

Herbert Marcuse

Surely you are not suggesting that Boas and Marcuse were European?

Adorno as well?


:eek:

Surely you are not suggesting that Boas and Marcuse were European? Adorno as well? Of course they were. So were Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Here is a stunning demolition of the myth that France has traditionally been a a pro-American country. Some interesting commentary on chauvinism too.

"Before the terrorist attacks of 2001, 77 percent of Americans held a favorable opinion of France and a merge 17 percent an unfavorable one. In March 2003, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, these feelings were reversed. Only 34 percent of Americans saw France in a positive light, while fully 64 percent viewed it negatively. (Fade: White man look out! Those Americans like FadeTheButcher are changing their views! 14/88)

In the United States, earnest pundits lamented the rift between the two countries. "Franco-American friendship goes back a long way," warned Kevin Phillips on National Public Radio. If the bitterness continued, it might erase a cherished legacy of goodwill and harmony. "We run the risk of losing this long friendship, a history built up over time and adversity," wrote Josephine Humphrey's in the New York Times. "Do we really want a divorce?"

Such sentiments assume, of course, that there has been a marriage in the first place -- a marriage allegedly consummated when France rushed to the aid of desperate American colonists during the War of Independence. That's where the oft-told story of Franco-American friendship usually begins, with tributes to the valor and idealism of the Marquis de Lafayette, the gallant aristocrat who offered his services to General Washington and the American cause. Within a few years of his arrival, the French provided decisive naval support at the battle of Yorktown, securing American liberty. Next comes the Louisiana Purchase of 1802, commonly understood as a benign real-estate transaction in which Napoleon generously sold vast tracks of North America at rock-bottom prices to his friend Thomas Jefferson. In the decades to follow, the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville toured the United States and gazed in wonder at its political achievements, leaving the impression that it was the French who had discovered the genius of American democracy. Later in the twentieth century, American doughboys fought in the trenches beside French troops in the First World War and symbolically repaid America's debt to Lafayette and his country. A generation later, GIs valiantly stormed the beaches of Normandy, liberated freedom-loving France from the Nazis, and, as their reward, enjoyed the gratitude of comely French maidens. During the Cold War, the United States and France stood shoulder to shoulder as they stared down the Soviet menace. Sure, Charles de Gaulle could be prickly and pompous at times, but he remained a steadfast ally of American when the chips were down. And in the early 1990s, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, the French once again went bravely into battle alongside their American cousins.

Isn't that how the story goes? Deep down, underneath their berets and black turtlenecks, don't the French really love us?

Au contraire. This familiar and comforting narrative can be found in our history books. French politicians eager to advance their country's interests have nutured it. American statesmen have been seduced by its charms. Yet this figure of our popular imagination is in fact a figment of our imagination. The tale of Franco-American harmony is a long standing and pernicious myth. The French attitude toward the United States consistently has been one of cultural suspicion and political dislike, bordering at times on raw hatred, as well as diplomatic friction that occasionally has erupted into violent hostility. France is not America's oldest ally, but its oldest enemy.

The true story of Franco-American relations begins many years before the American Revolution, during the French and Indian Wars. Lasting nearly a century, these conflicts pitted the French and their Indian comrades against seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American colonists. French military officers used massacares as weapons of imperial terror against the hardy men, women, and children who settled on the frontier. At the age of twenty-two, George Washington nearly fell victim to one of these brutal onslaughts and was reviled in France as a murderous villain for many years (an opinion sustained by French propaganda and reversed only when the American Revolution made it politically necessary). Amid this tumult, the first articulations of a recognizably American national consciousness came into being. Indeed, America's first authentic sense of self was not born in a revolt against Britain, but in a struggle with France.

Although the French provided American colonial rebels with crucial assistance during their bid for independence, direct French military intervention came only after the Americans had achieved a decisive victory of their own at Saratoga. The French crown regarded the principles of the Declaration of Independence as abhorrent and frightening. French aristocrats viewed Lafayette with contempt and branded him a criminal for traveling to America against King Louis XVI's explicit command. The king and his government overcame their revulsion to the young republic only because they sniffed an opportunity to weaken their ancient rival Britain. To be sure, France did become an ally to the colonists for a few years in the late 1770s and early 1780s when American sovereignty served French geopolitical aims. But then the French believed that double-dealing against their erstwhile friends after Yorktown served their interests as well. During the peace talks, France sought to limit American gains because it feared the new nation might become too powerful. If the French had achieved all of their objectives in the Treaty of Paris in 1783, the United States today might be confined to a slender band of territory along the eastern seaboard, like a North American version of Chile.

In 1998, French defense minister Alain Richard declared that "France and the United States never fought each other." This is manifestly untrue. Within a generation of Yorktown, French and American forces were exchanging deadly fire during the little-known Quasi-War of 1798-1800 -- during which France earned the dubious distinction of becoming the first military enemy of the United States following the ratification of the Constitution. Shortly before these hostilities, France supplied the United States with its first foreign subversive: French ambassador Edmond Charles Genet, better known as "Citizen Genet." In 1796, a Genet successor, Pierre Adet, meddled in the presidential election in a desperate but failed attempt to prevent John Adams from becoming commander-in-chief.

During the Napoleonic era, France posed a constant threat to the United States and its westward expansion. Napoleon himself longed to invade North America with a powerful army. He agreed to sell the Louisiana Territory only after suffering a military disaster in the Caribbean and hearing threats of war from Thomas Jefferson. The War of 1812 was very nearly fought against France rather than Britain, and the Monroe Doctrine was written with France clearly in mind. In the 1830s, Andrew Jackson came close to declaring war on France for its persistent refusal to make good on promised reparations for French naval crimes during Napoleon's reign.

Whenever French politicians want to generate feelings of goodwill among Americans, they invariably appeal to the memory of Lafayette and Yorktown. They neglect to mention the French role in the Civil War, when Napoleon's imperial nephew supported the South and incited disunion, carried out the first major transgression of the Monroe Doctrine, and engaged in what General Ulysses S. Grant considered acts of war against the United States.

In the twentieth century, France welcomed American help to end the First World War. During the subsequent peace negotiations, however, the French fought the United States over how to treat the vanquished Germans and conceive a postwar world. By rejecting the advice of Woodrow Wilson and insisting on crippling and humiliating reparations, France fatally undermined the fledgling German democracy and planted many of the seeds of the Second World War -- a conflict for which the French required another American rescue. Before that liberation could occur, however, American troops landing in North Africa in 1942 encountered stiff resistance from the soldiers of Vichy France. The GIs literally had to fight their way through the French to get to the Nazis.

More than 60,000 Americans who gave their lives in these two world wars lie buried in French soil. Yet it was not long after the Second World War had ended that many in France forgot this sacrifice. Anti-Americanism metastasized as a whole generation of French intellectuals embraced the West's totalitarian enemy, the Soviet Union. During the Cold War, French misrule in its Southeast Asian colonies made Ho Chi Minh's Communist movement possible and set the stage for an American debacle. Indeed, if the French ahd followed the advice of Franklin Roosevelt and granted Vietman its independence after World War II, the Vietnam War might not have been necessary, and today Vietnam might be a prospering democracy like South Korea.

During the presidency of Charles de Gaulle, France became a source of strife within the Western alliance as it undermined NATO and downplayed the Soviet threat -- and even refused to rule out aiming its own nuclear missiles at the United States. In 1986, when the United States aimed positive proof that Libyan strongman Muammar Qaddafi was behind a fatal terrorist bombing in Berlin, the French rejected American requests to let U.S. warplanes fly through their airspace on a mission to retaliate against a sinister forerunner of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

At times, Americans have reacted with passionate indignation at French hostility and intransigence. In the 1790s, during the imfamous XYZ affair, the public was outraged when French officials demanded huge bribes from American diplomats. In the 1960s, de Gaulle's shrill anti-American harangues and his dramatic decision to pull French troops from NATO resulted in boycotts of French products across the United States. Yet the myth of Franco-American friendship remains so tenacious that when each new generation of Americans encounters French emnity, it reacts with shock and disbelief.

The French themselves have harbored considerably fewer misapprehensions. "We are at war with America," declared François Mitterand shortly before his death in 1996. "A permanent war . . . a war without death. They are very hard, the Americans -- they are voracious. They want undivided power over the world." Indeed, anti-Americanism has deep roots in France, especially among its political and intellectual elites. Fueled by an abiding belief in French superiority, this attitude at times has assumed odd shapes: As a diplomat in Paris in the 1780s, Thomas Jefferson tried to disabuse French thinkers of their strange insistence that North American animals were smaller and weaker than those native to Europe. More often, however, the French have sought to contrast their Old World refinements with what they have regarded as New World vulgarities. As French prime minister Georges Clemenceau put it, "America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual intervention of civilization."

Yet the French have been victims of their own illusion: a mirage of grandeuer and entitlement based on the belief that because France was once a powerful nation, it should always be a powerful nation. This has produced a national character dominated by nostalgia for a glorious past that simply cannot be recovered. French national decline began in the middle of the eighteenth century and has progressed almost without interruption. The single exception came during the reign of Napoleon, when the French made an audacious and bloody bid for European dominance. Their failure has haunted them ever since. Time and time again in the last two centuries, France has refused to come to grips with its diminished status as a country whose greatest general war a foreigner, whose greatest warrior was a teenage girl, and whose last great military victory came on the plains of Wagram in 1809. Instead, it projects a politics of chauvinism and resentment -- with much of its animus aimed at the United States, a nation whose rise to prominence in global affairs presents almost a mirror image of French decline.

Indeed, the very word chauvinism derives from the life and attitude of one Nicolas Chauvin, an officer in Napoleon's Grande Armée who was severely wounded seventeen times during his military service. Years after Waterloo, he refused to give up his fiece loyalty to his former general and the French dream of empire. In time, the French public made Chauvin's excessive patriotism an object of ridicule and derision. Plays satirized the disfigured ex-soldier and his undying loyalty to the imperial cause. Yet if the French had looked more closely at themselves, they would have seen that Chauvin was less of an eccentric than an exemplar. As French power and influence withered, the French public remained true to the alluring vision of a great and transcendent France -- just like Napoleon's gallant soldier. Unfortunately, a foreign policy built on a fantasy is bound to stumble when it encounters hard realities. Much Franco-American friction over the last century and a half has come the French reluctance to accept a new role in a democratic world order led by the United States.

How fascinating. And you say the authors are named Rubin?

Here are two other famous French writers who have expressed quite poisonous dislike for America: "Father of decadence," Charles Baudelaire, and Louis-Ferdinand Celine.


"Barely half a century into its existence, the young American republic was already getting a bad rap in France. The poet Charles Baudelaire declaimed that the poor man who became Americanized would lose the idea of the differences which characterize the phenomena of the physical world and of the moral world, of the natural and of the supernatural.

" Baudelaire was accordingly stuck with the problem of what to do with Americans who palpably were not so lost. His solution: de-Americanize them. Thus, according to Baudelaire, the America of one of his heroes, Edgar Allan Poe, was a vast cage, a great accounting establishment, in which the great poŠte maudit made feeble efforts to escape the influence of this antipathetic atmosphere."

http://www.worldpolicy.org/grantham.html


I greatly admire Michael A. Hoffman II, but I really cannot comprehend his infatuation with Louis-Ferdinand Celine, whose books are mostly just faux-clever, disgusting rambling, IMHO. (I am all too much reminded of Alex Linder)

Btw, both Leon Trotsky and Allen Ginsberg admired Celine's nihilistic style in spite of his anti-Semitism.


Petr

Okay, so let's get that list up to date.

Writers Who Are No Damn Good According to Petr

Twain
Wilde
Bierce
Mencken
Baudelaire
Celine

Am leaving Derrida off this list since we have yet to spot the puff of white smoke out of Petr's chimney designating 'yea' or 'nay'- besides, without Derrida, how would Fade have ever learned to dismantle an opponent's argument into so many meaningless independent sentences?

- "Writers Who Are No Damn Good According to Petr"


Are you stalking me?

:D


Actually, I might give some slack on Wilde, he was better than rest of these blasphemers. He somewhat repented in prison, or so I'd like to think. ("De Profundis")

Perhaps if other decadents were also roughed up a bit, they would find some noble sentiments from themselves too...

:p


Petr

He was a sodomite. I'm sure he had better things to do in prison than repenting...

Dan Dare: Surely you are not suggesting that Boas and Marcuse were European? Adorno as well?

FadeTheButcherOf course they were. So were Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Dan Dare: Gosh! You are an ecumenical chap. No wonder you are so pissed off at Europeans if you can't distinguish between real ones and itinerant Israelites.

Quite striking though where Herb and the gang eventually found the most fertile soil to till. Protective coloration kicked in, in all likelihood.

This is another very interesting new book that I picked up today. From what I can tell, jew Barry Rubin and jew Judith Rubin do a first class job in exploding the myth that the neoconservatives are responsible for the anti-Americanism which has been pervasive in Europe for several generations now. .

Of course they did their best to "explode that 'myth'" Fade. They have a vested interest in convincing the American public that the world's animosity towards the US has absolutely nothing to do with the neoconservative hijacking of US foreign policy.

Perhaps Mr. and Mrs. Rubin can explain one thing to us: after 9/11, the entire world, including nations traditionally at odds with America (Russia, China, many Arab countries) offered the US friendship and support. When Bush followed the advice of his neoconservative handlers and invaded Iraq, he managed to alienate not only our newfound friends, but traditional allies like postwar Germany and France. Sure, the neocons had nothing at all to do with this, it's all because those Europeans hate us for our prosperity and freedom (it's funny how nobody hates the Swiss for their prosperity and their freedom, isn't it)?

I suppose that Arab anti-Americanism has nothing to do with US support for Israel, just as the neocons have nothing to do with soured US/European relations?

Of course they did their best to "explode that 'myth'" Fade. They have a vested interest in convincing the American public that the world's animosity towards the US has absolutely nothing to do with the neoconservative hijacking of US foreign policy.Their motivations really do not interest me. What interests me is whether or not what they are saying is true. From what I can tell, it is. They put forth a very convincing argument which they are able to support with overwhelming evidence. There has been enormous hostility in France to the United States for several generations now. On the contrary, Americans have traditionally been pro-French. So its not like the current French anti-Americanism simply came out of nowhere. It was already in existence long before Bush was even elected and long before he invaded Iraq.Perhaps Mr. and Mrs. Rubin can explain one thing to us: after 9/11, the entire world, including nations traditionally at odds with America (Russia, China, many Arab countries) offered the US friendship and support.They dealt with this very subject actually.

"Then there was the matter of what Le Monde really meant when it declared "We Are All Americans." This much-celebrated headline sat atop one of the most most-cited but least-read newspaper editorials ever written, for beneath that catchy phrase was an an anti-American diatribe of extraordinary virulence and rage. Penned by publisher Jean-Marie Colombani, it worried that the United States would turn "Islamic fundamentalism" into "the new enemy." After the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, wrote Colombani, Americans had succumbed to an "anti-Islamic reflex" consisting of "ridiculous, if not downright odious" behavior. He further asserted that 9/11 had occurred because the United States dominates a world "with no counterbalance." The terrorist atrocity was the predictable result "of an America whose own cynicism has caught up with it." In the person of Osama bin Laden, whom he interpreted as the villainous invention of the Central Intelligence Agency. Anything but a decalration of solidarity, the famous editorial was constructed around a particularly ugly and outrageous slander: "Might it not then have been America itself that created this demon?"

Credited in the world press with a sympathy for America that it had not expressed, Le Monde made certain in the days to follow that none of its readers with misinterpret its true beliefs. "How we have dreamt of this event," wrote the eminent intellectual Jean Baudrillard, referring to 9/11. "How all the world without exception dreamnt of this event, for no one can avoid dreaming of the destruction of a power that has become hegemonic . . . It is they who acted, but we who wanted the deed." Colombani also did his best to make sure no one in the future would mistake him for an admirer of the United States. In subsequent writings, including a book called Tous Américains? (All Americans?) -- in which he retreated from his original headline by adding a question mark -- the illustrious publisher stooped to present an old and vicious caricature of America as a country controlled by crazed Christian dogmatists who excelled at oppressing their black neighbors. He further argued that the United States wasa hypocritical to protest the consequences of Islamic radicalism when it still embraced that supposedly primitive instrument of legalized brutality, the death penalty."When Bush followed the advice of his neoconservative handlers and invaded Iraq, he managed to alienate not only our newfound friends, but traditional allies like postwar Germany and France.But France has never been a traditional ally of the United States. They even tried to kill us when we were restoring their independence! Bush never alienated France from the United States either. I suppose you can say it has been more or less alienated from the United States for three generations. The French dislike the United States and have for some time now. Only recently have Americans begun to take notice.Sure, the neocons had nothing at all to do with this, it's all because those Europeans hate us for our prosperity and freedom (it's funny how nobody hates the Swiss for their prosperity and their freedom, isn't it)?That hatred of the United States in Western Europe goes way back before the Iraq War. And lets be honest. They do hate us for our prosperity and freedom. They have said so on countless occasions now going back hundreds of years. The Nazis certainly hated us for our prosperity and freedom. So did the Bolsheviks. See the excerpts posted above that document all of that at some length.I suppose that Arab anti-Americanism has nothing to do with US support for Israel, just as the neocons have nothing to do with soured US/European relations?Its becoming obvious to me that this hatred of the United States that is so pervasive in Europe today did not simply appear out of the blue because we invaded Iraq. If that were the case, then I would not be seeing so much evidence of it long before Bush came to power.

But France has never been a traditional ally of the United States. They even tried to kill us when we were restoring their independence!

Great Britain did more to crush the US in its cradle (i.e. War of 1812) than did France. Does this make Britain a "lifelong enemy?"

Bush never alienated France from the United States either. I suppose you can say it has been more or less alienated from the United States for three generations.

US-French relations were never as close as with Britain, but there was never open enmity either. Even under Clinton US-French relations were quite good.

They do hate us for our prosperity and freedom. They have said so on countless occasions now going back hundreds of years. The Nazis certainly hated us for our prosperity and freedom. So did the Bolsheviks.

So why doesn't the whole world hate Switzerland, or any number of properous and free Western European nations? I'm sorry, but I find it hard to believe that anyone, be it Bin Laden or a "Neo Nazi" bogeyman, sits around saying, "God damn it. Those Americans all have cars and stereos, and get to vote in national elections. Let's kill them!" As Pat Buchanan said, "they hate us for our freedom" is a good explanation to teach elementary school kids to hate "the bad guys," but it's really rather wanting for anyone with minimal critical thinking skills.

See the excerpts posted above that document all of that at some length.Its becoming obvious to me that this hatred of the United States that is so pervasive in Europe today did not simply appear out of the blue because we invaded Iraq. If that were the case, then I would not be seeing so much evidence of it long before Bush came to power.

So why is it that today US-French and US-German relations are at their lowest point in postwar history?

Dan Dare: Surely you are not suggesting that Boas and Marcuse were European? Adorno as well?

FadeTheButcherOf course they were. So were Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.


So are we to take it that the subversive beliefs of Boas, Adorno, Marcuse, Horkheim, and Marx were due to their being born in Germany rather than being Jews? I suppose it's just a coincidence that these "Germans" share attitudes in common with "Russians" like Trotsky, Kamenev, and Sverdlov, "Austrians" like Adler, and "Hungarians" like Kuhn (and, "Americans" like Dershowitz, Foxman, Bronfman, Lantos, and Schwartz).

AntiYuppie: So then the subversive attitudes of Boas, Adorno, Marcuse, Horkheim, and Marx were due to their being born in Germany rather than being Jews? I suppose it's just a coincidence that these "Germans" share attitudes in common with "Russians" like Trotsky, Kamenev, and Sverdlov, "Austrians" like Adler, and "Hungarians" like Kuhn.

Yes. It should be added that not only were these Jews, but that most of them were either chased from Europe, or were liquidated there.
Fade, why did America readily accept these refugees and open up the doors of its academic institutions to them?

- "So are we to take it that the subversive beliefs of Boas, Adorno, Marcuse, Horkheim, and Marx were due to their being born in Germany rather than being Jews?"


A minor nitpick: Theodor Adorno was only biologically half-Jewish.

"Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund-Adorno was born in Frankfurt in 1903 into a wealthy, highly-cultivated, liberal-bourgeois family. His father was an assimilated Jewish wine merchant who had converted to Protestantism, and his mother was the Catholic daughter of a Corsican-French army officer and a German-born singer."

http://www2.rz.hu-berlin.de/fpm/texte/harker3.htm


Petr

Great Britain did more to crush the US in its cradle (i.e. War of 1812) than did France. Does this make Britain a "lifelong enemy?"
France was for over a century the number one enemy of colonial Americans. The French were allied with the Indian savages that existed along our frontiers and would regularly send the Indians into the colonies to massacare and terrorize settlers. On the contrary, enmity between the British and Americans was intense for just a few short years but shortly subsided thereafter. The Monroe Doctrine, which was enforced by the Royal Navy for years, was a British idea and many Americans desired to intervene in the Napoleonic Wars on the side of Britain. The use of terrorism by the French in the Seven Years' War and other conflicts was largely not repeated by the British against Americans in the American Revolution and the War of 1812. So no, Britain has not traditionally been a lifelong enemy of the United States. The enmity between France and Americans goes well back into the colonial era, persists throughout the 19th century, subsides in the early 20th century somewhat, and reappears after the First World War.

"The Deerfield Massacare was merely an episode in what the colonists would collectively refer to as the French Wars -- a series of brutal conflicts that eventually came to be known as the French and Indian Wars. There were four of them in all -- King William's War (1689 to 1697), Queen Anne's War (1702 to 1713), King George's War (1744 to 1748), and the eponymous one known as the French and Indian War (1754 to 1760). Each was part of a larger imperial struggle between Britain and France, with American colonists taking the brunt of the violence. . .

What the French lacked in population, however, they tried to compensate for in good tribal relations. Indians formed alliances with both French and British colonists, but a clearly majority of those who fought in the French and Indian Wars did so on the side of the French. This gave France a distinct advantage in the guerrilla combat of an untamed continent. It also forced tremendous suffering upon British colonists who were trying to create a new life in the New World. Indians aligned with the French were responsible for a vast majority of raids and massacares against North American settlers, the British did not have entirely clean hands when it came to Indian atrocities, but their crimes simply did not compare with what France was willing to tolerate in its name. The French were far more effective at exploiting and directing Indian violence.

From this bloodshed, it is possible to glean the beginnings of an American national identity forged in opposition to the constant threat from New France. As the distinguished twentieth-century historian Crane Brinton observered in the late 1960s: "For New Englanders and New Yorkers the existence of a French menace on their northern borders was for years a very real thing, more real than any acute danger from a foreign power was to seem to Americans until the Russians acquired their own atomic bomb." The French and Indian Wars were not merely a series of British efforts to defeat an imperial adversary -- they were a set of joint American efforts to defend against a common foe. The famously fractious colonists demonstrated an ability to band together during times of trouble. During Queen Anne's War, as French and Indian raiders plundered Deerfield, Connecticut sent troops into Massachusetts. Such cooperation became a routine practice during the eighteenth century and played a crucial role in persuading the colonists that they shared common interests.

Although these early Americans did not create a formal union until later in the century, they began to think about it seriously for the first time during the French and Indian Wars. At the Albany Congress of 1754, when representatives from seven colonies gathered to discuss increased cooperation, Benjamin Franklin observed that their "disunited state" actually encouraged French aggression. The French, said Franklin, "presume that they may act with impunity . . . kill, seize, and imprison our traders, and confiscate at pleasure (as they have done for several years past), murder and scalp our farmers, with their wives and children, and taken an easy possession of such parts of the British territory as they find most convenient for them.

Franklin issued his warnings at the dawn of the fourth, final, and most decisive French and Indian War. While the first three had erupted in Europe before making their way to America, this new war would be different. Starting in the New World, it quickly expanded into a global conflict. It was triggered by a young Virginian who unwittingly put his name to a document that had him admitting to a monstrous act in the forests of Pennsylvania. His name was George Washington."

US-French relations were never as close as with Britain, but there was never open enmity either. Even under Clinton US-French relations were quite good.
Sure there was. There was enormous hostility to France in the colonial era during the French and Indian Wars, shortly thereafter during the Napoleonic Wars, again during the Civil War when France subsidized the Confederacy and violated the Monroe Doctrine by intervening in Mexico, during the Paris Peace Talks that produced the Versailles Treaty, during World War II between Roosevelt and de Gaulle, during the Cold War when the French withdrew from the NATO military command, and most recently during the first Gulf War. France has literally been seething with hostility to the United States going back to the aftermath of World War 2. British-American relations have traditionally never been so hostile.

So why doesn't the whole world hate Switzerland, or any number of properous and free Western European nations?
Lets focus specifically on the case of France. The French have long denigrated America on account of its "crude materialistic culture" which they have always found to be so obviously inferior to their own. Similarly, they also long denigrated our political system on account of the relative freedom Americans enjoy, as opposed to the French model, which has traditionally been far more statist.

I think you are engaging in projection here. You are searching for a rational explanation for what is at bottom an irrational phenomena, a prejudice. So of course it does not make sense. Sure. Switzerland, like the United States, is a wealthy and relatively free country. But so what? There are obviously Jews who do not set out destroy white people each and every day. Does that stop people like Linder from calling for the mass murder of ALL Jews? No, it does not.

I'm sorry, but I find it hard to believe that anyone, be it Bin Laden or a "Neo Nazi" bogeyman, sits around saying, "God damn it. Those Americans all have cars and stereos, and get to vote in national elections. Let's kill them!"
Take Jacques Chirac for example. When a mob of vandals attacked a McDonald's restaurant in southern France in 1999, Chirac applauded. There are literally people who have the living shit out of the bourgeoisie because they are the bourgeoisie. There are people who can get that worked up over things like McDonald's restaurants, CDs that no one forces them to buy, and films that no one forces them to see. You know very well that such people exist too. They used to post here all the time. Many still do.

As Pat Buchanan said, "they hate us for our freedom" is a good explanation to teach elementary school kids to hate "the bad guys," but it's really rather wanting for anyone with minimal critical thinking skills.
Hating the bourgeoisie and hating capitalism as a way of life goes back centuries.

So why is it that today US-French and US-German relations are at their lowest point in postwar history?
They have never been all that great. We had all sorts of problems with de Gaulle and Willy Brandt, to say nothing of Mitterand who openly declared that the U.S. was the enemy of France.

So are we to take it that the subversive beliefs of Boas, Adorno, Marcuse, Horkheim, and Marx were due to their being born in Germany rather than being Jews?
Degler explains in his book that Boas was a product of radical leftist German culture. His ideas actually come from one of his German teachers. I can't remember the name off the top of my head but it should be posted elsewhere.

I suppose it's just a coincidence that these "Germans" share attitudes in common with "Russians" like Trotsky, Kamenev, and Sverdlov, "Austrians" like Adler, and "Hungarians" like Kuhn (and, "Americans" like Dershowitz, Foxman, Bronfman, Lantos, and Schwartz).
There are millions of gentiles who also share the same views.

I hate what America has become. I'm with Buchanan, who opens his _Death of the West_ with the sentiment that to love one's country, one's country must be lovely, and that America today is "their country--not ours...not worth living in and not worth fighting for."

France was for over a century the number one enemy of colonial Americans. The French were allied with the Indian savages that existed along our frontiers and would regularly send the Indians into the colonies to massacare and terrorize settlers.

The French and Indian wars were a war between France and Britain. At the time, the French (rightly) saw US settlers as Englishmen living abroad, not as part of an incipient nation. So yes, Franco-English ill will does go back centuries.

Lets focus specifically on the case of France. The French have long denigrated America on account of its "crude materialistic culture" which they have always found to be so obviously inferior to their own. Similarly, they also long denigrated our political system on account of the relative freedom Americans enjoy, as opposed to the French model, which has traditionally been far more statist.

Most Americans with any education and culture dislike crude materialism, just as any sincerely religious person (or even many who are not particularly religious) are disgusted by the commercialization of Christmas.

I think you are engaging in projection here. You are searching for a rational explanation for what is at bottom an irrational phenomena, a prejudice. So of course it does not make sense. Sure. Switzerland, like the United States, is a wealthy and relatively free country. But so what? There are obviously Jews who do not set out destroy white people each and every day. Does that stop people like Linder from calling for the mass murder of ALL Jews? No, it does not.

I don't follow your analogy with Linder. If Islamists and Neo-Nazis hated countries for their "prosperity and freedom" they would hate Switzerland. They don't. That implies that there must be some reason for their hatred for the US other than "prosperity and freedom," doesn't it?


Take Jacques Chirac for example. When a mob of vandals attacked a McDonald's restaurant in southern France in 1999, Chirac applauded. There are literally people who have the living shit out of the bourgeoisie because they are the bourgeoisie. There are people who can get that worked up over things like McDonald's restaurants, CDs that no one forces them to buy, and films that no one forces them to see. You know very well that such people exist too. They used to post here all the time. Many still do.

Personally, I wouldn't mind it if there were no McDonald's in America or anywhere else on Earth.


Hating the bourgeoisie and hating capitalism as a way of life goes back centuries.

Yes, but once again, bin Laden's mantra is not "working men of the world unite," nor does he target many other capitalist, bourgeois nations for destruction.


Degler explains in his book that Boas was a product of radical leftist German culture. His ideas actually come from one of his German teachers. I can't remember the name off the top of my head but it should be posted elsewhere.

Was he an ethnic German? Chances are that Boas distorted the teachings of his master in the same way that Marx distorted the teachings of Hegel (who as an old-school Prussian would have spun in his grave if he had known that his thought were adapted for some radical, anti-national cause).


There are millions of gentiles who also share the same [Marxist] views.

Indeed. There are also plenty of white murderers, rapists, and robbers, but that does not make negro crime any less real or disproportionate.

"The United States of America, according to the universal agreement of all travellers, is the magnificent land of the future. It has the great task of throwing aside all outworn ideas which date from before its foundation. It can proceed with youthful strength to set up the new idea of the racial State, such as some awakened Americans have already apprehended like Grant and Stoddard. They saw the necessity for the expulsion and resettlement of the blacks and the yellow men, the handing over of East Asiatic possessions to Japan, the working toward a black colonization in Central Africa and the resettlement of Jews to a region where this entire group can find a place (443)." -- Alfred Rosenberg (Hitler's Minister of the Occupied Eastern Territories), _The Myth of the Twentieth Century_, 1937.

The French and Indian wars were a war between France and Britain. At the time, the French (rightly) saw US settlers as Englishmen living abroad, not as part of an incipient nation. So yes, Franco-English ill will does go back centuries.
Colonial Americans saw things differently. To colonial Americans, the French and their Indian allies were a menace to be reckoned with in their own right. They were standing in the way of American expansion into Louisiana and the Ohio river valley. As the author points out, it was during the French and Indian Wars that Americans first began to articulate a common national identity. Kaufmann discusses the matter as well in his book The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America.

"Protestant identity also fed off a tradition of anti-Catholicism that was well established in Britain by the early eighteenth century, forged as it was through protracted warfare with France and fanned by a stream of popular pamphlet literature (Colley 1992: 40-42). In the American colonies, the French and Indian War of 1754-1763 helped to ignite these inherited British anti-Catholic sensibilities. The treatment of French-speaking, Catholic, Acadian refugees illustrates the degree to which an exclusive Anglo-Protestant consciousness operated in this period just prior to independence, for "at not time were the Acadian exiles given more than grudging acceptance" (Dormon 1983: 16-17)."

Most Americans with any education and culture dislike crude materialism, just as any sincerely religious person (or even many who are not particularly religious) are disgusted by the commercialization of Christmas.
I have no sympathy for crude materialism either and I consider that to be a valid criticism of the United States. But crude materialism has its counterpart in crude romanticism, which falls at the other extreme. Quite often, crude romanticism can degenerate into irrationality and apologia for gross immorality. Utopian anti-bourgeoisie ideologies have long lionized all sorts of saviors -- the working class, the Third World, the cult of the Duce etc. Disaster has struck each and every time. But honestly, what is more ridiculous that to sit around and listen to a bunch of European atheists talking about soullessness or a bunch of Communists talking about rootlessness? Whatever their faults, Americans are amongst the most religious people on earth.

I don't follow your analogy with Linder.
Linder singles out and demonizes the Jews for engaging in the same activity that gentiles engage in.

If Islamists and Neo-Nazis hated countries for their "prosperity and freedom" they would hate Switzerland. They don't. That implies that there must be some reason for their hatred for the US other than "prosperity and freedom," doesn't it?
This is precisely what I pointed out before. You are presupposing that people have reasons to justify their behavior in the first place, that such people are rational actors, that they have any regard whatsoever for rationality. But is this actually the case? The very same sort of "crude materialistic" consumer culture that can be found in the United States today can be found in many other countries: Japan, Canada, Britain, Germany, France etc. Such societies exist today for socioeconomic reasons -- highly industrialized nations have overproductive economies which logically result in cultures that encourage mass consumption. There are fast food restaurants everywhere in Canada. I saw them when I was there. But Canada is not singled out and loathed for being such a consumer society, the way the United States often is. And lets be perfectly honest here.

This critique of the United States that is so pervasive abroad has often has little to do with American foreign policy. The U.S. often finds itself damned if it does and damned if it doesn't. Refuse to trade with Iraq and Americans are to blame for the humanitarian catastrophe under the rule of Saddam. Intervene in Iraq and Americans are belligerent evil imperialists out to rule the world. Don't intervene in the Balkans and Americans are turning a blind eye to genocide. Intervene in the Balkans and Americans are mass murderers and persecutors of Serbs. Refuse to trade with Castro and America is to blame from Cuban poverty. Intervene in Cuba and Americans are denying Cubans self-determination. The existence of such attitudes alone should arouse suspicion that such criticism is in anyway motivated by sincere opposition to U.S. foreign policy. Then there is the fact that countries like France criticize the U.S. for sending troops to Iraq yet France itself has troops in the Ivory Coast right now. And where is the outpouring of criticism? If imperialism is indeed so wrong, then why does it seem to be excusable when certain nations engage it? What about Saddam Hussein? Did he not attack Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Israel? Yet all of that can easily be brushed aside, just like concern for human life matters in some cases but not in others. None of this makes any sense until one realizes that it is anti-Americanism that is motivating much of this criticism. And what is anti-Americanism?

"This book in no way seeks to suggest that all criticism of America constitutes anti-Americanism or is invalid. One reason why it is important to examine the history of this debate is to see what can be learned about the real defects of the United States, as well as ways to communicate its virtues better. Similarly, those governments, classes, groups, ideologies, and individuals who have held anti-American views can be better understood by investigating the reasons for these attitudes.

In this book we have carefully defined anti-Americanism as being limited to having one or more of the following characteristics:


An antagonism to the United States that is systemic, seeing it as completely and inevitably evil.
A view that greatly exaggerates America's shortcomings.
The deliberate misrepresentation of the nature or policies of the United States for political purposes.
A misrepresentation of American society, policies, or goals which falsely portrays them as ridiculous or malevolent.
Personally, I wouldn't mind it if there were no McDonald's in America or anywhere else on Earth.
I don't like McDonald's either but no one forces me to eat there. I am also convinced that McDonald's is benign compared to the sort of people who would take away my individual rights and throw my family in a concentration camp.

Yes, but once again, bin Laden's mantra is not "working men of the world unite," nor does he target many other capitalist, bourgeois nations for destruction.
He uses precisely the same rhetoric and precisely the same critique that the Marxists used for years. The Nazis were literally indistinguishable from the Bolsheviks in this respect. So its quite wrong to say that such people hate Americans because of this or because of that. There is no rational explanation for it. They simply hate Americans because they are Americans and always have. Its prejudice that is at work here. Stereotypes. Scapegoating. Nothing but pure bigotry.

Was he an ethnic German? Chances are that Boas distorted the teachings of his master in the same way that Marx distorted the teachings of Hegel (who as an old-school Prussian would have spun in his grave if he had known that his thought were adapted for some radical, anti-national cause).
Yes. There has been throughout modern history a radical German leftist culture. Many of these people immigrated to the United States after the failure of the Revolution of 1848 in Germany. More on that here:

"The European Revolutions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution) of 1848 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1848), in some countries known as the Spring of Nations, were the bloody (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence) consequences of a variety of changes that had been taking place in Europe in the first half of the 19th century (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19th_century). In politics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics), both bourgeois (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourgeois) reformers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reformer) and radical politicians (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_politician) were seeking change in their nations' governments. In society (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society), technological (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological) change was creating new ways of life for the working classes, a popular press extended political awareness, and new values and ideas such as nationalism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationalism) and socialism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism) began to spring up. The tinder (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinder) that lit the fire was a series of economic downturns (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_downturn) and crop failures (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Crop_failure&action=edit) that left many of the poor starving (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starving).
The result was a wave of revolution sweeping across Europe and raising hopes of liberal reform as far away as Brazil (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil), where the rhetoric surrounding the Praieira revolt (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praieira_revolt) took many cues from European events, as did its thorough repression. Only the United Kingdom (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom) and Russia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia) were missing: Russia had not yet a real bourgeois or proletarian class to initiate a revolution. In the United Kingdom, the middle classes had been pacified by general enfranchisement in the Reform Act of 1832 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_Act_1832), with the consequent agitations, violence, and petitions of the Chartist movement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartism) that came to a head with the petition to Parliament of 1848. The repeal of the protectionist agricultural tariffs called the "Corn Laws (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_Laws)" in 1846 had defused some proletarian fervor. The United States (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States) remained profoundly isolated, increasingly involved in its own expansion and social ills; there, after a summer of European revolutions, the Free Soil Party (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Soil_Party) in the November presidential election sufficed only to divide Democrats and bring the apolitical slave-holding career soldier General Zachary Taylor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zachary_Taylor) into office.

Although the revolutions were put down quickly, in their span there was horrific violence on all sides. Thousands were killed.

Although the immediate effects of the revolutions were short-term, there were lasting legacies."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_of_1848

Boas was really no different in this respect. Thousands of German immigrants played a decisive role in radicalizing the antislavery movement in the Midwest during the 1850s. The hardcore racial egalitarians were disproportionately German immigrants at the time. I recall reading about this several years ago during my research into the causes of the War Between the States.

Indeed. There are also plenty of white murderers, rapists, and robbers, but that does not make negro crime any less real or disproportionate.
Can we say that Swedes are disproportionately radical leftists? Gunnar Myrdal was one of the earliest bitter European critics of American race relations.

- "But honestly, what is more ridiculous that to sit around and listen to a bunch of European atheists talking about soullessness or a bunch of Communists talking about rootlessness? "


Ain't that a fact.


Petr

He uses precisely the same rhetoric and precisely the same critique that the Marxists used for years. The Nazis were literally indistinguishable from the Bolsheviks in this respect. So its quite wrong to say that such people hate Americans because of this or because of that. There is no rational explanation for it. They simply hate Americans because they are Americans and always have. Its prejudice that is at work here. Stereotypes. Scapegoating. Nothing but pure bigotry.

I've noticed a running theme when it comes to your position on "hating America." Basically, you're saying that the America-haters are somehow invalid or illegitimate because they criticize the United States for the same things that other countries do as well (while ignoring or excusing the behaviors of the other countries). Maybe so, but you have to admit that the United States is pretty much at the top of the heap with these behaviors in a "unipolar" world, and therefore makes a good target.

In cases where it's Americans doing the "America-hating," it's important to keep in mind that these Americans may be holding their own to a higher standard because they expect more from their own, and they know what America's true potential is (a potential it falls woefully short of). This is the same reason why some have observed that "White Nationalists" are hardest on Whites themselves--that's because they care more about their kindred Whites and thus there are stricter expectations. After all, we expect Blacks to act, well, like Blacks, so we sort of excuse Blacks for that--but a White acting like a Black is unacceptable. It's all about keeping your own house clean, so naturally you're not going to criticize other people's houses as much as you do your own since you're obviously going to apply a higher standard. You expect more from yourself than you do others. America-hatred by Americans is one of the highest forms of patriotism, and an expression of the highest faith in American potential, from this perspective.

At a higher level, though, why does one always have to have "principled" positions that one applies equally in all cases and to all places? Where's this universalism and rationalism coming from--echoes of your Rand days? What's wrong with, as you put it, "prejudice...stereotypes...scapegoating...pure bigotry?" Can't you see that if you had your way here, you'd end up sanitizing half of what makes us human? These things you assign negative weight to actually are elements of the universe worth preserving. These elements persist for a reason--they have value and serve a purpose among human beings. I faintly recall Dostoievsky's _Notes from Underground_ here; we need to preserve that dissonant element, that "swerve" that keeps everything human from becoming rigid and static and mathematical...and "perfect."

I've noticed a running theme when it comes to your position on "hating America."
I suppose you can say that. It has been my experience that these people tend to be first and foremost motivated by anti-Americanism or some sort of other irrational prejudice. That is why their criticism of America is almost always of the same peculiar sort -- a systemic, exaggerated, politically motivated misrepresenation of American life. Such people should not be taken seriously by Americans. Their criticism lacks any valid rational basis.

Basically, you're saying that the America-haters are somehow invalid or illegitimate because they criticize the United States for the same things that other countries do as well (while ignoring or excusing the behaviors of the other countries).
I am saying that it has been my experience that these people are often motivated by some prejudice or hostility that lacks any rational basis. Its their anti-American prejudice that guides their critique of the United States, although they do occassionally bring in 'reasons' to justify it after fact. These reasons are not the cause of the prejudice, however. On the contrary, they are simply attempts to rationalize this particular attitude which is often derived from stereotypes or fantasy ideology. That is why upon closer inspection these reasons are quite easily dispensed with as superfluous.

Maybe so, but you have to admit that the United States is pretty much at the top of the heap with these behaviors in a "unipolar" world, and therefore makes a good target.
I am referring to the sort of people who express their outrage at American imperialism yet conveniently look the other way when other nations or non-Americans are engaged in it. These are the sort of people who are outraged by the American attack on Iraq but are the first to dismiss the brutal expansionism of the Nazis as nothing more than 'realpolitik'. The basis of their criticism is prejudice, not priniciple.

In cases where it's Americans doing the "America-hating," it's important to keep in mind that these Americans may be holding their own to a higher standard because they expect more from their own, and they know what America's true potential is (a potential it falls woefully short of).
If that were truly the case, then it would not be that hard to discern whether or not such people do indeed hold their own countrymen to a higher standard because they expect more 'their own'. But it has been my experience that these people quite often do not even identify with the United States in the first place. For instance, as you pointed out yourself, America is no longer your country. At least you will admit to it. We will take that into consideration when you criticize the United States.

This is the same reason why some have observed that "White Nationalists" are hardest on Whites themselves--that's because they care more about their kindred Whites and thus there are stricter expectations.
It has been my experience that many White Nationalists have more regard for Nazi Germany and its welfare than they do for their own country. As far as I am concerned, people like that are traitors. I also think that White Nationalism is something of a stripped down version of Nazism (e.g., 14/88). Many people who call themselves White Nationalists are obviously not of that point of view. Many of these people are concerned patriots who are worried about the welfare of their country. Its usually quite easy to distinguish such people from the rest. On the other hand, there are also many people simply engaging in fantasy ideology.

After all, we expect Blacks to act, well, like Blacks, so we sort of excuse Blacks for that--but a White acting like a Black is unacceptable.
Weren't you the guy citing Alex Linder in the other thread? Alex Linder calls for the mass murder of millions of people on account of their ethnicity. Now such things wouldn't surprise me if I was a savage in black Africa with a bone through my nose. But I expect civilized men and women to adhere to a higher standard. And just what is your objection to the behavior of blacks anyway? Were you not just the other day yearning for the white man to unleash his, as you put it, "inner barbarian."

It's all about keeping your own house clean, so naturally you're not going to criticize other people's houses as much as you do your own since you're obviously going to apply a higher standard.
I was under the impression that you were tired of such standards. Those are holding us back, right? Aren't you tired of hearing about morality, PaleoconAvatar? Or has this changed?

You expect more from yourself than you do others.
It doesn't surprise me when a Negro pulls up next to me at a stoplight with his radio blasting "muthafucka, muthafucka, muthafucka, blast his bitch ass." Ditto for whiggers. But I also see people like NeoNietzsche saying they don't have any real objection to the rape of women. Then we have you saying you are tired of hearing about morality.

America-hatred by Americans is one of the highest forms of patriotism, and an expression of the highest faith in American potential, from this perspective.
I don't see the patriotism of people who openly declare that America is no longer their country, much less those who yearn for the victories of our enemies when we are engaged in war. That's not patriotism at all.

At a higher level, though, why does one always have to have "principled" positions that one applies equally in all cases and to all places?
Its generally a good idea to be motivated and guided by some set of core principles or values which one use as a basis to make judgments. This is necessary to prevent oneself from being consumed by irrationality.

Where's this universalism and rationalism coming from--echoes of your Rand days?
I suppose you can say that my rationalism and my respect for logical argument and civilized debate stems from my residual Objectivism. But no, I am not a universalist. I am a racial communitarian.

What's wrong with, as you put it, "prejudice...stereotypes...scapegoating...pure bigotry?"
They are irrational because they lack any substantiated basis. Thus those of us who have some respect for rationality object to such things.

Can't you see that if you had your way here, you'd end up sanitizing half of what makes us human?
I am not a savage.

These elements persist for a reason--they have value and serve a purpose among human beings.
Now you are contradicting yourself. Irrationality has a rational basis.

I faintly recall Dostoievsky's _Notes from Underground_ here; we need to preserve that dissonant element, that "swerve" that keeps everything human from becoming rigid and static and mathematical...and "perfect."
That's okay. I will let you commune with your inner Negro. I think I will pass. :p

Weren't you the guy citing Alex Linder in the other thread? Alex Linder calls for the mass murder of millions of people on account of their ethnicity.

Maybe you should get out a dictionary and look up the words "rhetoric" and "hyperbole." :D


-----

I suppose you can say that. It has been my experience that these people tend to be first and foremost motivated by anti-Americanism or some sort of other irrational prejudice. That is why their criticism of America is almost always of the same peculiar sort -- a systemic, exaggerated, politically motivated misrepresenation of American life. Such people should not be taken seriously by Americans. Their criticism lacks any valid rational basis.

I can see why you'd say this. You're obviously capable of seeing through an argument to get at the kernel of what a particular person is after. That's a valuable skill, but you seem to take a dim view of what this ability allows you to see. After all, are you really surprised by it all? What you call a "misrepresentation," for example, is just another person's perception of reality. Of course that representation is going to be "politically motivated" and driven by non-rational elements, sometimes consciously, sometimes not.

The pretense of "rationality" is really just a propaganda tool for making one's desires appear more legitimate and palatable beyond the fact that "it's a personal preference." In some ways it lets people off the hook, they don't have to take responsibility for their desires and they can distance themselves from it. They can say, "it's not me speaking here, it's reality, look, the numbers are right here on this printout..." I'm sure you do the same thing. You've got rationality and you cite your sources, but it's to justify your own "baser" desires...in this case, you couldn't overcome your attachment to convention, maybe your societal upbringing, maybe the religious elements still floating around in the air in America, and you turned your back on what you call "Nazism." [Although the elements involved in "Nazism" run far deeper than what manifested in Germany from 1933-45...they existed long before Hitler and they'll exist as an archetype in the Western "Shadow" long afterward]. You briefly felt the allure of the catalogue of "evils" you've mentioned (pessimism, irrationality, and so on). Something in your original studies from Spengler to Foucault that you cite appealed to you. You basically admit that it didn't "emotionally" sit right with you after a while, so now you have found a massive constellation of "American" sources you can draw upon. I am glad that like water, you've sought your own level. May you find happiness.

I am saying that it has been my experience that these people are often motivated by some prejudice or hostility that lacks any rational basis. Its their anti-American prejudice that guides their critique of the United States, although they do occassionally bring in 'reasons' to justify it after fact. These reasons are not the cause of the prejudice, however. On the contrary, they are simply attempts to rationalize this particular attitude which is often derived from stereotypes or fantasy ideology. That is why upon closer inspection these reasons are quite easily dispensed with as superfluous.

Everyone looks for things that support their case (or desires). You've decided that the reasons don't meet up with your measuring stick, so you've dispensed with them. Someone else coming across those reasons might find them persuasive or life-changing. I say let a thousand flowers bloom.

I am referring to the sort of people who express their outrage at American imperialism yet conveniently look the other way when other nations or non-Americans are engaged in it. These are the sort of people who are outraged by the American attack on Iraq but are the first to dismiss the brutal expansionism of the Nazis as nothing more than 'realpolitik'. The basis of their criticism is prejudice, not priniciple.

For some people, you're probably right, whether they know it or not, they have "double-standards." What's wrong with defending the things you love, and attacking the things you don't, no-holds-barred?

If that were truly the case, then it would not be that hard to discern whether or not such people do indeed hold their own countrymen to a higher standard because they expect more 'their own'. But it has been my experience that these people quite often do not even identify with the United States in the first place. For instance, as you pointed out yourself, America is no longer your country. At least you will admit to it. We will take that into consideration when you criticize the United States.

This attitude toward the U.S. is common in paleoconservative circles and White Nationalist circles, basically it's there in varying degrees outside of neo-condom. It involves recognizing that America right here and right now in 2004 simply sucks. Some want to go to back to an America of an earlier age as their model and their remedy for this, while others want to just burn the whole thing to the ground and start afresh in the future.

It has been my experience that many White Nationalists have more regard for Nazi Germany and its welfare than they do for their own country. As far as I am concerned, people like that are traitors. I also think that White Nationalism is something of a stripped down version of Nazism (e.g., 14/88). Many people who call themselves White Nationalists are obviously not of that point of view. Many of these people are concerned patriots who are worried about the welfare of their country. Its usually quite easy to distinguish such people from the rest. On the other hand, there are also many people simply engaging in fantasy ideology.

There is a certain sympathy out there for Nazi Germany because they are a recent and dramatic example of a group of Whites who boldly stood up for themselves, mercilessly stuck it to their enemies as they perceived them, and turned the world upside down. It's a sharp contrast with the America of today which is currently having a hot debate over whether we'll give $35 billion or $350 billion to the Asian tsunami victims. And what are these WNs traitors to, exactly? A Constitution that the government doesn't follow anymore? A government that actively supports the export of their jobs overseas while racially-alien laborers are imported to take the remaining jobs that are left here? You know the list of grievances here, and they have a point. If this is treason, let's make the most of it.

Weren't you the guy citing Alex Linder in the other thread? Alex Linder calls for the mass murder of millions of people on account of their ethnicity. Now such things wouldn't surprise me if I was a savage in black Africa with a bone through my nose. But I expect civilized men and women to adhere to a higher standard. And just what is your objection to the behavior of blacks anyway? Were you not just the other day yearning for the white man to unleash his, as you put it, "inner barbarian."

Actually, I don't object to the behavior of Blacks when they keep to themselves with it; I was simply making a comparison between two levels that I felt many people here might be conversant with.

By citing the "inner barbarian" comment, you're making the assumption that I apply "principles" across all times and places. I'm not advocating that whites victimize each other in society--that would lead to the dissolution of the whole group. It's possible to have a dual code, one that applies to the in-group, and the other to the out-group.

I was under the impression that you were tired of such standards. Those are holding us back, right? Aren't you tired of hearing about morality, PaleoconAvatar? Or has this changed?

It seems around here, "morality" is taken to mean some sort of overarching "humaneness" or humanitarianism, where we weep for what the Japanese did to the Chinese in WW2 and so on. That's what I think is foolish handwringing. I'm not interested in people's consciences or what they say is right or wrong based on what the Bible says or what some other code-giving authority reasons. I like to boil things down to interests and power.

It doesn't surprise me when a Negro pulls up next to me at a stoplight with his radio blasting "muthafucka, muthafucka, muthafucka, blast his bitch ass." Ditto for whiggers. But I also see people like NeoNietzsche saying they don't have any real objection to the rape of women. Then we have you saying you are tired of hearing about morality.

We live in an era in which we have to "ride the tiger." Hell, I'll cite Linder again...General Lee lost the War Between the States because he was a gentleman.

I don't see the patriotism of people who openly declare that America is no longer their country, much less those who yearn for the victories of our enemies when we are engaged in war. That's not patriotism at all.

It's more complicated than that. Is "America" the current government? The territorial land? The Constitution? The people living in between the two lines drawn on a map at this very moment? Future generations?

Some would say bin Laden isn't our enemy, he's the enemy of a government that bestrides the world arranging things for the greater glory of the multinational corporations and Tel Aviv. Some would say that White Americans are just as oppressed by the New World Order as were the Serbs who Clinton chose to bomb. Some would say "America" died a long time ago, and is now a caricature of itself, or is an impostor, or has been hijacked. Lots of ways to look at it here, and these perspectives resonate with me more than say, Bill Kristol's.

Its generally a good idea to be motivated and guided by some set of core principles or values which one use as a basis to make judgments. This is necessary to prevent oneself from being consumed by irrationality.

Innocuous statements, but the clincher is in the details...dare I ask what it means to be "consumed by irrationality?"

Now you are contradicting yourself. Irrationality has a rational basis.

As earlier when you referenced my comments on morality, you have to realize that this is a different subject, or at least a different aspect if you go for the whole "interconnectedness of the issues" thing. I'm compartmentalizing my apples and oranges.

That's okay. I will let you commune with your inner Negro. I think I will pass. :p

Your choice. The Negro has a stronger racial consciousness than most Whites, and for that I give him credit.

Your choice. The Negro has a stronger racial consciousness than most Whites, and for that I give him credit.
I am of the view that our civilization must not be worth saving if we are going to dispense with its most cherished principles in order to return to the barbarism you have advocated. Just listen to yourself. You criticize the Negro on account of his immorality, because he commits crimes, for his uncivilized behaviour and for various other reasons. Then you hypocritically hold him up as a model to imitiate. What does that say to the casual observer?

I can see why you'd say this. You're obviously capable of seeing through an argument to get at the kernel of what a particular person is after.
I like to strip away superficialities for I can discern what is truly motivating people. I have more respect for people who just come right out and say they dislike the United States and that they are motivated by this prejudice than the people who pretend otherwise. At least I know who I am dealing with in such cases.

That's a valuable skill, but you seem to take a dim view of what this ability allows you to see. After all, are you really surprised by it all? What you call a "misrepresentation," for example, is just another person's perception of reality.
It has been my experience that many people who are truly motivated by anti-American prejudice dislike going on the record and admitting to that. Of course, there are others who are motivated by genuine social concern and it is usually quite easy to distinguish the latter from the former. It is also entirely possible to systematically misrepresent the positions of others. An example of this sort of irrationality is the straw man line of argument.

Of course that representation is going to be "politically motivated" and driven by non-rational elements, sometimes consciously, sometimes not.
I prefer to dismiss irrational misrepresentations out of hand for they lack any logical basis from which such criticisms can be legitimately made.

The pretense of "rationality" is really just a propaganda tool for making one's desires appear more legitimate and palatable beyond the fact that "it's a personal preference."
You are simply projecting yourself. Perhaps you do not attach much value to rationality. But it hardly follows that when others speak of rationality they are necessarily engaging in a dishonest attempt to rhetorically privilege their own argument in a debate. I consider rationality to be an ideal. That is why I am constantly looking for errors in my own reasoning. Its why I am often guilty of the great crime of "changing my views." All of us are capable of making errors but we can also strive to avoid them and make corrections where necessary.

In some ways it lets people off the hook, they don't have to take responsibility for their desires and they can distance themselves from it. They can say, "it's not me speaking here, it's reality, look, the numbers are right here on this printout..." I'm sure you do the same thing. You've got rationality and you cite your sources, but it's to justify your own "baser" desires...
You seem to be advocating irresponsibility here. You point out that it "in some ways it lets people of the hook." But what standards, values, or principles are you advocating? I am unable to discern any. From what I can tell, you are simply advocating barbarism. For instance, a man may lust after a woman. In a civilized society, such a man is disciplined into adhering to social norms of behavior. He respects certain customs and traditions that are imparted to him by his culture. He recognizes that such a woman has rights and thus it would be immoral to simply rape her. White men generally do not engage in such activity in America. I think that is a good thing too. You obviously seem to be of a different point of view.

in this case, you couldn't overcome your attachment to convention, maybe your societal upbringing, maybe the religious elements still floating around in the air in America, and you turned your back on what you call "Nazism."
I don't want to overcome the things that have made our culture great and worth preserving. On the contrary, I am motivated by what I see as a degeneration of the virtues of our civilization into vices. My purpose is to restore an otherwise workable system that has since become dysfunctional, not to raze it to the ground in order to replace it with something else, or in your case, nothing at all. The Nazis were ultimately consumed by their own radicalism. I don't consider myself to be a radical at all anymore.

[Although the elements involved in "Nazism" run far deeper than what manifested in Germany from 1933-45...they existed long before Hitler and they'll exist as an archetype in the Western "Shadow" long afterward].
Kevin MacDonald has had several interesting things to say about this ideology. For instance, he sees National Socialism as being the mirror image of traditional Judaism. I agree. The Nazis so hated the Jews that they eventually became Jews themselves. Perhaps our contemporaries are so repulsed by the Nazis because Nazism was ultimately so alien to Western culture. That is one reason that I do not see it as a workable vehicle for change in America today.

You briefly felt the allure of the catalogue of "evils" you've mentioned (pessimism, irrationality, and so on).
Its true that I immersed myself for several years in continental European philosophy. I was significantly influenced at the time by the material I was exposing myself to. That is also one of the primary reasons that I roll my eyes now when I hear such people beating their chest about their culture. What is this culture the Nazis talk about and are so proud of? It tends to be a repulsive cocktail of confusion, nihilism, mysticism, romanticism, and irrationality. This wasn't always descriptive of continental philosophy. Continental Europeans have certainly come a long way since Kant and Hegel. But its pretty much been all downhill from there.

Something in your original studies from Spengler to Foucault that you cite appealed to you.
I suppose you can say that what makes continental philosophy so attractive is its aesthetic appeal, especially to otherwise alienated people. Nietzsche was certainly a brilliant stylist. So was Voltaire. But neither Nietzsche or Voltaire really said much of substance. The postmodernists are quite similar. They have sown confusion but that is about it.

You basically admit that it didn't "emotionally" sit right with you after a while, so now you have found a massive constellation of "American" sources you can draw upon. I am glad that like water, you've sought your own level. May you find happiness.
I have only recently begun to explore the Anglo-American philosophical tradition. I found Alasdair MacIntyre's explanation of our moral degeneration into emotivism to be particularly fascinating, as the thought had also occured to me before, although I never spent much time pursuing it.

Everyone looks for things that support their case (or desires). You've decided that the reasons don't meet up with your measuring stick, so you've dispensed with them. Someone else coming across those reasons might find them persuasive or life-changing. I say let a thousand flowers bloom.
This is what is known as emotivism. And what is emotivism?

"Emotivism is the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character.''

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, pp.10-11

MacIntyre believes we are degenerating into a new Dark Age, that we may very well have passed the point of no return. I agree with his assessment.

"It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the more misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age . . . and the epoch in which the Roman Empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. . . . What they set themselves to achieve-often not recognizing fully what they were doing-was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. . . . This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers, they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are not waiting for Godot, but for another-and doubtless very different-St. Benedict."

For some people, you're probably right, whether they know it or not, they have "double-standards." What's wrong with defending the things you love, and attacking the things you don't, no-holds-barred?
I don't see anything necessarily wrong with that. Its lying about it that bothers me.

This attitude toward the U.S. is common in paleoconservative circles and White Nationalist circles, basically it's there in varying degrees outside of neo-condom.
That is precisely the fundamental problem that I have paleoconservatism. It seems that sometimes their hostility to the neoconservatives becomes so virulent that they reject patriotism simply to spite the neocons. They accomplish absolutely nothing in doing this. They alienate themselves from millions of their fellow citizens in the process.

It involves recognizing that America right here and right now in 2004 simply sucks.
I am not the biggest fan of the situation we are in today either. But I recognize that things could be worse and I still have hope that things will get better.

Some want to go to back to an America of an earlier age as their model and their remedy for this, while others want to just burn the whole thing to the ground and start afresh in the future.
There is nothing conservative about this sort of radical impulse to raze all society to the ground. Those who subscribe to such a philosophy have long since left conservatism behind. That is precisely the sort of insanity that led to my ultimate disillusionment with Nazism -- the realization that the Nazis were ultimately about nothing but brutality, exploitation, hatred, and terror.

Some people see the Nazis as some sort of revolutionary movement that would have redeemed Western Civilization from its current decline. I don't see it that way. The Nazis, just like the Bolsheviks, were a symptom of precisely this decay. They were an illustration of just how far we have fallen. They were our precursors, nothing but a common rabble largely devoid of morality, culture, reason, and principle. This fascination with costumes is similar to the sort of crude people who artificially stimulate themselves today with all sorts of drugs.

There is a certain sympathy out there for Nazi Germany because they are a recent and dramatic example of a group of Whites who boldly stood up for themselves, mercilessly stuck it to their enemies as they perceived them, and turned the world upside down.
I don't see the Nazis in that light. They remind me of the primitive Germanic warbands which used to descend on the Roman Empire. The Nazis were simply a bunch of gangsters that set about attacking other nations in order to oppress and exploit their populations. They didn't set about doing this for any higher purpose. They didn't invade the Soviet Union in order to liberate the people that lived there from tyranny and poverty. They were out to destroy and steal for them.

It's a sharp contrast with the America of today which is currently having a hot debate over whether we'll give $35 billion or $350 billion to the Asian tsunami victims. And what are these WNs traitors to, exactly?
It is a sharp contrast. It says a lot about what distinguishes the Nazis from the Western democracies. The people who live in the West are generally good people. They don't like to see other people suffer. They don't believe in brutality for the sake of brutality, as the fascists did. Consider just how kind our people are. They would give millions of dollars to total strangers of another race or ethnicity in order to help them rebuild their lives after they suffered a catastrophe. Search through all of human history and see if you can find similar examples. You certainly won't find that many. That is just one reason why our right to self-preservation is justified.

A Constitution that the government doesn't follow anymore?
How is the government not following the Constitution?

A government that actively supports the export of their jobs overseas while racially-alien laborers are imported to take the remaining jobs that are left here?
I am confident that the gradual decline of U.S. global power will eventually put an end to this.

You know the list of grievances here, and they have a point. If this is treason, let's make the most of it.
I don't think treason is the right message that we want to send to our contemporaries. But for some people, its not making racialism a success that matters.

Actually, I don't object to the behavior of Blacks when they keep to themselves with it; I was simply making a comparison between two levels that I felt many people here might be conversant with.
You don't find such behavior to be morally objectionable?

By citing the "inner barbarian" comment, you're making the assumption that I apply "principles" across all times and places.
If you do not subscribe to any morals or principles, then you can always let us know at any time.

I'm not advocating that whites victimize each other in society--that would lead to the dissolution of the whole group.
You have yet to explain why anyone should care about their race. I believe that I have a moral obligation to future generations to do my best to prevent them from living in the sort of society they will soon inherit.

It's possible to have a dual code, one that applies to the in-group, and the other to the out-group.
I agree. But it does not necessarily follow that I believe we should brutalize other races, that we should have no respect for human life.

It seems around here, "morality" is taken to mean some sort of overarching "humaneness" or humanitarianism, where we weep for what the Japanese did to the Chinese in WW2 and so on.
I suppose you can say that most people in our country believe that morality entails some respect for the dignity of human life. We recognize that others have rights and that it would be immoral to simply brutalize them. Similarly, we morally condemn what the Japanese did to the Chinese in WW2 on the basis of such values.

That's what I think is foolish handwringing.
So its foolish to value human life?

I'm not interested in people's consciences or what they say is right or wrong based on what the Bible says or what some other code-giving authority reasons.
Alright.

I like to boil things down to interests and power.
So you want to live in a world governed by naked interest and power now? Would you like to discuss what such a world was once like?

We live in an era in which we have to "ride the tiger." Hell, I'll cite Linder again...General Lee lost the War Between the States because he was a gentleman.
General Lee did adhere to old fashioned concepts like morality and honor. Perhaps that put him at a decisive advantage with those who had no regard for such principles. I still think General Lee is a better representation of the sort of racialism that I adhere to, not Adolf Hitler, still less his jackal Mussolini.

It's more complicated than that. Is "America" the current government?
A state is not a nation.

The territorial land? The Constitution? The people living in between the two lines drawn on a map at this very moment? Future generations?
Sure.

Some would say bin Laden isn't our enemy, he's the enemy of a government that bestrides the world arranging things for the greater glory of the multinational corporations and Tel Aviv. Some would say that White Americans are just as oppressed by the New World Order as were the Serbs who Clinton chose to bomb. Some would say "America" died a long time ago, and is now a caricature of itself, or is an impostor, or has been hijacked. Lots of ways to look at it here, and these perspectives resonate with me more than say, Bill Kristol's.
And most Americans are going to listen to someone like Bill Kristol say that such people are traitors and think to themselves, "you know, he's right."

Innocuous statements, but the clincher is in the details...dare I ask what it means to be "consumed by irrationality?"
To be "consumed by irrationality" means to have little or no regard whatsoever for any substantial basis upon which can make assertions. For instance, I suppose you could say that someone who says that Marvin the Martian is the President of the United States is "consumed by irrationality" when such a person has no proof to that effect much less any concern for providing evidence to justify one's own position.

As earlier when you referenced my comments on morality, you have to realize that this is a different subject, or at least a different aspect if you go for the whole "interconnectedness of the issues" thing. I'm compartmentalizing my apples and oranges.
This sounds like arbitrariness to me.

I am of the view that our civilization must not be worth saving if we are going to dispense with its most cherished principles in order to return to the barbarism you have advocated.

Suppose Whites were to go extinct as a result of their altruism and sense of "fair play." What good were these principles if no one is left around to respect or uphold them? Principles, values, whatever you want to call them, are only useful to the extent that they keep you alive, keep your group intact, and enhance its power. If "principles" start to get in the way of these goals, then they've outlived their usefulness.

Just listen to yourself. You criticize the Negro on account of his immorality, because he commits crimes, for his uncivilized behaviour and for various other reasons. Then you hypocritically hold him up as a model to imitiate. What does that say to the casual observer?

That's actually one of my favorite manuevers, because the general public expects someone like me to never offer the Negro a compliment. When I do make a positive observation about Negroes, it throws observers off balance, and possibly makes their minds more receptive to my seed. In fact, here's another one: the Jews are by far the best at ethnocentrism, and I am forced to give them credit for that. Whites could learn a lot about self-preservation from them.

It has been my experience that many people who are truly motivated by anti-American prejudice dislike going on the record and admitting to that. Of course, there are others who are motivated by genuine social concern and it is usually quite easy to distinguish the latter from the former. It is also entirely possible to systematically misrepresent the positions of others. An example of this sort of irrationality is the straw man line of argument.

I'm sure some "anti-Americans" like the veneer of "objectivity" that's in vogue, and that's why they like to play the "disinterested observer" routine. Then I'm sure on the other side you find fiery characters who'd come right out and say "Damn straight I hate Americans as Americans." I don't consider myself anti-American, since I am one myself, after all. And I think America/Americans are redeemable, so I don't hold a permanent grudge against them just because of the fact I don't like the status quo. To paraphrase Rumsfeld, this is the country we've got.

You are simply projecting yourself. Perhaps you do not attach much value to rationality. But it hardly follows that when others speak of rationality they are necessarily engaging in a dishonest attempt to rhetorically privilege their own argument in a debate. I consider rationality to be an ideal. That is why I am constantly looking for errors in my own reasoning. Its why I am often guilty of the great crime of "changing my views." All of us are capable of making errors but we can also strive to avoid them and make corrections where necessary.

I don't think it always "follows" that they're being "dishonest." Actually, you're projecting your own values there, because I don't think there's anything "dishonest" about it--I think there are varying degrees of consciousness on the part of the speaker as to what they're doing. I used the term "disinterested observer" in the segment above, and the reason I mentioned this is because I doubt that there is such a thing as a "disinterested observer." Theories are for someone, and for some purpose.

You seem to be advocating irresponsibility here. You point out that it "in some ways it lets people of the hook." But what standards, values, or principles are you advocating? I am unable to discern any. From what I can tell, you are simply advocating barbarism. For instance, a man may lust after a woman. In a civilized society, such a man is disciplined into adhering to social norms of behavior. He respects certain customs and traditions that are imparted to him by his culture. He recognizes that such a woman has rights and thus it would be immoral to simply rape her. White men generally do not engage in such activity in America. I think that is a good thing too. You obviously seem to be of a different point of view.

The scenario you describe applies within White society among Whites. I have no objections to this level of societal order and decorum. I become concerned, however, when I see people try to take the "morality" that governs individuals in a White society and apply it to relations with other racial groups. I see people do the same thing with international relations--they take the codes of conduct that govern how individuals in a country relate to each other, and they apply it to how states interact. I go with Treitschke on this and say that the two realms are separate. What would be "criminal" conduct for individuals to engage in is simply good statesmanship when nation-states do it.

For the same reason, this is why I think that it's a bad idea for White racialist individuals to engage in personal violence, or even lesser unpleasantness, against non-whites in this country. After all, what would it accomplish--they only breed replacements. I treat every individual I come into contact with in my daily life with respect, regardless of their race, because politics is about the relations between groups, not individuals. The best analogy I like to use is that of getting rid of a nest of yellow jackets near your house. It's foolish to waste time trying to exterminate every single individual yellow jacket. That only gets you stung. You get the nest, all at once, as a group.

I don't want to overcome the things that have made our culture great and worth preserving. On the contrary, I am motivated by what I see as a degeneration of the virtues of our civilization into vices. My purpose is to restore an otherwise workable system that has since become dysfunctional, not to raze it to the ground in order to replace it with something else, or in your case, nothing at all. The Nazis were ultimately consumed by their own radicalism. I don't consider myself to be a radical at all anymore.

I'm hoping for a whirlwind that will eventually create the conditions for the rise of an Order of self-ordaining god-men that Hitler envisioned, as described in Rauschning's _The Voice of Destruction_, specifically in the chapters titled "Magic, Black and White" and "The Human Solstice." It's time for man to take a leap forward, and to do that, he first must be purified in the crucible of the "darkness" that liberalism, mired in its pity and weakness, seeks to extirpate.

Kevin MacDonald has had several interesting things to say about this ideology. For instance, he sees National Socialism as being the mirror image of traditional Judaism. I agree. The Nazis so hated the Jews that they eventually became Jews themselves. Perhaps our contemporaries are so repulsed by the Nazis because Nazism was ultimately so alien to Western culture. That is one reason that I do not see it as a workable vehicle for change in America today.

I agree, too, but unlike yourself I think we can learn a lot from the Jews about self-preservation. Actually, I recall that the National Alliance (I'm no longer an official member but I sympathize) has a speech online called "White Zion." And in Rauschning's text, Hitler himself says he's not too proud to learn from his enemies.

Its true that I immersed myself for several years in continental European philosophy. I was significantly influenced at the time by the material I was exposing myself to. That is also one of the primary reasons that I roll my eyes now when I hear such people beating their chest about their culture. What is this culture the Nazis talk about and are so proud of? It tends to be a repulsive cocktail of confusion, nihilism, mysticism, romanticism, and irrationality. This wasn't always descriptive of continental philosophy. Continental Europeans have certainly come a long way since Kant and Hegel. But its pretty much been all downhill from there.

That cocktail existed long before the Nazis, and it shall exist long after. And I hope that beautiful catalog of "errors" you enumerate triumphs, because right now things are out of balance, tiltled too far in favor of equality and meekness and such, and that's preventing not only White survival, but White ascension. I call that "repulsive cocktail" a much needed medicine: Eurocentric Metapolitics.

I suppose you can say that what makes continental philosophy so attractive is its aesthetic appeal, especially to otherwise alienated people. Nietzsche was certainly a brilliant stylist. So was Voltaire. But neither Nietzsche or Voltaire really said much of substance. The postmodernists are quite similar. They have sown confusion but that is about it.

Postmodernism is a useful bag of tools--Lefty-multiculti types love it, but "properly misread" you can make it have right-wing outcomes, or at least use it to undermine the "Holocaust narrative" and such. And let's not forget that Paul de Man, for example, had "fascist" connections.

That is precisely the fundamental problem that I have paleoconservatism. It seems that sometimes their hostility to the neoconservatives becomes so virulent that they reject patriotism simply to spite the neocons. They accomplish absolutely nothing in doing this. They alienate themselves from millions of their fellow citizens in the process.

Those fellow citizens are lemmings or sheep, and they aren't that important in the grand scheme of things. They'll come along soon enough.

I don't see the Nazis in that light. They remind me of the primitive Germanic warbands which used to descend on the Roman Empire. The Nazis were simply a bunch of gangsters that set about attacking other nations in order to oppress and exploit their populations. They didn't set about doing this for any higher purpose. They didn't invade the Soviet Union in order to liberate the people that lived there from tyranny and poverty. They were out to destroy and steal for them.

You know, I'd take the Germanic warbands analogy as a compliment, even though you didn't intend it as such. I often wonder what the Third Reich could have achieved within its own borders if it had taken an isolationist rather than an expansionist route. They might have created all sorts of wonders. They should have bided their time and kept to themselves, in a couple decades they could have studied the Jew enough to develop a "genetic weapon" that could be deployed to destroy the Jews the world over while leaving Whites intact. Ah, well, no sense focusing on the past, just the future.

Besides, I know you don't approve of fratricidal wars in Europe (as you accuse of Hitler of igniting). Since we're living in well, 2005 in a moment, it makes sense not to nurture grudges against the Brits and Poles, like that guy you always cite from the Fedayeen Tent. There aren't very many Whites left today, so we need to stick together. Most National Socialists are thankfully pan-Europeanists, and do not seek to subjugate other White cultures.

It is a sharp contrast. It says a lot about what distinguishes the Nazis from the Western democracies. The people who live in the West are generally good people. They don't like to see other people suffer. They don't believe in brutality for the sake of brutality, as the fascists did. Consider just how kind our people are. They would give millions of dollars to total strangers of another race or ethnicity in order to help them rebuild their lives after they suffered a catastrophe. Search through all of human history and see if you can find similar examples. You certainly won't find that many. That is just one reason why our right to self-preservation is justified.

Or not--you ever think that maybe the reason why altruism is rare in human history is because "charity begins at home," and it's kind of foolish to strengthen aliens who could later come back and stick it to you? We're the odd men out, here, in the modern West.

How is the government not following the Constitution?

I'm sure you'll come up with lovely interpretations that justifies every move the Feds make, but where does foreign aid fit in? Or the Overseas Private Investment Corporation that greases the skids with taxpayer dollars for companies to move overseas?

Not that I care about the Constitution, of course--it's a dead letter and I don't have any objection to the use of government power to strengthen a White citizenry. Over the past few years I've been cleansing myself of the "libertarian" residue that infested the "conservatism" I came out of, as detailed over on the "your philosophical background" thread. I mentioned the Constitution because lots of "mainstream" types like to say that it defines America and should command American loyalty, so my comment was aimed at problematizing the Constitution and taking away some of its hypnotic lustre.

I am confident that the gradual decline of U.S. global power will eventually put an end to this.

Can't come soon enough for me. The end of American hegemony will let human beings finally start acting like human beings again. There won't be anyone around to tell the Chinese they can't have Taiwan. And there will be no one to harass Slobodon Milosevic for handling his internal affairs. We'll have a world of realism again, instead of these fictions about "international law" and norms and such.

You don't find such behavior to be morally objectionable?

What Negroes do among themselves doesn't enter my circle of concerns. But then you have do-gooders out there whining about the treatment of women under the Taliban in Afghanistan, or female circumcision in Africa, and so on, imposing Western standards on non-Westerners as if humans were interchangeable.

You have yet to explain why anyone should care about their race. I believe that I have a moral obligation to future generations to do my best to prevent them from living in the sort of society they will soon inherit.

My racialism comes from the fact that it's in my interests to ensure that the group that I'm a part of is the group that's on top, simple as that. I am a White, English-speaking male, and as a result I am part of a class that is under siege in this country (and on the planet overall). You can tell who rules a society by looking at who it is you aren't allowed to criticize. Criticize women or gays, and you're in big trouble. Criticize Blacks or Mestizos or Asians, and you're in big trouble. Criticize Jews, and the sky starts falling in. But criticize the White man, and more often than not you get praised for it! That tells me that Whites are at the bottom of the totem pole, and as a member of that class, it makes sense that I'd seek to overturn that situation.

Additionally, I couldn't have come into existence apart from the racial architecture that created me as an individual--I'm part of a chain of life. I came into existence because of the countless generations that struggled on this planet before me. So why would I foul my own nest?

I agree. But it does not necessarily follow that I believe we should brutalize other races, that we should have no respect for human life.

I don't recognize the existence of "human life"--that's an abstract that assumes all creatures remotely resembling us with two legs (or less) and an opposable thumb is "equal" or "worthy." I have more respect and awe for beautiful lifeforms on this planet like the tiger than I do the disposable boolies that perished in the Asian tsunami. As Savitri Devi points out, when it comes to humans, quality counts more than quantity. Humanity is an overgrown weed-patch that needs pruning and development before it can earn any respect.

I suppose you can say that most people in our country believe that morality entails some respect for the dignity of human life. We recognize that others have rights and that it would be immoral to simply brutalize them. Similarly, we morally condemn what the Japanese did to the Chinese in WW2 on the basis of such values.

Rights? There are no "rights" apart from the power to assert them. And "rights" are Western ideas anyway, and you're talking about the Chinese versus the Japanese...different ballgame, different rules.

Suppose Whites were to go extinct as a result of their altruism and sense of "fair play."There is nothing necessarily wrong with altruism or our sense of fairness. Its generally a good thing to have some regard for the welfare of one's fellow citizens. Such virtues only become problematic when they are perverted into their opposites.What good were these principles if no one is left around to respect or uphold them? Those principles are the foundation of modern, civilized, orderly governments. Such principles are goodprecisely because they are virtues. They facilitate the creation of such societies. The people that you are referring to are in the degenerate state today because they are no longer practicing such virtues. Their concern for the welfare of nonwhites has been perverted into a manifest neglect of their own people. That's a vice of deficiency. But you are not advocating a return to the virtuous moderate position. You want to swing to the opposite extreme that is just as noxious and just as destructive, albeit in a different way. Principles, values, whatever you want to call them, are only useful to the extent that they keep you alive, keep your group intact, and enhance its power.Those principles, values, traditions, and customs have made America the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world. That's no small accomplishment. So pardon me if I roll my eyes at the sort of people who would raze our society to the ground in order to replace it with nothing.If "principles" start to get in the way of these goals, then they've outlived their usefulnessThis is a non sequitur. Its also where the fatal contradiction in your own worldview reveals itself. You cannot repudiate altruism and fair play and still expect people to give a damn about one another. That's actually one of my favorite manuevers, because the general public expects someone like me to never offer the Negro a compliment. Why should wedesire to imitiate the sort of barbarism that prevails today in black Africa? I also fail to see anything whatsoever conservative about this position that you advocate.When I do make a positive observation about Negroes, it throws observers off balance, and possibly makes their minds more receptive to my seed.You seem to be living in a bubble here. Going around saying how you are sick and tired of morality and how you want to unleash your inner barbarian while praising the Third Reich is not going to make your fellow citizens more receptive to your ideas at all.In fact, here's another one: the Jews are by far the best at ethnocentrism, and I am forced to give them credit for that. The Jews have one of the highest intermarriage rates of any ethnic group in America. They also tend found in the vanguard of causes like social justice and civil rights, even when such activism can have a manifestly negative impact upon the Jewish community.Whites could learn a lot about self-preservation from them.That's very true. But we don't have to become Jews to preserve our racial and ethnic integrity in America. I will also say this about the Jews. They have some understanding of the concept of public relations. The guys who sit around idolizing the Third Reich do not.I'm sure some "anti-Americans" like the veneer of "objectivity" that's in vogue, and that's why they like to play the "disinterested observer" routine. Then I'm sure on the other side you find fiery characters who'd come right out and say "Damn straight I hate Americans as Americans." I suppose that is because most people are less likely to take an individual seriously when he admits that his criticism is motivated by an unsubstantiated and irrational prejudice. It has been my experience that it is usually easy to discern whether or not this is the case. I run into a lot of these people on forums like this one.I don't consider myself anti-American, since I am one myself, after all. And I think America/Americans are redeemable, so I don't hold a permanent grudge against them just because of the fact I don't like the status quo. To paraphrase Rumsfeld, this is the country we've got.Perhaps you should explain to us precisely how, in your view, Americans are to redeem themselves. What is so wrong with America as it exists today? I would like to hear this. You have described yourself as a paleoconservative in the past. But you don't sound anything like Patrick Buchanan to me.The scenario you describe applies within White society among Whites.We have always lived amongst nonwhites in America. We have done this for almost four centuries now and the sky had yet to fall.I have no objections to this level of societal order and decorum.I think you should describe your idea of societal order and decorum in greater detal.I become concerned, however, when I see people try to take the "morality" that governs individuals in a White society and apply it to relations with other racial groups.I take it you are trying to argue here that morality has a racial as opposed to a communal basis. If that is the argument that you are making here, then I profoundly disagree with that position. Our own sense of morality in the United States differs in many important respects for whites living in other nations. It has changed remarkably in the past several centuries. Furthermore, whites and nonwhites alike living in America often share similar values and adhere to the same societal norms.I see people do the same thing with international relations--they take the codes of conduct that govern how individuals in a country relate to each other, and they apply it to how states interact. I go with Treitschke on this and say that the two realms are separate. What would be "criminal" conduct for individuals to engage in is simply good statesmanship when nation-states do it. It seems to me that you are trying to construct something of an artificial moral wall between whites and nonwhites in America. But blacks and whites alike in America tend to be Protestant Christians and their sense of morality ultimately derives from the same biblical narrative. Even American secularists are to some degree influenced by the Christian tinge of our culture. I guess you can say that I am simply not seeing this division that you are seeing.For the same reason, this is why I think that it's a bad idea for White racialist individuals to engage in personal violence, or even lesser unpleasantness, against non-whites in this country. After all, what would it accomplish--they only breed replacements.Most Americans, whether they are white or black, would say that it is wrong to murder people on account of their race because such behavior is so repulsive to the established and commonly accepted norms of their society. I can see how this might make no sense to someone who has discarded the belief that human life has any essential value in its own right. I treat every individual I come into contact with in my daily life with respect, regardless of their race, because politics is about the relations between groups, not individuals. Whites in American generally do not attach much importance to their racial identity so they do not organize themselves politically to advance racial interests like other groups are so fond of doing.The best analogy I like to use is that of getting rid of a nest of yellow jackets near your house. It's foolish to waste time trying to exterminate every single individual yellow jacket. That only gets you stung. You get the nest, all at once, as a group. The nest of yellow jackets near your house is not composed of a community of your fellow citizens. You are building sand castles in the air here. You are not starting with any preexisting commonly accepted set of values. You are simply spinning out your own personal prejudices.I'm hoping for a whirlwind that will eventually create the conditions for the rise of an Order of self-ordaining god-men that Hitler envisioned, as described in Rauschning's _The Voice of Destruction_, specifically in the chapters titled "Magic, Black and White" and "The Human Solstice." Then I suppose you will be waiting for quite a long time. The vast majority of Americans of all races have nothing but disgust for the Nazi regime and th principles that it stood for. I also really do not see the point in drawing upon such an alien and discredited model of racialism when we already have preexisting traditions we can work with.It's time for man to take a leap forward, and to do that, he first must be purified in the crucible of the "darkness" that liberalism, mired in its pity and weakness, seeks to extirpate.Or more accurately, a leap backwards. What you are in fact advocating here is nothing but a return to the sort of cruelty, misery, and brutality that has traditionally plagued mankind, something we have only really begun to move away from in the past several centuries.Those fellow citizens are lemmings or sheep, and they aren't that important in the grand scheme of things. They'll come along soon enough.I see this sort of rhetoric all the time. Its generally not a good idea to denigrate the people you are trying to reach out to, however. Most Americans would say that the real lemmings are the guys who grovel at the feet of dead sadistic dictators like Adolf Hitler.Postmodernism is a useful bag of tools--Lefty-multiculti types love it, but "properly misread" you can make it have right-wing outcomes, or at least use it to undermine the "Holocaust narrative" and such. And let's not forget that Paul de Man, for example, had "fascist" connections.I am pretty sure that I am far more familar with postmodernism than you are. And while is certainly true that postmodernism is quite useful for those wanting to engage in deconstructive criticism, it is also true that postmodernism is not particularly useful for reconstructing a cohesive and healthy social order.I agree, too, but unlike yourself I think we can learn a lot from the Jews about self-preservation.I wonder what the Jews would have to say about that. Would you honestly like to trade places with the Jews, taking into account the sort of persecutions that have been inflicted upon them? Actually, I recall that the National Alliance (I'm no longer an official member but I sympathize) has a speech online called "White Zion." And in Rauschning's text, Hitler himself says he's not too proud to learn from his enemies.But why should a man like Hitler be considered the gold standard of American racialism? Hitler wasn't American. Nazi Germany also declared war on the United States and an entire generation of Americans fought to destroy his wicked regime. Hasn't Neo-Nazism been an utter failure in the United States?I don't think it always "follows" that they're being "dishonest." That wasn't my assertion.Actually, you're projecting your own values there, because I don't think there's anything "dishonest" about it--I think there are varying degrees of consciousness on the part of the speaker as to what they're doing. I used the term "disinterested observer" in the segment above, and the reason I mentioned this is because I doubt that there is such a thing as a "disinterested observer." Are you conscious of what they are doing?Theories are for someone, and for some purpose.Its true that theories have a functional purpose. But it is not true that they are necessarily created to advance some naked political or ethnic interest.That cocktail existed long before the Nazis, and it shall exist long after. I can't say that I took much of value from that sort of philosophy myself. In hindsight, it would probably have been much more profitable to read the Bible, as it does have some relevance to contemporary American values.And I hope that beautiful catalog of "errors" you enumerate triumphs, because right now things are out of balance, tiltled too far in favor of equality and meekness and such, and that's preventing not only White survival, but White ascension. I call that "repulsive cocktail" a much needed medicine: Eurocentric Metapolitics. That sort of cocktail of confusion, nihilism, mysticism, romanticism, and irrationality that I described above has already triumphed. In fact, it is one of the fundamental reasons that we are in the situation we are in today. Its virtually impossible to have a conversation about race in educated circles now without that sort of crap filtering into the discussion. Call it intellectual pollution. Previous generations of Americans had a much more pristine conception of race relations precisely because they were not being constantly exposed to such nonsense from the other side of the Atlantic.

- "I'm hoping for a whirlwind that will eventually create the conditions for the rise of an Order of self-ordaining god-men that Hitler envisioned, as described in Rauschning's _The Voice of Destruction_, specifically in the chapters titled "Magic, Black and White" and "The Human Solstice."


That's interesting, ThuleanFire.

You see, usually Nazis and revisionists declare - with a pretty good reason - that Hermann Rauschning's writings are garbage, a Jew-funded propagandistic hitjob to make Hitler and Nazism look monstrous and insane in the eyes of Americans.

But you seem to rather enjoy the image of Hitler as presented by Rauschning... that's ironic.



- "As Savitri Devi points out, when it comes to humans, quality counts more than quantity."

Oh yeah, and Savitri Devi was a race-mixing, Jap-aiding, wannabee-Hindu kook as well.

"In 1932 she traveled to India in search of a living pagan culture. She volunteered at the Hindu Mission and wrote A Warning to the Hindus to offer support for Hindu nationalism and independence, and rally resistance to the spread of Christianity and especially Islam in India.

...

In 1940 she married Asit Krishna Mukherji, a Bengali Brahmin with National Socialist convictions who edited the pro-German newspaper New Mercury. Together they gathered information from British servicemen to pass on to the Japanese."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savitri_devi


Petr

There is nothing necessarily wrong with altruism or our sense of fairness. Its generally a good thing to have some regard for the welfare of one's fellow citizens.

I'd agree with you if you'd qualify that a bit more to read "the welfare of one's fellow White citizens."

Those principles, values, traditions, and customs have made America the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world. That's no small accomplishment.

America lucked out geographically, and that was enhanced by the fact that her homeland and infrastructure was left intact after both world wars, while Europe had a harder time of it. Genetically we're Europeans.

You cannot repudiate altruism and fair play and still expect people to give a damn about one another.

I repudiate those qualities when they are directed toward non-whites.

The Jews have one of the highest intermarriage rates of any ethnic group in America. They also tend found in the vanguard of causes like social justice and civil rights, even when such activism can have a manifestly negative impact upon the Jewish community.

This is true, today. It amuses me that they're eroding their own position while they attempt to erode ours for their "security." I'm not advocating following the Jewish model slavishly, since that would involve a diaspora and subverting an alien host culture from the inside. I simply admire their traditional ethnocentrism, their superiority complex, and their "paranoia."

Perhaps you should explain to us precisely how, in your view, Americans are to redeem themselves. What is so wrong with America as it exists today? I would like to hear this.

They'll redeem themselves when they smash the liberal normative matrix that binds them. As for what's wrong with America? A few grievances off the top of my head include the crusading military adventures overseas, the presence and power of non-Whites and Jews throughout our society, and the power of the multinational corporations that is deindustrializing America.

You have described yourself as a paleoconservative in the past. But you don't sound anything like Patrick Buchanan to me.

I chose the paleo label as a way of amplifying the ties between that sector of conservatism and more radical sectors. The intent is to radicalize the paleos. As for Buchanan, I've voted for him every time because I think he'd at least be a good start.

We have always lived amongst nonwhites in America. We have done this for almost four centuries now and the sky had yet to fall.

Non-whites are a millstone around our neck. Billions upon billions have been spent over welfare, crime, and riots. Education has been dumbed-down in light of Brown vs. Board of Education, and White kids get to look forward to being shaken down for their lunch money (or worse things happen) at the hands of Blacks. Go to the ATM and you have to choose between a bunch of languages to make your transaction. Yeah, we're still here, but that's in spite of nonwhites, not because of them. Things could be better.

I think you should describe your idea of societal order and decorum in greater detail.

I have no problem with the way Whites have interacted among themselves and governed themselves prior to the 1960s in this country. The issue is the way they treat aliens. I say we keep the civility and the "niceties" between Whites.

I take it you are trying to argue here that morality has a racial as opposed to a communal basis. If that is the argument that you are making here, then I profoundly disagree with that position. Our own sense of morality in the United States differs in many important respects for whites living in other nations. It has changed remarkably in the past several centuries. Furthermore, whites and nonwhites alike living in America often share similar values and adhere to the same societal norms. It seems to me that you are trying to construct something of an artificial moral wall between whites and nonwhites in America. But blacks and whites alike in America tend to be Protestant Christians and their sense of morality ultimately derives from the same biblical narrative. Even American secularists are to some degree influenced by the Christian tinge of our culture. I guess you can say that I am simply not seeing this division that you are seeing.

Outside of the Blacks that spend their time committing crimes, yes, many of them are singing away in their Protestant churches. Simply because the African can ape us doesn't justify his presence here. He's still an African, and forever an alien, genetically. Yes, my goal is to construct a wall on every plane and in every form between Whites and non-whites.

I also really do not see the point in drawing upon such an alien and discredited model of racialism when we already have preexisting traditions we can work with.

There's something about that "alien and discredited" model that scares the hell out of my opponents--there's a lot of energy there, so I head for the energy. The System works incredibly hard to keep the Nazis down, spinning out endless movies and documentaries. This tells me the System fears that energy, and therefore I suspect the key to destroying the System is to rekindle and release that energy. You see, the System's whining about Nazis has broken one of Fr. Gracian's rules in his book, _The Art of Worldly Wisdom_. He says, "do not exhibit your sore finger, for all to strike upon, and do not complain of it, for malice always pounds where it hurts most." Hence, I plan to hit the System's sore finger...metaphorically speaking, of course.

Or more accurately, a leap backwards. What you are in fact advocating here is nothing but a return to the sort of cruelty, misery, and brutality that has traditionally plagued mankind, something we have only really begun to move away from in the past several centuries.

This answers your question earlier about my "conservatism." How boring future history books would be if they read, "...and humanity lived happily ever after...." I don't agree with the direction of the past several centuries. America seeks to remake the world in its own image, spreading its "liberal democracy" around the globe. I can't support all this Francis Fukuyama crap. You're pathologizing, and attempting to sanitize, a lot of what makes us human when you advocate getting rid of the "traditional plagues." I suspect strife has evolutionary potential, while peace is stagnation.

I see this sort of rhetoric all the time. Its generally not a good idea to denigrate the people you are trying to reach out to, however.

From another angle, it's a good propaganda technique because it lets people say, "I'm not going to be part of the herd anymore, I'm going to join the elite." I suppose it depends on the personality of the listener. You're right, there are some listeners who will identify more with Joe Sixpack and be offended at the term "lemming." This technique weeds people out--the people who like to be comfortable in convention and the people who don't want to rock the boat will probably take a pass. That's fine. Throughout history the masses generally have sat on the sidelines.

Most Americans would say that the real lemmings are the guys who grovel at the feet of dead sadistic dictators like Adolf Hitler.

Perhaps, but if you're implying that this describes me, you should consider that I've said before that the elements I seek to invoke existed long before Hitler, and they'll exist long after. Also, I recognize that National Socialism may not be an end in itself, but merely a means. I simply think it's a powerful manifestation of a certain kind of force at work in the world, one that's under attack by liberal democracy and the Abrahamic "JCI" religions. I'm more with David Myatt and the goal of "realizing the sinister dialectic" in history, and eventually building a Galactic Imperium out of the West.

I am pretty sure that I am far more familar with postmodernism than you are. And while is certainly true that postmodernism is quite useful for those wanting to engage in deconstructive criticism, it is also true that postmodernism is not particularly useful for reconstructing a cohesive and healthy social order.

Before you can write on the chalkboard, you have to erase the things already written on it first.

I wonder what the Jews would have to say about that. Would you honestly like to trade places with the Jews, taking into account the sort of persecutions that have been inflicted upon them?

I'm satisfied being a White guy. And you do realize that the Jews bring that persecution on themselves, since they engage in subversion wherever they've gone throughout history, right? Doesn't it kind of strike you as odd that it's the Jews who've had such a rough time--no matter where they go, people hate them. Could that be because the hatred is justified, that the problem might be with the Jews instead of the Russians, the Poles, the Spaniards, and every other place they were kicked out of?

But you seem to rather enjoy the image of Hitler as presented by Rauschning... that's ironic.

Hey, Petr...none of the cool people are in Heaven...have fun spending eternity with the likes of Mother Teresa.

- "Hey, Petr...none of the cool people are in Heaven...have fun spending eternity with the likes of Mother Teresa."


And Charlemagne, and Oliver Cromwell... :p

My my, what a mature answer. I hit a sore spot, didn't I?

:D

Here revisionist Mark Weber tells you just how credible source Herr Rauschning is:

"There are some valuable lessons to be learned from the story of this sordid hoax, which took more than 40 years to finally unmask: It shows that even the most brazen historical fraud can have a tremendous impact if it serves important interests, that it's easier to invent a great historical lie than to expose one and finally, that everyone should be extremely wary of even the "authoritative" portrayals of the emotionally-charged Hitler era."

http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v06/v06p499_Weber.html


And could you tell us why we should consider "Savitri Devi" to have been anything besides a pathetic quasi-Hinduist volkisch groupie?


Petr

- "Hey, Petr...none of the cool people are in Heaven...have fun spending eternity with the likes of Mother Teresa."


And Charlemagne, and Oliver Cromwell... :p

My my, what a mature answer. I hit a sore spot, didn't I?

:D

Here revisionist Mark Weber tells you just how credible source Herr Rauschning is:

"There are some valuable lessons to be learned from the story of this sordid hoax, which took more than 40 years to finally unmask: It shows that even the most brazen historical fraud can have a tremendous impact if it serves important interests, that it's easier to invent a great historical lie than to expose one and finally, that everyone should be extremely wary of even the "authoritative" portrayals of the emotionally-charged Hitler era."

http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v06/v06p499_Weber.html


And could you tell us why we should consider "Savitri Devi" to have been anything besides a pathetic quasi-Hinduist volkisch groupie?


Petr

No sore spot hit, don't give yourself that much credit. I made my comment because I thought it was funny, that's all. You can consider Savitri Devi anything you like, as her personal behavior doesn't interest me. Her writings serve my purposes, however, just like Herr Rauschning's. Maybe I can paraphrase Linder on the _Protocols_ as far as the "authenticity" of the Rauschning text: is it possible to make a "forgery" of something that doesn't exist?

I suppose you can say that my rationalism and my respect for logical argument and civilized debate stems from my residual Objectivism. I prefer to dismiss irrational misrepresentations out of hand for they lack any logical basis from which such criticisms can be legitimately made. They are irrational because they lack any substantiated basis. Thus those of us who have some respect for rationality object to such things.

I am also convinced that McDonald's is benign compared to the sort of people who would take away my individual rights and throw my family in a concentration camp.

Ahem...