← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Texas Dissident
Thread ID: 11836 | Posts: 4 | Started: 2004-01-10
2004-01-10 21:09 | User Profile
[url=http://www.amconmag.com/1_19_04/review.html]Uncritical Champion[/url]
Anti-Americanism, Jean-François Revel, Encounter, 176 pages
by Peter Hitchens
When I later lived in America for two years, I condemned myself to permanent internal exile in my own country. For having already known in part that the resentful, jealous misrepresentation of the United States was untrue, I now knew this fully, face to face and completely. I had either to sit silent and listen, inwardly fuming, to the uninformed rubbish of the modish Americophobes -- or I had to make enemies by contradicting them.
It must be even worse for conservative Frenchmen than for conservative Englishmen. In England we still have the last faint traces of our own patriotic, Protestant tradition, discernible on a clear day from a high place. Poor France, however, pretends that it is a revolutionary nation, though it would be hard to find anything closer to an 18th-century absolute monarchy, grandeur and all, anywhere on the surface of the earth. And so its thinking classes will always sympathize with the causes and governments that manage to combine dungeons with affected rhetoric and grand gestures, Stalin yesterday, Castro today, who knows what grisly tyranny tomorrow?
And so one whoops with delight to find, in the excellent Jean-François Revel, a Frenchman with the sense, understanding, and knowledge to defy Left Bank modishness and defend America with spirit against its dimwit foes. Many parts of this book are good for heart and soul alike, being brisk, merciless refutations of Euro-smugness about Kyoto, the death penalty, racialism, inequality, and the rest of the false claims of the new Europe to be morally and politically superior to the nation on the far side of the Atlantic. There is much here that is exhilarating, crackling with perceptiveness and bitter humor. He has grasped the need of Europe's failed elites to blame America for the miseries they have brought upon themselves, their need to feel superior to a culture that has in so many ways humiliated them by its success and then made matters even worse with its generosity. He correctly identifies "an anti-American psychopathology, which routinely seeks to transform the United States into a scapegoat burdened with all the sins of the world."
2004-01-11 05:05 | User Profile
Yes, this French man is on target with his views, but for U.S. today our government is a totally alien dual citizenship cabal of treason criminals. Our mess, started at full speed with FDR, though it really started with Lincoln and then with President Wislon's full blown treason Conduct with the Federal Reserve in t1913 and then entering U.S. in to WW 1 for NO reason at all, and against U.S. the interests..Causing millions more young white men to die in the trenches.. It was FDR who got U.S. in WW 2 against the will of 90% of the U.S. and the will of Congress in 1941 who did not want to fight on the side of the Murdering U.S.S.R. that had muredered the Orthodox Christian Church and literally Crucified Orthodox priest's. That U.S.S.R. that FDR regonized making U.S. the first such nation to do so was a crime.. His administration was top heavy with Soviet Jewish agents. Jews like FDR'S choice for Secretary of the Treasury Mr. Morganthau, who wanted to and pushed very hard to sterilize all the German Women under 45 after the WAR, and that is a FACT..This alone shows who the hater's are..... See John Sack's book "An Eye for Eye" he documents the Jewish run gulags after the WW2 and he is Jewish and writes for the Village Voice.. How can any honest person, not look at the last 100 yeas of history and not see Jewish influence. Of course now the Gentle plutocrate elite's appear to be fully in bed with them and fully intermarrying.. Look at Who Al Gore's daughter married and JFK's daughter married.. Interesting that JFK Jr. was writing about PALS and was having if I read correctly a breakup with with business partner at George Magazine about it..
2004-01-11 05:10 | User Profile
FYI to any Revel fans:
Jean-François Revel published his book How Democracies Perish during Reagan's arms buildup in Germany in the 80s. A long excerpt of it was the headline article of an issue of Commentary, the neocon flagship, during the time it was perfecting its bogus "right" stance it postures with today.
M. Revel started this sort of thing a decade earlier, with his book Ni Marx Ni Jesus (published in America under the title Without Marx or Jesus). It was in this earlier, odd book that Revel honed his skills as a leftist-bashing iconoclast; what good he does for the Right is another matter. Coming out in the early 70s, Without Marx or Jesus asserts (with tons of dubious or irrelevent evidence) that America was never attracted to Communism and now (ie, in the 70s) shedding Jesus as well, becoming a truly "modern" nation with neither political nor mystical superstitions.
Yep, Revel was right on the money.
It's easy to see why the neocons took a shine to him, and if anyone else wants to do the same, I won't stand in his way. Here's why I won't:
There's a certain kind of "iconoclasm" that's good for a regime that likes to keep people divided by false controversy. Revel is the French egghead sort, as Rush is the American just-folks sort. Both of these regime-friendly "opponents" forget that certain natural passions are useful, when honestly and passionately applied.
America could use a good dose of real antiAmericanism right now. When Europeans were running around in the 60s saying America needed a "de-nazification program" they might have been thinking more with their glands than with their brains - but it helped galvanize Americans to look at what a mess Johnson and Nixon were making in Indochina.
The fact that the neocons like Revel is not a reason to hate him, but it might be a good reason to look a bit closer at the fellow.
2004-01-11 05:17 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Smedley Butler]Yes, this French man is on target with his views, but for U.S. today our government is a totally alien dual citizenship cabal of treason criminals. Our mess, started at full speed with FDR...[/QUOTE]
Hi Smedley! A case of simultaneous posting here (almost!)
Of course I agree with that part, Revel is less wrong than untrustworthy. I have this idea we'll be seeing lots of quotes from him... at Free Republic and at National Review and for all the wrong reasons.
Let anti-Americanism bloom if it makes Bush as uncomfortable as it made Nixon. That's the case in a nutshell.