On Guilt and Complexes
HENEHAN, ANNE
On Guilt and Complexes AMONG THE ANTI-AMERICANS By Thomas B. Morgan Holt, Rinehart and Winston 211 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by ANNE HENEHAN Former Executive Secretary, American Friends of Vietnam I...
...One explanation, stressed by several of Morgan's sources, is that anti-Americanism is frequently an outlet for domestic malaise or a useful ploy in domestic politics...
...Only one of the people Morgan quotes mentioned Ugly Americanism, and one gets the feeling that the Egyptian editor with this complaint was inspired mainly by Lederer and Bur-dick...
...Perhaps the solution lies in more carefully conceived and executed foreign policies, patient tolerance of some of the irritating manifestations of anti-Americanism and, Morgan suggests, "paying a little more attention to what people abroad are saying and what they mean when they say it...
...A functionary in Kenya's Ministry of Education said that "America is our witch doctor now"??to be blamed when the real cause of problems cannot be identified...
...Morgan also realizes that many of the people he talked to merely enjoyed hearing themselves expound and found him an indulgent sounding board...
...Economic policies, Morgan indicates, stimulate anti-Americanism, too...
...Unlike the professional Ugly American-hunters, Morgan is sophisticated enough to realize that the incestuous Embassy types whose local contacts are limited to servants and commissary clerks are a nuisance, but largely irrelevant to the prestige problem...
...On the surface, it is manifested in the resentment of African students who have suffered racial discrimination in the U.S.??which is cited in a chapter on Kenya...
...America doesn't give the impression that it is in Africa because it cares about Africans...
...Sandwiched between such interesting but unenlightening observations are a few clues to the underlying factors of anti-Americanism...
...Eric Hoffer has suggested that the process of modernization requires a powerful, even if irrational, mystique...
...Nor is our aid-not-tradc approach to much of the underdeveloped world likely to win us any popularity contests...
...Happily, it has not turned out to be that kind of book...
...on Japanese life...
...Rightly or wrongly, the U.S...
...Unfortunately, the author's perception and sophistication are not put to optimum use...
...The economic results of this may actually be constructive...
...Why should at the very last minute the squaw-girl have to die...
...High U.S...
...Several years ago I had a talk with my friend Eric Johnson, chairman of the American Motion Picture Association...
...Other than forcing happy endings on Hollywood's mixed couples, how can we combat anti-Americanism...
...Thus, the Brazilian architect who utters such pseudo-profundities as "You think of countries when it is basic to think of individuals," is dismissed with understated but definite irony...
...Had all the Americans in Djakarta eschewed cars for bicycles, the usis library would still have been burned...
...There are in addition, as a wise old Egyptian editor suggested, certain historical factors which make anti-Americanism nearly inevitable...
...Anti-Americanism, one infers from this book, is greater than the rational sum of its parts...
...I suggested to Eric Johnson, next time make a picture that ends happily...
...Some American movies, Sukarno complained, "hurt the feelings of the brown and the black men...
...tariffs and low purchasing prices for coffee hurt Brazil more than the Alliance for Progress helps it...
...I spoke tc him about an American picture, The Broken Arrow, a love story between an American officer and an Indian squaw-girl...
...Much ot it is emotional and, at least in the Afro-Asian world, derives from a combined underdevelopment and race complex...
...Though the book contains some impressionistic, be-tween-the-lines interpretation of the author's whirlwind 45,000-mile trip, it is essentially an anecdote-studded travelogue...
...But it has deeper psychological roots and strong sexual overtones, as Sukarno indicated in a conversation with Morgan...
...Instead of providing an illuminating analysis of his material an analysis he is no doubt qualified to tackle??Morgan chose to fill out the book's 211 pages with folksy obiter dicta about the cooking prowess of Look's lady in Paris and the high quality of Chinese cuisine in Singapore...
...Americans in Kenya suggested that professed anti-Americanism is a political stance, an almost essential platform plank, particularly for Africans who have studied in the States...
...Not through a gleeful purge of Ugly Americans from the Foreign Service ??or even from the aid missions where they are more plentiful...
...Though this may be blame-by-association, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that much anti-Americanism is due to fuzzily-conceived or mistaken U.S...
...bourbon in Djakarta's only air conditioned and very unindigenous bar...
...The racial aspects of this complex, however, can only be harmful...
...After hinting that the Coca Cola-ciA-"cultural desert" syndrome is not the basic cause of anti-Americanism, Morgan leaves the reader up in the air with the sweeping conclusion that "the causes of hostility among nations are innumerable...
...policies abroad...
...Washington seems prone to taking the wrong side, propping up unpopular regimes and undercutting democratic Leftists...
...An Indonesian official offered the thesis that "anti-Americanism is only a by-product of the crisis we have gotten ourselves into...
...Information Service operations...
...Then, of course, there is Vietnam, which was variously seen as an anti-Communist fiasco and a case of rashly-assumed responsibility...
...Anti-Americanism may be as effective and, in the long run, as harmless a mystique as any...
...And as a young Harvard-trained Kenyan editor told Morgan, it is "irritating to think that the only reason you are here is to keep the Communists out...
...A Tokyo intellectual told Morgan that anti-Americanism stems in part from the ambivalency the Japanese feel toward the impact of the U.S...
...When he said he was collecting material for a book on anti-Americanism, the Americans in the party felt vaguely guilty that they weren't out in the boondocks slugging rice wine with The People rather than sipping bonded U.S...
...is blamed for the colonialist policies ol its postwar allies...
...Reviewed by ANNE HENEHAN Former Executive Secretary, American Friends of Vietnam I met Thomas Morgan briefly in 1965 in the cocktail lounge of the Hotel Indonesia...
...And not through the frenetic, directionless image-building characteristic of most U.S...
...Let them live happily ever after...
Vol. 50 • April 1967 • No. 8
