| Ander Nieuws week 6 / nieuwe oorlog 2007 | The Guardian February 1, 2007 By Edward Pearce The charge of anti-Americanism made by new right British journalists against critics of the Bush government is in itself a nonsense, not more grown-up than the charge of anti-semitism thrown at people opposed to the Israeli government bombing Lebanese hill villages and the people in them. But, indeed, people here, and in continental Europe, are coming to candidly dislike America. That dislike co-exists with a wide affection, among those who have travelled in that country, for so many Americans. The ones we met were kind, friendly, civil, good to know, yet they are the subjects of so much power held in such dreadful hands and seem most of the time so submissive to it. They recall Orwell's definition of England in the thirties as "a family with the wrong members in control". But his charge against the Baldwin people was weakness; anxiety at the American elite concerns an over-blown strength. Distaste for the United States is directed not only at what its politicians and military do, but, in part, at what the American state and society have become. That nation is, for a start, absurdly militarised. It is a fearful thought that the US should hold nine times the total nuclear weapons reserve of all the other nuclear powers combined. Clearly, General Eisenhower's remarking, in his 1961 farewell address, of "a military-industrial complex" was the plain truth, and the truth has deepened across 46 years. But symbols often speak darker things than statistics. John Kerry, candidate of the more liberal and humane party, wearing his military cap to the Democratic convention, saluting and proclaiming name and number and reporting for duty, was more American than can surely be good for America. There are too many ex-marines trying to become president. The early civilian republic, served by civilian militias to win independence, has taken on Prussian qualities - qualities reinforced by bullying and manipulative populism: Prussia served by Fox TV. Denis Healey, friendly for all the good reasons, to the US, shrewdly withheld in his memoirs the warm feelings he had for the British command when he came to the US generals. Curtis Le May wanting "to bomb China into the Stone Age" is not an isolated figure. Soldiers in an aggressive state grow fascinated by the infinite possibilities of stark power. The Cold War became an alibi for talking dirty about morally deficient terms "throw-weight" and "kill-power". It produced a language rich in risible euphemisms: "take out", "terminate", "pacify". And the words took life and became death. If power corrupts, as, assuredly, it does, military power corrupts militarily. Things military conflate with another American quality: patriotism. The United States is far too patriotic for the ultimate good of the rest of us. They salute a flag; they talk about themselves all the time. What the people of Europe have grown out of, they clutch at. Worse, they speak reverentially of "Our President", a leader and an embodiment of the people, something extremely harmful to a mere butter-and-egg politician and, in a fool, potentially calamitous. And on the committees of rich men who choose, at any rate, Republican candidates, fools have lately been very well-regarded. As such, a hybridisation of mystique and command bears its fruit; how very dear and consoling becomes the innocent and sensible figure of Her Majesty the Queen. If you are looking for historical parallels for the contemporary United States, look at and think about Wilhelmine Germany. My grandfather, a Lancashire builder, came back from a holiday in Germany in 1910 and said: "There'll be war. The boys don't just play soldiers, they drill." The men around Wilhelm II, and the Kaiser himself, were not wilfully wicked. They had simply enjoyed too much success since 1860 and now enjoyed too much pure military power: divisions, artillery and, perhaps, unlike the United States, high skills at soldiering. To have a gun is to want to use it. To win in conflict is to expect always to win. The United States, for all its vein of intense religion, attracts politicians fascinated by immoral acts justifiable only by two other Wilhelmine expressions, Realpolitik and Machtpolitik. Two examples say it all: the silly-clever scoundrelism of Henry Kissinger seeing himself as Metternich and wishing, in an ill-favoured jest, that Iranians and Iraqis at war with one another could mutually kill everyone; Alexander Haig, an overbearing soldier improperly conducting foreign affairs, giving a wink of approval to Ariel Sharon's invasion of the Lebanon with what consequences the Lebanese best know. So, fools have been on a great spree, but American society, so patriotic, so fundamentally deferential to money and power talking patriotism, is not shaped to stop them. For American life contains another poison - nicely cultivated fear: "the Russians are coming", "the Present Danger". There are reactions and pendulum swings, of course. Remember how anarchic and disrespectful the US seemed at the time of Vietnam and we will shortly enjoy another interlude of sense. But drum and trumpet and "Present Danger", which gave Vietnam its successor, will be at hand. The real world out there is, in fact, dangerous, but a country so self-preoccupied that, on the last figure I heard, only about 12% of citizens held passports, is ill-equipped to understand the complexity of those dangers or to be tolerant of the dull incremental process of diminishing them. "Anti-American" we are not; but darkly worried about America we certainly should be. 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