The geyser of criticism is not only self-contradictory, Revel correctly notes, but hypocritical—this last the attribute so often ascribed to Americans. Confronted with the outrageous human rights records of Libya, Sudan, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and China, the critics who loudly deplore the curtailment of civil liberties in the United States in the wake of September 11 may suddenly be found coughing discreetly into their napkins and ponderously picking lint from their neckties. In the meantime, their countrymen profit handsomely from commercial relations with these countries’ dictators and kleptocrats.

Revel rightly finds it interesting and suggestive that critics so often attack the United States for failings that might more accurately be ascribed to their own societies: It takes real nerve, he observes, for the Germans and Japanese to excoriate American militarism or for Latin Americans to cavil at American electoral corruption. The French, complaining of American brutality in Afghanistan and Iraq, have misplaced entirely the memory of their own attempt to suppress a terrorist uprising in Algeria, an exercise of such savagery that by comparison, the jailors of Abu Ghraib appear kittenishly playful. Moving southwards, African elites, blaming their continent’s misfortunes on the United States, demanded in 2001 a “Marshall Plan for Africa.” Revel notes that Africans have received the equivalent of four Marshall Plans in as many decades. The bulk has been squirreled away in Swiss banks, invested in weapons used against their own citizens, or the palaces of presidents-for-life.

Revel is at his best when examining the anti-American delirium evident in the round international condemnation of the United States’ war on terror and its foreign policy in the Middle East. An example: In response to American military action in Afghanistan, and without reference to the 3,000 massacred in Manhattan, 113 French intellectuals launched an appeal against the United States’ “imperial crusade,” declaring that “This is not our war. In the name of the law and morality of the jungle, the Western armada administers its divine justice.” This seems a bit far-fetched: Which party to this conflict, precisely, is more likely to see itself as divinely inspired? Revel is absolutely right to stress that the 113 could not more thoroughly have missed the point: The purpose of the American response was not revenge, but the preemption of moreterrorism. The threat to the world, France included, came from a terrorist mastermind who had taken up residence in Afghanistan. What country should they have bombed?

Revel is surely not exaggerating about the extent of anti-Americanism or its frequently hallucinatory nature. Note the reception of 9/11: The Big Lie, a book by the French journalist Thierry Meyssan, who argues that no airplane crashed into the Pentagon on September 11. He proposes that the American secret services and its military-industrial complex invented the event to prime their gullible, sheep-like countrymen for a war of imperial conquest against Afghanistan and Iraq. The book was a best seller in France.

Anti-Americanism, Revel concludes, is a cultist system of faith rather than a set of rational beliefs. It is thus impervious to revision upon confrontation with logic, evidence, gestures of goodwill, public relations campaigns, or attempts on the part of the American secretary of state to be a better, more sensitive listener. The American Left’s contention that it is the current administration’s foreign policy that has made the United States an object of hatred worldwide is delusory. Revel is dismissive of their program to understand the world’s antipathy toward the United States by means of pained introspection and to correct it with improved behavior: Nothing Americans might do, short of disappearing politely en masse, will help.

 

I do not wish to criticize a book for failing to be something it does not attempt to be, but I do wish that Revel had taken this idea further. The most interesting question, to my mind, and the one with which Revel engages least satisfactorily, is not whether the most delirious exemplars of anti-Americanism are correct—it takes nothing more than a few argumentative flyswatters to demonstrate that they are not—but why they are so eager to embrace the hogwash. It is the astonishing persistence of these beliefs that needs to be explained, and here Revel’s answers are not wholly satisfying. He sees anti-Americanism in terms of failed domestic politics, of the universal human propensity to turn complaints outward in preference to subjecting oneself to scrutiny. He suggests as well that European anti-Americanism reflects humiliation over the loss of Europe’s six-hundred-year leadership role. This is fine as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough.

There is a quasi-religious, even messianic aspect about this latest spasm of anti-Americanism, particularly in its coupling with undifferentiated anti-modernism and anti-Semitism. It is this mystical element of the anti-American movement that is both most interesting and alarming, for it brings to mind the Continent’s illiberal antecedents not only from the Marxist Left, but also from the Right. Here it is important to document the words and slogans of activists who conceive of their program as essentially spiritual or transcendental—to note, for example, characters such as “Starhawk,” a signatory to the Not in Our Name petition against war and repression,who claims to be “deeply committed to bringing the techniques and creative power of spirituality to political activism,” or, more seriously, the extremely influential German neo-Protestant writer Eugen Drewermann. In this light, it seems germane to ask what kind of spiritual void, what kind of existential emptiness, does anti-Americanism serve to fill? And why?

The answers to these questions are apt to vary depending upon the kind of anti-Americanism under scrutiny. Revel sees anti-Americanism as an essentially undifferentiated phenomenon; it is not. The anti-Americanism of the Third World, Islamic anti-Americanism particularly, has its origins in resentment and envy; European anti-Americanism—the more interesting anti-Americanism—contains aspects of this, but also contains aspects of surrogate religious faith. George Orwell, observing the rise of fascism in Europe, described power worship as “the new religion of Europe.” In a sense, Europe has been searching for a new religion ever since Nietzsche and Sartre pronounced dead the God that had for two thousand years animated the Continent; anti-Americanism is but one more endeavor to recapture that sense of destiny. The movement answers many of the fundamental needs ordinarily filled by religion: It offers a higher collective goal; it suggests new avenues for crusades. It affords its adherents a pleasing sense of moral superiority without the taint of now-unfashionable obvious religious primitivism. Socially, the anti-American movement functions much as the Church functioned: Young anti-American activists find community and social organization in these protest movements, as well as zeal, belonging, even ecstasy.

Revel concludes that the danger of anti-Americanism is its tendency to produce exactly the outcome it most fears: “The often extravagant ravings of anti-American hatred, the media imputations—sometimes the product of incompetence, sometimes of mythomania—the opinionated ill will that puts the United States in an unfavorable light at every turn, can only confirm for Americans the uselessness of consultation. The result is the exact opposite of what is sought…. And so America’s confused enemies and allies alike, valuing animosity over influence, condemn themselves to impotence—and thus, in effect, strengthen the country they claim to fear.”

This is surely so, and Revel is right to say so; indeed, he is right to say almost everything he says. This is an important little pamphlet, and one that deserves a wide audience. Yet it is more important still to conclude that anti-Americanism is not merely a counterproductive folly, but a deeply disturbing symptom: There is something profoundly rotten at the core of this system of belief, and as the past century has shown, nations in the grip of mythomaniacal belief systems tend not merely to be foolish, but volatile, self-destructive, and dangerous to international order.
 

Claire Berlinski is a writer who lives in Paris. She is the author of Loose Lips (Random House, 2003) and is currently working on a study of the challenges facing the European political order.