"America, whose core is made up of Europe's asocial elements, is the result of an illegal invasion by Europe's asocials. Their theft of territory from the native population, their genocide of this native population, their import of slavery and murder of millions of african slaves, their killing of over one million civilians since 1944 all over the world, are their greatest crimes."
Good rants make bad history. This one, from "The Guardian" message board, is an example. The notion is 40 years out of date that the U.S. is "made up of Europe's asocial elements" -- an old-time historian put it more colorfully than this writer: "rogues, whores, vagabonds, cheats and rabble of all descriptions, raked from the gutter and kicked out of the country." The old opinion is based on popular prejudice against indentured servants, as preserved in 18th century writings. If you really care about historical truth, you'd no more base your argument on that today than you would use pro-slavery polemic of 1850 to make assertions about African-Americans.
Historians have subsequently corrected themselves, after analyzing quantifiable data rather than literary evidence, and concluded that the bulk of settlers in the North American colonies came from "the middling classes: farmers and skilled workers, the productive groups in England's working population." [Mildred Campbell, who first challenged the old view]
As for subsequent immigrants to America, I'd be interested to see the evidence to prove that, say, the millions of Irish driven out by starvation and English economic policy in the '40s, or the Jews driven out by Eastern European pogroms in the '80s, were "asocial elements" in their native communities.
The "illegal" adjective has been sufficiently exposed as ridiculous. There was no international law governing the colonization and settlement of a continent in the 17th century; without a law to break, the adjective "illegal" is meaningless. This was pointed out on the message board, but rather than back off an inch and admit he should have written "immoral," the writer above clung to it with the tenacity of a 4-year-old.
Genocide of the native population, and slavery, are good hits. They are crimes the U.S. and those who love it have to own up to, accept, and strive to understand.
However, the entire New World, not just the fraction of it that became the U.S., was overrun by Europeans (and their slaves), to the great loss of the original inhabitants, with the full cooperation and encouragement of those Europeans who stayed at home in addition to those who actually crossed over. Those who stayed home financed the enterprises, and profited from the rape of the land and the dispossession of its native people. Who, then would be more to blame? The families and institutions in England, France and the Netherlands enriched by the New World, or the American descendants of those they shipped overseas to do their dirty work?
The genocide was a European-based crime, not one particular to the U.S. Others have said so. But the original poster seems to have taken this as an excuse to tack on another rant to the earlier, flawed one: that of U.S. citizens arrogating to themselves the word "American." How this answers the objection I cannot see.
As for slavery, it, too, was by no means a peculiar creation of the U.S., or an anachronism. Slavery still existed in Europe and in Africa in 1492, though it was not economically important in most places (Lisbon, however, had an estimated 15,000 slaves in the 1630s). It was begun in the New World almost at once, by the Spanish, and the imporations from Africa were begun by the Dutch and Portuguese, along with the African middle-men who provided the slaves.
New World slavery fit smoothly into a world economy, and its guilt, if it is to be inherited, can't be limited to the United States. Roughly half of the 9 or 10 million Africans brought in bondage to the New World were sent to the islands or Brazil, to sate Europe's sweet tooth for Caribbean sugar and Amazon gold. Those in the U.S., as has been pointed out, provided the raw material for English looms in the early 19th century. Robert Russell, the observant British traveller, wrote that slavery was "a necessary evil attending upon the great good of cheap cotton."
The only reason the writer here could have chosen "1944" is to start the death-count from the A-bomb attacks on Japan. The atomic bomb is a peculiar horror, and it still haunts us. But if the issue is "killing of civilians" it represents the outcome of military strategy pursued by both sides in World War II, and it wasn't even the most effective one in terms of sheer numbers. Air Marshal Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris, the commander of the British strategic air offensive, wrote in 1947 that during the war 23 German cities had more than 60 percent of their built-up area destroyed; 46 had half of it destroyed. This would necessarily involve killing millions of civilians.
It goes without saying that this was achieved by British, as well as U.S., air power, and represents a strategy that emerged in the Allied war effort before the U.S. got into the war.
I suspect the author of the above post wrote more to slap heads than to make sense, but since his thread has offered another chance to hash out old misconceptions, he's perhaps to be commended for it. On the other hand, it wastes the time of U.S. citizens who might be otherwise exploring the legitimate and pressing problems in their society and national character, to have to be continually answering this sort of ranting nonsense.
As for the U.S. media being the problem, by the way, I work as a copy editor at a U.S. newspaper, and Chomsky is a great favorite among my colleagues, often quoted.
I visit European message boards, and see the same scene since Sept. 11: Americans in various states of anguish or apoplexy about the meanness of Britons. This is nothing new.
Since Americans forced the issue of their independence, the intellectuals in the former colonies have tried to cozy up to the Mother Country, who has returned the affection with scorn, disowning her one-time darling as a red-headed stepchild with only a smidgen of true Anglo-Saxon blood.
The historian Allan Nevins, studying 19th century authors, has noted that "the nervous interest of Americans in the impressions formed of them by visiting Europeans and their sensitiveness to British criticism in especial, were long regarded as constituting a salient national trait."
The British regarded Americans as mere barbarous upstarts, and British publications, widely circulated across the Atlantic, poured out invective for generations on everything they deigned to notice from the United States.
Even friendly notices of American literary works contained that peculiarly British gift: the insult wrapped in a compliment (to the effect of, "he writes surprisingly well, for an American"). But friendly notices were far between, and only Englishmen already branded as iconoclasts or outcasts (e.g. Lord Byron) openly praised Americans for anything. The usual practice of British authors was to take every slander of one American by another in a hot political campaign as an absolute truism, and to present the most degraded characters from the frontier or the slum as the typical inhabitant of the United States.
"Both the travelers and the literary journalists of [England]," writes Timothy Dwight, the elder, defending America, "have, for reasons which it would be idle to inquire after and useless to allege, thought it proper to caricature the Americans. Their pens have been dipped in gall, and their representations have been, almost merely, a mixture of malevolence and falsehood."
As a result, as H.L. Mencken reported ["The American Language," 1919], "the native authors became extremely self-conscious and diffident, and the educated classes, in general, were daunted by the torrent of abuse: they could not help finding in it an occasional reasonableness, an accidental true hit."
The most notorious indictment was the sneer of Sydney Smith, reviewing a statistical abstract of the United States in the "Edinburgh Review," 1820, who wrote:
"In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue? What does the world yet owe to American physicians or surgeons? What new substances have their chemists discovered? Or what old ones have they analyzed? What new constellations have been discovered by the telescopes of Americans? What have they done in mathematics? Who drinks out of American glasses? or eats from American plates? Or wears American coats or gowns? or sleeps in American blankets?"
I know not whether that extended sneer is at all remembered in Britain, but I have seen it in print dozens of times in America in modern times, and the contempt of the sting is still felt sharply. It seems our history of the succeeding 150 years, for better and worse, was one long answer to Sydney Smith.
In 1863 the Very Rev. Henry Alford, DD, dean of Canterbury, wrote a "Plea for the Queen's English" which decried the "deterioration" of English in American mouths. It warned Englishmen to hold aloof from the American way with the language and compared the state of English in America to "the character and history of the nation":
--its blunted sense of moral obligations and duties to man; its open disregard of conventional right when aggrandizement is to be obtained; and I may now say, its reckless and fruitless maintenance of the most cruel and unprincipled war in the history of the world.It was the familiar list of crimes and vices and hypocrisies. Every learned Englishman could rehearse it and many of the finest writers, such as Coleridge and Smith, bent their considerable talents to spelling it out at length. Except that, coming in the middle of the American Civil War, Alford's screed had gone out of its way to replace a now-doubtful entry in the catalogue of American vice with a freshly minted one. Never mind that the substitution was blatant hypocrisy. As H.L. Mencken noted,
Smith had denounced slavery, whereas Alford, by a tremendous feat of moral virtuosity, was now denouncing the war to put it down.It was the universal sneer of the Educated European -- one of the things that marked Lord Byron as a dangerous radical was that he actually liked America and Americans, and said so -- but the British took particular pains to say it loud and often, to make it clear that the claim that the United States was an outpost of Anglo-Saxon civilization and a child of Britain was not acknowledged as legitimate in the Mother Country.
Long before 9/11. long before Israel existed, long before the world wars, before America was any kind of player on the world stage, this was the regard European intellectuals had for it. Has the left stopped talking about "squandering the good will of the world" yet? Or is it necessary to remind it still that the three weeks or so in September 2001 were the doomed aberation in two centuries of European attitudes.
Americans gave it back, in the long war over the English language. An American named G. Washington Moon responded to Dean Alford's snobby plea for the Queen's English with "The Dean's English," in which he pointed out Alford himself was guilty, in his writings, of many of the faults he ascribed to American authors.
The language war raged and still rages. The British rarely give ground. Even when they admit an American expression is better than its British counterpart -- sidewalk over pavement was an oft-cited example -- they see no reason to admit the "foreign" word. For the core of their argument was racist and ethnic, not linguistic. Articles in Britain on American speech invariably make reference to "their huge hybrid population of which only a small minority are even racially Anglo-Saxons" [New Statesman, 1927] and the sad fate of American English, "imposed upon and influenced by a host of immigrants from all the nations of Europe" [Times].
So the Times wrote, but the times have changed. And here is Europe today, led by the descendants of these academic aristocracies, still tangled up in the contradiction of its prejudices. It now has admitted, under force of economics and post-imperialist guilt, a large alien population into its nations, but not into its souls. It claims to be taking the opposite path of American assimilation -- if the Americans do it it must be bad -- and claims to be on the more enlightened path of respecting the immigrant culture.
But this "respect" is accomplished by subsidizing the immigrant culture in its alien ways and ghettoizing it. The European intelligensia often maintains that the other culture is equal to or superior to the native one -- Do they practice honor killings? well, until recently Europeans were so barbaric as to execute criminals! Who are we to condemn them? -- while it quietly draws an invisible wall around the European societies to prevent the assimilation of the darker skins, and the pollution that might bring.
The result is, there are vast no-go areas for the local police in some European cities, where Shari'a rule is effectively enforced by imams, and third-generation immigrant children who have lived in European capitals all their lives can barely speak a sentence of the native language.
But that can't possibly be racist. Only Americans are racists.