FadeTheButcher
12-30-2004, 05:47 AM
To: Kevin_O'Keeffe and Franco
From: FadeTheButcher
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).
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.
From: FadeTheButcher
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).
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.