Jean-François Revel on Anti-Americanism

“America is the object of their loathing because, for a half-century or more, she has been the most prosperous and creative capitalist society on earth. Ultimately it is liberal democracy - or quite simply liberty itself - that they are eager to destroy, even though they are among its foremost beneficiaries, being free to travel anywhere, anytime in order to hatch their plots. If their diktats were carried out, if frontier barriers were reestablished everywhere, with passports and visas even for tourists, there could have been no Seattle and no Goteborg.”

“There is a big difference between being anti-American and being critical of the United States. Once again, critiques are appropriate and necessary, provided that they rest on facts and address real abuses, real errors and real excesses, without deliberately losing sight of America's wise decisions, beneficent interventions and salutary policies. But critiques of this kind, balanced, fair and well-founded are hard to find, except in America herself: in the daily press in weekly news magazines, on television and radio, and in highbrow monthly journals, which are more widely read than their equivalents in Europe... Strangely, it is always America that is described as degenerate and 'fascist', while it is solely in Europe that actual dictatorships and totalitarian regimes spring up.”