Why They Have Hated Us

February 3, 2002

by Bruce Walker

Liberal pundits have for decades rhetorically asked why Americans seem to be hated throughout much of the world. Conservatives note that cheap thugs who run impoverished nations need a scapegoat: genial and generous America plays that role well. Liberals review the vestiges of colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, and even slavery as plausible reasons for anger at America.

Envy is a factor. Our wealth, according to the twisted thinking of the jealous America-haters, comes at their expense. Destroying the World Trade Center somehow restores the greatness of Buenos Aires or Bagdad. The envy of wealthy and modern powers like France, Germany and Japan - all of whom once dreamed of being the global hegemon, and all of whom now must settle for safe, peaceful, prosperous self-determination - lies beneath the surface, but it is still real.

But mere jealousy is only part of why so many nations particularly hate the United States of America. There is another more sinister factor: Communism. This ghastly system - which includes Fascism, Socialism, and Nazism - fails in every endeavor except for the incitement of vile emotions. The Venona decrypted documents validate what many conservatives had been saying for decades: the Soviet Union made demonizing the United States a top priority.

Soviet Russia spent more rubles subsidizing anti-war activities in the United States than it did providing military and economic aid to the North Vietnamese (and it turned out to be an excellent investment.) America moved from a nation of bipartisan patriotism under Eisenhower and Kennedy into a divided nation in which leading Democrats called the police force of their own administration "Gestapo."

Many of the leading black congressional representatives received direct and indirect support from Castro, and wrote glowing letters to their comrade in Havana. Hollywood truly and genuinely did have communists who influence and censored the film industry.

We now know that so called "feminists" like Betty Friedan and Bella Abzug were actually communists - not sort of, kind of, radical-ish liberals, but people who had been members of the Communist Party USA or were otherwise actual agents of influence of the Soviet Union.

This helps explain why so many of these movements of alienation really have had nothing to do with advancing the welfare of their putative constituencies. Prosperous and stable black families, happy and thankful wives, children who respected the vast accomplishments of their fathers in the Second World War - these were all the precise opposite of what communists wanted.

The communists found even more fertile ground in the new states of post-colonial Asia and Africa. The radical Islamic venom for America is largely political, not religious. Hussein of Iraq and dead dictator Assad of Syria, for example, proclaimed their radical socialist Baathist Party agenda much more than any veneer of Islam.

If sincere commitment to Islam was the primary issue, then why was there not a powerful and concerted effort during the seventy-five years of Soviet Communism by Moslem nations to free the oppressed Moslem Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Azerbaijanis, Turkomen, Tadjiks, and Kirghiz within the officially atheist Soviet Union?

Were the streets of Cairo, Damascus, and Bagdad filled with riots against the Kremlin? Were children in the schools of these nations taught that Communist Russia was the great oppressor? No - these people were told instead that the United States, which never colonized a single Moslem land and which allowed Moslems complete freedom of worship and which provided hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign aid over the decades to these nations was ... the enemy!

Soviet policy made sure that the focus of blame was on the United States. Colonialism was a relatively benign influence in much of Asia and Africa, although ancient and sophisticated civilizations like India could understandably resent the British Raj or why the Syrians and Lebanese, whose ancestors were building palaces and libraries while Gaul was a rough and ignorant land, could reasonably disdain any notion of manifest French cultural superiority.

France, Britain, Holland, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Germany, Belgium, and even Denmark held actual colonies that encompassed much of the world well into the Twentieth Century. So if anti-colonialism was the Third World brief against the West, it should have resulted in special outrage towards these active colonizers.

The riots and shouts, however, were not directed towards these affluent, industrial colonial powers, but rather towards the United States, which had a better record regarding the offense of colonialization (if such activity is an offense) than any significant nation in the world. That includes non-European nations.

Japan held Chosen (Korea) and Formosa (Taiwan) as colonies for decades and exploited them ruthlessly. China also colonized Taiwan and engaged in the sort of colonization in Tibet that Hitler envisioned for Poland and Ukraine. The Ottoman Turks colonized much of the Middle East, and today nations like Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, and Turkey are - within much of their nations’ boundaries - colonial powers oppressing peoples with utter ruthlessness.

Black Africans enslave and murder other black Africans who belong to the wrong tribe or religion. While the horrific mass murders of Hutus and Tutsis may seem remote and odd to us, those recent crimes were as bad any in history, with not so much as imaginary complicity by America. The Nigerian Civil War, the Ugandan pogroms against Asians in under Idi Amin, and the ongoing holocaust in Sudan are all as disconnected from American culpability as it is possible to conceive.

Even relatively happy areas, those parts of the Indian subcontinent away from the Pakistani border and those Latin American nations that have evolved towards functional democracies, have bloody wars in which a ruling race, religion, or linguistic group is locked in savage combat with a weaker group.

Except America. The political curiosity - these United States of America - passed almost one quarter of a millennium ago, the Northwest Ordinances; an example of benevolent modernity which gave those colonies of the several United States the right to enter the Union as full and equal sovereign states. This statute, adopted under the Articles of Confederation and ratified under Federal Republic, remains breathtakingly noble and wise, even today.

Malicious yelps and whispers against our good nation reflects perfectly the warped perspectives of Marxists, who in unguarded moments make those stunning admissions like: "The worse, the better." When ideologues who feast on misery gained control of the largest nation on Earth, their ability to produce legions of agents dedicated to convincing the unhappy peoples of the world that their greatest hope, America, was actually the author of all their miseries.

Who listened to these lies? Well, socialists and other Marxists, of course. But the toxins worked just as well on unhappy women, blacks, Hispanics, ethnic minorities, religious minorities, homosexuals, disabled people, and anyone who felt - rightly or wrongly - that life had dealt them a bad hand. Soviet agents and helpers spent decades nourishing angry stares at the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.

Well, the Marxist paradise that Lenin created and the crypto-Marxist utopias of National Socialists, Maoists, Fascists, and other monsters have largely died (the mafioso of Beijing makes little pretense to seek anything but power.) The bile of Marxist lies, however, lives on in radical Islam, in psychotic North Korea, in simmering Argentina, in bloody Africa.

We have not yet won the war against that most despicable ideology - godless Marxism - but once we see this true enemy, then we will have a chance to win the final victory for human freedom.

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Bruce Walker has been a dyed in the wool conservative since, as a sixth grader, he campaigned door to door for Barry Goldwater. Bruce has had almost two hundred published articles have appeared in the Oklahoma Bar Journal, Law & Order, Legal Secretary Today, The Single Parent, Enter Stage Right, Citizen's View, The American Partisan, Port of Call, and several other professional and political periodicals.

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