“A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism.” Those were the words of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848 and their predictions turned out to be highly accurate, as we all know. Now the spectre of communism is haunting America and the end of the world is near.
The conservative media is mega-scared by this spectre and accuses Obama of turning the land of the free and the home of the brave into Russia/Europe/communism/socialism. For instance, Jonah Goldberg, editor-at-large of National Review Online, writes in Townhall (via No Pasaran): “The recently passed health-care legislation is the cornerstone of the Europeanization of America.” Like “Amerikanische Verhältnisse” (American conditions) in Germany, the “Europeanization of America” is an increasingly popular catch phrase for fear mongering (“The Europeanization of America”, Atlantica: A Threat to American Freedom, “If It’s From Europe, Forget It” and Other Comments on Health Care).
Apparently the US conservative media needs to resort to fear mongering in order to attract an audience and advertisements from big companies.
Capitalism is the excuse to exaggerate and insult. Americans live in the harsh reality of a free market economy and are not living the sheltered lives of 7 year old kids as we Europeans do, according to Goldberg:
We can’t become Europe unless someone else is willing to become America. Look at it this way. My 7 year-old daughter has a great lifestyle. She has all of her clothes and food bought for her. She goes on great vacations. She has plenty of leisure time. A day doesn’t go by where I don’t look at her and feel envious at how good she’s got it compared to me. But here’s the problem: If I decide to live like her, who’s going to take my place? Europe is a free-rider. It can only afford to be Europe because we can afford to be America.
And according to FOX “News” we are not just free-riders, but a “pack of pagan losers.” The video below shows how funny the FOX folks find those derogatory remarks from one of their their anchors:
Video via Media Matters and Dialog International, which comments: “Why do millions of Americans believe that Europe is a socialist nightmare? Because the only information they get about Europe and European affairs is from Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News network.”
This stand-up comedy from Lewis Black is a good response to Goldberg and FOX. He talks about the need for health care in the US, what he learned from travelling, and how folks react to someone who claims he is the greatest and everybody else would die without him, i.e. the free rider claim:
Joerg Wolf is founder and editor-in-chief of the Atlantic Review (http://atlanticreview.org), a blog on transatlantic relations sponsored by the German Fulbright Alumni Association.
He currently works as editor-in-chief of the Open Think Tank atlantic-community.org in Berlin.
Joerg studied political science at the Free University of Berlin and worked as a research associate for the International Risk Policy project at the Free University’s Center for Transatlantic Foreign and Security Policy. He has been a Fulbright scholar at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and Washington DC and has worked for the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Cairo and in Berlin.