Why Others Hate Us, and
What We Can Do About It

Editorial

We should not find it difficult to understand why others hate us when many intellectuals inside the United States have the same point of view. Says Dwight Murphey:

Our school children are told that Americans of the nineteenth century and, before that, of the eighteenth, were racists and exclusionary, seizing a continent by a long series of depredations against a worthy indigenous population. The Constitution revered by those Americans was antiquated and not given to the egalitarianism that today is the moral imperative by which all, past and present, is judged. The economy was one of sweatshops and wage slavery. Women were held down and blacks, even after slavery was ended, survived on the bare margin of society. This is today’s conventional wisdom.

Nor, they are told, need we limit such befoulment to those earlier centuries: the baseball of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig was tainted by the absence of minorities; the United States before the Civil Rights Revolution and the feminist movement would hardly have been worthy of the respect of later Americans. And even now, the great mass of (white) Americans remain “unconsciously racist and sexist,” with their “racial profiling” and “glass ceilings.” -Dwight D. Murphey, Out of the Ashes: America’s Renewal, Wichita, KS: Thought Piece Books, 2002.

This superficial and contemptuous perversion of our history is held by many if not most of our universities, is imposed on our local students by school boards, and reflects a point of view shared by some members of the Supreme Court, and many politicians. With the events of September 11, and a reawakening of pride in our country, the reaction of the citizenry has quieted academics and compelled a reversal of some un-American school policies.

A more sophisticated explanation of the general hatred toward us can be seen in our well-meaning missionary spirit. Americans are a generous, kind people, aware of the blessings they share, feeling guilty that others are not as we are, and do what they can to help everyone, including our former enemies: Germany, Russia, Japan. These people hated us and did what they could to destroy us. Germany was going to conquer the world, Russia was going to bury us with a superior idea of government, Japan had a hatred of us equal to that of Islam today. They are now our allies. Because of our help after World War II, they became world leaders and recovered their roots. Japan did not have similar roots with us, being locked into an Emperor worship centuries old, but they quickly became one of the wealthiest countries in the world. We overcame hatred with affection.

But this affectionate attitude toward others has also betrayed us. We have been thought arrogant, a heavyweight able to pummel others into submission to our way of life. President Wilson intended to make the world safe for democracy. His ambition was laudable, and it was correct, for no country can be stable and achieve a decent standard of living without democracy, but the world was not ready to change its ways, and our goodwill was interpreted as arrogance.

We have been involved in Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, all with good intentions, but with little success. We think they should have a multicultural society, which we have largely accomplished, but these people have ethnic and tribal beliefs they hold dear, which they have held for centuries, and they resent our telling them they should love each other and live in peace. So they should, but they won’t and we must allow them to live as they please, and hope they will grow out of petty resentments. We tell these countries they should be capitalists, so they should, but they cannot do it until they have traditions of law, protection of property rights, a sound economy, and traditions that respect these. Until they realize the wisdom of our advice they resent us telling them and insist we mind our own business. We tell China to straighten out its economy, but that is easier said than done in a large country of poverty. They will do it in their own time or remain poor for centuries, but we get nowhere by preaching to them. And our advice goes against the grain of these petty dictators, or socialists, or powerful dictators whose goal is individual power. Wisdom is lost on many countries because of poverty and corruption, and we cannot do much about it. In our own country we observe people whose goal of life is control of others. They act with good intentions, but they are without modesty. If we have these people who have crass ambition, should we be surprised to see it in the people of other countries? Much of our political life is for the protection of liberty against well-meaning people who would rob us of this heritage. If these are among us, we should not be surprised to find them worldwide.

Then, we are resented because of our success. Jealousy is a great motivator. Hubert Vedrine, French Foreign Minister, said in November 1999,

The United States is a hyperpower. We cannot accept that politically, nor can we accept a culturally uniform world, nor unilateral action.

On the other hand, France, and other European powers, rely on our strength for European defence, carping at us all of the time.

Lastly, we have militant Islam. Why do they hate us? They hate us because we have what they do not have and which they cannot have because of the way their countries are organized. They are socialist, dictatorships, corrupt, without any of the basic requirements for a civilized state. The people want freedom as much as we do, and the state needs freedom to be a genuine state, with laws that protect contracts between free people and organizations, with citizens permitted to have differences of opinion, and alternate candidates for election. With these, a people can be what it wants to be. Without these, there can only be poverty, jealousy, and hatred.

What can we do? Our first responsibility is defense, of course. We have gone into Afghanistan to destroy the central training ground of terrorism, and are doing what we can to destroy cells around the world. But they are everywhere, including the United States. We cannot rid the world of this cancer by war. The problem is one of education, a task of great difficulty. Syria is a socialist dictatorship whose President al-Assad is well defended. Saudi Arabia is a monarchy ruled by the Koran, with money enough from oil to prevent change. And the oil money facilitates terrorism. President Mubarak of Egypt has tried some privatization, and seems to have common sense, but he presides over a country with much terrorism. He is limited by the fanatics among his citizens. Qaddafi of Libya is a socialist dictator who nationalized the private sector, banks, and oil. Libya is a strictly Muslim state where change and improvement is not on the horizon. Jordan seems to be a sensible nation, doing its best, without hatred. Turkey has become a secularist state, banning the rule of clergy, and able to control internal fanatics. Most Islamic countries can change only from within, as we do our best to protect ourselves from them. Turkey is the example others have to follow, but what can we do when clerics are in charge and rule by their bible? These people are trained to hate the United States as an excuse for their failures, and it is to the advantage of ruling despots to deflect their failures on the United States. We have to preserve our heritage until they recognize their failures are due to themselves.

Until the happy day when Islamic states choose civilized behavior and adopt the practices that are necessary for financial and social improvement, we must be busy making ourselves independent of them. If it were not for our success they would have few markets for their oil. We must look elsewhere for energy supplies: Russia, Mexico, Indonesia, Argentina, and what we can get from the United States. We do not have the luxury of the sentimental environmentalists who would prevent us from drilling in Alaska. Drilling for oil there would do little harm to our four-footed beasts, but it would need to be done if it did cause them a little inconvenience. Our survival as a civilization is at stake. In the meantime, we need an immense investment in research that will bring forms of energy to make us independent of this black fire from the desert. Show the Arabs we don’t need them and they will come to their senses quicker than we might imagine.

Jeffrey Hart has written a good book that deserves a wide readership: Smiling through the Cultural Catastrophe: Toward the Revival of Higher Education, published by Yale University Press. There is, he says, a tension between Athens and Jerusalem. Athens represents intelligence. Jerusalem represents a spiritual aspiration to holiness. These two are compatible, but they are always in tension, one against the other. The European tradition is the record of how these have been at the heart of our lives for two thousand years and explain the tension and the vibrancy that have made us what we are. No other tradition has this vibrancy, this tension, which is the power that has enabled us to become free and decent, competitive to a fault but with an ability to learn and to change. The other traditions do not have this tension: Buddhism, Confucianism, and Islam. Islam at the moment, has sunk into fundamentalism, and is producing fanatics who cannot balance intelligence and religion.