Criticizes Pascal Bruckner's anti-anti-Americanism: Replies
Bruckner, Pascal
I have bad news from Paris for James B. Rule: the French love America and love to hate it. They whip the Republican administration only to give freer rein to their lust for everything that comes...
...The immediate failures of the Bush team do not legitimize a wholesale condemnation of the United States...
...But it's much more comfortable to spit on one's own country from the comfort of a campus, a cafe, or in the pages of a magazine without taking the least physical or intellectual risk...
...and the Afghans would still be living under the dark tutelage of the Taliban...
...James B. Rule must really tell them why they're wrong...
...Bosnians and Kosovars would still be beneath yoke of Serb nationalism...
...I'm ashamed to say it but there are still French people—it's terrible, really—who think Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and friends are worse than George W. Bush...
...Don't just visit for a bit and pretend to take on our voices...
...Maybe he knows it as a visitor who comes to sate his hunger for the exotic or find a counter-model to his own country...
...For several years we've witnessed a strange reversal of roles...
...Clearly, James B. Rule needs more than surface knowledge of Europe, West or East...
...Seriously...
...I advise James B. Rule to abandon his North American provincialism...
...For the last five years, I've seen too many American artists and writers (especially those published in or visiting Europe) declaiming against their country and telling us that the land of Abraham Lincoln is now a fascist state...
...106 n DISSENT / Winter 2007...
...Don't just visit Europe, but really speak to people here from many walks of life, as well as to people in the rest of the world...
...Europe is not warlike and will never be so again, but Europeans know that without force to back them their laws and rights are only fictions...
...navy in all the global hotspots (especially in the Red Sea...
...Translated by Marco Roth PASCAL BRUCKNER'S books in English include The Temptations of Innocence, The Tears of the White Man, Evil Angels, and The Divine Child...
...They whip the Republican administration only to give freer rein to their lust for everything that comes from the United States...
...So I guess 53 percent of French people have become neoconservatives in the Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld mold...
...Mired in Iraq, the administration in Washington seems to have given up on systematic militarism, while Europe's most enlightened elites have felt the need for an efficient armed force capable of rapid intervention in distant theaters of operation...
...And it gets worse: according to a poll recently published by the German Marshall Fund, nearly 53 percent of French people are in favor of using force if Iran attacks our interests...
...The French fight alongside American troops in Afghanistan under the auspices of the NATO International Security Assistance Force (mandated by the UN...
...Let me remind him of these trivial facts: Without America, we French would today be either Nazified or Sovietized...
...democratic revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia would never have succeeded...
...I advise him to visit the former communist bloc, where he'll discover that the United States is not universally despised...
...The hatred of George W. Bush and his team can blind even the best minds...
...When an American intellectual tells me about his hatred of America, I always wonder where he's been living...
...There France's major intelligence organizations work with the FBI, the CIA, the German MBK, Britain's MI5 and MI6, along with the Canadian and Australian secret services...
...Such is the ambivalence of our anti-Americanism, an impossible passion...
...Has he left his corrupted 106 n DISSENT / Winter 2007 Puritan Babylon for more civilized locales...
...they cooperate with the U.S...
...But during these same five years, I meet the same people in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, or Miami going about their vapid little business as though nothing were amiss...
...Clearly they are just posturing, or imposturing...
...I have worse news: even our current government collaborates with the Bush team...
...Even worse: in the heart of Paris, at the Ecole Militaire, France has set up an international center for intelligence gathering...
...Horror and damnation...
...It is strange, but perfectly fine, that a French writer must advise him this way...
...If the United States has really become an outpost of Big Brother, why don't you ask us for political asylum...
Vol. 54 • January 2007 • No. 1
