Those who adhere to doctrines that reduce the universe to an easily comprehensible set of notions, tend to uphold a distorted picture of reality. We are all implicated in this tendency because we all want to understand the world, yet every form of understanding is an abridgment of reality that necessarily misunderstands the whole. Imaginative enthusiasm leads us to a constructive misremembering and a faulty arrangement of fact and context. We believe what we want to believe, and sometimes we see what we want to see. The potentially most destructive distortions are those in which persons or governments are unfairly maligned. The anti-American press in Asia, Latin America and Europe exemplify this process of distortion. The distortion, in turn, fuels terrorism and bolsters the world's aspiring dictators who are threatened by the advance of freedom. Although the Marxist-Leninist form of communism has faded from Russia, clever and more flexible variants of anti-capitalism and anti-Americanism are forming into a compact mass. These doctrines preach the wickedness of America as the world's leading polluter, exploiter and imperialist power. "If you want war," wrote William Graham Sumner, "nourish a doctrine. Doctrines are the most fearful tyrants to which men ever are subject, because doctrines get inside of a man's own reason and betray him against himself. Civilized men have done their fiercest fighting for doctrines."
Hatred is a staple of those who seek to unify different forces under one banner. In The True Believer, Eric Hoffer wrote: "Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensible of all unifying agents. It pulls and whirls the individual away from his own self, makes him oblivious of his weal and future, frees him of jealousies and self-seeking." According to Hoffer, "Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil." Hitler was once asked whether he sought the destruction of the Jews. "No," he replied, "We should then have to invent [the Jews]. It is essential to have a tangible enemy, not merely an abstract one." Hitler's answer revealed the extent to which he understood the motivating formula of his doctrine. Today the totalitarian movements of the world are linked by one theme, one doctrine and one enmity. America is the enemy of mankind, the exploiter of the poor and oppressor of the weak. Destroy America and a better world will be possible. However dressed up, this is the doctrine of Al Qaeda. It is also the doctrine of the ruling Iranian clergy, of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Cuba's Fidel Castro, to name but a few.
The anti-American distortion is not only a phenomenon of the Third World, of a resentful Russia or emerging China. "Within some democratic countries," explained Jean-François Revel, "a subset of the population, some political parties and a majority of intellectuals, were prone to adhere to Communism, or at least support similar ideas. For this crowd, anti-Americanism was rational, since America was identified with capitalism, and capitalism with evil." Less rational was the Left's willingness to swallow "the most flagrant and stupid lies about American society," noted Revel. What troubled the French writer most of all, was the anti-Americanism of "those who feared and rejected Communism." Hatred of America is a natural tendency in those who resent the second or third-rate status of their own countries. "It is in France that this loss ... of great power status engenders the most bitterness," Revel admitted. The imagination seeks to justify a wounded national pride. "In Latin America, emotional currents are ruled by a very old grudge: the grudge of an America that failed against an America that succeeded...."
Eric Hoffer wrote: "That hatred springs more from self-contempt than from legitimate grievance is seen in the intimate connection between hatred and a guilty conscience." Thus it is more than sinister that Russia's president indirectly suggested, last summer, that America was behind the Chechen terrorists who killed hundreds of children at Beslan. There is a psychology of hatred and blame that manufactures lies in the same way that a sausage factory makes sausages. It is often said that once you find out what a sausage is made of, you will never eat a sausage again. The same may be true of lies made in totalitarian hate-factories. Once you know what goes into them, you'll never swallow one again.
But there is a human tendency to swallow everything. We want to be satisfied. We are empty and want to be full. We want answers, we want conclusions and God forbid that they lead us to further questions. Learning to see, wrote Nietzsche, involves "habituating the eye to repose, to patience, to letting things come to it; learning to defer judgment, to investigate and comprehend the individual case in all its aspects."
Our tendency is the opposite of repose and patience. We do not defer judgment. More often than not, we rush to judgment. Furthermore, "Seeing is believing," and all too often believing is a cherished form of seeing (in the absence of intellectual integrity). Consider, in this light, the belief that America is a bad country led by evil men. If only the situation were that simple. Jean-Francois Revel, in a book titled Anti-Americanism, wrote as follows: "The pitying sniggers ritually directed against the American whipping boy by the European media ... come for the most part from an ignorance so profound that it seems deliberate."
All ideologies subvert the truth through a process in which reality is simplified by reduction. "I soon realized that the correct use of propaganda is a true art which has remained practically unknown to the bourgeois parties," wrote Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf. "The art of propaganda lies in understanding the emotional ideas of the great masses and finding, through a psychologically correct form, the way to the attention and thence to the heart of the broad masses." Hitler further stated: "The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan. As soon as you sacrifice this slogan and try to be many-sided, the effect will piddle away, for the crowd can neither digest nor retain the material offered."
The key point in Hitler's statement is the one about "understanding the emotional ideas of the great masses." In Robert Kagan's national bestseller Of Paradise and Power, the author struggles to understand Europe's double standard in condemning America's invasion of Iraq. "As the Iraq crisis approached in 2002 and early 2003," noted Kagan, "many Europeans simply shifted their view of both international law and international legitimacy." Why did they do this? What was the emotive cause of Europe's shift? Kagan suggests that, in part, Europe's double standard is a ploy to constrain the United States.
Envy is a swamp, and a feeling of thwarted ambition lies at the bottom of this swamp. As German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer once confessed: "The question now is: What will become of the Europeans given the dominant role of the United States? Will they be able to determine their own fate or will they merely be forced to carry out what has been decided elsewhere?" According to Revel, the crux of the matter is very different than that presented by Fischer. "Obsessed by their hatred and floundering in illogicality, these dupes forget that the United States ... is also acting in the interest of us Europeans...."
In the end, hatred is about power and influence. More often than not, the hated object is merely "in the way." America stands in the way of Chinese or Russian or European global dominance. Each man dreams of his own glory, and the more he dreams the more he loathes standing in the shadow of a greater man. In Shakespeare's play, Julius Caesar, Cassius laments that Caesar has "now become a god; and Cassius is a wretched creature...." Cassius is incensed that Caesar should "get the start of the majestic world, and bear the palm alone." Caesar bestrides the "narrow world like a colossus; and we petty men walk under his huge legs, and peep about to find ourselves dishonorable graves."
The emotion is a powerful one. It animates ideologies and moves continents.
