The aircraft touches down, you are checked in and tipped out into the throng of the foreign land. Even if the street level does not offer any matchless sensual delights, you vibrate internally with expectation. In this mood the most commonplace things stimulate you to thoughts and impulses.

But on arrival in the USA I am not overwhelmed by this sense of well-being. I am sceptical about the shape and colour of the buildings, the state of the pavements, the signs and the atmosphere at those places where coffee is served. I am depressed by people’s clothes and appearance, taken aback by the affected tone of voice; and those snatches of conversation that I catch rarely make an uplifting impression. The area of Queens where I mostly end up is not a poor area, but a nimbus of human poverty lies over it. “You’ve gotta feel good, baby, good…!!!” thunders from a passing car stereo. Well, that is precisely my dark secret. I must admit that I find small corners to feel good in, and spontaneous good humour, under violent terror regimes like Egypt and Cuba.

I see, notes the reader coolly. Does it matter where you are happy, or not? No, it does not. European sensibility feels for a thousand and one reasons more at ease in a Cuban village bar or under the shade of a Middle Eastern mulberry tree than in the USA. This is the reason why Swedish diplomats, journalists, writers and politicians with such naturalness have made themselves into apologists for evil murderous regimes—and have consistently put their own well-being before that of the indigenous population.

I AM TO a great extent pro-American, although this is in my head rather than my heart. It would admittedly be nice if the world’s most unjustly detested country had a little genuine charm, a little finesse, a tad of sober taste outside the old seats of learning, perhaps even a little elusive mystique—as at one time did the localities and characters in Poe, Melville and Hawthorne. And certainly it would be more pleasant to speak for the USA if it was not from there that the most vulgar relativism and multiculturalism was being disseminated. (An acquaintance of mine, the head of a still functioning Swedish humanist institution, says: “My best pupil won a scholarship to study Cultural Studies at Harvard. When he returned, it was not possible to use him for scientific work, as they had filled his head with so many idiotic ideas.”)

I have, it should be said, a fragmentary image of the North American continent. Of all its populations and landscapes I have only seen a few close-up. I have, like so many Europeans, dropped in on the coasts, Boston-New York-Miami-California. I have only hazy notions of the rest, of the real America. When I went to the USA as a small child to live there for a while, I encountered a fairytale country of ice cream, swimming pools, chewing gum, fine weather, watermelons—and fairytales. Completely new, alien fairytales; fairytales which were not merely about fooling giants and freeing captive princesses, but about the perils of avoiding honest toil.

The important thing is, of course, not to defend or embellish the existing USA, but to counteract and explain structural anti-Americanism, which lives its own life pretty well unaffected by the USA’s ravages in the external world.

Not because our Lutheran–intellectual form of anti-Americanism would appreciably damage the USA’s interests, or force the USA to abandon its responsibilities. But because it is a dislocation in our own culture, an element in the post-modern syndrome that undermines our contact with reality and distorts our moral attitudes.

Anti-Americanism is in its psychology more like a religion than an ideology. By this I mean that it has more to do with emotional needs than with objective reasoning. Those needs it satisfies, in particular in Lutheran cultures with a surviving doctrine of hell in its cultural baggage, are for a superior evil principle; an all-round explanation of everything, from the highest to the lowest. There are scarcely any boundaries any longer to what believers are prepared to put down to the USA’s account: from large and small events in global politics to global climate, the drugs trade and African civil wars, world trade, terrorism, the prices of raw materials, interest rates and the inherent contradictions of the Middle East.

BEING ANGRY, DISAPPOINTED and embittered by American leaders and their policies is not anti-Americanism. The destruction of recent years has been played out in Iraq, but people at a number of other locations will pay the price: those persecuted in Darfur, Palestinians, Israelis and Europeans in the former Soviet bloc. In brief all those whose physical, strategic and financial well-being is linked to the USA’s energy and credibility.

No, anti-Americanism is placing the USA in a moral category of its own, in which its good and unselfish actions are magicked away with a Pavlovian reflex, and faults and shortcomings are demonised with the same response.

Assume that our geopolitical detestation is rational. Assume that we have come from another planet to visit Earth, and want to calibrate our hatred according to local conditions. We make a list of things that arouse our indignation: seizing people without trial, terror, religious violence against women, racism, torture—a lengthy list. Then we compare the list with reality. The USA is included there, but a long way down, far below China, Russia, Iran, Cuba, Pakistan and a number of other offending regimes to whom the inhabitants of planet Earth show an angelic indulgence.

The same distortion can also be observed further along the time axis: our view of Russia is not overshadowed by the Gulag, by the cynical threat of nuclear weapons against a free Europe and the occupation of central Europe. Germans are judged by their deeds today, not by Germany’s misdeeds in the past. But the USA will carry Iraq as an albatross around its neck for just as long as it carried Vietnam.

This lopsidedness is no longer the prerogative of young and uneducated left-wing extremists. More and more bourgeois commentators have anti-American woven into their wiring diagram. I discovered that a couple of otherwise sensible acquaintances in Buenos Aires had got it into their heads that the 30 or 60 dead in the daily bulletins of horror from Baghdad are victims of the USA, not those of al Qaeda or the Baathists. The Swedish media are not a great deal better. Immediately in 2003 we began to call Iraqis who murder innocent Iraqis in blind terror actions “resistance men” and “insurgents.” Imagine that we had employed the same terminology to describe European mass-murderers of European civilians. Last year, when an equally unexpected and unplanned war broke out between Israel and Hezbollah, the leader in one of our major morning papers accused the completely innocent USA. This was the purest balderdash, but it was within the scope of an instinctive mental reaction which is now just as well established as thunder after lightning.

Some commentators have reached the stage that they find it difficult to endure, conceptually speaking, catastrophes and calamities that are not linked to the USA.

HOW DID IT get to this pass? Vietnam, someone suggests. No, read Orwell’s letters and notes during the years immediately after the Second World War, when Stalin had begun to shake up those countries he had liberated. The Socialist Orwell, who had never been pro-American, saw in growing desperation that his literary and intellectual friends did not object to the hanging of Polish and Czech freedom fighters and democrats, at the same time as they were capable of the most animated hatred of the USA—a country that had recently saved Great Britain, and was at that time supporting it.

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Den tidigare så ansedda människorätts­orga­­­nisa­tionen har övergett sina ideal och ideologiserats, skriver Bengt G Nilsson.

Bengt G Nilsson Samhälle 2025 2

It existed even then. Even the—in my view—greatly exalted Heine, I admit with sorrow in my heart, dismissed the USA with slogans such as “the kingdom of Mammon.” It existed in the Sweden which repudiated Vilhelm Moberg when he began to research and write about the emigrants to America, the deserters.

Anti-Americanism is among the last things in the arsenal of the West, the only marketable product in its warehouse. Marxist production methods, its routines of human rights and its legal systems can be recommended to modern Europeans just as little as can Soviet environmental conservation or Maoist cultural policy. Marxism needs the USA just as desperately as a naked man needs a fig leaf. The great debt of the modern age to humanity is, along with Hitler’s, that of Marxism. As long as the USA can be accused of exploitation, world domination and torture, the discussion of really evil crimes is avoided.

The USA is a lynchpin in the one-sided materialist explanation of the world. I remember when, as a secondary school pupil, I took the FLN movement’s basic course. The hidden motives for the war were solemnly revealed to us: oil in the Mekong Delta, that was what the USA wanted to get its hands on.

Despite Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia and many other striking counter-examples, the anti-Americanists persist in seeing the USA’s global interventions as a Viking expedition in search of raw materials. Four years have now passed; the USA has frittered away a couple of hundred billion dollars in Iraq, but is still not “taken” Iraq’s oil. Why not?

Those Latin Americans who captivate northern European radicals are not the responsible and peaceful leaders of Brazil, Chile, Uruguay and Peru, but Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez. The fact that they have run their countries into the ground and abolished all institutions except themselves counts for little against the anti-American harangues of these gentlemen. Because it is anti-Americanism that is the jewel in the crown, not the welfare of the people affected. Commit whatever crimes you want—as long as you utter anti-American primal screams everything will be forgiven you.