Ed Morrissey has an interesting post over at his blog Captain’s Quarters about anti-Americanim in Germany, based on this article in Der Spiegel. In short, Germans consider the U.S. to be “a greater threat to world peace than Iran.”
Ed comments:
I’m not going to claim that America has never made a foreign-policy error, but the notion that we represent a greater threat to peace than the main terrorist-sponsoring state in the world is nothing short of breathtakingly stupid. And Malzahn has this analyzed perfectly: it’s safe to hate America. We don’t set off bombs in discotheques or mass in front of embassies whenever anyone insults us or our leadership.
But the Germans really should know better. For decades, we stood guard on the freedom of most of Germany, putting American lives on the line to keep the Soviets from overrunning the rest of their country. We rebuilt their nation after their defeat in the last world war, and we have maintained European security even after the end of the Cold War. If anyone should understand the efforts we have made in keeping totalitarianism and terrorism at bay, it should be the Germans.
As Claus Christian Malzahn points out in his essay (Der Spiegel), the German political establishment is largely responsible for this growing anti-American sentiment in Germany. Opposition to the U.S. has become something like government, or at least campaign policy. From that essay:
For us Germans, the Americans are either too fat or too obsessed with exercise, too prudish or too pornographic, too religious or too nihilistic. In terms of history and foreign policy, the Americans have either been too isolationist or too imperialistic. They simply go ahead and invade foreign countries (something we Germans, of course, would never do) and then abandon them, the way they did in Vietnam and will soon do in Iraq.
Worst of all, the Americans won the war in 1945. (Well, with German help, of course — from Einstein and his ilk.) There are some Germans who will never forgive the Americans for VE Day, when they defeated Hitler. After all, Nazism was just an accident, whereas Americans are inherently evil. Just look at President Bush, the man who, as some of SPIEGEL ONLINE’s readers steadfastly believe, “is worse than Hitler.” Now that gives us a chance to kill two birds with one stone. If Bush is the new Hitler, then we Germans have finally unloaded the Führer on to someone else. In fact, we won’t even have to posthumously revoke his German citizenship, as politicians in Lower Saxony recently proposed. No one can hold a candle to our talent for symbolism!
Bush worse than Hitler.
Some Germans actually believe that.
That can, of course, mean two things:
1- those individuals don’t know much about Hitler / exaggerate what America does
2- they don’t consider what Hitler did necessarily bad
Anyway, back to the anti-Americanism of the majority of the German people (obviously, it’s not the majority of Germans that believes that Bush is worse than Hitler):
Anti-Americanism is the wonder drug of German politics. If no one believes what you’re saying, take a swing at the Yanks and you’ll be shooting your way back up to the top of the opinion polls in no time. And on the practical side, you can be the head of the Social Democratic Party and endear yourself to the party’s hardcore with a load of anti-American nonsense, and still get invited back to Washington — just look at Gerhard Schröder. In fact, you could, like leading German politicians in the debate over the planned American missile shield in Europe, be accused of having “an almost unbelievable lack of knowledge” by a former NATO general, and even that wouldn’t matter. It’s all about what you believe, not what you know.
Anti-Americanism is hypocrisy at its finest. You can spend your evening catching the latest episode of “24” and then complain about Guantanamo the next morning. You can claim that the Americans have themselves to blame for terrorism, while at the same time calling for tougher restrictions on Muslim immigration to Germany. You can call the American president a mass murderer and book a flight to New York the next day. You can lament the average American’s supposed lack of culture and savvy and meanwhile send off for the documents for the Green Card lottery.
I recognize quite a lot of what Claus Christian Malzahn writes: I think that it’s not just Germany that’s becoming more and more (irrationally) anti-America. The same thing is happening in the Netherlands and probably just about every other Western European nation. The hypocrisy is quite amusing at times though. Recently, someone said during a class “won’t those Americans ever learn?”, to which I answered “why, have we? We only do something when it’s in our own best interest.”
The notion that Americans have a long history of invading countries when it’s more convenient is alive and kicking as well, or so it seems. America as the aggressor. Bush, it has to be said, re-affirmed that prejudice: Americans are cowboys who shoot before thinking (things through). Bill Clinton was, in that regard, better for America’s image (although quite some Dutch probably considered Clinton to be the exception on the rule).
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