On her recent visit to Pakistan, the US foreign secretary Hillary Clinton lectured Pakistanis in these words: “Pakistan should understand that anti-Americanism and conspiracy theories will not make problems disappear.” The lady may have many qualities to qualify for the post of foreign secretary, but she doesn’t seem to have a good understanding of history. Not only Pakistanis but a larger part of this world is anti-American, and more than anyone Americans themselves are to be blamed for it.
Anti-Americanism is not new; it has been there since the Americans donned the mantle of a global superpower in the aftermath of the Second World War. People of the world value friendship with the US but no self-respecting person will be willing to give in to the American pressure to relinquish an iota of his freedom. The US is within its rights to protect its interests but as the Egyptian President Gemal Abdel Nasser tried to explain to President Eisenhower, “What we want from America is understanding — which is more important to us than aid”; Nasser’s words actually echoed the sentiments of all the self-respecting peoples of the world.
America can dole out huge amounts of aid because it possesses vast reserves of wealth but, at the same time, there is a common feeling in the world that it has accumulated this treasure by siphoning off the wealth of the poor countries. For instance, there has been a general feeling in Latin America that Americans “are rich because we are poor; we are poor because they are rich.” Have the Americans ever thought that why much of the $500 billion Latin American foreign debt was owed only to US banks? The Americans have every right to trade and do business but what have they done to rein in the US-based multinationals that rapaciously exploit the resources and populations of the weak countries so that they perpetually remain politically and economically dependent on the US.
Such anti-Americanism is not only restricted to Latin America which was declared a US sphere of influence with the onset of the Monroe Doctrine in the early nineteenth century; this anti-Americanism has been widespread in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. In the last two mentioned regions, the roots of anti-Americanism lay in the ‘pactomania’ of the 1950s when the US hammered out defence pacts like SEATO and the Baghdad Pact to stem the tide of Soviet communism. Bolstering your defence is legitimate but engineering coups in other countries in the garb of defence pacts can never be justified. There is documented evidence that the Special Security Committee of the Baghdad Pact in cahoots with the CIA planned the overthrow of the Arab nationalist regime in Syria.
While the US lectures the world to be tolerant towards the co-existence of the plurality of different ideas, the Americans themselves have been the most intolerant towards those states that tried to fashion their societies on the nationalist, Marxist or the Islamist ideals. That is why America is viewed as the central villain by as diverse political figures as the nationalist Robert Mugabe, Marxist Fidel Castro and Islamist Ayatollah Khomeini.
Just as the American hold their ideals of life very dearly, other peoples of the world feel the same way towards their ideals and beliefs. Although the Americans tend to deliberately ignore it, the history of the Third World is full of shining examples when certain leaders did not shirk from sacrificing their lives in defence of their coveted ideals. Salvador Allende of Chile in the early 1970s is the most shining example. Rest assured, he was not a communist. All he intended to do was to implement progressive social and economic reforms to liberate his country and its people from the rapacity of the US monopoly capital. And when the CIA-backed armed gangs led by Pinochet surrounded his presidential house, instead of showing the white flag to save his life, this democratically elected president preferred to take up arms to fight and die for his ideals.
But Americans don’t understand all this. They have fallen headlong into business and enterprise making big money out of their ventures, only to waste it into fighting unnecessary wars. Has any US think tank ever bothered to calculate how much wealth and precious resources were lost in fighting the Cold War for almost half a century? I doubt! What did they get out of this war? Hardly anything!
Has anyone in the US ever realised that despite their enormous wealth, the best available weapons and a huge army, why did they lose the Vietnam War? Among a sundry of causes, the most important factor was the demoralisation of the American soldiers in Vietnam. Why were these best of the soldiers of the world demoralised? Just because they had started taking opium. And in the words of the Chinese Premier Chou En-Lai, China was “planting the best kinds of opium especially for the American soldiers in Vietnam.” Elaborating the Chinese hatred towards the Americans, Chou stated, “Do you remember when the West imposed opium on us? They fought us with opium. And we are going to fight them with their own weapons. We are going to use their own methods against them. We want them to have a big army in Vietnam which will be hostage to us and we want to demoralise them. The effect this demoralisation is going to have on the United States will be far greater than anyone realises.” Eventually, the Chinese strategy prevailed over the brute American firepower. But the roots of this “opium revenge” go back to a century, when the West including the US, drunk in the superiority of their military might coerced the Chinese to become the biggest opium eaters of the world in the mid-nineteenth century.
But at their own peril, the Americans have remained unmindful of history. Had they learnt any lesson from history, they would not have plunged into the Iraq and Afghanistan wars? As long as Hillary Clinton and the likes in the US policy making will continue to push under the carpet, the bloody and brutal chapters of American neo-imperialism, America would continue to tumble into more Iraqs and Afghanistans; and as long as the rivers of blood will continue to flow, anti-Americanism will also continue to grow worldwide.
(The writer is an academic and journalist. He can be reached at [email protected])
Interesting how a motivated piece does not mention some facts that would show a lot of anti-Americanism for the hypocritical stand that it is – in quoting Gamal Abdul Nasser, the writer omits mention of the support that the USA gave Egypt when the Israelis, French and British attacked the country during the Suez crisis. Or, for that matter, that Isabel Allende, the most vocal member of the Allende family since her uncle Salvatore, resides in the USA and not in Cuba.
At some level or the other, every country in the world "engineers coups" to install allies in places of consequence. Recent analyses of the crisis in Bahrain, for example, have clearly demonstrated that the Saudis invaded the country to crush the brewing Shia rebellion without even being invited by the Bahraini monarchy. And yet, in much of the world where the USA is reviled, the hatred goes out of religious institutions funded by the Saudis. People have been killed in Pakistan by groups that were "educated" and funded by the Saudis and Emiratis and yet, there is not as much as a whimper about this nation's role as a source of destruction and mayhem. Don;t also forget that the Saudis remain as US "allies" because they hold the bulk of the energy resources that the Americans require to keep their own nation running. The USA has not been able to do squat about Saudi funding of terror simply because the Saudis hold Americans by the short hairs. So much for the image of a "superpower" that cannot, as much as act against the nation that finances most terror against it and to whose head the US president even kowtowed in public.
Yes, much anti Americanism is irrational, sometimes to the point of its being infantile. The USA is not perfect, neither is it a superpower that runs the whole world as it wants to. It simply cannot. No country can. Ask the South Americans who owe money to "US banks" as the article mentions – more of them would rather live here than in any other country in the world. Over 13 million of them live as undocumented aliens already and more would come in if Mexico didn't keep other Latinos out while permitting its own citizens to come in from time to time.
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