AND ANOTHER THING
The decline and fall of anti-Americanism in Britain
PAUL JOHNSON
Is anti-Americanism in Britain dead? Not quite, but it is dying. In recent days I have been charging up and down Britain launch- ing my new book A History of the American People, giving lectures in public places about writing it, signing copies in book- shops and debating with readers. Of hun- dreds of questions put to me, only two had the smallest anti-American slant. British people are evidently worried about the United States in relation to drugs, crime, the trash issuing from Hollywood and reli- gious fundamentalism. But hostility is reserved for France, Germany and (at the moment) Italy. America is seen as an ally against the Continentals, and all are keen on the Special Relationship flourishing which, thank God, it does. The old anti- Yankee slogan that they are 'overpaid, over-sexed and over here' is now a histori- cal curiosity: people under 40 have to have it explained to them, and even then they find it rum.
One reason is that the young have been there, often for many weeks or months at a time, have no cultural hang-ups and see Americans as people very like ourselves. Anyone of Tony Blair's age or less has an American dimension to their lives. My son Luke thinks no more of going to the States than I did, at his age, of going to Brighton. Blair is actively pro-America: he finds it exciting, dynamic, wedded to benevolent change. That is characteristic of young Britons today. To the young, America is identified with the future and with radical, non-ideological solutions to the world's ills. American universities are enormously admired, and more and more of our young people attend them.
In some ways we are getting back to the progressive transatlantic axis which held good for most of the 19th century. In the generation after the American Revolution, young Englishmen who wanted to change society looked to America for inspiration and example. Byron said, 'I always shake the hand of an American.' The young Southey and Coleridge planned to set up a Utopian community there in the Susque- hanna Valley. Shelley actually had Ameri- can blood and fantasised about American ideals being transported here; it is no acci- dent that modern Shelley scholarship began in the States. And Keats simply said, `I love an American.' John Stuart Mill was so enamoured of American ideas, especial- ly in relation to the emancipation of women, that he went so far as to defend the federal government's efforts to detribalise the Indians. Bertrand Russell told me that his parents, Lord and Lady Amberley, a highly progressive couple, chose to spend their honeymoon travelling around Ameri- ca in search of new ideas.
As it happened, Russell's own lifetime saw the emergence, especially among intel- lectuals, of systematic anti-Americanism, to which he himself made a waspish contribu- tion. It reached its apogee between the Korean war and the end of American inter- vention in Vietnam. It was mainly, though not entirely, irrational, and has been bril- liantly catalogued by that assiduous compil- er of case histories, Paul Hollander, in his book Anti-Americanism: Critiques at Home and Abroad, 1965-90 (Oxford 1992). It is still strong in parts of the eastern United States, especially among the radical misfits and weirdies of New York, Boston and other towns where ultra-liberals congregate to swap horror stories. These people do their best to keep it alive in Britain, where in other respects it is in precipitous decline, except in a few intellectual circles which events have passed by.
A characteristic example of this transat- lantic anti-Americanism was an attack on my book in the Sunday Times earlier this month. The Sunday Times is not against America, far from it. It takes the same view as its boss, Rupert Murdoch, that the Unit- ed States is the Big Cheese, worth a nibble or even a hefty bite. But the paper is big and chaotic, and the book pages, which have been heavily dumbed down in recent years, and confusingly muddled up with the children's comic, form an Adullam's Cave of lefty pseudo-intellectuals and Yankee- haters. My book, which treats the Ameri- cans, past and present, as engaged in a con- tinuing Manichaean struggle between God and righteousness on the one hand and Mammon and bigotry on the other, is anathema to such people, who see America as the Great Satan tout court.
So they hired an American hatchetman called Anson to do a demolition job. Anson is unknown over here, but in New York he makes a living as a conspiracy theorist, who writes books about Dark Forces. You know the kind of thing: Who Really Killed Kennedy?; How Nixon Planned to Blow Up the World; Ronald Reagan and the Star Wars Plot etc. Anson, an underclass version of Gore Vidal, is a reptilian creature who dwells in that bottomless sewer, Vanity Fair, occasionally emerging to spit venom. His strategy was to accuse me of getting things wrong, because of course my book does not coincide with his conspiratorial view of con- temporary America at any point (he seems to know nothing of history and to be less interested in it). I have come across this line of attack before, notably in Eastern Europe, where my books are often targeted by the neo-Marxists. In the Czech Republic Modern Times sold 50,000 copies, a fact which infuriated the communists, who pub- lished a long list of its 'errors'. On examina- tion I found it a catalogue of lies. Anson faults me for calling an obscure Californian politician 'Pete' instead of 'Pat% his other points are mostly matters of opinion. It is one of the characteristics of the left-wing mentality that it cannot distinguish between views and objective facts.
You may ask, how does Murdoch, who is so pro-American that he actually changed his citizenship to become one — and not entirely or even mainly for commercial rea- sons either — put up with this kind of thing in one of his flagship papers? The answer is he owns too many properties to supervise them in detail. Oddly enough, I remember an occasion some years ago when he came to my house in Iver for Sunday lunch. He picked up the Sunday Times, started to read it, exploded in rage, scrumpled up the offending pages and hurled them into the fire, stamping them with his foot in his anx- iety to hasten their incineration. 'Hey,' said I, 'do you mind, that's my copy!' It was a wonderful image of the furious, frustrated proprietor homswoggled by his disobedient or, more likely, stupid underlings. (It is true that the paper's editor was replaced shortly afterwards.) I am not going to nag Mur- doch about this little Anson episode. Try- ing to stamp out anti-Americanism serves no purpose. It is on its last legs anyway, as the march of events and the logic of facts expose its idiocies. My only sadness is that corner-boy ideological journalism should damage the serious study of history, about which I care a great deal. But when was the Left ever interested in truth?
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