Ugly Anti-Americanism.

Read Norman Podhoretz's "America the Ugly" in Opinion Journal. Here's an excerpt:

As a veteran of the political and cultural wars of the '60s, I knew from my own scars that no matter how small and insignificant a group the anti-Americans of the left might for the moment look to the naked eye, they had it in them to rise and grow again.

...those who thought that we had brought 9/11 down on ourselves and had it coming were in a very tiny minority--even tinier than the antiwar movement of the early '60s. On the other hand, they were much stronger at a comparably early stage of the game than their counterparts of the '60s (who in some cases were their own younger selves). The reason was that, as the Vietnam War ground inconclusively on, the institutions that shape our culture were one by one and bit by bit converting to the "faith in America the ugly." By now, indeed, in the world of the arts, in the universities, in the major media of news and entertainment, and even in some of the mainstream churches, that faith had become the regnant orthodoxy.
But it would be a great mistake to suppose that the influence of these sectors of the culture was limited to their inhabitants. John Maynard Keynes once said that "practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist." Keynes was referring specifically to businessmen. But bureaucrats and administrators are subject to the same rule, though they tend to be the slaves not of economists, but of historians and sociologists and philosophers and novelists who may be very much alive even when their ideas have, or should have, become defunct.

Nor is it necessary for the "practical men" to have studied the works in question, or even ever to have heard of their authors. All they need do is read the New York Times, or switch on their television sets, or go to the movies--and, drip by drip, a more easily assimilable form of the original material is absorbed into their heads and into their nervous systems.

The few people I knew who shared my apprehensions believed that if things went well on the military front of what we were calling World War IV (the Cold War having in our scheme of things been World War III), all would be well on the home front too. And that was how it appeared from the effect wrought by the Afghanistan campaign, the first front to be opened in World War IV. For a short spell, the spectacular success of that campaign dampened the nascent antiwar activity on at least a number of campuses. But I felt certain that, as other fronts were opened--with Iraq most likely being the next--opposition not only would grow but would become more and more extreme.

I turned out to be right about this, and yet even I never imagined that the new antiwar movement would so rapidly arrive at the stage of virulence it had taken years for its ancestors of the Vietnam era to reach. Nor did I anticipate how closely the antiwar playbook of that era would be followed and how successfully it would be applied to Iraq, even though the two wars had nothing whatever in common.

global war on terror Islamofaschism World War IV anti-Americanism anti-war