Silly Thinking

Here's a link to an article from the Washington Post that is just about as bad an example of the rhetoric around Americanism as I've ever run across.

Sneering Anti-Americans

And here's the opening paragraph from the article:
"It can be emotional, spontaneous and contradictory. It has no leader, no platform and no ideology. It varies from country to country in its roots and its manifestations. It doesn't even have an accepted name: Those most strongly identified with it indignantly deny they advocate or practice it."

What is it? Why it's the cult of anti-Americanism of course.

Whenever I stumble upon one of these jingoistic diatribes I think about what Noam Chomsky has to say about the whole notion of "Anti-Americanism."

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CHOMSKY: The concept "anti-American" is an interesting one. The counterpart is used only in totalitarian states or military dictatorships, something I wrote about many years ago (see my book Letters from Lexington). Thus, in the old Soviet Union, dissidents were condemned as "anti-Soviet." That's a natural usage among people with deeply rooted totalitarian instincts, which identify state policy with the society, the people, the culture. In contrast, people with even the slightest concept of democracy treat such notions with ridicule and contempt. Suppose someone in Italy who criticizes Italian state policy were condemned as "anti-Italian." It would be regarded as too ridiculous even to merit laughter. Maybe under Mussolini, but surely not otherwise.

Actually the concept has earlier origins. It was used in the Bible by King Ahab, the epitome of evil, to condemn those who sought justice as "anti-Israel" ("ocher Yisrael," in the original Hebrew, roughly "hater of Israel," or "disturber of Israel"). His specific target was Elijah.
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In my opinion the most American thing you can be these days is anti-American. After all it was Thomas Jefferson who said:
"Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it. . ."