IN THE AFTERMATH of the attacks of September 11, attempts are being made in the United States and elsewhere to understand the hatred of the attackers by shifting responsibility for it onto their target, the United States. We are witnessing a new outpouring of anti-Americanism on a scale not seen since the late 1960s. All the usual suspects, from Noam Chomsky to Paul Kennedy, Katha Pollitt, Norman Mailer, Robin Morgan, Harold Pinter, Edward Said, and Susan Sontag (to mention only a few), have seized the opportunity to vent their longstanding dislike or detestation of this society and culture. No doubt the patriotic rallying of the vast majority has stimulated this resurgence of hostility to America and a willingness to hold the United States culpable for most of the evil in the world.
Intellectuals and quasi-intellectuals, college professors, ministers, and those nostalgic for the 1960s and their youthful ideals, have come forth to affirm once again what they have always believed: that this country is a unique incarnation of injustice and hypocrisy. It is their key conviction and message that if the United States is hated, there must be good reasons why--namely, this country's endless wrongdoing at home and abroad. Of course, these same people also warmly support hate-crime legislation and the severe punishment of hate-criminals who assault women, minorities, or homosexuals. In none of these instances would they admonish the public to seek "root causes" or ask what the women, blacks, or homosexuals had done to provoke such hatred. In such cases,
it is politically correct to be judgmental of the perpetrators and to hold that human beings are capable of irrational hatred and unjustifiable violence that deserves no sympathy or contextual mitigation.
The responses of "the adversary culture" to the recent outrages illuminate the persistence and intensity of a certain visceral rejection of this society. The embittered critics of America are capable of moral indignation or anger only at actions, attitudes, or policies they associate with the United States. They are totally incapable of, or unwilling to entertain or express, any critical feeling toward those who are the murderous enemies of this country. There is a huge discrepancy between the anguished anticipatory compassion these critics have already extended to the wholly unintended, innocent victims and potential victims of American strikes against the terrorists, and the far more measured compassion they have expressed for the actual and wholly intended victims of the recent attacks.
Susan Sontag notoriously directed not a trace of anger or moral indignation at the terrorists, but an enormous amount of contempt and hostility at the Bush administration and the mass media. In the London Times, Norman Mailer suggested that "Americans should reflect on and try to understand why so many people feel a revulsion toward the U.S." and beware that in much of the world the United States is seen as the source of "cultural and aesthetic repression." Mailer (not known for turning down handsome advances and royalties for his books) cautioned against American greed and hunger for profit.
Noam Chomsky made the claim, remarkable even for a man who denied Pol Pot's atrocities, that the recent atrocity may not have equaled an attack such as Clinton's obliteration of a pharmaceutical factory in the Sudan. Dario Fo, an Italian playwright, suggested that "regardless of who carried out the massacre, this violence is the legitimate daughter of the culture of violence, hunger, and inhumane exploitation." In France, the New Yorker reported, "four of the eleven candidates competing for the French presidency--three on the far left and one . . . on the far right--told the local press that the United States essentially had itself to blame for the attacks."
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