IN THE AFTERMATH of the attacks of September 11, attempts are being made in the United States and elsewhere to understand the hatred of the attackers by shifting responsibility for it onto their target, the United States. We are witnessing a new outpouring of anti-Americanism on a scale not seen since the late 1960s. All the usual suspects, from Noam Chomsky to Paul Kennedy, Katha Pollitt, Norman Mailer, Robin Morgan, Harold Pinter, Edward Said, and Susan Sontag (to mention only a few), have seized the opportunity to vent their longstanding dislike or detestation of this society and culture. No doubt the patriotic rallying of the vast majority has stimulated this resurgence of hostility to America and a willingness to hold the United States culpable for most of the evil in the world.

Intellectuals and quasi-intellectuals, college professors, ministers, and those nostalgic for the 1960s and their youthful ideals, have come forth to affirm once again what they have always believed: that this country is a unique incarnation of injustice and hypocrisy. It is their key conviction and message that if the United States is hated, there must be good reasons why--namely, this country's endless wrongdoing at home and abroad. Of course, these same people also warmly support hate-crime legislation and the severe punishment of hate-criminals who assault women, minorities, or homosexuals. In none of these instances would they admonish the public to seek "root causes" or ask what the women, blacks, or homosexuals had done to provoke such hatred. In such cases, it is politically correct to be judgmental of the perpetrators and to hold that human beings are capable of irrational hatred and unjustifiable violence that deserves no sympathy or contextual mitigation.

The responses of "the adversary culture" to the recent outrages illuminate the persistence and intensity of a certain visceral rejection of this society. The embittered critics of America are capable of moral indignation or anger only at actions, attitudes, or policies they associate with the United States. They are totally incapable of, or unwilling to entertain or express, any critical feeling toward those who are the murderous enemies of this country. There is a huge discrepancy between the anguished anticipatory compassion these critics have already extended to the wholly unintended, innocent victims and potential victims of American strikes against the terrorists, and the far more measured compassion they have expressed for the actual and wholly intended victims of the recent attacks.

Susan Sontag notoriously directed not a trace of anger or moral indignation at the terrorists, but an enormous amount of contempt and hostility at the Bush administration and the mass media. In the London Times, Norman Mailer suggested that "Americans should reflect on and try to understand why so many people feel a revulsion toward the U.S." and beware that in much of the world the United States is seen as the source of "cultural and aesthetic repression." Mailer (not known for turning down handsome advances and royalties for his books) cautioned against American greed and hunger for profit.

Noam Chomsky made the claim, remarkable even for a man who denied Pol Pot's atrocities, that the recent atrocity may not have equaled an attack such as Clinton's obliteration of a pharmaceutical factory in the Sudan. Dario Fo, an Italian playwright, suggested that "regardless of who carried out the massacre, this violence is the legitimate daughter of the culture of violence, hunger, and inhumane exploitation." In France, the New Yorker reported, "four of the eleven candidates competing for the French presidency--three on the far left and one . . . on the far right--told the local press that the United States essentially had itself to blame for the attacks."

For a physics professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst quoted in the Wall Street Journal, "'the [American] flag is a symbol of terrorism and death and fear and destruction and oppression....' Not even the events of September 11 have altered her opinions." For Katha Pollitt, writing in the Nation, the American "flag stands for jingoism and vengeance." A professor of journalism (also at U. Mass., Amherst) sees the attacks as "the predictable result of American . . . neglect and cowardice" that "ignored the suffering of the Palestinians." He was fully persuaded that "our policy created zealots and suicide bombers," according to the Massachusetts Daily Collegian.

In this vision, none of the enemies of the United States has any choice: Their actions are created by the evil the United States represents. Only American policymakers have choices, and they always make the immoral one. Thus, a U. Mass., Amherst, sociology professor pleads for finding ways "to reduce those alienating actions whereby we create our enemies." Meanwhile, down the road in Northampton, Massachusetts, a reader writes to the local newspaper, the Daily Hampshire Gazette, that "we need the courage and honesty to search our souls, recognize our wrongdoings." On the same page a minister warns against "ruthless patriotism" but not against the ruthless fanaticism of those who killed thousands, while other writers insist that "retaliation is not the answer," what we need is unspecified "non-violent justice, not revenge," and "compassion rather than aggression." Peace groups advocate "justice not revenge," except when they're endorsing the slogan of black protesters, "No justice, no peace."

For some, taking action against the terrorists is "racist scapegoating." Harvard students parade with the sign "War is also terrorism." A writer in the local "alternative" newspaper, the Advocate, talks about the "newfound obsession with terrorism" as if the recent events deserved minimal attention. Several contributors to the same paper treat the attacks as a welcome excuse for the forces of darkness in the United States to strangle all civil liberties: "The terror attacks of September 11 wiped the slate clean. All the psychological and moral prohibitions on the reactionary right have been lifted. The same thing happened in Germany after World War I."

Such hysterical anticipation is reminiscent of predictions, back in the 1960s, of imminent "fascist" repression, at once perversely hoped for to prove the utter degradation of the American political system and welcomed as the proper precondition for its revolutionary destruction.

Thus, Brown University hastened to issue "a curriculum guide on how to discuss the attacks in the classroom ...that called for understanding why people resent the United States." And at a Quaker meeting at Haverford College, the New York Times reported, "an emeritus professor . . . agonized over why the United States was the most violent nation on earth and ended by saying, 'We are complicit.'" Doubtless, on every major campus identical sentiments are being expressed.

In contrast to all these sentiments, I suggest that the suicide attacks were the purest expression of pathological hatred and fanaticism, the most intense and irrational manifestation of anti-Americanism legitimated by religious beliefs and the conviction that modernity, with all the moral uncertainties it creates--embodied by the United States--is the source of evil in the world.

Understanding the pathology of murderous hatred does not require a new round of collective self-flagellation and guilty soul-searching. These crimes were committed by individuals who chose their actions freely and with utmost deliberation and under no compulsion other than the prodding of their irrational beliefs. The perverted idealism of the perpetrators no more legitimates their actions than other types of idealistic beliefs justified the mass murders of the past, also undertaken to cleanse the world.



Paul Hollander is the author of Anti-Americanism: Irrational and Rational (1995). His "Discontents: Postmodern and Postcommunist" will be published in November by Transaction Publishers.

October 22, 2001 - Volume 7, Number 6