> From: "boowa"
> Organization: http://groups.google.com
> Newsgroups:
> rec.travel.europe,rec.travel.usa-canada,rec.arts.movies.current-films,misc.sur
> vivalism,misc.invest.stocks
> Date: 18 Jun 2005 11:26:56 -0700
> Subject: Anti-Americanism & The World
>
> Mexican fans took up the chant "Osama! Osama!" during a recent
> US-Canada Olympic soccer game held south of our border. Last month,
> protesters in Athens chanted "Sept. 11 every day!" during an
> anti-American rally.
>
> American chief executive of the financial services firm Swift and
> president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Belgium, took a seat
> next to an elegant woman he recognized as one of Belgium's richest
> people. During the pre-dinner chitchat in a room full of
> museum-quality contemporary art, she ventured offhandedly that it was
> "good that the Americans got hit on Sept. 11. Maybe it taught them a
> lesson."
> "She was just repeating what she had heard," he says. "The real point
> is that 90% of the people she talks to every day would agree with
> her."
>
> Philadelphia transplant Susan Steele, head of Forum management company
> in London, has noticed that many Europeans have started using the
> phrase "that's American," which is shorthand, Steele says, for "not
> taking anyone else into consideration."
>
> Three-time gold medalist Karch Kiraly shared his volleyball war
> stories with some of the current crop of American Olympians. He
> described being pelted with ice cubes, raw eggs, tomatoes and D-cell
> batteries while playing in Argentina. In Brazil, assaults on the
> Americans came from spitting fans perched above the court's exit.
>
> In Britain, the United States' staunchest friend, snide remarks and
> downright animosity greet many Americans these days. It's not just
> religious radicals and terrorists who resent the United States
> anymore.
>
> Leading up to the Iraq war,millions of protestors took to the streets
> throughout Italy to protest the planned invasion.One reporter asked a
> protestor in Rome why he was protesting and he replied "Bush is the new
> Hitler and America is the new Nazi Germany and Iraq is the new
> Poland.They all deserve more 9/11s!Our premier is the new Mussolini and
> he should get what Mussolini got!"
>
> "Why do people attack Americans?" asks Tiny Waslandek, a social worker
> in Amsterdam, Netherlands. "Because they have a big, big mouth and
> they mind everybody's business."
>
> "Around the world, from Western Europe to the Far East, many see the
> United States as arrogant, hypocritical, self-absorbed,self-indulgent
> and contemptuous of others," Peterson says. "This is not a Muslim
> country issue. It has metastasized to the rest of the world and
> includes some of our closest European allies."
>
> New Yorker Julia Magnet, a journalist who just moved to London, found
> that out when she decided to throw a Fourth of July party for British
> friends. Between grilled sausages and chocolate cake, her friends
> launched an attack on Bush and the United States. They called Bush a
> "homicidal maniac" and "stupid" and the United States the "world's
> biggest terrorist."
>
> A road trip for a group of U.S. peewee hockey players to a tournament
> in Montreal turned into a foray into enemy territory as the boys were
> barraged with anti-American insults and witnessed protesters trashing
> the American flag, reports the Globe and Mail. Americans watched as a
> crowd cheered when a protester waved the Iraqi flag, and booed the
> U.S. flag. Next, the Stars and Stripes were doused with kerosene and
> ignited. "It went up in a puff of smoke and flames, and the crowd went
> wild. They were all cheering,""They told us we s----, gave us the
> finger and said 'Down with the U.S.A.' or 'The U.S.A. s----,"
>
> "People hate you. Everyone hates you. The whole world hates you." The
> pretty middle-aged woman, a Swiss mother and scholar, at the dinner
> table in Geneva earnestly wants to make that perfectly clear.She isn't
> angry with me. She thinks the American people are totally ignorant,
> misled by the media and a criminal president.
>
> I was traveling on a London bus when a well-dressed woman boarded
> with her equally-respectable son in his school uniform. Ahead of her
> was an elderly American woman, who said, 'I beg your pardon, I didn't
> mean to bang into you.' This prompted a tirade from the Englishwoman
> -- let's call her Lady E -- that resembled a verbal assault by a
> brownshirt against a hapless Jewish pedestrian in 1933. The American
> -- call her Mrs. A -- sat down and cowered as the tirade continued:
> 'I
> rejoice every time I hear of another American soldier dying!
> You people all deserve to die in another 9/11. You are destroying the
> world.' Mrs A fought back: 'I personally am NOT destroying the
> world.'
> This only provoked Lady E more, and as the bus driver and passengers
> laughed, she screamed into the American's face 'I wish every one of
> you would leave this country and not set foot in it ever again,' and
> Mrs A began to wince, crying. 'Thank you for ruining my day and my
> trip.' At this point Lady E lunged at the American and began to shake
> her. I jumped up and shouted at the top of my voice for the driver to
> stop and for her to leave the woman alone, prompting Lady E to come
> over to me and grab me. 'Another bloody American
> accent! You come here and think you can strut about, well, you are
> scum.' Thankfully, the woman next to me pushed her away. I left the
> bus as the American woman sat sobbing.
>
> A few weeks before, I had attended a party at which I was lambasted,
> intimidated and mocked by a group of people I had known for some
> twenty-odd years. It reminded me of a comment made to me by an
> American expatriate shortly after 9/11: 'Now I know what the Jews
> felt
> like in pre-war Germany.'
> During the tea break I asked a man at one of the booths for a
> leaflet. Instead of welcoming me and asking for a donation, he had
> detected my accent and duly launched into a loud and red-faced
> screeching session about the evils of the American Empire and of the
> 'Naziism' and 'Fascism' promulgated by the United States. A black
> man
> came over and began shouting about America having 'invented slavery'
> and soon a delicate elderly lady joined the fray to bellow about the
> Zionists running America (did she mean Robert Rubin, Dennis
> Ross, Sandy Berger -- after all, it was the pre-Wolfowitz/Perle time
> zone) and the 'genocides' perpetrated by Americans since the days of
> William Penn."You Yanks should look at yourselves in the mirror and
> wonder why every so often there is a Holocaust or massacre or pogrom.
> You bring it on yourselves. Just look at the way you are and then
> figure out why the rest of the world wants to flatten you."
>
> The English are not known for public displays of fury except perhaps
> at soccer matches, but there is something about an American accent
> that brings out their pent-up rage.
>
> Many Americans are leaving their homes abroad and returning home after
> decades in foreign countries. Notwithstanding the loss of free medical
> care and pills (and that is one hell of a sacrifice!) afforded by
> their adopted countries, they can no longer endure the daily abuse and
> the ugly posters and stickers that proliferate across European cities.
> When the many anti-war rallies were held in February 2003 young people
> in European cities were seen wearing headbands with slogans wishing
> death upon Jews and Israel.
>
> America now faces "the sorrows of empire": a state of perpetual war,
> soon with weapons of mass destruction; the end of constitutional
> democracy, with a Pentagonised presidency; and the bankruptcy of the
> US economy.US imperial ambitions are designed to overcome the inherent
> failures and contradictions of the American economy.Bush's open-ended
> claims for US power--including the unilateral right to invade and
> occupy "failed states" to execute "regime change"--offend
> international law and are prerogatives associated only with
> empire. But Bush's greater vulnerability is about money. You can't
> sustain an empire from a debtor's weakening position--sooner or later
> the creditors pull the plug. That humiliating lesson was learned by
> Great Britain early in the last century, and the United States faces a
> similar reckoning ahead.
I live in France, the country that is supposed to be the most viciously
anti-American, and I have never had anything like any of these experiences.
The last time the subject came up at all with a French person, the woman was
full of praise for the United States.
Donna Evleth
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