European anti-Americanism.

Interesting article on the foundations and the premise of European anti-Americanism at The American Thinker. Here are excerpts:

The groundwork for moral equivalence between democracy and murderous tyranny was laid over two generations of willful post-modern obfuscation of the difference between "the fire and the fire brigade," as Churchill aptly called it. Unsurprisingly, the intellectual paragons of such ethical primitivism included Nazi admirers like Paul de Man, Martin Heidegger and Francois Mitterand, and Stalin worshippers like Jean-Paul Sartre. Many Sixties radicals in Europe were totalitarians in spirit, taking their cues from fascist as well as Leftist forerunners. Just as before the war, "les extrêmes se touchent (the extremes converge)." When the violent past of famous Green politician Joschka Fischer was exposed, he simply explained that, yes, "we (radicals) were drawn to the totalitarian temptation."

That's a nice way of putting it. As late as the 1970s the people of Cambodia were subject to the gentle ministrations of a French-trained Leftist intellectual who gave in to the "totalitarian temptation," someone named Pol Pot. Perhaps three million Khmer people never survived to tell the tale. Mao Zedong killed tens of millions of Chinese in the 1960s, even while American college airheads were parading with Mao's "Little Red Book." In recent memory two million North Koreans were starved of food by another Stalin-Mao devotee, Kim Jong Il, and nobody in the West really knows if the starvation has ended yet.

Europe is now being subjected to daft "Third Way Socialism" by a new ruling class that is trying to recreate a Soviet Lite version of the same old political con-job, using the same old scapegoating propaganda that worked so well for Bismarck in the nineteenth century. The goal, of course, is to serve themselves while proclaiming ever-lasting compassion for others.

Hence German hectoring against "the Anglo-Saxons" --- a phony racialist term from the 19th century --- and its implicit reversion to the dark, rejected past. Throw some really scary Islamic-fascist head-choppers into the mix, lubricate the whole mess with billions of euros in Saudi money, and you have today's witches' brew in European politics.

[anti-American] [Europe][Saddam][Iraq][Iran][France][Germany][totalitarian][fascism]