An Important BBC Series – A Must Read
'Death to US': Anti-Americanism examined
The
He argues anti-Americanism is often a cover for hatreds with little justification in fact. His three part series takes him to
In the Abbey Churchyard in the lovely English city of
My dear mother Gloria Webb, who died last year, was one of the protesters. In her day, she was an energetic duffle-coated figure who wanted to ban the bomb, stop wars of all kinds and suffering anywhere.
She was a wonderful person, my mum, and so were her friends. Yet it always struck me, when she told me about these protests (and when, I freely confess, I attended them with enthusiasm as a youngster) that there was an odd one-sidedness to the game.
The protests against nuclear weapons, for instance, concentrated on American weapons. The anti-war rallies were against American-led wars. The anti death penalty campaign focused on
A pattern was emerging and has never seriously been altered. A pattern of willingness to condemn
In the beginning
And if anti-Americanism is alive and well among surprisingly mild-mannered people in
To find out, I have visited Venezuela, where the nation's leader Hugo Chavez compares George W Bush to Hitler, and Egypt, where the regime warns of a tide of stars and stripes burning if its hold on power is weakened.
And
Anti-Americanism was born in
The prevailing view among French academics throughout the 18th Century was that the
In their heart of hearts, many French people still believe that to be true.
A French intellectual once compared the
Dislike
In the heart of
Well up to a point: in
The kind of anti-Americanism fostered by French intellectuals down the centuries revolves around intense dislike of what
Sitting in the Cafe de Flore, in the very seat where Jean-Paul Sartre once held sway, the self-described writer and philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy puts it like this:
Antagonism
Levy is sympathetic to the
But such balance is, according to Levy, missing in the French political debate on American power and American life. He describes a process whereby this antagonism to the fundamentals of the
It began on the right but now in the shape of Jose Bove (the anti-McDonald's campaigner, and presidential candidate) and other luminaries of the left, it lives on.
And this is not a recent migration brought on by Mr Bush. In May 1944 (just weeks before American GIs landed on the beaches of Normandy), Hubert Beuve-Mery, the founder of Le Monde newspaper - certainly no mouthpiece of the right - wrote this: "The Americans represent a real danger for France, different from the one posed by Germany or the one with which the Russians may - in time - threaten us. The Americans may have preserved a cult of
It is time that we understood that this attitude, this contempt for what democracy can do, is at the heart of at least some of the anti-Americanism we see in the world today.