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167 of 200 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Ben Franklin & James Madison Would Have Praised This Book, May 26, 2003
The heart of this book is not why people hate America, but rather on how Americans have lost touch with reality.
This book joins three others books I have reviewed and recommend separately, as the "quartet for revolution" in how Americans must demand access to reliable information about the real world. They are Bill McKibben on "The Age of Missing Information" (a day in the woods contrasted with a year reviewing a day's worth of non-information on broadcast television); Anne Branscomb's "Who Owns Information" (not the citizen); and Roger Shattuck, "Forbidden Knowledge." These are the higher level books--there are many others, both on the disgrace of the media and the abuse of secrecy by government, as well as on such excellent topics as "Who Will Tell the People: The Betrayal of American Democracy" by William Greider, and "The Closing of the American Mind" by Allan Bloom. Here are a few points made by this book that every American needs to understand if we are to restore true democracy, true freedom of the press, and true American values to our foreign policy, which has been hijacked by neo-conservative corporate interests: 1) "Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel." Dr. Samuel Johnson said this in 1775, on the eve of US revolution from British tyranny. When patriotism is used to suppress dissent, to demand blind obedience, and to commit war crimes "in our name," then patriotism has lost its meaning. 2) According to the authors, Robert Kaplan and Thomas Friedman are flat out *wrong* when they suggest that "they" hate us for our freedoms, the success of our economy, for our rich cultural heritage. Most good-hearted Americans simply have no idea how big the gap is between our perception of our goodness and the rest of the world's perception of our badness (in terms set forth below). 3) According to the authors, a language dies every two weeks. Although there are differing figures on how many languages are still active today (between 3,000 and 5,500), the point is vital. If language is the ultimate representation of a distinct and unique culture that is ideally suited to the environment in which it has flourished over the past millenium, then the triple strikes of English displacing the language, the American "hamburger virus" and city planning displacing all else, and American policy instruments--inclusive of the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund--eliminating any choices before the Third World or even the European policy makers, then America can be said to have been invasive, predatory, and repressive. At multiple levels, from "hate" by Islamic fundamentalists, to "fear and disdain" by French purists, to "annoyance" by Asians to "infatuation" by teenagers, the Americans are seen as way too big for their britches--Americans are the proverbial bull in the china shop, and their leaders lack morals--the failure of America to ratify treaties that honor the right of children to food and health, the failure of America to respect international conventions-the average of two military interventions a year since the Cold War (not to mention two countries invaded but not rescued), all add up to "blowback." 4) According to the authors, America is "out of control" largely because the people who vote and pay taxes are uninformed. The authors of this book are most articulate. Consider the following quote: "And the power of the American media, as we repeatedly argue, works to keep American people closed to experience and ideas from the rest of the world and thereby increases the insularity, self-absorption, and ignorance that is the overriding problem the rest of the world has with American." 5) According to the authors, the impact of America overseas can be best summed up as a "hamburger virus" that comes as a complete package, and is especially pathological. McDonalds "serves" rather than "feeds". The "hamburger culture" is eradicating indigenous cultures everywhere, and often this is leading, decades later, to the realization that those cultures had thrived because they were well suited to the environment--the "hamburger culture" assumes that electricity will provide for air conditioning, that everyone can afford a car once the cities have been paved over, etcetera. When this turns out to not be the case, the losses that have occurred over decades cannot be turned back, and poverty, as well as ethnic strife, are the result. 6) Finally--and the authors have many other points to make in this excellent book, but this is the last one for this "summative" evaluation of their work--according to the authors the USA is what could be considered the ultimate manifestation of the "eighth crusade", with Christopher Columbus and the destruction of the native American Indians (both North and South) having been the seventh crusade. The authors are most interesting as they define the predominantly Catholic edicts from the Pope and from Kings and Queens, that declared that anyone not speaking their language (and therefore not able to understand their edicts) was a savage, an animal, and therefore suitable for enslavement. In the eyes of much of the world, America is a culturally-oppressive force that is enslaving local governments and local economies for the benefit of a select wealthy elite that live in gated compounds, while demeaning, demoting, and destroying the balance of power and the balance with nature and the balance among tribes, that existed prior to the arrival of American "gunboat diplomacy" and "banana capitalism." There you have it. According to the authors:
1) Americans are uninformed about the real world
2) Americans are not in charge of their own foreign policy
3) What is done in the name of all Americans is severely detrimental to the rest of the world, and Americans will pay a heavy price if they allow this "hamburger/gunboat imperialism" to continue. May God have mercy on our souls, for we know not what we do.
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29 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Oh, would some Power...., July 19, 2003
I wish I could give this book more stars, I really do. The question is vital to our future relations with the rest of the world and there is a lot of "good stuff" in here. Unfortunately, there's a lot of other stuff as well.Before I get into that, a quick response to some other reviewers. First, yes, the book is "unbalanced" but the title question itself is unbalanced. Thus, as the authors say in the introduction "This is not a book about the positive sides of the United States." People don't hate you for what they truly like about you. So of course the ground covered is going to be negative. Second, it avowedly "is not a book about 9-11; nor is it about the action stemming from it. It is a book prompted by that awful event and concerned to understand the overriding question that emerged from the devastation." It is, in short, a book about why people hate the US. And indeed, it's at its strongest when it focuses directly on that question in the spirit of Robert Burns' famous lines (modernized): "Oh would some Power the gift give us/To see ourselves as others see us./It would from many a blunder free us/And foolish notion." The simple fact is, as the authors demonstrate, to untold millions around the world the US appears hypocritical, conceited, selfish, self-centered, insular, and greedy; as the proverbial 600-pound gorilla, proclaiming with bogus innocence (as some here have) "no one is forcing you to eat at McDonald's" while doing all in its power to overwhelm any alternatives by sheer mass of presence and weight of money, undermining local culture all the while; as the spoiled brat that wonders aloud "what's in it for me" when others cry for help but expects the entire world to drop everything and get in line when it itself is the victim; as the arrogant braggart constantly patting itself on the back for its decency even as it continues to take advantage of the weakness of others. Moreover, they also show that to a greater extent than most Americans would be willing to admit, that image is deserved. If they had stuck to that, I would have given the book five stars and rated it a "must read." But when they shift from analysis of the US's role in the world and how it appears to others to an analysis of US culture and how it came to be how it is, I had problems. One is that a fair amount of that analysis is devoted to factors that are, let me call it, invisible to those others whose point of view is being considered; that is, they're actually not relevant to the question the book asks. Another is that the authors are not immune to some of the sins they condemn: On more than one occasion they engage in open romanticization of the past, which can itself become a form of cultural imperialism, one that demands other cultures remain locked in a time that we find pleasant or quaint. For example, they bemoan that in Singapore there is nowhere to be found "a joss stick smouldering in an old brass holder...a mirror...set to snare the evil that travels in a straight line; a rusty rickshaw...." But the opposition movement they immediately turn to isn't in or about Singapore, but South Korea! The authors appear to miss rusty rickshaws more than the people of Singapore do. Ultimately, there is an underlying sense of cultural condescension here, that old notion that American culture is by definition, trashy, brassy, and pushy - to be blunt, there were times I thought the book should have been titled "Why We Hate America" rather than "Why Do People Hate America." Finally, there are several errors, some minor, some not. For example, they identify Native American scholar and author Vine Deloria as "Vince" Deloria, an error in which, however, they are not alone. At the end of chapter four they say that all 1500 "Wimpy's" fast-food restaurants were shut down in 1978 when the founder died, as per his wishes. But the footnote for that very paragraph says that most Wimpy's were turned into Burger Kings in 1989 and that some are still open. Huh? A more serious error, because it is used as an example of US cultural domination, is the assertion that AOL and Microsoft together control "much of the content" of the Internet. Not even "access," which would also be untrue, but "content." In a similar vein, they refer to Ben Bagdikian's on-going study of media concentration- according to which by 2002 just nine transnational firms were dominant - and assert that "virtually everything Americans see and hear" through electronic and print media is controlled by that group. Bagdikian, however, only claims "most" is so controlled, which is serious enough, but is not "virtually everything." This kind of overstatement, of overreaching their data, runs through their argument, leaving them open to nit-picking "false in one, false in all" rebuttals. And that is quite unfortunate because, I say again, the question the book asks is vital - and when the authors do address that question, the book is very, very good.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Fact free, September 8, 2007
It's time to put down a book when it is obviously substituting contention for fact. This one says that the Iranian Prime Minister Mossadegh was assassinated by the CIA in the 1950s. In fact, he died of cancer in 1967. Very clever, those CIA agents, to get him to do that.
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