posted August 13, 2007 12:02 PM            

No, I haven't actually read the book but I'm familar with the points he makes. I have read an interview he gave to Front Page Magazine last year but had already reached the same conclusions Bawer comes to from having lived in Europe...Bawer, not me.

It has seemed to me for some time that Western Europe is doomed as an alliance of free western nations. It seemingly wasn't enough for them or they never learned their lessons from being saved by the United States in 2 world wars and/or having the United States as their shield against a Soviet invasion all through the cold war.

They still are not prepared militarily or psychologically to defend their nations, their values, their interests or their cultures. Perhaps it's time to let them go their own way and learn the lessons they have avoided for so long. Their rabid anti-Americanism isn't helpful.

Yet, some here screech and whine...why can't we be like the Europeans.

posted August 13, 2007 12:08 PM            

While Europe Slept
By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com | 5/23/2006

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Bruce Bawer, a New York writer who has lived in Europe since 1998. He is a literary critic, translator, poet, and the author of books about being gay in America and fundamentalist Christianity. His most recent book is While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within (Doubleday).

FP: Bruce Bawer, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Bawer: Hi Jamie, thanks for having me.

FP: I just finished your book. It was a fascinating and powerful read. I know the answer to this question, but let’s help our readers get acquainted with you. Tell us why you ended up writing this book.

Bawer: In 1998 I moved from New York, where I’m from, to Amsterdam. I loved the Netherlands – its tolerance, its secularism, its heritage of freedom and learning and culture. But in early 1999, living in a largely Muslim area called the Oud West, I saw another side of the Netherlands, and of Europe, that I hadn’t seen before, or even been particularly aware of. The Oud West seemed less a neighborhood than an enclave – a piece of another society that had been dropped down into the city and that lived apart from it and its values. Just to walk from downtown Amsterdam into the Oud West was to experience a staggering contrast.

I soon came to realize that Amsterdam wasn’t unique – virtually every major city in Europe had Muslim enclaves like this one. The people outside of them were living in a democracy, but the people in them were living in a theocracy, ruled by imams and elders who preached contempt for the host society and its values. They were against secular law, against pluralism, against freedom of speech and religion, against sexual equality. Husbands believed it was their sacred right to beat and rape their wives. Parents practiced honor killings and female genital mutilation. Unemployment and crime rates were through the roof.

Most remarkable of all, nobody was saying or doing anything about any of this. European politicians took a hands-off attitude. Journalists sang the praises of multicultural society. With very few exceptions, nobody in a position of authority seemed willing to stand up for basic democratic values.

FP: You were at one time, I think it would be safe to say, a man of the Left. But you grew quite critical of leftwing European attitudes toward the US, Israel and capitalism. Could you give us an insight into your intellectual journey in this context?

Bawer: I’ve always thought of myself as a more or less classic Cold War liberal. But never New Left. The New Left always appalled me, and I’ve always been strongly anti-Communist. Yes, I’ve changed political alliances more than once over the years – not because I’ve changed positions, but because the labels started meaning different things.

This business of labels is maddening. In Stealing Jesus I criticized Christian fundamentalism and liberals loved it; in While Europe Slept, I criticize Islamic fundamentalism, which is by any measure a lot worse than Christian fundamentalism, and some of the same people who loved Stealing Jesus are appalled and think I’ve totally changed my politics, when in fact I’m being totally consistent. Anyway, as I explain in While Europe Slept, I moved to Europe in 1998, not long after Stealing Jesus came out, I looked forward to living in what I thought was a secular society. What I found, however, was a society governed according to what I gradually came to recognize as another kind of fundamentalism – namely, big-government, welfare-state social democracy.

European social democracy was rigid, doctrinaire, controlling. Social democrats ran politics, the media, and the academy, and they worked together to propagandize against their system’s #1 competition in the world – namely, American-style liberal democracy. The anti-Americanism I encountered every single day in the European media floored me. The American media had given me a very flattering picture of today’s Western Europe. But reading European papers and watching European TV news and talking to individual Europeans, I got a picture of America I hardly recognized. They depicted a capitalistic nightmare straight out of Upton Sinclair, a country where education and health care were only for the rich and where there was no such thing as unemployment insurance or retirement benefits.

The hostility to America was ubiquitous, and reflexive. Ditto the hostility to Israel, which Europeans have been taught by their elite to see almost exclusively as America’s 51st state, an oppressor of Palestinians and an illegal occupier of Arab and Muslim lands. I had been in many ways a critic of America, but in Europe I increasingly came to appreciate its virtues – and repeatedly found myself in social situations where I was obliged to defend it against people who regurgitated inane anti-American clichés that they’d been fed since infancy.

FP: Tell us about European attitudes toward immigration/immigrants in comparison to American attitudes.

Bawer: For decades, Western Europe has been admitting huge numbers of immigrants for decades, most of them Muslims. But the way they’ve handled them has been disastrous. The European elite hates America so much that instead of recognizing the U.S. as a model of how to integrate newcomers, they rejected the American approach entirely. They chose to view immigrants as members of groups rather than as individuals, as dependent children rather than adults who are potentially self-sufficient and responsible, and as exotic alien creatures who should remain exotic rather than as Europeans in the making. When I was first living in Norway, politicians and journalists were in the habit of congratulating Muslims for having turned Norway into a “colorful society” – a “fargerik felleskap.” Nobody seemed to realize how condescending this was, or how at odds it was with Martin Luther King’s dream of a colorblind society. I was also shocked to hear people refer to immigrants’ European-born children as “second-generation immigrants.” And their children were “third-generation immigrants.” This summed up an incredibly dramatic difference in the ways Americans and Europeans thought about immigrants. My father’s parents were Polish, but never in my life had it occurred to me to think of myself as a third-generation immigrant or of my father as a second-generation immigrant. The idea was ludicrous. We were Americans, period.

America encourages immigrants to go to work, learn the language, and become full members of society; Europe encourages immigrants to live apart and maintain their cultures and lifestyles and values without adjusting in the slightest to their new environment. This is called multiculturalism. And it’s been a disaster. In America, immigrants tend to make the switch to English relatively quickly; by contrast, an incredible number of European children (and even grandchildren) of immigrants are barely able to speak the language of the country in which they were born. Immigrants to the U.S. are also far more likely into enter the work force than immigrants in Europe, and are better paid.

In Europe, the elite prefers its minorities unintegrated, and the supposed reason is that it respects differences. But the real reason is a profound discomfort with the idea of “them” becoming “us.” Anyone can become an American; but an immigrant to Norway or the Netherlands will never really be thought of by anyone as Norwegian or Dutch.

In Norway there’s a comedienne named Shabana Rehman whose parents brought her to Norway from Pakistan when she was a baby. On her website, she writes: “I speak strikingly good Norwegian. But most native Norwegians I meet wish that it was a little broken.” I’ve seen this attitude. Americans are delighted to hear immigrants speaking English. By contrast, many Norwegians are uncomfortable when they hear a Pakistani speaking Norwegian. One thing I still find remarkable in Norway is the frequency with which people use the expression “Like barn leker best.” It’s a very common expression and it means something like “Children play best with other children who are like themselves.” I’ve heard it being said a thousand times by people who think of themselves as devout multiculturalists.

The most successful immigrant group in the history of the world is American Jews. Why? Because they integrated enthusiastically into the mainstream of American society. They rejected the ghetto and embraced American pluralism. In Europe, this same eagerness to belong, to contribute, and to thrive – and not remain segregated and ghettoized – led to the Jews’ near-extermination. It seems to me that part of the reason why anti-Semitism is so widespread in Europe while Islam is often treated with kid gloves is that the European elite has a reflexive contempt for a group that blends in and a reflexive respect for a group that holds itself proudly apart and resists assimilation. That’s a formula for disaster.

FP: Muslim immigration to Europe has meant higher crime and the perpetration of honor killing, female genital mutilation, and forced marriages on European soil. Yet many Europeans remain morally indignant about something America has supposedly done to them or something horrible that it supposedly represents. And they remain silent on what radical Muslims are perpetrating on their soil. This is a bit strange, no?

Bawer: It’s very strange. I never get used to it. It’s kind of schizophrenic, actually. On one level there’s an enthusiasm for America. America is sexy, exciting. Europeans love American TV, American pop music. They wear Yankee caps and t-shirts with Old Glory on them. If you’re out someplace for the evening and somebody hears you’re an American, they want to talk to you and hear about your life. It’s thrilling for them. But the very same people will then turn around and tell you how horrible your country is – everybody in America is overweight, nobody has health insurance, they’re all idiots, and so forth. This is what they’ve been taught in school and heard in the media. Weirdly, it’s their very enthusiasm for America, I think, that feeds their eagerness to believe this nonsense. They’re so in awe of America, so drawn to it, that they need to believe that there’s something horrible at the heart of it in order to be content with their own lives in their own societies.

Besides, buying into the idea that America is the #1 problem in the world – the #1 threat to world peace and so on – is a good way of distracting themselves from the genuine problems facing their own countries. After all, in Europe, there’s a lot of pressure not to address those problems. To criticize any aspect of immigrant communities or immigration policies is to risk being called a racist. In Norway, there’s been a rash of cold-blooded murders by rejected asylum seekers, who, after being rejected, incredible as it sounds, are simply allowed to roam free in the streets of Oslo. Recently, one of them walked into the downtown Oslo office of somebody I knew, a wonderful doctor, and stabbed him to death with a huge knife he’d brought with him. On the day it happened, a mutual friend of ours, who was despondent and in shock, said, “Something needs to be done about these asylum seekers.” And as soon as the words were out of his mouth, he added, “Oh, I shouldn’t say that, it sounds racist.” He hadn’t said anything racist. But this is how people have been trained to think. It’s paralyzing. So it is that the frustration and anger over the crisis in their own societies is deflected to a safe target – America. You can say anything you want about Americans and nobody will call you a racist.

FP: What is your perspective on what we could call European dhimmitude and the reflexive European appeasement mentality?

Bawer: Americans and Europeans both learned a lesson from World War II – but we learned different lessons. America learned that evil should never be appeased. If Britain and France had not caved in to Hitler at Munich, the war and the Holocaust might never have happened. Europeans, however, have been taught that the lesson of WWII is the evil of war, pure and simple. War should be avoided at all costs. Dialogue is always better than armed conflict. This mentality feeds anti-Americanism – instead of admiring America’s willingness to defend its freedoms in war, which after all is what made possible the liberation of Western Europe from the Nazis – duh! – Europeans see Americans as people who simply love to make war. We’re primitive, bloodthirsty warmongers. They see themselves, by contrast, as the preachers and guardians of a new, more noble and sophisticated era of peace. And they’ll make any compromise in order to preserve that peace.

European Muslim leaders know this. And they’ve manipulated it brilliantly. European politicians have become classic dhimmis, giving in to Muslim demands and being careful to avoid giving any offense whatsoever in order to maintain social harmony. The result, of course, is that Muslim leaders just get more and more demanding, and more and more easily offended.

Of all the heads of government in Europe, the only real exception to this rule is Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the prime minister of Denmark, who in response to the uproar over the Muhammed cartoons stood up valiantly for freedom of speech. In Norway, by contrast, the editor of the first publication to reprint the cartoons ended up being pressured by the Norwegian government to apologize, which he did, abjectly, at a press conference in a government office building in the presence of the largest group of imams ever brought together in Norway. It was a deeply disturbing episode. But it came and went, and afterwards everybody seemed eager to sweep it under the rug, to pretend that it hadn’t happened or that it wasn’t really as weird and disturbing and disgusting as it was.

Dhimmitude is bursting out all over. Last year in Britain, the House of Commons voted for a bill that would have punished offensive speech about somebody else’s religion – it took the House of Lords to put the kibosh on it. In Norway, such a law was actually passed late last year. It’s now a crime in Norway to insult somebody else’s religion. Under this law, the burden of proof is on the accused, and the punishment is imprisonment. This is chilling. And it’s only the beginning.

FP: What do you think the cartoon controversy signified? What does it portend? What does the case of Denmark teach us?

Bawer: What happened in the cartoon controversy was that Danish Muslim leaders thought they could get lots of Muslims out into the streets making noise and making threats, and thereby force the Danish government to punish Jyllands-Posten editors and cartoonists in order to quiet things down. This would have put a chill on freedom of speech and advanced Islamist goals in Europe by a giant step. What they didn’t count on was Anders Fogh Rasmussen. The case of Denmark teaches us that there are people in Europe who see what’s going on and are deeply disturbed and angry about it – who love their countries and want to preserve their democracies. The people in Denmark who feel this way are lucky because they have a leader who agrees with them and who’s not afraid to say so and to act accordingly. It was very cheering during the cartoon controversy to see in the polls that Fogh Rasmussen’s posture on all this enjoyed the support of a huge majority of the Danish people. Even in the face of a boycott of Danish companies in the Muslim world, most Danes felt: “Okay, let’s take an economic hit, it’s worth it. We’re standing up for principle.” The lesson of this is that Europe needs principled leaders who believe fiercely in secular pluralistic democracy and who aren’t afraid to offend democracy’s enemies.

What’s dismaying is that Denmark has taken a lot of heat from journalists and politicians elsewhere in Europe. Denmark stood up for democracy, and it’s being attacked for being culturally insensitive, anti-Muslim, racist. Some Danes are very upset about this. They worry that their country’s image has been tarnished. They don’t seem to grasp that the people criticizing their prime minister are dhimmis, and they’re criticizing him for not being a dhimmi.

It’s also dismaying that as time goes by, the fortitude of some Danes seems to be ebbing. Apparently, they’re increasingly willing to make compromises for “peace.” Something similar also appears to be going on in the Netherlands, where recent polls revealed a surprising hostility toward Ayaan Hirsi Ali – whose only crime has been standing up for the freedom of the people who despise her. Europe needs a few Churchills to keep the people from back down – to remind them on a regular basis how much they have to be grateful for and how much they have to lose if they don’t stand up for it.

FP: Is there any hope for reform in Europe?

Bawer: We have to hope. Some days I’m more optimistic than others. Sometimes, alas, it seems as if the elite appeasers are so firmly in control of the reins of government, and the masses of people are so used to being passive and letting the elite call the shots, that it’s hard to imagine all of this working itself out in a positive way. All that’s certain is that the Muslim minorities are growing in numbers and in self-confidence and in power – and that many Europeans are upset about this, and frustrated with official inaction. There’s already been a noticeable movement toward right-wing, anti-immigration parties, some of which are cheering oases of pro-American and pro-freedom sentiment, and some of which are disturbingly racist and fascist. If European governments don’t stop being dhimmis and appeasers, there’ll be more and more movement in the direction of such parties. A Europe torn between nativist fascism and Islamofascism is a grim prospect, all too reminiscent of the situation in Europe in the 1930s. Some days it feels avoidable. Other days it feels inevitable.

FP: Bruce Bawer, thank you for joining us.

Bawer: Thank you, Jamie.
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posted August 13, 2007 12:30 PM            

Hating America
By Bruce Bawer
The Hudson Review | 11/19/2004

I moved from the U.S. to Europe in 1998, and I’ve been drawing comparisons ever since. Living in turn in the Netherlands, where kids come out of high school able to speak four languages, where gay marriage is a non-issue, and where book-buying levels are the world’s highest, and in Norway, where a staggering percentage of people read three newspapers a day and where respect for learning is reflected even in Oslo place names (“Professor Aschehoug Square”; “Professor Birkeland Road”), I was tempted at one point to write a book lamenting Americans’ anti-intellectualism—their indifference to foreign languages, ignorance of history, indifference to academic achievement, susceptibility to vulgar religion and trash TV, and so forth. On point after point, I would argue, Europe had us beat.

Yet as my weeks in the Old World stretched into months and then years, my perceptions shifted. Yes, many Europeans were book lovers—but which country’s literature most engaged them? Many of them revered education—but to which country’s universities did they most wish to send their children? (Answer: the same country that performs the majority of the world’s scientific research and wins most of the Nobel Prizes.) Yes, American television was responsible for drivel like “The Ricki Lake Show”—but Europeans, I learned, watched this stuff just as eagerly as Americans did (only to turn around, of course, and mock it as a reflection of American boorishness). No, Europeans weren’t Bible-thumpers—but the Continent’s ever-growing Muslim population, I had come to realize, represented even more of a threat to pluralist democracy than fundamentalist Christians did in the U.S. And yes, more Europeans were multilingual—but then, if each of the fifty states had its own language, Americans would be multilingual, too.1 I’d marveled at Norwegians’ newspaper consumption; but what did they actually read in those newspapers?

That this was, in fact, a crucial question was brought home to me when a travel piece I wrote for the New York Times about a weekend in rural Telemark received front-page coverage in Aftenposten, Norway’s newspaper of record. Not that my article’s contents were remotely newsworthy; its sole news value lay in the fact that Norway had been mentioned in the New York Times. It was astonishing. And even more astonishing was what happened next: the owner of the farm hotel at which I’d stayed, irked that I’d made a point of his want of hospitality, got his revenge by telling reporters that I’d demanded McDonald’s hamburgers for dinner instead of that most Norwegian of delicacies, reindeer steak. Though this was a transparent fabrication (his establishment was located atop a remote mountain, far from the nearest golden arches), the press lapped it up. The story received prominent coverage all over Norway and dragged on for days. My inhospitable host became a folk hero; my irksome weekend trip was transformed into a morality play about the threat posed by vulgar, fast-food-eating American urbanites to cherished native folk traditions. I was flabbergasted. But my erstwhile host obviously wasn’t: he knew his country; he knew its media; and he’d known, accordingly, that all he needed to do to spin events to his advantage was to breathe that talismanic word, McDonald’s.

For me, this startling episode raised a few questions. Why had the Norwegian press given such prominent attention in the first place to a mere travel article? Why had it then been so eager to repeat a cartoonish lie? Were these actions reflective of a society more serious, more thoughtful, than the one I’d left? Or did they reveal a culture, or at least a media class, that was so awed by America as to be flattered by even its slightest attentions but that was also reflexively, irrationally belligerent toward it?

This experience was only part of a larger process of edification. Living in Europe, I gradually came to appreciate American virtues I’d always taken for granted, or even disdained—among them a lack of self-seriousness, a grasp of irony and self-deprecating humor, a friendly informality with strangers, an unashamed curiosity, an openness to new experience, an innate optimism, a willingness to think for oneself and speak one’s mind and question the accepted way of doing things. (One reason why Euro- peans view Americans as ignorant is that when we don’t know something, we’re more likely to admit it freely and ask questions.) While Americans, I saw, cherished liberty, Europeans tended to take it for granted or dismiss it as a naïve or cynical, and somehow vaguely embarrassing, American fiction. I found myself toting up words that begin with i: individuality, imagination, initiative, inventiveness, independence of mind. Americans, it seemed to me, were more likely to think for themselves and trust their own judgments, and less easily cowed by authorities or bossed around by “experts”; they believed in their own ability to make things better. No wonder so many smart, ambitious young Europeans look for inspiration to the United States, which has a dynamism their own countries lack, and which communicates the idea that life can be an adventure and that there’s important, exciting work to be done. Reagan-style “morning in America” clichés may make some of us wince, but they reflect something genuine and valuable in the American air. Europeans may or may not have more of a “sense of history” than Americans do (in fact, in a recent study comparing students’ historical knowledge, the results were pretty much a draw), but America has something else that matters—a belief in the future.

Over time, then, these things came into focus for me. Then came September 11. Briefly, Western European hostility toward the U.S. yielded to sincere, if shallow, solidarity (“We are all Americans”). But the enmity soon re-established itself (a fact confirmed for me daily on the websites of the many Western European newspapers I had begun reading online). With the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, it intensified. Yet the endlessly reiterated claim that George W. Bush “squandered” Western Europe’s post-9/11 sympathy is nonsense. The sympathy was a blip; the anti-Americanism is chronic. Why? In The Eagle’s Shadow: Why America Fascinates and Infuriates the World, American journalist and NPR commentator Mark Hertsgaard purports to seek an answer.2 His assumption throughout is that anti-Americanism is amply justified, for these reasons, among others:

Our foreign policy is often arrogant and cruel and threatens to “blow back” against us in terrible ways. Our consumerist definition of prosperity is killing us, and perhaps the planet. Our democracy is an embarrassment to the word, a den of entrenched bureaucrats and legal bribery. Our media are a disgrace to the hallowed concept of freedom of the press. Our precious civil liberties are under siege, our economy is dividing us into rich and poor, our signature cultural activities are shopping and watching television. To top it off, our business and political elites are insisting that our model should also be the world’s model, through the glories of corporate-led globalization.

America, in short, is a mess—a cultural wasteland, an economic nightmare, a political abomination, an international misfit, outlaw, parasite, and pariah. If Americans don’t know this already, it is, in Hertsgaard’s view, precisely because they are Americans: “Foreigners,” he proposes, “can see things about America that natives cannot. . . . Americans can learn from their perceptions, if we choose to.” What he fails to acknowledge, however, is that most foreigners never set foot in the United States, and that the things they think they know about it are consequently based not on first-hand experience but on school textbooks, books by people like Michael Moore, movies about spies and gangsters, “Ricki Lake,” “C.S.I.,” and, above all, the daily news reports in their own national media. What, one must therefore ask, are their media telling them? What aren’t they telling them? And what are the agendas of those doing the telling? Such questions, crucial to a study of the kind Hertsgaard pretends to be making, are never asked here. Citing a South African restaurateur’s assertion that non-Americans “have an advantage over [Americans], because we know everything about you and you know nothing about us,” Hertsgaard tells us that this is a good point, but it’s not: non-Americans are always saying this to Americans, but when you poke around a bit, you almost invariably discover that what they “know” about America is very wide of the mark.

In any event, The Eagle’s Shadow proves to be something of a gyp: for though it’s packaged as a work of reportage about foreigners’ views of America, it’s really a jeremiad by Hertsgaard himself, punctuated occasionally, to be sure, by relevant quotations from cabbies, busdrivers, and, yes, a restaurateur whom he’s run across in his travels. His running theme is Americans’ parochialism: we “not only don’t know much about the rest of the world, we don’t care.” I used to buy this line, too; then I moved to Europe and found that—surprise!—people everywhere are parochial. Norwegians are no less fixated on Norway (pop. 4.5 million) than Americans are on America (pop. 280 million). And while Americans’ relative indifference to foreign news is certainly nothing to crow about, the provincial focus of Norwegian news reporting and public-affairs programming can feel downright claustrophobic. Hertsgaard illustrates Americans’ ignorance of world geography by telling us about a Spaniard who was asked at a wedding in Tennessee if Spain was in Mexico. I once told such stories as well (in fact, I began my professional writing career with a fretful op-ed about the lack of general knowledge that I, then a doctoral candidate in English, found among my undergraduate students); then I moved to Europe and met people like the sixtyish Norwegian author and psychologist who, at the annual dinner of a Norwegian authors’ society, told me she’d been to San Francisco but never to California.

One of Hertsgaard’s main interests—which he shares with several other writers who have recently published books about America and the world—is the state of American journalism. His argument, in a nutshell, is that “few foreigners appreciate how poorly served Americans are by our media and educational systems—how narrow the range of information and debate is in the land of the free.” To support this claim, he offers up the fact that “internationally renowned intellectuals such as Edward W. Said and Frances Moore Lappé” signed a statement against the invasion of Afghanistan, but were forced to run it as an ad because newspapers wouldn’t print it for free. Hertsgaard’s acid comment: “In the United States, it seems, there are some things you have to buy the freedom to say.” Now, I didn’t know who Lappé was when I read this (it turns out she wrote a book called Diet for a Small Planet), but as for the late Professor Said, no writer on earth was given more opportunities by prominent newspapers and journals to air his views on the war against terror. In the two years between 9/11 and his death in 2003, his byline seemed ubiquitous.

Yes, there’s much about the American news media that deserves criticism, from the vulgar personality journalism of Larry King and Diane Sawyer to the cultural polarization nourished by the many publishers and TV news producers who prefer sensation to substance. But to suggest that American journalism, taken as a whole, offers a narrower range of information and debate than its foreign counterparts is absurd. America’s major political magazines range from National Review and The Weekly Standard on the right to The Nation and Mother Jones on the left; its all-news networks, from conservative Fox to liberal CNN; its leading newspapers, from the New York Post and Washington Times to the New York Times and Washington Post. Scores of TV programs and radio call-in shows are devoted to fiery polemic by, or vigorous exchanges between, true believers at both ends of the political spectrum. Nothing remotely approaching this breadth of news and opinion is available in a country like Norway. Purportedly to strengthen journalistic diversity (which, in the ludicrous words of a recent prime minister, “is too important to be left up to the marketplace”), Norway’s social-democratic government actually subsidizes several of the country’s major newspapers (in addition to running two of its three broadcast channels and most of its radio); yet the Norwegian media are (guess what?) almost uniformly social-democratic—a fact reflected not only in their explicit editorial positions but also in the slant and selectivity of their international coverage.3 Reading the opinion pieces in Norwegian newspapers, one has the distinct impression that the professors and bureaucrats who write most of them view it as their paramount function not to introduce or debate fresh ideas but to remind the masses what they’re supposed to think. The same is true of most of the journalists, who routinely spin the news from the perspective of social-democratic orthodoxy, systematically omitting or misrepresenting any challenge to that orthodoxy—and almost invariably presenting the U.S. in a negative light. Most Norwegians are so accustomed to being presented with only one position on certain events and issues (such as the Iraq War) that they don’t even realize that there exists an intelligent alternative position.

Things are scarcely better in neighboring Sweden. During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, the only time I saw pro-war arguments fairly represented in the Scandinavian media was on an episode of “Oprah” that aired on Sweden’s TV4. Not surprisingly, a Swedish government agency later censured TV4 on the grounds that the program had violated media-balance guidelines. In reality, the show, which had featured participants from both sides of the issue, had plainly offended authorities by exposing Swedish viewers to something their nation’s media had otherwise shielded them from—a forceful articulation of the case for going into Iraq.4 In other European countries, to be sure, the media spectrum is broader than this; yet with the exception of Britain, no Western European nation even approaches America’s journalistic diversity. (The British courts’ recent silencing of royal rumors, moreover, reminded us that press freedom is distinctly more circumscribed in the U.K. than in the U.S.) And yet Western Europeans are regularly told by their media that it’s Americans who are fed slanted, selective news—a falsehood also given currency by Americans like Hertsgaard.

No less regrettable than Hertsgaard’s misinformation about the American media are his comments on American affluence, which he regards as an international embarrassment and a sign of moral deficiency. He waxes sarcastic about malls, about the range of products available to American consumers (whom he describes as “dining on steak and ice cream twice a day”), and about the fact that Americans “spent $535 billion on entertainment in 1999, more than the combined GNPs of the world’s forty-five poorest nations.” He appears not to have solicited the opinions of Eastern Europeans, a great many of whom, having been deprived under Communism of both civil rights and a decent standard of living, have a deep appreciation for both American liberty and American prosperity. But then Hertsgaard, predictably, touches on Communism only in the course of making anti-American points. For example, he recalls a man in Havana who, during the dispute over Florida’s electoral votes in the 2000 presidential contest, whimsically suggested that Cuba send over election observers. (Well, that would’ve been one way to escape Cuba without being gunned down.) Hertsgaard further sneers that for many Americans, the fall of the Berlin Wall proved that they lived in “the chosen nation of God.” Now, for my part, I never heard anyone suggest such a connection. What I do remember about the Wall coming down is the lack of shame or contrition on the part of Western leftists who had spent decades appeasing and apologizing for Soviet Communism. In any event, does Hertsgaard really think that in a work purporting to evaluate America in an international context, this smirking comment about the Berlin Wall is all that need be said about the expiration of an empire that murdered tens of millions and from which the U.S., at extraordinary risk and expense, protected its allies for nearly half a century?

The victory over Soviet Communism is not the only honorable chapter of American history that Hertsgaard trashes. World War II? Though he grants that the U.S. saved Western Europe, he puts the word “saving” in scare quotes and maintains that “America had its own reasons” (economic, naturally) for performing this service. September 11? Here, in its entirety, is what he has to say about that cataclysmic day: “Suddenly Americans had learned the hard way: what foreigners think does matter.” The Iraq War? An atrocity against innocent civilians—nothing more. There’s no reference here to Saddam’s torture cells, imprisoned children, or mass graves, no mention of the fact that millions of Iraqis who lived in terror are now free. Instead, Hertsgaard cites with approval a U.N. official’s smug comment that Americans, who never understand anything anyway, have failed to grasp “that Iraq is not made up of twenty-two million Saddam Husseins” but of families and children. For a proper response to this remark, I need only quote from an address made to the Security Council by Iraqi foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari on December 16, 2003. Accusing the U.N. of failing to save Iraq from “a murderous tyranny,” Zebari said: “Today we are unearthing thousands of victims in horrifying testament to that failure. The United Nations must not fail the Iraqi people again.”5

Hertsgaard compares America unfavorably not only with Europe but—incredibly—with Africa. If “many Europeans speak two if not three languages,” he rhapsodizes, “in Africa, multilingualism is even more common.” So, one might add, are poverty, starvation, rape, AIDS infection, state tyranny and corruption, and such human-rights abominations as slavery, female genital mutilation, and the use of children as soldiers and prostitutes.

Hertsgaard contrasts America’s “frenzied pace” with the “African rhythms” that he finds more congenial and notes with admiration that “Africans live in social conditions that encourage inter- change, discourage hurry, and elevate the common good over that of the individual.” In response to which it might be pointed out (a) that those “social conditions” generally go by the name of abject poverty and (b) that Hertsgaard fails to cite such recent examples of benign African “social . . . interchange” and expressions of concern for the “common good” as Mugabe’s terror regime in Zimbabwe, ethnic clashes in the Central African Republic, Somali anarchy, Rwandan genocide (800,000 dead), prolonged civil wars in Sudan (two million dead), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (1.7 million dead), Liberia (200,000 dead), the Ivory Coast, and elsewhere, not to mention massacres of Christians by Muslims in Sudan and Nigeria. To recommend Africa to Americans as a model of social harmony without a hint of qualification is not just unserious, it’s hallucinatory.6

Every nation requires serious, responsible criticism, particularly if it’s the planet’s leading economic power, the arsenal of democracy, and the center of humanity’s common culture. But Hertsgaard’s criticism of America is neither serious nor responsible. Though at one point (apropos of American medicine and science) he concedes, with breathtaking dismissiveness, that “We Americans are a clever bunch,” he usually talks about his fellow countrymen as if they’re buffoons who have mysteriously and unjustly lucked into living in the world’s richest country, while most of the rest of the species, though far brighter and more deserving, somehow ended up in grinding poverty. For him, Americans’ intellectual mediocrity would seem to be a self-evident truth, but his own observations hardly exemplify the kind of reflectiveness a reader of such a book has a right to expect. For example, when he notes with satisfaction that the young Sigmund Freud “complained . . . incessantly about [America’s] lack of taste and culture,” Hertsgaard seems not to have realized that Freud was, of course, comparing the U.S. to his native Austria, which would later demonstrate its “taste and culture” by welcoming the Nazi Anschluss. One ventures to suggest that had Freud—who escaped the Gestapo thanks to intervention by Franklin D. Roosevelt—survived to see the liberated death camps in which his four sisters perished, he might well have revised his views about the relative virtues of American and Austrian culture.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID={9D8F06D1-FAB4-4DC1-A742-2208C37 4807E}

posted August 13, 2007 12:50 PM              

"...regurgitated inane anti-American clichés that they’d been fed since infancy."

Generally true, I have little doubt. Still, I can't help but wonder what pesky little anti-fill in the blank cliches I've been fed since infancy.

quote:

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In Europe, the elite prefers its minorities unintegrated, and the supposed reason is that it respects differences. But the real reason is a profound discomfort with the idea of “them” becoming “us.” Anyone can become an American; but an immigrant to Norway or the Netherlands will never really be thought of by anyone as Norwegian or Dutch.

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That's an awully good point and it's not made nearly enough. 'Course it illustrates part of the charm of the USA, so maybe better to ignore it.

"Like barn leker best" yup. I'm going to go out on a limb here and propose that this mindset is not just illustrative of the problem but rather the root of the problem you mentioned, jwhop. This perceived cowardly, wishy-washy nature of the Europeans, their reluctance to engage the problem ... hell to even acknowledge the problem ... is the result of a markedly divisive and war-like past. A history much older the WWII. All those tiny little countries, all of those tribal nations, all those lines on a map. The poor bast@rds wouldn't know what to do with true unity if their very lives depended on it. Unfortunately it probably does. So maybe just be patient with them. They're struggling with a problem we've blessedly been spared.

posted August 13, 2007 02:52 PM            

Ummm, "Land of the free and home of the brave"? "Give me liberty or give me death? "Mom, baseball and apple pie"?"Shining city on the hill?

""Like barn leker best" yup""

It's the water.

Well, their problems stem from a lot of things but there's a marked element of collective guilt, perhaps associated with their former colonial empires. That doesn't account for Denmark, Sweden or Norway though.

There's an even bigger problem facing western Europe. That's their declining birthrates which Bawer didn't touch on. Their birthrates are below population replacement numbers. They're literally breeding..or non breeding themselves and their cultures out of existence while nations from which most of their immigrants come are experiencing population explosions. Those same population explosions are going on inside western European nations among their immigrants...who are not assimilating into those cultures.

Diether Haenicke
Is Europe on its deathbed?
Wednesday, July 25, 2007

The countries of Western Europe, and particularly countries such as Germany, have never been, historically speaking, immigration countries. The peoples of France, Germany, Spain or England have, by and large, always been fairly homogenous as far as ethnic background, language, religion, or cultural heritage are concerned.

This has changed dramatically in the last few decades. Immigration, mainly from Africa, Southeast Asia and the Middle East, is beginning to change the face of some major European population centers, and significant problems and conflicts accompany this unprecedented migration.

Much of this development has to do with four major factors: one, the declining birth rates in practically all European countries; two, the high fertility rates in the countries where the immigration waves originate; three, the superior economic opportunities in the host nations; and, four, the ultra liberal immigration policies of Western Europe.

None of the European countries, Western or Eastern, currently has a birthrate that replaces the current population. According to the latest United Nations projections, the population of Germany, currently at 82 million, will decline 26 percent to 61 million in 2050.

In Italy, which now counts 57 million citizens, projections are for only 37 million by mid-century, a decline of 35 percent. Spain will shrink from 39 million to 28. Similar figures have been estimated for all of Europe. Once the populations of these countries become overage, their fertility rates naturally fall further, and the decline in numbers accelerates even more rapidly. The projected median age for indigenous Europeans by 2050 is expected to be 53. It currently stands at 36. By contrast, the median population age in Iran is 25, in Egypt 24, in Bangladesh 22, and in Yemen 18.

According to the same UN projections, some of the poorest countries outside Europe will vastly increase in numbers. For instance, Yemen had 4 million inhabitants in 1950, but now has 20 million and, if current birth rates continue, will have more than a 100 million in 2050. Similar growth is predicted in countries such as Turkey, Egypt, Morocco, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Uganda, Kenya and so on.

For young people in these countries with very low median age and consequently higher birth rates but poor economic opportunities, Western Europe's booming economies act like a magnet. Unfortunately, many of the young immigrants from these countries are unskilled, poorly educated, and drive up the unemployment rates in their host countries.

However, in spite of this, practically all European countries have immigration policies that allow immediate and generous asylum for all who claim to be political refugees. The local welfare systems immediately provide housing, monthly stipends, and free medical care, and while housing may be modest, it is in most cases much superior to the conditions in the immigrants' home countries. It can take years until the immigrants' claims for asylum are verified, and even if the findings are negative, repatriations are extremely difficult and rare.

Huge ghettos are developing in and around European metropolitan areas, and no-go zones for police already exist. Social unrest develops. Tensions between the resident populations and the newcomers evolve. The face of entire city districts changes. Demands by their hosts that the immigrants assimilate into the local culture, learn the language, and adopt the social, political, and economic mores of the guest land become ever stronger and are, by many immigrant groups, vehemently resisted.

The birth rates in the world outside Europe; the growing trend toward an overage population in many European countries; and the uncontrolled immigration from outside the European Union are bound to alter the demographics in the countries of Europe beyond recognition.

The Europe of yore with its distinct ethnic charm and differences is slowly beginning to disappear into the ubiquitous sinkhole of multiculturalism. In one or two generations, the Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower, the Fontana di Trevi, the Coliseum, and the great gothic cathedrals may stand out as remnants of a distant, historical Europe that is no longer.
http://www.mlive.com/columns/kzgazette/diether_haenicke/index.ssf ?/base/columns-0/1185373286176980.xml&coll=7

posted August 13, 2007 06:01 PM            

quote:

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Europe encourages immigrants to live apart and maintain their cultures and lifestyles and values without adjusting in the slightest to their new environment. This is called multiculturalism. And it’s been a disaster. In America, immigrants tend to make the switch to English relatively quickly; by contrast, an incredible number of European children (and even grandchildren) of immigrants are barely able to speak the language of the country in which they were born.

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Ermmm that may be true for some nations there but there are others like Portugal, France, Spain,England, etc. where the majority of the immigrants come from former colonies so I don't think learning the language is ever really the problem. But anyways........

*Personal opinion alert* On the subject of immigration in Europe: while I think the European gov'ts have been okay to the immigrants I think the relationship between European society and its nonwhite immigrants leave ALOT to be desired. If there is any cases of poor immigrant intergration in Europe its because of that IMO. No, I don't hate Europeans and I'm not saying it happens all over Europe or that all Europeans are bad, but some places and people make me go hmmmm.......and I have the accounts from some people (including Europeans themselves).