Hating America

Jamie Glazov interviews Paul Hollander, editor of a new collection of essays by America’s foremost scholars and thinkers, "Understanding Anti-Americanism: Its Origins and Impact at Home and Abroad." Mr. Hollander makes some interesting points in his interview on the subject of anti-Americanism and identifies some well known factors. One of the interesting things brought up here is the difference between the hate of the western intellectuals and the hate of the Arab Islamofascists.

The Arabs are, of course, primitive tribal savages and modernity is a threat to their whole way of life, including their misogynistic subjugation of women as their apartheid system for"unbelievers." While there is no doubt that they must be fought and destroyed, one can at least understand why primitive savages might react as they do before the spread of the modern world; a world which must inevitably replace the collectivist tribalism which they have known and which has made theirs the most backwards part of the world. Their dark-ages culture will be overthrown in time for the simple reason that it cannot compete with the modern world in any area of achievement and because history has shown over and over again that in a conflict between the modern and the primitive, it is the modern which has the advantage.

But the western intellectual class is anti-American because they have rejected the discipline of reason and logic. The entire edifice of modern academic leftism has at its core the rejection of objectivity and logic as a core belief. The view for many generations in academic circles has been that reality is subjective, that there is no objective truth, that reason is limited and logic is a fallacy. And while academic fashions like subjectivism, existentialism, behaviorism and post-modernism may come and go, they all have at their root the rejection of the objective reality which we live in with the wishful thinking that must invariably take its place. Thus the academics give themselves permission to come up with all manner of fantasies which can have no basis in the real world. And since the real world is the only one which does in fact exist, the fantasies of the academics can only have the most horrible of real world consequences when they are actually applied. The deaths of millions at the hands of social engineers in the 20th century is mute testimony to the fact that, as Aristotle would have said, "existence exists."