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Anti-Americanism

Cathy Young replies today: First of all, I have never claimed that all anti-Americanism is “an expression of envy and dissatisfaction in the failures of one’s own society.” Cathy Young wrote last week: Russia’s post-cold war humiliation is real. But as the human rights activist Elena Bonner, widow of the great scientist and dissident Andrei […]

Cathy Young replies today:

First of all, I have never claimed that all anti-Americanism is “an expression of envy and dissatisfaction in the failures of one’s own society.”

Cathy Young wrote last week:

Russia’s post-cold war humiliation is real. But as the human rights activist Elena Bonner, widow of the great scientist and dissident Andrei Sakharov, told me recently: “Nobody humiliated Russia. Russia humiliated itself.”

In the post-Soviet era, many Russians are angry because their country has neither the stature nor the living standards that they believe it deserves. Polls shows that most Russians actually favor a Western way of life. Nearly two-thirds would rather live in a well-off country than in one that is poorer but more powerful and feared by others. Unfortunately, most also believe their country will not reach Western levels of well-being any time soon, if ever. As frustrations mount, it is often easier to blame an external force than the country’s own failings [bold mine-DL]. It doesn’t help that the 1990s, when pro-Western attitudes were at their peak, are remembered as a time of poverty and insecurity.

The result is an inferiority complex toward the West and, in particular, the United States, as the pre-eminent Western power and cold war rival. This widespread sentiment combines admiration, envy, grievance, resentment, and craving for respect and acceptance as an equal [bold mine-DL]. Most Russians viewed the recent conflict in Georgia as a victory over the Americans — a matter less of strategic self-interest than of psychological self-assertion.

In his Nov. 5 speech, President Medvedev asserted that “we have no inherent anti-Americanism.” True enough, but in recent years, anti-Americanism has been carefully cultivated by official and semi-official propaganda, especially on government-controlled television, which manipulates popular insecurities and easily slides into outright paranoia.

Of course, I did not say that Young blamed all anti-Americanism on these things, but that in her remarks on Russian anti-Americanism she used the same argument that we hear constantly from those who insist that Arabs and Muslims have anti-American views (i.e., views hostile to U.S. government policy): it is supposedly a product of envy, dissatisfaction at home and a feeling of inferiority. The foreign government is always the sole one responsible for “stoking” or encouraging these feelings–her argument is very close to Cagaptay’s complaint about AKP in Turkey. That must be what it is–it couldn’t be a response to the policy of other states. To be precise, I wrote:

One of the most dominant myths that prevails in America today is that anti-Americanism is merely an expression of envy and dissatisfaction in the failures of one’s own society (Young recites all of this as you would expect) and has nothing or next to nothing to do with the substance of policy and the aggressive interference that the policy often represents.

Perhaps I could have been slightly more clear. Young was writing about Russian anti-Americanism, deploying the tired tropes of envy, failure and inferiority, so she recited all of this in the context of discussing Russia. She objects that she doesn’t assume this is true of all anti-Americanism. No one said that she did. However, in one breath, she says that Russians have no inherent anti-Americanism (whatever that might look like), and in the next insists that the government is manipulating Russians’ inferiority complex towards the U.S., which most conventional (and conventionally wrong) explanations identify as the cause of anti-Americanism. Clearly, with respect to Russia, Young was reciting the standard line that anti-American attitudes are a product of envy, failure and inferiority, and that was my point in that part of the post.

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