Webb on anti-Americanism (I)

BBC Washington correspondent Justin Webb has written a series of articles on anti-Americanism, including attitudes on the U.S. in France, Venezuela and Egypt. Webb wants to challenge “the idea that the U.S. is an international bully, a modern day imperial power”. (BBC: Anti-Americanism)

We can guess he'll have a hard time :-) Let's see what arguments he can come up with.

According to Webb there is “a willingness to condemn America for the tiniest indiscretion [...] while leaving murderers, dictators, and thieves who run other nations oddly untouched”. Sure, there are many murderers and dictators in this world, but usually there are only capable of murdering their own people and perhaps those of a neighboring country. Not only has the U.S. completely wiped out its native inhabitants – the Indians – it has massacred peoples around the world, the list is really too long to mention here... Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq, just to name a few. To Webb that's only a tiny indiscretion.

“Anti-Americanism was born in France ... well before the United States existed”. This remark is really to idiotic to even be worth refuting. How can anybody be “anti-American” even before the U.S. existed. This only shows Webb's twisted logic, who claims the French found the New World “ghastly”. Well now, the French also tried to colonize the New World, until they were defeated by English settlers. OK, maybe they are bad losers. But as even Webb has to confess, anti-Americanism also exists in the U.K.! While ranting about French anti-Americanism, Webb descends into the ugly depths of “anti-Frenchism”, too ugly to describe here. According to Webb the French can't stand ordinariness, such as epitomized by the U.S. or ... Belgium. Ahem, what about the aristocratic British with their stiff upper lip?

Latin American countries have only themselves to blame for being poor, judges Webb. In each and every one of them in the past century a dictatorship has been imposed on the people with the all too active support of the U.S. Now that the Latin American countries are liberating themselves from this American yoke, Webb rants about Chavez's “anti-Americanism”. How much did the neocons pay him to write this nonsense, or is Webb really brain-death? What kind of “infrastructure” did the Yankees put in place in South America if not to plunder its riches? “Millions and millions of Latin Americans benefit every day from the powerhouse US economy – from relatives cleaning cars in Los Angeles, making beds in Las Vegas and picking fruit in rural Georgia,” Webb writes. And so they toil as wage slaves earning a pittance to make American capitalists rich. According to Webb, they should be grateful and kiss the Americans' ass.

And Webb wonders if Latin Americans will “reward US support and good behavior” in the future. What a stupid question! The U.S. will never show “good” behavior before its imperialism is destroyed by the rising opposition of the peoples of the world, and ultimately by the American people itself, which is also suffering under the system imposed on it by the robber barons.

It is a disgrace to the BBC that this individual is on its payroll. Webb should send his C.V. to Fox News or the Washington Times, where he belongs.