2005 October 21 | Intellectual Conservative Politics and Philosophy

Resurgence of the Warfare State: The Crisis Since 9/11

By Bob Cheeks, on October 21st, 2005

In his recent book, Dr. Robert Higgs argues that war always ratchets up the power of the state and that its primary product is death and suffering.

Resurgence of the Warfare State: The Crisis Since 9/11
Dr. Robert Higgs
The Independent Institute
Oakland, Ca 2005
Ppbk, 252 pgs., index
ISBN: 13-978-0-945999-56-0

Dr. Robert Higgs’s latest book, Resurgence of the Warfare State: The Crisis Since 9/11, is a compilation of “dozens of statements, commentaries, and other forms of expression…” that he has written and disseminated since the massacre of 9/11. It is a timely and erudite book that takes the position that the Islamic attack on America would “primarily provide government and business interests the opportunity to enrich themselves at the expense of the public’s wealth, lives, and liberties in the U.S. and around the world.”

Higgs’s finest attribute is his ability to deftly apply arcane government statistics, weave them into the appropriate historical background, and in a few adroit sentences explain to the lay reader just how Leviathan has empowered itself at the expense of our public treasure and liberties. For example, in his essay “Free Enterprise and War, A Dangerous Liaison,” Higgs writes,

In World War I, the government imposed a variety of unprecedented controls on business. It nationalized outright the firms in the railroad, telephone, and telegraph industries…It fixed scores of industrial commodity prices, intervened extensively in management-labor relations, and promoted unionization and collective bargaining. It hiked corporate income taxes to undreamt-of heights and added a huge excess-profits tax on top of them. The net result of all this government dictation, taxation, takeover, and all around meddling became known to contemporaries as ‘war socialism.’

Higgs’s forte is economics and he shines when revealing to the public the spending proclivities of the federal government. Unfortunately, economics can make my eyes glaze over, but the author has that ability to sustain and expand even my short attention span. In his essay “The Defense Budget is Bigger Than You Think,” he reveals that their (Department of Defense) “super-grand total in fiscal year 2004 will reach the astonishing amount of nearly $754 billion…”

The author’s criticism of the American government is non-political in the sense that, regardless of the party affiliation of the man in the presidency, he is opposed to the constant expansion of state power. He is an honorable reactionary and an advocate of the old republic’s first principles and in that I applaud his efforts (he’s written ten books) and agree with his conclusions. In his essay “George Bush’s Faith-Based Foreign Policy,” he writes, “Whatever else Iraq may be, it certainly is not a democratic success story waiting to be told by American crusaders. Indeed, given the violent ethnic, religious, and political conflicts that ravage this unfortunate country, it may not be viable under any form of government except dictatorship — nothing in its history suggests otherwise.” Higgs, of course, has hit the proverbial nail on the head. President Bush’s much touted efforts “to bring democracy to the Middle East” are fraught with peril and any American history book available to any high school student across the land tells us as much.

But what if George Bush was fighting the right war, but for the wrong reasons. The question of WMD’s (weapons of mass destruction) is superfluous; Iraq’s WMD’s were used against the Kurds and perhaps they were later destroyed or buried. The question is, were they a threat to the U.S. and the answer is no. Were they a threat to our ally Israel, the answer is yes. And, if Iraq was a threat to Israel, what should be our response? Also, we might ask if Iraq has participated in a causa belli against the United States.

In his essay “What’s So Special About Those Killed by Hijackers on September 11, 2001?”, Higgs argues that the Murrah Federal Building bombing (April 19, 1995) is not remembered to the degree that the 9/11 massacre is because the perpetrators were two disgruntled, former U.S. soldiers (the now deceased Timothy McVeigh and his cohort, Terry Nichols) who blew up the building in response to “the government’s own murderous assault on the Branch Davidians at Waco precisely two years earlier.” Higgs has it right on the Branch Davidian massacre, but errs, I think, on the Murrah bombing.

If former T.V. journalist Jayna Davis is correct (see her book, The Third Terrorist), and I believe she has done a great service for her country, then the Murrah building bombing was orchestrated under an umbrella group, The Armed Islamic Movement, which was established by the secret services of Iraq and Iran in retaliation for Gulf War I. AIM utilized former Iraqi special ops soldiers for the assault while planning, coordination, and financial support came from Osama bin Laden’s henchman, Ramzi Yousef.� Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were utilized to assist in assembling the bomb’s ingredients and help take it to the target; they were merely “mules.” If Ms. Davis’s findings of fact are accurate, and she has reams of documentation, then Iraq and Iran perpetrated an act of war against the United States and America’s invasion of Iraq is justified. The Clinton administration’s cowardly obfuscations of the Murrah bombing and the Bush administration’s abject failure to reveal the truth of the matter will forever cloud America’s response in its war with Islam.

I agree with Dr. Higgs’s argument that war always “ratchets up the power” of the state, that war’s primary product is death and suffering, and that the Patriot Act has the potential of weakening our liberties; however, we must make a sober examination of the current state of affairs. Osama bin Laden has called for the death of four million Americans (two million must be children) and, according to some sources, has located sleeper cells and suitcase nukes inside the United States (see Paul Williams’ The al Qaeda Connection). Islamic terrorists have been at war with us since 1979 and whatever their reasons for war we must accept the fact that we are in a fight for our lives against a fanatical foe that has no intentions of laying down their arms.

Until we recognize that we are at war with a significant majority of Islam and act accordingly we are doomed to suffer significant casualties at the hands of the Muslims. Dr. Higgs’s book is an astute critique of the Bush administration and the Orwellian concept of “perpetual war for perpetual peace,” but commingled within the muck and mire of Bush’s mishandling of objectives of the Iraq war is the very real war with Islam. On this matter Dr. Higgs is silent.
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Resurgence of the Warfare State is available on Amazon.com.

Bob Cheeks has written for The American Enterprise, Human Events, Southern Partisan, and The Pittsburgh Tribune Review.

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Lest We Forget: Remembering the Zebra Victims

By Nicholas Stix, on October 21st, 2005

October 20 marked the 32nd anniversary of the beginning of the “Zebra Killings” in San Francisco.

If heinous crimes are forgotten or disappeared, a second injustice is added to the original crimes.

Like homicide detectives, journalists speak for the dead.

October 20 marked the 32nd anniversary of the beginning of the “Zebra Killings” in San Francisco.

Know ye, these dead:

Quita Hague, hacked to death….

Frances Rose, her face blown apart by close-range gunshots.

Saleem Erakat, tied up and executed.

Paul Dancik, shot down at a public telephone….

Marietta DiGirolamo, thrown into a doorway and shot to death.

Ilario Bertuccio, killed while walking home from work….

Neal Moynihan, shot down while taking a teddy bear to his little sister.

Mildred Hosler, shot down while walking toward her bus stop.

John Doe #169, kidnapped, tortured, butchered, decapitated.

Tana Smith, murdered on her way to buy blouse material.

Vincent Wollin, murdered on his sixty-ninth birthday.

John Bambic, murdered while rummaging in a trash bin.

Jane Holly, murdered in a public Laundromat….

Thomas Rainwater, shot down on the street as he walked to a market….

And Nelson Shields IV, shot three times in the back as he was straightening out the cargo deck on his station wagon.

The above passage is from Clark Howard’s 1979 book, Zebra: The true account of the 179 days of terror in San Francisco. I inserted ellipses, because Howard’s list contains both those who were murdered and those who were grievously wounded in San Francisco. I separated the groups into two lists. Herewith the wounded:

Richard Hague [Quita’s husband], his face butchered.

“Ellen Linder,” [a pseudonym Howard devised to protect her privacy], raped, ravaged, threatened with death.

Arthur Agnos [who would later be elected mayor], surviving after his insides were ripped up by bullets.

Angela Roselli, surviving with nerve damage in her back.

Roxanne McMillian, surviving but paralyzed from the waist down.

Linda Story, surviving with nerve damage in her back.

Ward Anderson, surviving but in serious condition after being shot down at a city bus stop.

Terry White, also surviving, also in serious condition, after being shot down at the same bus stop.

And courtesy of Julia Scheeres, at Court TV’s crimelibrary.com,

Robert Stoeckmann, grazed in the neck by a shot fired by Leroy Doctor.

Howard repeats the list again and again and again, throughout the book; the publisher, Richard Marek, repeats it on the book jacket. Some people may find that tiresome. But Howard did not want those names forgotten; neither do I. And so, if some should find me tiresome, so be it. They can switch to a different, less tiresome Web page.

The nine wounded victims survived due to the incompetence of the Zebra assassins, and in Ellen Linder and Robert Stoeckmann’s respective cases, thanks to their own resourcefulness. Linder psychologically maneuvered her attacker, Jesse Lee Cooks, into letting her live. Stoeckmann ducked from Leroy Doctor’s gun as the latter fired, and then, when Doctor shoved the revolver into Stoeckmann’s gut to finish him off, grabbed the cylinder (which one can only do with a revolver), so that it could not fire. Stoeckmann swung the gun away, it skittered away, and he won the chase for it. When Doctor continued after him, Stoeckmann shot him three times. Doctor was convicted of assault with a deadly weapon, but was not charged in any of the Zebra killings.

Jesse Lee Cooks would seek to “atone” for his act of “mercy” in the case of Ellen Lindner, by blowing the face off of Frances Rose.

Arguably the most resourceful of all of the Death Angels’ (in this case, Jesse Lee Cooks, Larry Green, and Anthony Cornelius Harris’) intended victims were the first whom they targeted on October 20, 1973 — Michele Denise Carrasco, and Marie and Frank Stewart. When the Death Angels attempted to kidnap them with a van, in order to murder them, all three ran away. Plucky Michele Denise Carrasco was but 11 years old, Marie Stewart was 12, and Frank was 15.
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All of the 24 victims were targeted for death for the same reason: They were white. Their attackers were all members of the black supremacist Nation of Islam (NOI), then primarily known as the Black Muslims, and acted on its behalf. They were members of the “Death Angels,” a branch of the NOI which existed for the sole purpose of murdering white people. The Death Angels had a scoring system, whereby they got more points for murdering women and children than grown men; their pathological cowardice had a numerical system. Clark Howard writes,

“Death Angels wings were awarded to each man who killed four white children, five white women, or nine white men. Upon completion of the required quota, a new member’s photograph was taken and a pair of black wings were drawn extending from the neck. The photo was mounted on a board along with pictures of other successful candidates, and the board was displayed on an easel at the loft meetings” at Black Self Help Moving and Storage.

The Death Angels were nurtured on a steady diet of NOI theology — that whites were “blue-eyed devils, “white devils,” and “grafted snakes,” a wicked race that had been created anywhere from 1,000-6,000 years ago by an evil black scientist named Yacub. (The number of years and method of Yacub changes from one version to another.) Actually, “the Myth of Yacub” was ripped off from black journalist George S. Schuyler’s classic, 1931 racial satire, Black No More. Schuyler in turn had been influenced by H.G. Wells.

Eight members of the NOI in San Francisco were arrested for the Zebra killings, but only four were prosecuted; all of the latter were convicted. They were Jesse Lee Cooks, J.C. Simon (aka J.C.X. Simon), Larry Green and Manuel Moore. The NOI paid for the defense of all but Cooks. The NOI wrote Cooks off as a traitor, because he alone confessed to a crime, the murder of Frances Rose. A black Moslem is never permitted to confess to a crime “in the white man’s court.” The police also had Cooks for the rape of Ellen Linder, and each crime could have gotten him a maximum life sentence. Prosecutors agreed — with Linder’s permission — to drop the rape charge, if Cooks would confess to the Frances Rose killing. (Cooks was caught minutes after the Frances Rose killing, mere blocks away, with the murder weapon in his waistband.)

Tom Manney, the manager of Black Self Help, and Dwight Stallings were also arrested but released, for lack of evidence. I have not been able to determine the names of the other two suspects who were released. For some peculiar reason, Howard refers to one by the pseudonym, “Jasper Childs.” All but one of the arrestees worked for the black Moslem business, Self Help Moving and Storage; Cooks worked for the Black Muslim-owned, Shabazz Bakery.

The convictions of J.C. Simon, Larry Green, and Manuel Moore were secured almost entirely through the testimony of one of their accomplices, Anthony Cornelius Harris.

Harris responded, as the authorities had hoped someone would, to enhanced reward money that was offered from a variety of public and private sources, for information leading to the arrest of the Zebra killers. The catalyst for Harris’ initiative, however, was a police artist’s sketch of two suspects, one of whom clearly was Harris.

Harris denied to police that he had committed any killings, but he obviously had been present at many of them, and thus an accomplice, and Clark Howard concluded from interviews with various Zebra killers and inspectors, and police reports, that Harris had murdered John Bambic. Harris also sought and got immunity, and new identities for himself, his girlfriend, and her child.

A note on the term “Zebra.” In the context of the NOI’s genocidal campaign, “Zebra” has been considered by many blacks to be controversial, and even racist. They are offended by the term’s black-on-white imagery. The term was employed by the SFPD, because the Department reserved radio frequency “Z” for all broadcasts related to the specific killing spree at hand. Killings were considered a part of the spree that were committed execution-style by a black against a white, using a .32 gun. (Only after Anthony Harris came in, did police discover that the machete killing of Quita Hague was a Zebra killing. Police also did not associate the Hague killing with the Zebra killings that followed it, because Jesse Lee Cooks sexually molested Quita Hague, and robbed the couple.) For clarity’s sake, all military and police organizations use a term for each letter in the alphabet. Thus, when one refers to “A Company,” one instead says, “Alpha Company;” for “B Company,” “Bravo Company,” and so on. One proceeds similarly when reading off a license plate number to a police dispatcher. For Z, one says “Zebra.”

But consider the blacks’ perspective. A black death squad is roaming around San Francisco, murdering whites in cold blood for no other reason than that they are white. It’s only natural that black folks would ignore the genocide in their midst, and focus on their feelings of racial slight, at the term used for the radio frequency police were using to try and solve the killings. The poor dears.

Note that this was over thirty years ago. Black sensitivities have since become much more refined. “Refugees,” anyone?

Howard recounts how local newspaper reporters interviewed blacks all over town, but could not find a single one who expressed any sorrow or sympathy for the victims. In fact, black San Franciscans were angry! After all, weren’t police focusing solely on black men? One black newspaper reporter even sought to embarrass police officials at a press conference, by insinuating that they should not be focusing on black men. In a show of common sense that today could spell career suicide, a police official reminded the scribe that all of the suspects were black men.

As some black residents commonsensically responded to a reporter’s question as to whether they felt afraid on the streets, no; the killers were only targeting whites.

But it gets worse.

On the night of January 28, 1974, the Death Angels dramatically upped the ante, shooting five whites, four of whom died, in five separate attacks.

The SFPD responded by circulating artists’ sketches of two suspects, and began stopping and questioning youngish, clean-cut black men who resembled the sketches. Howard writes,

The police began issuing specially printed ‘Zebra Check’ cards: identification cards about the size of a driver’s license, containing space for an individual’s name, address, driver’s license number, Social Security number, and the date, time, and location where he was stopped. The officer making the stop had to sign the card and note his badge number. If the person was stopped again, all he had to do was show the card along with his identification, and he was allowed to proceed without further delay.

The black organizations were not satisfied. They were determined to interfere with the police effort in any way they could.

I believe the legal term is, “obstruction of justice.”

The only black community leader who showed any decency was Dr. Washington Garner, a member of the three-man police commission, who reminded blacks that in the case of the Nob Hill serial rapist, in which the suspect was white, police had proceeded in identical fashion, stopping hundreds of white men for questioning.

Black organizations ignored Dr. Garner. The NAACP sued, and local Rev. Cecil Williams threatened a race war — as if the race war were not already in progress.

Officer Jesse Byrd (spelled Bird by some sources), the president of the segregated, black SFPD officers’ organization, Officers for Justice, also demanded an end to the street stops.

The local newspapers did show some gumption that they have long since lost. As Howard recounts, the San Francisco Examiner supported the stops, though in diplomatic language, while the San Francisco Chronicle was adamant in support of them.

The Zebra murders have brought out the police on highly visible, and reassuring patrols of the streets. The patrols are called ‘extreme measures’ by Mayor Alioto, who invoked them, and since their purpose is to involve police in stopping and questioning black men who may resemble a Zebra suspect, the procedure has created a certain amount of restiveness and complaint from black citizens and organizations. It is, however, hard to accept such complaints as justifiable. If the killers are black, there would be no point in stopping white men for questioning….

According to SFPD homicide Inspector (many other cities call the same rank, “detective”) Gus Coreris, who with his partner, Insp. John Fotinos, ran the case, at least one black officer conspired with the NOI to murder the one witness without whom no one besides Jesse Lee Cooks could ever have been prosecuted. (Cooks was apprehended minutes after he murdered Frances Rose, in the vicinity of the killing.)

Inspectors Coreris and Fotinos secreted away Anthony Harris, his girlfriend, Debbie, and her baby in a motel. One day, while Harris in the shower, Debbie called her NOI minister’s wife. The wife asked Debbie where she was staying, and Debbie told her. Within minutes, a squad of NOI assassins showed up to kill everyone. Coreris and Fotinos were able to sneak Harris and family out of the motel only seconds ahead of the NOI assassins, who, aware yet indifferent to the presence of the two inspectors, were conducting a room-to-room search of the motel.

After Harris and family were moved to a hotel, the NOI hit squad continued its fevered search for him.

When Insp. Coreris got back to his office the evening after rescuing Anthony Harris, there was a message waiting for him from a black police officer. The officer came to visit Coreris, and asked him for the new address where Anthony Harris was being secreted. The officer admitted to Coreris that members of the NOI had asked him to get the information. Coreris told the officer that the information was none of his business, and that Coreris would report him to his superiors.

Thus, a black police officer — at least one — conspired with the NOI to obstruct justice and murder a government witness.

And what happened, you may ask, to the rogue cop? Nothing.

One black policeman, homicide Insp. Rotea Gilford, did heroic work during the Zebra investigation. Insp. Gilford, the city’s first black homicide inspector, brought in Dwight Stallings. Insp. Gilford had grown up with Stallings, and knew Stallings had blood on his hands, but he lacked sufficient evidence to make the arrest stick. Gilford and Stallings have both since died.

Note that the Zebra killings were not the stuff of a tiny conspiracy. At least one dozen NOI member/killers attended regular Death Angel meetings at Black Self Help Moving and Storage. And at the NOI’s San Francisco headquarters, Mosque #26, the existence of the Death Angels, though not the exact identity of all of its members, was common knowledge.

The NOI’s local goal was to run all whites out of the city by the bay, and establish San Francisco (though surely with a new name) as America’s first Moslem city.

But these devils and their works were not limited to San Francisco.

As Howard writes, already by October 20, 1973, “there were 15 accredited Death Angels in California.” With the dozen aspiring Death Angels attending the loft meetings at Black Self help, that makes for 27. But there may have been as many as 50 Death Angels.

The California attorney general’s office had compiled a list of 71 execution-style murders committed around the state, either with a machete or a pistol, in which the killer or killers was always a well-dressed and groomed youngish black man, and the victim always white. In addition to San Francisco, the murders were carried out in Oakland, San Jose, Emeryville, Berkeley, Long Beach, Signal Hill, Santa Barbara, Palo Alto, Pacifica, San Diego, Los Angeles, and in the counties of San Mateo, Santa Clara, Los Angeles, Contra Costa, Ventura and Alameda. The NOI genocide campaign had actually begun approximately three years before the San Francisco killings.

State police also acted in the professional manner of a bygone era. Dick Walley, of the state California Department of Justice’s Intelligence Analysis Unit (IAU), requested and got permission to “establish a central repository for all information pertaining to homicides with the following modus operandi: hackings, unprovoked street attacks, hitchhike kidnappings; all unexplained homicides of a similar nature, and all black-perpetrator/white-victim homicides.”

Imagine how large such a database would be today!

According to Clark Howard, however, the true number of Zebra murders was “just under 270.” And all of the Zebra killers but the four convicts and Anthony Harris have remained at large, ever since.

Lou Calabro, a retired SFPD lieutenant who was a sergeant at the time of the San Francisco killings, has labored for years to keep the memory of the Zebra killings alive, and to keep the convicts, who periodically come up for parole, in jail. In a recent telephone interview, Calabro told me that a team effort is required to ascertain the identities of all of the Zebra victims throughout the State of California. Calabro is the president of the European American Issues forum.
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Since the NOI had revealed itself to be the deadliest domestic terrorist organization in American history, you’d expect that the FBI would have launched a national campaign against it, dwarfing its campaign against the Ku Klux Klan. But you’d be wrong. There was no FBI campaign. Indeed, it is the NOI that launched a campaign against the FBI, insisting that the Bureau had orchestrated the assassination of Malcolm X (Malcolm Little), who was in reality murdered by NOI assassins.

One of the greatest true crime stories ever written, Zebra is one of the best books you can’t buy, except used. And it’s not for lack of interest. It was printed once in hardcover and once in paper, and in spite of its fame and popularity, never reprinted. Peculiar, that.

You’d think that movies would have been based on it, but you’d be wrong. There is a move afoot to make a movie about the killings, only with a black policemen-hero, in inspectors Gus Coreris and John Fotinos’ stead. And that “hero” is not Insp. Rotea Gilford, but rather a politician named Ed Sanders, who via Officers for Justice made it all the way to chief, but who made no contribution that I could find to the Zebra investigation.

You’d think that such a heinous campaign of murder would be taught across the generations, so that no one would ever forget. But you’d be wrong. According to crime writer Julia Scheeres, few San Franciscans today are aware of the Zebra killings. Imagine it is the year 2031, and few New Yorkers are aware of 911.

I guess that after preaching against the evils of white, heterosexual males, the San Francisco public schools just don’t have any time left to teach about the Zebra killings.

Meanwhile, San Francisco journalists today are either silent about the Zebra killings, or have diminished and revised them beyond recognition, including editing out their racial character. And in academia, alleged historians have “disappeared” the history of the Zebra killings. And when anyone seeks to give students even indirect access to learn about the murders, the “historians” seek to destroy him.

But the unwriting of the Zebra murders is a topic for another time.

After reading this report, you may wonder, “Could Zebra happen again?”

What makes you think it hasn’t?

Quita Hague
Frances Rose
Saleem Erakat
Paul Dancik
Marietta DiGirolamo
Ilario Bertuccio
Neal Moynihan
Mildred Hosler
John Doe #169
Tana Smith
Vincent Wollin
John Bambic
Jane Holly
Thomas Rainwater
Nelson Shields IV
Richard Hague
“Ellen Linder”
Arthur Agnos
Angela Roselli
Roxanne McMillian
Linda Story
Ward Anderson
Terry White
Robert Stoeckmann

And those of their attackers that were apprehended: Jesse Lee Cooks, J.C. Simon (aka J.C.X. Simon), Larry Green, Manuel Moore, Leroy Doctor and Anthony Cornelius Harris.

New York-based freelancer Nicholas Stix has written for Toogood Reports, Middle American News, the New York Post, Daily News, American Enterprise, Insight, Chronicles, Newsday and many other publications. His recent work is collected at The Critical Critic.

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Does Condi Realize the Danger of Europe’s Anti-Americanism?

By Paul Belien, on October 21st, 2005

Anti-Americanism is more widespread in Western Europe now than it has ever been before, and its roots are much deeper than mere opposition to the Iraq War.

The inaugural issue of the new American quarterly The American Interest (Autumn 2005) includes an interview with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. In the course of the conversation AI editor Adam Garfinkle asks Rice a question on anti-Americanism:

During the Cold War we were all familiar with varieties of anti-Americanism, mostly on the Left. A lot of people now claim that not only is there more anti-Americanism, but that its sources are more diverse. Do you think that’s so and if you do, where does this new anti-Americanism come from? Is it just a reaction to American conduct after the 9/11 attacks or is it because we’re No. 1 and there’s a natural envy? What do you think accounts for it?

It is a very pertinent question and it goes to the roots of one of the major problems confronting Europe but also America today, with not only political but also economic consequences. Is there more anti-Americanism today than before? Are its sources more diverse? Where does the new anti-Americanism come from? Is it a reaction to America’s reaction to 9/11? Or is it envy? What does the leading American foreign policy maker think? These were the things Garfinkle asked, but, unfortunately, Rice did not answer. What she said was as evasive as it was trivial:

I think people have to be more rigorous about what they mean by anti-Americanism. Clearly this is still the most popular place in the world to come if you want to be educated, or if you want to immigrate. The United States is still a pretty popular place. American culture, both good and bad, is very much sought after abroad. And I still think that the values of the United States are the most universal of all values.

Now, I do think that we’ve gone through a period of time in which the United States has had to do very difficult things, as the most powerful state in the international system, to shape the environment so that things began to change. And I would give a couple of examples where those decisions were wildly unpopular at the time but now have become almost common wisdom. For example, the decision that we weren’t going to deal with Yasir Arafat because he was a failed, bankrupt leader and there was going to be no peace in the Middle East until the Palestinians had new leadership. Now it’s almost common wisdom. But when the President said that in June of 2002, it was considered an outrageous statement.

Garfinkle and Rice then go on about the Middle East and a range of other issues but the topic of anti-Americanism is not raised anymore. Frankly, to me as a European, Rice’s answer is disappointing. She just says that America is still “the most popular place in the world” for those seeking an education. (Nobody will deny that. The conspirators of 9/11 came to America to take flying lessons.) She adds that immigrants still flock to the US. (That is true for Europe, too. But these immigrants are not necessarily pro-American, or pro-European for that matter: it is doubtful whether most of them come to the West because they share Western values.) If America is still a “pretty popular place,” it would be interesting to know if its culture and values are less popular today than they used to be. If so, that would be a clear indication of growing anti-Americanism. Rice seems to imply that anti-Americanism is diminishing, because she refers to the “very difficult,” “wildly unpopular,” seemingly “outrageous” decisions that America had to take a few years ago (as in 2002), but that are considered “almost common wisdom” nowadays.

My impression is that anti-Americanism is more widespread in Western Europe now than it has ever been before. If so, there must be a reason for it. I have argued that I do not think it has to do with the Iraq war, because the Western Europeans heap as much scorn on the American conservatives who oppose the war as on the so-called neo-conservatives. They are not even aware of what Joshua Muravchik pointed out in an article about “Iraq and the Conservatives” in the October issue of [the neo-conservative magazine] Commentary, namely that “the most interesting arguments are not between Left and Right. The Left long ago lost any coherent voice on national security […] The most interesting arguments are within the Right, most of which supports the war but some of which contains its most trenchant and acerbic critics.” Europe’s anti-Americans reject not only America’s foreign policy, but also its economic and cultural values. The growing anti-Americanism, at least in Europe, predates the 2003 American intervention in Iraq.

Well, then, is it simply, as Garfinkle asked Secretary of State Rice, “because [America is] No. 1 and there’s a natural envy?” Anti-Americanism as the equally irrational, deeply psychological envy that Freud said women feel towards men: a kind of Transatlantic “penis envy” that Europeans, who are said to come from Venus, feel for Americans, who are said to come from Mars? And could this, perhaps, be the subconscious reason why Rice evades the question?

Envy of those who are richer, or rather the egalitarian impulse to cut everyone down to the same level, is the driving force behind the Westeuropean welfare model. Since America is not only stronger than Europe, but also richer, this might go some way to explaining Europe’s attitude towards America. It does not explain, however, why anti-Americanism is growing, unless America is growing rapidly richer than Western Europe or the egalitarian impulses in Europe are rapidly increasing. A better psychological explanation for the growth of anti-Americanism might be anger rather than envy.

In the latest issue of The National Interest (Fall 2005) — not to be confused with The American Interest mentioned above — John Hulsman and William Schirano write that “the European Union is dead.” For fifty years the European elite has been harboring the dream of an ever closer union, described by the two authors as “a willful ignorance of the Continent’s amazing diversity assumed in an effort to force an artificial one-size-fits-all approach.”

There is little doubt, following the twin ‘no’ votes in France and the Netherlands, that the European Union, long proudly proclaimed as the future model of international relations, is dead. � So, to understand what is happening here, we must think unconventionally about the end of the dream of ever closer union – about death and the process of coming to terms with it. In 1969, in her seminal work On Death and Dying, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross eloquently detailed the five stages of dying – denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally, acceptance.

Hulsman and Schirano argue that the European elites, after the initial stage of denial that their attempt to create the “postmodern, post-Westphalian, post-nation-state” has proved impossible, are now in the second stage described by Kübler-Ross: the state of “anger, rage, envy and resentment” — a state which “usually begins innocently, with a thought such as ‘why me, why not him or her?’” The authors do not draw the parallel between this psychological state and Transatlantic relations, but apply the analysis to the relations between the European elite and the European people, where angry politicians such as the former head of the rotating EU presidency, Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker of Luxembourg, told voters that “the countries that have said ‘no’ [to the European Constitution] will have to ask themselves the question again.” Jacques Chirac, too, they write, “behaved exactly as Kübler-Ross would have predicted.” The leaders are angry with the people because “the cozy corporatist economics in the face of globalization or political elitism instead of broad-based support for Europe, can no longer be sustained.”

I believe the psychological model is more appropriately applied not just to the European federalist project but to the general plight of Europe as a whole, namely the fact that it is a dying continent in the most literal sense, as its demographic rates indicate. This issue (among others) is explicitly raised by Conrad Black in an article entitled “Europe’s Dream Disturbed,” in the same issue of The National Interest. Black sees the European Union not only as an attempt “to be emancipated from the straitjacket of national identity” but also as an attempt to “[impose] Euro-Socialism” and “casting off the soft hegemony of the United States.”

That Europe is dying can be seen in its “collapsed birthrate” — “it is ultimately unnatural for people not to reproduce themselves,” says Black — but also in “stagnant economic growth in France and Germany, double-digit unemployment, impending pension crises, and demographic levels sustained by relatively unassimilable immigration from Islamic countries.” One can easily see that, as this situation worsens, anti-American feelings are likely to grow because the “Why me, why not him” feelings will be directed towards the US. Indeed, in the perception of many egalitarian Europeans it is a gross injustice that the economy of the “social” European model is collapsing while that of the capitalist American model keeps growing.

And yet, there is also a foreign policy reason for why anti-Americanism has grown even deeper than it was twenty years ago at the height of the Transatlantic debate over the deployment of American cruise missiles in Western Europe. At that time the Left in Western Europe succeeded in convincing part of West European public opinion that the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, were basically of the same, evil, nature. This was the theory of moral equivalence, where some regarded the US as an “occupying” force in Western Europe on par with the Soviet Union’s occupation of Eastern Europe. While the East Europeans had to liberate themselves from the warmongering Soviets, the West Europeans were told that they had to “liberate” themselves from the warmongering Americans. This explains why in the early and mid 1980s hundreds of thousands took to the streets in anti-American “peace demonstrations” in various West European capitals. These were the largest mass demonstrations that Europe had ever seen.

Interestingly, the moral equivalence idea was shared by others. This is where the Muslim radicals and the West European Left meet. According to Osama bin Laden the Muslim victory over the Soviets in Afghanistan, in which he took part, convinced him of the possibility of conquering the other infidel power, America. Having played their role in bringing down the Soviet Union, the fighters of Islamic Jihad turned their attention to the US. For them the attacks of 9/11 were a logical follow-up to the attacks on the Red Army in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The US had armed the Jihadists in the 1980s only to discover a decade later that it had been supporting its new mortal enemy.

In Western Europe, however, the idea of moral equivalence was reinforced after the collapse of communism in 1989. Contrary to the so-called “denazification” which took place in Germany after 1945, with prosecutions of Nazi criminals and collaborators and moral condemnations of civil servants who had remained silent, there was no “decommification” after 1989. On the contrary, many of the fellow travelers of the old regime simply turned their coats, rising to high positions in post-communist society. The Russian President Putin, a former high-ranking KGB official, is one example that immediately springs to mind. Imagine a former Gestapo officer of high rank becoming Chancellor of Germany in the 1950s!

In Germany, the pivot and cornerstone of Europe, the former Communists were allowed to reestablish their own party after German reunification in 1990, as if the former Nazis had been allowed the same in 1945. Others (such as Wolfgang Thierse and Rolf Schwanitz) who had been university professors in economics or law in East Germany — a position that was only open to collaborators of the regime — joined the SPD and became high-ranking Social-Democrat politicians in the new Germany. This reinforced the message that, indeed, there was no real moral difference between the collaborators of the old communist puppet regimes installed by the Soviet occupiers in Central and Eastern Europe and the Western politicians who had backed the Atlantic Alliance. It reinforced the message of the “peace” movement of the 1980s that the Soviet occupation was basically on a par with the American domination of Western Europe. Now that the Soviet domination has ended, West European public opinion wants America out as well. It is a sentiment they share with the Jihadists. It is a pity that Condoleezza Rice does not seem to realize how dangerous this growing anti-Americanism in Europe is.

Paul Belien founded the Brussels-based think tank Centre for the New Europe, and acted as CNE’s first managing director and research director from 1994 to 2000, when he left to write his Ph.D. dissertation and homeschool his five children. � He is the editor of the Flemish quarterly Secessie and the editor-in-chief of The Brussels Journal. � His most recent book is A Throne in Brussels. � Republished with permission of The Brussels Journal.

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