Blame America First 
By Bruce Shields

In my youth just after World War II, the typical high school history teacher might have criticized the America of Teddy Roosevelt’s era for its jingoism, a boundless confidence that America was always right and had an absolute need to become the "policeman of the world" to preserve our interest everywhere and at all times.  This view was explained to be a consequence of James Polk’s platform of America’s Manifest Destiny to control and direct all the inferior races.  In American analysis, Woodrow Wilson was seen as the great antagonist of Roosevelt’s jingoism, the multi-lateralist who could not muster a majority of Congress to support his vision of international peace and cooperation. 

Imagine my confusion when a graduate student at Edinburgh University in 1962.  As in most of Britain at that time, all the most interesting young people were engaged in a mulligan stew of Left and Far Left activist organizations, although actual Leninists were despised as being "anal-retentives."   To these activists, Woodrow Wilson was seen as the face of American imperialism -- for reasons not germane to my present theme.  In the 1960’s European Left analysis, America used multilateral organizations to sustain American hegemony.  Using that analysis, America either coerced the United Nations into increasing the American grip on the world, or engineered spectacular UN failures to discredit any independent solutions to world problems.

To a large degree, this Euro-Left analysis has come to dominate our contemporary political discourse: America’s Left is dominated by anti-American thought.  This fact is agreed to by political analysts of considerable diversity.  Rush Limbaugh decries the America Last movement; Joe Lieberman campaigned against the Blame America First activists.  A thoughtful survey of threads on the website of Moveon.Org shows that the Left is not uncomfortable with that view.  The organizing thought of the contemporary Left is that American power and influence is responsible for almost every ill in the world, from poverty and ignorance in the third world, endemic diseases in tropical areas, genocides and slaughters of civilians in many areas, piracy on the high seas, human rights violations in Russia, political repression in China, over-fishing along continental shelves, global warming, dieback of coral reefs, and for all I know, the extinction of the Dodo.

One part of this strangely self-hating attitude can be traced to a sort of cultural analogue to the Stockholm Sydrome.  In Stockholm about 35 years ago a large group of office workers were  taken hostage by a radical group demanding certain things of the Swedish government.  Sweden, committed to peaceful conflict resolution, refused to storm the building.  Negotiations were protracted for weeks, during which the hostage takers -- to put pressure for settlement -- committed numerous atrocities on their hostages.  To the world’s astonishment, when the captives were released, many announced that they respected and even revered their captors as lovers of liberty and freedom fighters. 

America had experienced similar anomalies during the Korean War: Americans captured by China or the North began to appear in propaganda movies denouncing America and declaring their solidarity with their captors.  At the time, the term "Brain washed" was used to explain their conversion.  But with the capture of Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army, America was treated to a full frontal exposure of how the Stockholm Syndrome worked.  Ms Hearst was abused -- possibly beaten and raped, but certainly starved and deprived of sleep -- by her captors.  In time, she came to revere and respect them, and joined in their operations.  In the years since, psychologists have found that people placed by others in situations of extreme stress come to identify with their captors. 

While not strictly connected to the Stockholm Syndrome, America has long developed in almost every conflict a political backlash group which has identified with our antagonist.  Before the age of mass communication, these movements were relatively minor.  Beginning with the Spanish American War, substantial and often influential groups identified with our opponent.  Reading The Atlantic Magazine from the 1890’s is to enter a world unknown to our high school survey courses.  Pro-German sentiment in the US was drowned out in World War I by mass rallies in which persons with German names were kidnapped from their homes and forced to applaud burning of the Kaiser in effigy.  During World War II, a national communications bureau under the Department of Defense simply purged all movies and publications of any means of organizing a pro-German effort.  Despite that, thousands of Americans moved to Mexico & South America to avoid fighting against Germany. 

During the Cold War, therefore, America experienced its first protracted conflict in two generations in which some form of censorship did not shape the public discourse.  A sizeable fraction of the populace, despite the theatrics of Joseph MacCarthy, chose to side with our antagonist, ranging from entertainers such as Paul Robeson to communications people like Westbrook Pegler to bureaucrats such as Alger Hiss.  During the Vietnam war, this identification with the other side came to dominate the political Left, and has remained a feature of America’s Left ever since. 

But the Left is not the only part of America’s civil discourse to yield to this kind of Stockholmism.  America’s Big Three auto makers found in the 1960’s that several German-made cars began to sell very well in America, with VW, Audi, & Opel garnering a substantial share of sales.  By 1970, many management books were being written suggesting that German style of management, which differed in some key ways from American, was what gave those cars the edge, and suddenly management consultants all over America were traveling to Germany in order to bring back the improved style.

Next, in the 1970’s, Japanese car makers began to invade the American market.  When the combined sales to five Japanese makers surpassed the sales of Chrysler, the smallest of the Big Three, books on Japanese management styles suddenly began to flood the market, and management consultants were rushing to learn Japanese.  Futurists began publishing books proclaiming that the 21st Century was going to be the Japanese Century, and predicting that Japan would control the world.  Today we are seeing a similar interest in things Chinese. 

While it is important to recognize that other peoples and other nations do many things right, this kind of Stockholm syndrome tends to assign superhuman powers to our opponents or competitors, and assume that the only way for American to stay alive is to adapt our politics, our social and economic systems, and our philosophy of life, to those of our competitors.  We need to guard that a cheerful ecclecticism does not turn into a slavish copying of our competitors’ faults along with their strong points.

Bruce P. Shields
6405 Garfield Rd
Wolcott VT 05680
802 888-5165
bshields@pwshift.com