Why Do People Hate America?

Rating:
Summary: Ben Franklin & James Madison Would Have Praised This Book
Review:

The heart of this book is not why people hate America, but rather on how Americans have lost touch with reality.

This book joins three others books I have reviewed and recommend separately, as the "quartet for revolution" in how Americans must demand access to reliable information about the real world. They are Bill McKibben on "The Age of Missing Information" (a day in the woods contrasted with a year reviewing a day's worth of non-information on broadcast television); Anne Branscomb's "Who Owns Information" (not the citizen); and Roger Shattuck, "Forbidden Knowledge." These are the higher level books--there are many others, both on the disgrace of the media and the abuse of secrecy by government, as well as on such excellent topics as "Who Will Tell the People: The Betrayal of American Democracy" by William Greider, and "The Closing of the American Mind" by Allan Bloom.

Here are a few points made by this book that every American needs to understand if we are to restore true democracy, true freedom of the press, and true American values to our foreign policy, which has been hijacked by neo-conservative corporate interests:

1) "Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel." Dr. Samuel Johnson said this in 1775, on the eve of US revolution from British tyranny. When patriotism is used to suppress dissent, to demand blind obedience, and to commit war crimes "in our name," then patriotism has lost its meaning.

2) According to the authors, Robert Kaplan and Thomas Friedman are flat out *wrong* when they suggest that "they" hate us for our freedoms, the success of our economy, for our rich cultural heritage. Most good-hearted Americans simply have no idea how big the gap is between our perception of our goodness and the rest of the world's perception of our badness (in terms set forth below).

3) According to the authors, a language dies every two weeks. Although there are differing figures on how many languages are still active today (between 3,000 and 5,500), the point is vital. If language is the ultimate representation of a distinct and unique culture that is ideally suited to the environment in which it has flourished over the past millenium, then the triple strikes of English displacing the language, the American "hamburger virus" and city planning displacing all else, and American policy instruments--inclusive of the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund--eliminating any choices before the Third World or even the European policy makers, then America can be said to have been invasive, predatory, and repressive. At multiple levels, from "hate" by Islamic fundamentalists, to "fear and disdain" by French purists, to "annoyance" by Asians to "infatuation" by teenagers, the Americans are seen as way too big for their britches--Americans are the proverbial bull in the china shop, and their leaders lack morals--the failure of America to ratify treaties that honor the right of children to food and health, the failure of America to respect international conventions-the average of two military interventions a year since the Cold War (not to mention two countries invaded but not rescued), all add up to "blowback."

4) According to the authors, America is "out of control" largely because the people who vote and pay taxes are uninformed. The authors of this book are most articulate. Consider the following quote: "And the power of the American media, as we repeatedly argue, works to keep American people closed to experience and ideas from the rest of the world and thereby increases the insularity, self-absorption, and ignorance that is the overriding problem the rest of the world has with American."

5) According to the authors, the impact of America overseas can be best summed up as a "hamburger virus" that comes as a complete package, and is especially pathological. McDonalds "serves" rather than "feeds". The "hamburger culture" is eradicating indigenous cultures everywhere, and often this is leading, decades later, to the realization that those cultures had thrived because they were well suited to the environment--the "hamburger culture" assumes that electricity will provide for air conditioning, that everyone can afford a car once the cities have been paved over, etcetera. When this turns out to not be the case, the losses that have occurred over decades cannot be turned back, and poverty, as well as ethnic strife, are the result.

6) Finally--and the authors have many other points to make in this excellent book, but this is the last one for this "summative" evaluation of their work--according to the authors the USA is what could be considered the ultimate manifestation of the "eighth crusade", with Christopher Columbus and the destruction of the native American Indians (both North and South) having been the seventh crusade. The authors are most interesting as they define the predominantly Catholic edicts from the Pope and from Kings and Queens, that declared that anyone not speaking their language (and therefore not able to understand their edicts) was a savage, an animal, and therefore suitable for enslavement. In the eyes of much of the world, America is a culturally-oppressive force that is enslaving local governments and local economies for the benefit of a select wealthy elite that live in gated compounds, while demeaning, demoting, and destroying the balance of power and the balance with nature and the balance among tribes, that existed prior to the arrival of American "gunboat diplomacy" and "banana capitalism."

There you have it. According to the authors:
1) Americans are uninformed about the real world
2) Americans are not in charge of their own foreign policy
3) What is done in the name of all Americans is severely detrimental to the rest of the world, and Americans will pay a heavy price if they allow this "hamburger/gunboat imperialism" to continue.

May God have mercy on our souls, for we know not what we do.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting and informative read!
Review: After Sept. 11, 2001, many Americans asked the question, "Why?" Unfortunately, due to America's pop culture, the reason often gets masked behind the sound bites, corporations, and what looks good on television. It is increasingly difficult to get a viewpoint on world events in the USA from a perspective other than American journalism sources. That's where this book excels.

The authors explain in an easy-to-understand manner exactly why those outside the USA dislike America, in ways many people are unfamiliar with. The USA might be the only remaining super-power, but to continuously ignore how others look at us as a country will prove to be disastrous. I highly recommend this book as one way to get that "outside perspective," and to shed some light on a subject that more often than not gets drowned out in political rhetoric and made-to-fit sound bites.

Rating:
Summary: An exercise in delusional paranoia
Review: America's place in the world, and the responses its power and influence evoke (including negative ones), are much-needed subjects for informed analysis and reasoned debate. Sadly, this book will disappont readers looking for a contribution to that kind of discussion. This is no more than an exercise in anti-American venom penned by authors apparently unschooled in history, political science or rational process.

If you're in a bookstore wondering whether to buy Why Do People Hate America?, flick through to page 195 (Australian edition - apologies to U.S. readers) and onward. There you will find the core of the authors' analysis - if such it can be termed. Here they articulate the four principal reasons for the hatred in which America is allegedly universally held - in their view, justifiably so. These are:

* The existential: "The U.S. has simply made it too difficult for other people to exist." The USA has contrived to structure the international economy to guarantee perpetual enrichment of itself, and abject poverty for everyone else (at least, the non-Western world).

* The cosmological: America has replaced God as the "cause of everything." Further, imperial America is engaged on a project that involves the consumption of all time and space, and aspires to consuming all non-American people; "Inducted into the cosmological structure of America, the rest of the world will vanish."

* The ontological: America has replaced the notion of "good" with the notion of itself, as the binary opposite to "evil". Thus, America can only be good and virtuous, and only America can be such.

* The definitional: American has assumed the right to define what it means even to be human, and that only in terms of its own identity. American values are therefore the only ones that any longer actually are.

This isn't argument or analysis; it's transparent nonsense, evidencing a seriously deformed kind of intellectualism. The whole world is no more than items on America's fast-food menu - literally the imperialist's snack, for heaven's sake. Are we expected to take this stuff seriously?

In this book, the "facts" of American evil and the hatred felt for it are not argued from circumstance or evidence; they are derived from an intellectual horizon wholly indifferent to logic. This is the hallmark of the most dangerous forms of bigotry. According to its authors, America's evil is inherent, insistent and inevitable, informed by a spirit of pure, unadulterated malignance towards the non-American world. To Sardar and Davies, America is not really a country at all, but a poisonous psychic space and an infectious effluvium. The rest of the world may as well just suit up and keep sterile until the infection burns out. This is plain lunacy.

In the end, despite its pretensions to political analysis, Why Do People Hate America? is purely the invention of its own malevolence. Its underlying psychological state is reminiscent of nothing so much as Nazi hate literature, where the Jews are viewed through the same pornographying prism of delusional paranoia.

If you buy the book, be prepared to navigate through some pretty scary territory on your way to deciding whether it was worth the purchase price - or not.

Rating:
Summary: Sharp business, bad writing
Review: By now you've already read page upon page of discussion regarding the authors' arguments in Why Do....? O.K., everybody's got a right. If, like me, you picked this thing up simply to be amused, or (gasp) enlightened. Forget it.

Intentionally or not, the book is a work of commercial writing in that it panders to the American susceptibility to fads of all kinds. This particular fad - American, Hate Thyself!- has re-surfaced at least three times in the last 50 years or so, and never completely goes away.

The writing itself is slow, even pedantic, as if the authors were compelled to give us step-by-step instructions on just how we've damaged the 3rd World (called here "Developing Countries" - with no evidence to support this moniker), and how we should and can make the hurt go away. This approach would be merely boring if the authors had not also, rather strangely I thought, co-mingled the plight of savages everywhere with the affront felt by the French that Americans just won't learn French Damn It. The result is a strange brew suitable for framing; just throw it up against wall, see if pattern emerges. Oh, and all of this is presented to the reader in a faux academic style, although the book's cardinal sin is that it is just not serious.

You want evidence? No problem: McDonald's as an instrument of world domination. Get real folks; it's McDonalds; they make bad burgers that you can buy without getting out of your car and might even keep your kids quiet for five minutes.

This is EVIL?

No, of course it's not. It IS an unmistakable indicator of the desperate lengths to which zealots will go in order to promote goofy ideas - or sell unreadable books - or both.

So spend the dough if you're your looking for the same old tedious "I hate America and I'm going to charge you to tell you how much" diatribe. My recommendation, however, is to take the money, buy the latest Grisham and head out to the pool with your honey. You'll thank me for this.





Rating:
Summary: Well-researched, but argues a few points that aren't useful
Review: First of all, this book is not easy to read. The language of the book is more academic than plain, and the authors really work to demonstrate their intellect in the wording. Not that it's indecipherable--I had no trouble following its points--but it actually LOSES part of its power by not making concepts simpler, plainer.

The book does indeed list some remarkable facts about America's behaviors and how the US dominates world economics, globalization, cultural export, arrogance, biotechnological warfare, corporate rule, and so on. A few of the facts reported in the book are truly astonishing, and I did further research to verify them (incidentally the authors' claims were always correct).

But the book also tries to make points that aren't very useful, like the tortured use of hamburgers as a metaphbor for American viral culture. Quite a bit of work is devoted to explaining that the hamburger, both as a symbol and as a literal food, represents the "layers" of American monoculture, agriculture, and farming that injure the world. The point might have been better made without trying to make hamburgers the centerpiece of an entire chapter of such a metaphor.

The authors also launch the book with WAY too much minute attention to the literal syntax of the phrase, "who do people hate America?". Every possible linguistic insight is analyzed.

Of particular value is a segment in which the US's military interventions in and against other countries in the name of "freedom" or "progess" are listed and briefly described; the authors use this list to question America's claim to be a beacon of freedom and democracy for the world (while simultaneously using military interventions to override free elections we don't like, using trade wars to force corporate advantages against Third World countries, using assassinations to subvert other countries' governments, etc.).

The authors also look at America through history, including interesting references to Native American authors, and the way that America appropriates and then modifies the "culture stories" of other people to become a Frankenstin monster-like parable of the American spirit.

It's the best book on the topic, but I wish it had been more straightforward. When it IS, it's at its best.

Rating:
Summary: Listen up, America
Review: I find all of these Amazon reader reviews enormously useful--especially the American ones because they illustrate so many of the points made by Sardar and Davies in this fascinating book, which I devoured at one sitting. Throughout the recent Republican convention, which I watched with great interest on CNN and PBS, I found myself returning to the book to re-examine and highlight points illustrated by convention speakers and delegates. For example, the night that Zell Miller and Dick Cheney spoke sent me searching for this passage:

The rhetoric of violence has become an integral part of the American political scene. As the US has become a polarised nation of two cultures, liberal and conservative, unable to communicate by political debate since the differences occur within the narrow spectrum of Republican and Democrat, it has become a country in which the politics of the bomb-o-gram has established itself. So some of those who passionately defend the right to life of an unborn foetus can bomb an abortion clinic and assassinate doctors who perform abortions.... If America has become a country that cannot debate, engage or negotiate with itself, cannot wrestle with different meanings among people who are all Americans, then what hope is there that it can extend a listening ear or open mind to the rest of the world? (pp. 188-189)

It's this unwillingness to listen that produces the kind of hostile reviews of the book on this website and makes me hear more clearly the note of despair in Sardar's and Davies' voices. All the world heard the pain in American voices after the tragedy of 9/11, and here in Canada, we grieved with our American cousins. But our voices were not heard by Americans when we hit the streets to caution Americans about the folly of invading Iraq. Indeed, the ten million voices around the globe went unheard by a reckless American administration. As Sardar and Davies intimate throughout this excellent book, when Americans stop hating each other (and Muslims and Frenchmen and Cubans and commies and liberals, etc., ad infinitum), perhaps non-Americans will stop hating them.

I highly recommend this book to those Americans--if there are any--who are actually interested in an answer to their most frequently asked question: "Why do they hate us?" And remember: for every non-American who hates the American STATE, there are at least two who admire the American NATION.

Rating:
Summary: An interesting read, but partial
Review: I found this book very interesting, although written under the influence of subterranean albeit disguised traces of that very hate that figures in the title.

You cannot read it and think you know how the issue stands, because it is essentially a monologue, clearly partial and somewhat simplistic, not a BBC-style investigation. Some further research and documentation on your side is mandatory.

However, it is interesting to have an extremist view of the various motives that people have to hate America. Because it is true in my experience that there are many people that do loathe, despise, contemn or simply scorn America.

The problem is that I do not believe that this book is of any use to change anyone's point of view, because of its sweeping generalizations and unsubstantiated statements, which are irritating even if in principle one would agree on the core issue.

After having read this book, you either still do not understand why people hate America or you still do understand it but now you don't agree with the authors.

I know that everyone has the right to have their own opinion, but depicting Americans as a mass of media-influenced egotistic zombies devouring their daily ration of the world's resources is, in my opinion, just rubbish. However, and this is where the true value of the book lies, I think that it hits the mark because this is a widespread perception.

I would encourage readers from the rich countries (because I would not consider "America" to be located only in America) to read the book, and worry about the fact that this is the way many people think. Maybe something of it is true, and then needs action, something else is false, and action is needed in this case too.

I personally think that some of the allegations the authors make about US foreign policy, particularly in regard to Islamic countries, could be easily shared, even sustained, and if you are able to filter the content of this book through your common sense and experience you might actually have gained something from it.

Rating:
Summary: Very, Very Few Good Points
Review: In "Why Do People Hate America?" Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies attempt to explain why, in their opinion, the United States is the most hated country in the world. They have come up with five reasons: 1) America presents a view of itself to the world via its cultural creations and political rhetoric that it fails to live up to, 2) by tilting the global trading system in its favor America has not only impoverished the world but it has actively sought to destroy other cultures and to starve the world's people to death, 3) the US uses a double standard when it comes to international conduct; one for itself and one for everyone else, 4) the American people do not know about the world outside their borders and, furthermore, they do not seem to care to know, and 5) American military intervention is unrestrained and devastates vast swaths of the globe.

You can tell from my one-star rating that I disagree with most of what the authors have said. Let me take each of the five items in turn.

The authors have done the inexplicable in using American movies to attempt to describe how America sees itself and how it presents itself to the rest of the world. They seem to particularly equate the film "Shane" with the United States. To anyone who would focus on a country's cultural outputs to try to find a description of that country I say, "Shame on you." American movies have nothing at all to do with how America sees itself or the world. In America, movies are explicitly a form of escapism. In other words, American movies are intended NOT to present reality as we see it. I would hope that the rest of the world would be informed well enough about America to understand that fact; but, I guess that street only goes one way though.

The idea that the global trading system is tilted in America's favor is simply laughable. No country imports more goods, and thereby creates jobs for other countries' citizens, than the United States. Furthermore, the institutions that the authors cite as being the global puppets of American corporations; the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization, a persona non grata in the United States specifically because they continuously institute policies and promulgate rulings that are inimical to America's interests. The US Congress has for years been attempting to do to these agencies what they have done to the United Nations: cut them off financially.

Yes, the United States does at times use a double standard in its dealings with the world. I never believe that the "other people do it too" defense is legitimate. And so, I wish that our political leaders would not do it even though it is par for the course of international diplomacy. Dealing with different countries in differing ways is not hypocritical; it is smart and necessary. However, carping on about a country's lack of human rights while at the same time happily accepting their prisoner- and child-made products is nauseating to anyone with a sense of fairness.

If these authors are any indication of the rest of the world's knowledge about America, then non-Americans need to brush up on their facts about America. There were several mistakes that the authors made in their description of America, the most egregious of which was referring to the US Secretary of Defense as the Secretary of State for Defense. This is the type of minor error that, if made about a foreign country, an American gets castigated for and gets called a country bumpkin. I believe these types of mistakes are inevitable when dealing with unfamiliar political systems. But, those who live in glass houses...

The last issue that I mentioned above is the most important one and the one that cuts to the heart of matter. No fact like the one that the United States, and only the United States, can intervene militarily any where in the world it wants, at any time it wants, via any method it chooses, so effectively encapsulates why America is detested. American military might fosters an image of the United States that is as fake as the movies Hollywood produces. It fosters the image that America is omnipotent.

The world's citizens have obtained an image of America as an all-encompassing giant whose mere wishes become reality. The authors actually make one of their last (and better) points about this. First, second, and third world people all see the products of America's military industrial complex and wonder at, if we can launch satellites thousands of miles up to spy on other countries, then why can't we end poverty and hunger and disease and homelessness and... well, you get the point.

When people see these things continuing to exist in a world where the United States can make them go away, they begin to believe that we, the American people, must somehow want them to live in suffering. This is the bane of America's overactive military endeavors. By maintaining a constant presence in every corner of the globe, the US engenders the very hostility that its military is deployed to combat. It is the ultimate catch-22.

While the authors rely on existential navel-gazing by the American people as a way of ending hatred of the US, I believe a much better method would be the entire withdrawal of American troops from the rest of the world. Of course, the rest of the world would likely go up in flames without the American military around to guarantee the peace; but, I say, who cares. If all they'll do is spit on us while we are protecting them, then who needs it.

Rating:
Summary: Very, Very Few Good Points
Review: In "Why Do People Hate America?" Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies attempt to explain why, in their opinion, the United States is the most hated country in the world. They have come up with five reasons: 1) America presents a view of itself to the world via its cultural creations and political rhetoric that it fails to live up to, 2) by tilting the global trading system in its favor America has not only impoverished the world but it has actively sought to destroy other cultures and to starve the world's people to death, 3) the US uses a double standard when it comes to international conduct; one for itself and one for everyone else, 4) the American people do not know about the world outside their borders and, furthermore, they do not seem to care to know, and 5) American military intervention is unrestrained and devastates vast swaths of the globe.

You can tell from my one-star rating that I disagree with most of what the authors have said. Let me take each of the five items in turn.

The authors have done the inexplicable in using American movies to attempt to describe how America sees itself and how it presents itself to the rest of the world. They seem to particularly equate the film "Shane" with the United States. To anyone who would focus on a country's cultural outputs to try to find a description of that country I say, "Shame on you." American movies have nothing at all to do with how America sees itself or the world. In America, movies are explicitly a form of escapism. In other words, American movies are intended NOT to present reality as we see it. I would hope that the rest of the world would be informed well enough about America to understand that fact; but, I guess that street only goes one way though.

The idea that the global trading system is tilted in America's favor is simply laughable. No country imports more goods, and thereby creates jobs for other countries' citizens, than the United States. Furthermore, the institutions that the authors cite as being the global puppets of American corporations; the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization, a persona non grata in the United States specifically because they continuously institute policies and promulgate rulings that are inimical to America's interests. The US Congress has for years been attempting to do to these agencies what they have done to the United Nations: cut them off financially.

Yes, the United States does at times use a double standard in its dealings with the world. I never believe that the "other people do it too" defense is legitimate. And so, I wish that our political leaders would not do it even though it is par for the course of international diplomacy. Dealing with different countries in differing ways is not hypocritical; it is smart and necessary. However, carping on about a country's lack of human rights while at the same time happily accepting their prisoner- and child-made products is nauseating to anyone with a sense of fairness.

If these authors are any indication of the rest of the world's knowledge about America, then non-Americans need to brush up on their facts about America. There were several mistakes that the authors made in their description of America, the most egregious of which was referring to the US Secretary of Defense as the Secretary of State for Defense. This is the type of minor error that, if made about a foreign country, an American gets castigated for and gets called a country bumpkin. I believe these types of mistakes are inevitable when dealing with unfamiliar political systems. But, those who live in glass houses...

The last issue that I mentioned above is the most important one and the one that cuts to the heart of matter. No fact like the one that the United States, and only the United States, can intervene militarily any where in the world it wants, at any time it wants, via any method it chooses, so effectively encapsulates why America is detested. American military might fosters an image of the United States that is as fake as the movies Hollywood produces. It fosters the image that America is omnipotent.

The world's citizens have obtained an image of America as an all-encompassing giant whose mere wishes become reality. The authors actually make one of their last (and better) points about this. First, second, and third world people all see the products of America's military industrial complex and wonder at, if we can launch satellites thousands of miles up to spy on other countries, then why can't we end poverty and hunger and disease and homelessness and... well, you get the point.

When people see these things continuing to exist in a world where the United States can make them go away, they begin to believe that we, the American people, must somehow want them to live in suffering. This is the bane of America's overactive military endeavors. By maintaining a constant presence in every corner of the globe, the US engenders the very hostility that its military is deployed to combat. It is the ultimate catch-22.

While the authors rely on existential navel-gazing by the American people as a way of ending hatred of the US, I believe a much better method would be the entire withdrawal of American troops from the rest of the world. Of course, the rest of the world would likely go up in flames without the American military around to guarantee the peace; but, I say, who cares. If all they'll do is spit on us while we are protecting them, then who needs it.

Rating:
Summary: Worth reading
Review: In general this is a well written text and it only wavers slightly in one or two places. In many ways it reads as though it is written for a european, or at least not an american audience. The reason I say this is related to Ed Oswalts comment "The point that the USA manipulates the world economy is made repeatedly with limited evidence.", basically I think almost anyone I know would be totally aware of the IMF/WTO abuse of say Jamaica in the past for american company benefit. Thus it seems rather futile to map out all the examples.

A particularly profound and downright frightening part of the book is the list of American military interventions over the last 200 years.

I feel I should state that I am absolutely not anti - american, I work in the USA and am very happy thank you, but this book addresses points that the american media does not, and this is concerening. Ed Oswalt's comment "perhaps because the authors view Americans as being informed largely by TV situation comedies and Disney movies", is a little unfair, as the final chapter in the book is really saying the opposite. However, this is a view that many europeans may take and hence the book does the usa a service in this area.

Having said all that, you will probably hate this book if you are a republican....