A HISTORY OF HATRED

by Duns Scotus

It was not part of their blood,

It came to them very late,

With long arrears to make good,

When the Euros began to hate.

It is not exactly clear when Europeans first felt the clawing tug of hatred towards America and the Americans.

Early on, there was just sneering contempt, ably expressed by the likes of Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707 – 1788) who said that America was "a land best suited for insects, reptiles, and feeble men." He believed that the cold swamps and deserts of America led to a degeneration both in man and beast, and also said "Man thinks, and immediately becomes the master of beings who do not think." This may also have been aimed at Americans.

This early disdain for "colonials" and "creoles" slowly abated, helped by the dividing waters of the Atlantic and the fact that Europeans were too busy hating (and killing) each other to seriously hate their unfortunate colonists with their half-caste or quarter-caste children.
  

A typical American with more than a hint of racial mystery

It was familiarity, as usual, that bred contempt, or at least refreshed it, with the advent of the Doughboys and GIs, drawn deep into Europe's world-shaping conflicts in WWI, WWII, and beyond.

Post-war conditions led to a situation in which Europeans had to finally set their differences aside -- or at least most of them. They soon realised that whatever past crimes and atrocities they had mutually committed there was much to admire in each other. Their hatred was also been directed towards Russia and the East, but as the Soviet Union naturally weakened during the course of the Cold War, a growing amount of their animosity started to be directed towards America.

GIs were always cheered on their way out

In Britain, a virulent strain of anti-Americanism was boosted by President Eisenhower's decision to "stab Britain in the back" over Suez in 1956.

Geopolitically, Britain may have been acting in a counter-productive way, and Eisenhower's decision might have been the correct one in terms of defeating the Soviet strategy of subverting the Third World, but it reminded some if not all Britons that American "friendship" was fake and could not be relied upon in a pinch. 

As for the French, the humiliating experience of being liberated by the Anglo-Americans and then the bruisings their colonial ego had suffered in Indo-China and Algeria, created an understandably twisted mindset that turned what should have been gratitude into implacable resentment, a vein that De Gaulle mined, and which led to his moves to block Britain from EU membership and to keep NATO at arm's length by removing France from NATO's integrated military command structure in 1966.

Another strand of anti-Americanism was evident in the 1960s, stemming from shills and useful idiots in academia, the intellectual and cultural world, and student radicals. This was stirred up by Kremlin ops, but America's well-intentioned but ill-fated campaign in Vietnam and its Civil Rights problems at home fuelled the flames of what would otherwise have been an astroturfed operation.

The USA was depicted as crude, materialistic, aggressive, unsophisticated, and racist, and the "racism" was even coded as inverted with the "inferior" whites being racist against their coloured "superiors":

Black maid putting her lowly White employer in her place with her noble kweenly ambiance

At this stage most of Europe was overwhelmingly White, so looking down at the interracial problems of others was relatively easy and involved little need for awkward self-reflection.

Despite all these elements of Anti-Americanism, however, Europe still maintained a largely positive view of America going into the 1970s. But this began to unravel when America started to elect Presidents who, to European eyes, seemed excessively stupid or toneless.

Ronald Reagan was the first of these, Clinton another, then George "Dubya" Bush made it even worse. These Presidents may all have been a lot more intelligent than they chose to appear, but the affectation of "democratic stupidity," while winning elections in America, also provided Europeans with a focus for the growing hatred of America that they were feeling.

This does not mean that they actually and openly hated America. Most Europeans were too intelligent to do that. They realised that with the Soviet Union still around, America was very much a force for good in the World, while many of them were attracted by certain cultural and consumerist aspects of America.

Also, from 1989 onwards, the "American system" had apparently succeeded, with the collapse of Communism. The tug of hatred was there, but there were both positive and negative reasons holding it back. 

Sympathy for America in its apparent "hour of need" when the country was attacked by Al Qaeda terrorists in 2001, rallied most Europeans behind America at the time, even the ones who had given in to the urge to hate it. But this was quickly followed by a sense, as with "anti-Semitism," attacks on Israel, and the overreaction, that this sympathy was being somewhat overplayed and exploited.

How did invading Iraq make amends for the destruction of a couple of boring-looking skyscrapers in New York by random Muslims? The simian face of Bush superimposed on the Middle-Eastern morass led many Europeans, rightly or wrongly, to conclude that anything Al Qaeda or ISIS did was at root the fault of the Americans or their Israeli friends. 

More and more gave in to the tug of hatred they were feeling, but the majority of Europeans still clung to the "official alliance" bolstered by the occasional "good omen."  The advent of Obama reassured them that America wasn't entirely the backwards cesspit that they suspected. Obama was America showing a degree of humility, a condition that most Europeans felt suited it far better than its characteristic arrogance. Obama, for Europeans, was America putting on sackcloth and ashes and seeking expiation for its sins.

Geopolitical sackcloth and ashes: Obama in Berlin

Perhaps such an America was one that Europeans could feel comfortable working with. But alas it was not to last. The advent of Obama helped feed the backlash that led to Trump and then, after a sterile Biden interlude, Trump and Vance.

In the "First Coming of Trump," many Europeans still kept their flickering candle of affinity with America alive because so many other Americans were opposed to him. There were, it seemed, millions of "good Americans" after all.

There was even a minority position that Trump was somehow "good", that he would "shake things up" and push America off its perch back into the real world in which Europeans believed they lived. An America concerned with its balance of trade and drawing in its imperial claws, after all, was essentially not dissimilar to themselves, no matter how garish and graceless the whole process appeared. 

But Trump 2.0 destroyed all these copes in one fell swoop.

The Americans who had so strongly opposed him in his own party and the wider country suddenly gave up the ghost after the failure of the abysmal Biden-Harris campaign in 2024. They were all acquiescing in Trump's ascendency, or at least it seemed so.

As for those Europeans who thought of Trump as a possible "positive force," it was now clear that he was only "shaking things up" for the benefit of the direct enemy of Europe in Vladimir Putin, or because he wanted to behave like a corrupt gangster.

To the rancid smell of cultural and racial inferiority was added the dank perfume of moral corruption and subversion, so amply demonstrated in the events in the Oval Office when President Zelensky came to visit.

There are still Americans who oppose Trump, and some of them even do this for good reasons. In time, they may even gain in strength and power. But it has been too little too late and the damage has already been done. The vast reservoir of hatred that Europeans have been building up for America over the course of the 20th century has breached its final dam.