Why do they hate us?

From time to time, when people fly airliners into our buildings for example, or when a shocking tragedy enacted by a first-generation immigrant sociopath is used by foreign media as a vehicle to cluck-cluck over our (implicitly deficient) culture, we tend to ask ourselves, “What’s up with that?”

Justin Webb, the BBC’s Washington bureau chief, travels around the globe searching for the roots of anti-Americanism. So far he’s visited Paris, where it all began according to Webb, and Venezuela, where an increasingly dictatorial Hugo Chavez surfs the populist waves of the anti-American wave generator to ever more grandiose visions of Latin rejectionism.

Webb’s essays are thoughtful and balanced, reflecting the complexity subject, even if they are rather shorter than the truly interested reader could hope for. You are left looking for one more page, or even a paragraph to reach some sort of conclusion. The best that he can offer us is, “It’s not necessarily what Americans do – it’s who they are.”

From Paris:

Anti-Americanism was born in France. And here’s a fascinating fact: it was born well before the United States existed. It was not caused by Coca-Cola, or McDonald’s, or Hollywood or George W Bush.

The prevailing view among French academics throughout the 18th Century was that the New World was ghastly. It stank, it was too humid for life to prosper. And, as one European biologist put it: “Everything found there is degenerate or monstrous.”

In their heart of hearts, many French people still believe that to be true…

Sitting in the Cafe de Flore, in the very seat where Jean-Paul Sartre once held sway, the self-described writer and philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy puts it like this: America became the nightmare that French right-wing intellectuals long feared, a nation built not on respectable ties of blood and tradition but on the self-conscious desire to create something new…

And this is not a recent migration brought on by Mr Bush. In May 1944 (just weeks before American GIs landed on the beaches of Normandy), Hubert Beuve-Mery, the founder of Le Monde newspaper – certainly no mouthpiece of the right – wrote this: “The Americans represent a real danger for France, different from the one posed by Germany or the one with which the Russians may – in time – threaten us. The Americans may have preserved a cult of Liberty but they do not feel the need to liberate themselves from the servitude which their capitalism has created. ”

It is time that we understood that this attitude, this contempt for what democracy can do, is at the heart of at least some of the anti-Americanism we see in the world today.

His view from Caracas:

Hugo (Chavez) said this recently about George: “The imperialist, mass murdering, fascist attitude of the president of the United States doesn’t have limits. I think Hitler could be a nursery baby next to George W Bush.”

You’ve got to wonder if there is any end to the capacity of the rest of the world to blame the United States for its problems. Nowhere is that more the case than in Latin America, where out of roughly 500 million people, 200 million live on less than $2 a day.

Why? Is it all the fault of the imperialists from the north? Or is just a little of it the result of local attitudes to poverty, local attitudes to honesty in government, and local attitudes to the rule of law?

In other words, in Latin America as elsewhere in the world, is anti-Americanism a smoke screen, a very convenient smoke screen, whose noxious fumes hide the reality of local failure?

As Otto Reich, a former Bush administration ambassador to Venezuela and public enemy number one (or two?) among many anti-Americans, told us: “The United States is the scapegoat. It provides an easy excuse for the failures: if something isn’t working, blame the Americans. Scratch the surface of some of these anti-Americans and you find self-loathing.”

What a Chavista like Eva Golinger will tell you is that that kind of comment is typical of American “prepotenzia” – arrogance.

Me? I think it’s got more to do with this, frankly.

Those that know, know.