UTTER FROM EUROPE: Mad About Us
Gedmin, Jeffrey
R FROM E JEFFREY GEDMIN Mad About Us RECENTLY HOSTED BIANCA JAGGER FOR A DEBATE in Berlin. (More about her in a moment.) We convened in a back room at Max Moritz, a smoky pub in Kreutzberg, a...
...Whites Have It Better...
...The issue: "Human Rights—Victim in the War on Terror...
...This isn't what the audience had in mind...
...I admired her courage when she stood up to Serbs, Clintonites, and Bush Realpolitik which held that the U.S...
...It reads like a mix of Soviet-era Pravda commentary of Soviet times and a PLO communique...
...ret...
...I like her...
...Sounds like Mr...
...True, check the footnotes and you'll find illuminating works like The Emergence of the Fascist American Theocratic State, which the author recommends as a "pamphlet easy to find in an Internet search...
...One Nation Under God—Bigotry and the Puritans...
...Thevessen may have been operating under cover...
...And praised us Americans when we did...
...Back to Bianca...
...An American expat sent me a note recently, fretting about the growth of totalitarianism in the U.S...
...Or what about Qaddafi's Libya...
...That was then...
...When Elmar Thevessen was living in Washington he had a neighbor named Byron York, who worked for The American Spectator, "a weekly [sic] magazine with extreme right-wing views...
...Or the president's commitment to democracy in the Middle East...
...Noam Chomsky's book, Power and Terror, is quoted here these days...
...Diplomats, think tankers, students, taxi drivers, and locals sipped on their beer and peppered the speakers with questions...
...His book, The American Empire: An Obituary (the U.S...
...Parasite of the World Economy...
...MAY 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 45...
...Okay, nothing new you say...
...Poor Paul O'Neill, silenced in Siberia...
...We're just trying to please our million readers," he explained...
...Herr Niles evidently missed the 9-11 Commission 44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 2004 and Dick Clarke's testimony in late March...
...Crossing swords with Bianca was Gen...
...Bushonomics—Politics as a Self-Service Shop for the Wealthy...
...A gentleman who works for German television provided the most crowd-pleasing question...
...Now, I had wanted to discuss subjects like whether we are turning a blind eye on Chechnya...
...I worked with her on Bosnia JEFFREY GEDMIN and Kosovo (when we were on the same side...
...The room was packed...
...edition is entitled After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order), is best described as something between warmed up Paul Kennedy and Michael Moore with footnotes...
...Even Dick Clarke hasn't claimed that...
...This stuff keeps coming...
...Elmar Thevessen, a recent Washington correspondent for ZDF German television—the more conservative German network!—has now dipped his own oar in the water with The Bush Report: How the U.S...
...in an in-house meeting as a "police state...
...The Land of the Executioner—the Popularity of the Death Penalty...
...Byron York "was actually quite nice," the author concedes, "although we only talked about the garden and the weather...
...Now Bianca was taking the side of Herr Niles...
...Blood, Lies and Dominos—the Vietnam War...
...People lap it up and an army of teachers, editors, politicians, and writers keep delivering the goods...
...Frey's chapter titles tell the story: "The Genocide Against Indians...
...President Betrayed his Country and the World...
...Charts, factoids, and statistics tell the reader that the inside jacket was not spoofing when it noted that Eric Frey, the book's Austrian author, is an established scholar, who once studied at Princeton...
...Molly Irvin's Bushwhacked...
...I'm not kidding...
...Herr Niles wanted to know why no one seems concerned with the absence of political debate in George W. Bush's America, where a chilling conformity and group think has taken hold...
...There is deep and profound analysis such as: "The Bush Doctrine...can be summarized in two words: preemptive and unilateral...
...The audience swooned and I considered, not for the first time, the real character of this indiscriminate America bashing...
...Joerg Lau, the culture editor of the weekly Die Zeit, rounded off the panel...
...She kicked the hell out of the European Union when the feckless Europeans failed to act...
...Or for that matter the writings of Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, Susan Sontag, and a few other brave dissenters...
...Educated people really say these things and apparently believe them...
...Eric Alterman's The Book on Bush: How George W. (Mis)leads America...
...Or bestsellers like Al Franken's Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them...
...TAS workers and readers: Do you know who your neighbors are...
...I had a German tell me in a letter that her son, who is now studying in the U.S., experiences an atmosphere so repressive that it cannot hold a candle to what the Stasi did in old East Germany...
...Lr Jeffrey Gedmin is director of the Aspen Institute Berlin...
...The New Witchhunt: The Campaign Against Smokers...
...Ah, that stifling politburo in Washington...
...David Corn's The Lies of George W. Bush...
...Last year, French scholar Emmanuel Todd stood atop bestseller lists and toured the continent as the king of the interview shows...
...Droves of Europeans seem to be craving this junk...
...Schwarzbuch USA—"The Black Book USA"—is a 497page catalogue of America's crimes throughout history...
...A senior foreign ministry official here in Berlin got into trouble last year when colleagues leaked to the press that he had referred to the U.S...
...did not have a dog in those fights...
...We convened in a back room at Max Moritz, a smoky pub in Kreutzberg, a neighborhood in Berlin known mostly for Turkish guest workers and left-wing anarchists...
...But I've saved the best for last...
...One of my recent personal favorites, Schwarzbuch USA—"The Black Book USA"—is a 497-page catalogue of America's crimes throughout history...
...It does not end here...
...Joerg Schoenbohm, the center-right interior minister from the nearby state of Brandenburg...
...A writer for the German weekly Der Spiegel told me during the Iraq debate not to take offense at the crude anti-American covers of the magazine such as the ugly, bearded, drooling Rambo figure it used to show the typical GI in Iraq...
...Herr Niles, alas, was pushing an idea that has become very popular in Europe...
...It's like what Michael Moore dishes up—comfort food for people who want to feel good about feeling bad toward America...
...Chapter titles like "Whites Have It Better," and "Parasite of the World Economy" tell the story...
...or before September 11th, the President did nothing but "play golf and fish...
Vol. 37 • May 2004 • No. 4
