Anti-Yankee Sentiment of European Intellighensia (July 2003)
I’m beginning to think that George W. Bush got it all wrong. The axis of evil is neither in the Middle East nor in Asia but in the European intelligentsia. In public schools, in the universities, on the editorial pages of certain newspapers, and in books that propagate preposterous paradigms, they plant ideological propaganda more poisonous than Anthrax.
At the recent international book fair in Turin, there was quite a strong concentration of the species. At a conference entitled, “America and the others” I learned that the only real source of evil in the world is the United States of America. The wise men who informed the audience of several hundred people of the status of my country were: Gian Enrico Rusconi, professor of political science at the University of Turin, Alberto Asor Rosa, director of the department of linguistic and literary studies at the University La Sapienza in Rome, Emmanuel Todd, a French scholar and author of the the new book, “Après L’Empire” or “After the Empire: the breakdown of the American system”, and Jean Ziegler, the Swiss sociologist and author of “Nouveau maitre du monde” or “The new masters of the world”.
The only one who was there to defend my poor country was Massimo Teodori, author of the new book “Benedetti americani” (Blessed Americans), following the success of another of his books, “Maledetti americani” (Damned Americans) in which he described the left wing, right wing, and Catholic roots of much of the anti-American sentiment in Italy. Gianni Riotta, the Corriere della Sera’s New York correspondent who acted as moderator, was far too diplomatic. What he had to put on the balance in defense of the United States was a feather compared to the lead that weighted the other side of the scale with fervent anti-Americanism.
The round table began with the delirious declarations of Gian Enrico Rusconi. In criticizing the position of the Italian government in support of the Gulf War, he kept speaking of “Lui” or “Him” when referring to the Italian prime minister who so ardently backed President Bush. Can you imagine? The man is so loath to accept Berlusconi as premier that he finds his name literally unspeakable. Instead of using the B-word, he uses the L-word, Lui! But that’s not the worst of it. The message that Rusconi really wanted to convey was the following: Europe must create a defense system that is independent from the United States, cost what it may, even if it means having to drastically reduce the social safety nets that Europeans are so accustomed to being coddled by from the cradle to the grave. Only if Europe is armed to the teeth will it be able not only to make its voice of dissent heard when America proposes its bellicose initiatives, but it will also be capable of threatening the use of its own arms stop her!
For Alberto Asor Rosa, this new militarism of the Americans has nothing to do with terrorism. If terrorism didn’t exist, the Americans would have invented it, and maybe that’s exactly what they did! And oil has nothing to do with the war in Iraq. The Americans sent soldiers to Baghdad in order to have preventive control of the global markets!
According to Rosa, the world is dominated by a force that is far too disproportionate. That force is called the United States, which creates a “perpetual state of emergency” that “threatens the rules of the game of democracy”. Someone needs to inform Mr. Rosa that democracy is no game and that in the United States its rules are alive and well. Actually, Teodori did try to tell him that, but Rosa didn’t seem to be fit for convincing.
Then he told us something truly tremendous. Imagine this: When Bush arrived in the Gulf region landing on an aircraft carrier, on the side of his helicopter in huge letters there was written “Commander-in-Chief” and not “President of the United States” as Mr. Rosa had evidently expected. It may be a surprise for Rosa to discover that Mr. Bush didn’t invent this title. The task is part of his job description written in our constitution!
Ziegler opened his speech by quoting Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “In the relationship between the weak and the strong, it is liberty that oppresses and the law that liberates. Just think! The insolence of these Americans that want to oppress the rest of the world with this demon they call “Liberty”! If we must quote the French, I prefer Montesquieu: Liberty is the good that allows us to enjoy every other good.
In any case, there we had Alberto Asor Rosa inviting everyone to “Fight the war” and Ziegler imploring everyone to go to Evian to protest against the G8 summit. With violent tones and tympanis, two old men who won’t admit that the earthly utopia they dreamed of during their youth produced nothing but deprivation, misery and massacres, are inciting violence in the name of peace and social justice!!
At least a generation separates the Frenchman Emmanuel Todd from Asor Rosa and Ziegler, but as far as ranting and outrageous raving is concerned, he walks off with all the prizes. According to Todd, the American Empire is dead. The American economy is in freefall. The Americans can’t even produce dry figs! (He must have forgotten about the ones in California.) All Americans know how to do is consume. With its devouring foreign accounts deficit, the new world is like a predator and the old world is its prey. It lives on products that come from faraway countries. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the old world doesn’t need the new world anymore. It’s the new world that needs the old in order to satisfy its unquenchable appetite.
America waged a war against Iraq not because of the oil, but because it needed to find a way to transform its dependency. It uses spectacular micro-militaristic theatrics in order to justify its presence in the old world. The economic expansionism of the United States during the last 20 years is comparable to the Spanish empire in the 1600s, which lived off other people’s gold!
The only one who didn’t advance aberrant theories, but who tried to allow the facts to refute the paranoiac paradigms of the others, was Massimo Teodori. As professor of American history at the University of Perugia, he was certainly the most qualified to furnish proper information on the subject. In defense of the charge of imperialism, Teodori recalled that in 1917, as in 1941, during the Cold War and even in Yugoslavia, it was the Europeans who asked for America’s help and that Italy had implored to be allowed to enter NATO. Call that imperialism!
In answer to the criticism toward Bush and the Republican party, he reminded the audience that it has often been democratic presidents that have led America to war: Wilson, Roosevelt, and Kennedy, while Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon and Johnson took the blame.
In the meantime, according to Teodori, it’s the French who haven’t been kidding when it comes to manifesting their imperialism. They’re the ones who started the trouble in Vietnam, not to mention Suez and Algeria. Moreover, while the pacifists of the world were in the streets in February protesting against a war that hadn’t even begun, Chirac was operating in Africa without a single peep of protest from anyone. While France was playing the moralist in the Security Council, it was sending its troops off to Ivory Coast.
For Teodori, it’s not the Americans who are conducting an infinite war. The Islamic terrorists are the ones who declared it and are carrying it out. He compared the demonization of the United States to the same treatment to which Israel is subjected. When Teodori dared to deviate from his recounting of the facts to pronounce these two well-informed opinions, I was the only one to applaud him. The others in the audience booed and hissed him, though their hands were peeling from the amount of clapping they did when Rusconi, Asor Rosa, Todd, and Ziegler were sounding off with their old clichés and their newly concocted conjectures.
I’m beginning to think that there is little hope indeed. It’s hard to fathom the ferocity of what these people are preaching. They want a war against America. They’re destroying the minds of yet another generation. I see it every day in the school where I teach. They use haughty and high-flown language and the morality of peace to sell their anti-American propaganda. When I heard that much devilry in just one day, I thought, “Maybe Mao didn’t have it all wrong after all, when he sent the intellectuals to the fields to perform forced labor. As a race, they’re more perilous than the plague.
Sandra Giovanna Giacomazzi teaches Law and Economics at the Liceo Europeo Umberto I in Turin, Italy. She also writes for the Roman daily, L'Opinione della Libertà and was awarded the Mario Soldati Prize for Journalism and Criticism for 2002.
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