SPIEGEL ONLINE – March 29, 2007, 12:27 PM
URL: ,1518 ,474636,00.html <, 1518,474636,00.html>
OPINION
Evil Americans, Poor Mullahs
By Claus Christian Malzahn
Forty-eight percent of Germans think the United States is more
dangerous than Iran, a new survey shows, with only 31 percent
believing the opposite. Germans’ fundamental hypocrisy about the US
suggests that it’s high time for a new bout of re-education.
The Germans have believed in many things in the course of their recent
history. They’ve believed in colonies in Africa and in the Kaiser.
They even believed in the Kaiser when he told them that there would be
no more political parties, only soldiers on the front.
Not too long afterwards, they believed that Jews should be placed into
ghettos and concentration camps because they were the enemies of the
people. Then they believed in the autobahn and that the Third Reich
would ultimately be victorious. A few years later, they believed in
the Deutsche mark. They believed that the Berlin Wall would be there
forever and that their pensions were safe. They believed in recycling
as well as in cheap jet travel. They even believed in a German victory
at the soccer World Cup.
Now they believe that the United States is a greater threat to world
peace than Iran. This was the by-no-means-surprising result of a Forsa
opinion poll commissioned by Stern magazine. Young Germans in
particular — 57 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds, to be precise — said
they considered the United States more dangerous than the religious
regime in Iran.
The German political establishment, which will no doubt loudly lament
the result of the poll, is largely responsible for this wave of
anti-Americanism. For years the country’s foreign ministers fed the
Germans the fairy tale of what they called a "critical dialogue"
between Europe and Iran. It went something like this: If we are nice
to the ayatollahs, cuddle up to them a bit and occasionally wag our
fingers at them when they’ve been naughty, they’ll stop condemning
their women to death for "unchaste behavior" and they’ll stop building
the atom bomb.
That plan failed at some point — an outcome, incidentally, that
Washington had long anticipated. Iran continues to work away
unhindered on its nuclear program, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
reacts to UN demands with an ostentatious show of ignorance. The UN
gets upset and drafts a resolution.
Another item on the Iranian president’s wish list is the annihilation
of Israel. But that will take a bit longer. In the meantime, just to
make sure it doesn’t get out of practice, the regime had 15 British
soldiers kidnapped a few days ago. But it’s still all the Americans’
fault — that much is obvious.
Inherently evil
We’ve known just what they’re like for a long time. The 19th-century
German author Karl May taught us about the American Wild West, and
Karl Marx warned us about unbridled capitalism. Besides, we’ve all
been there at least once — on vacation, of course. Be it in
California or Florida (that’s where you get the best deals on rental
cars, you know), we can see right through the Americans.
For us Germans, the Americans are either too fat or too obsessed with
exercise, too prudish or too pornographic, too religious or too
nihilistic. In terms of history and foreign policy, the Americans have
either been too isolationist or too imperialistic. They simply go
ahead and invade foreign countries (something we Germans, of course,
would never do) and then abandon them, the way they did in Vietnam and
will soon do in Iraq.
Worst of all, the Americans won the war in 1945. (Well, with German
help, of course — from Einstein and his ilk.) There are some Germans
who will never forgive the Americans for VE Day, when they defeated
Hitler. After all, Nazism was just an accident, whereas Americans are
inherently evil. Just look at President Bush, the man who, as some of
SPIEGEL ONLINE’s readers steadfastly believe, "is worse than Hitler."
Now that gives us a chance to kill two birds with one stone. If Bush
is the new Hitler, then we Germans have finally unloaded the Führer on
to someone else. In fact, we won’t even have to posthumously revoke
his German citizenship, as politicians in Lower Saxony recently
proposed. No one can hold a candle to our talent for symbolism!
Anti-Americanism is the wonder drug of German politics. If no one
believes what you’re saying, take a swing at the Yanks and you’ll be
shooting your way back up to the top of the opinion polls in no
time. And on the practical side, you can be the head of the Social
Democratic Party and endear yourself to the party’s hardcore with a
load of anti-American nonsense, and still get invited back to
Washington — just look at Gerhard Schröder. In fact, you could, like
leading German politicians in the debate over the planned American
missile shield in Europe, be accused of having "an almost unbelievable
lack of knowledge" by a former NATO general, and even that wouldn’t
matter. It’s all about what you believe, not what you know.
Anti-Americanism is hypocrisy at its finest. You can spend your
evening catching the latest episode of "24" and then complain about
Guantanamo the next morning. You can claim that the Americans have
themselves to blame for terrorism, while at the same time calling for
tougher restrictions on Muslim immigration to Germany. You can call
the American president a mass murderer and book a flight to New York
the next day. You can lament the average American’s supposed lack of
culture and savvy and meanwhile send off for the documents for the
Green Card lottery.
Not a day passes in Germany when someone isn’t making the wildest
claims, hurling the vilest insults or spreading the most outlandish
conspiracy theories about the United States. But there’s no risk
involved and it all serves mainly to boost the German feeling of
self-righteousness.
Not so safe
Iran is a different story. The last time someone made a joke on German
TV about an Iranian leader, the outcome was not pleasant. Exactly 20
years ago, Dutch entertainer Rudi Carell produced a short TV sketch
portraying Ayatollah Khomeini dressed in women’s underwear. Carell
received death threats. The piece, which lasted all of a few seconds,
led to flights being cancelled and German diplomats being expelled
from Tehran. Carell apologized. Jokes about fat Americans are just
safer.
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, the American historian who in his 1996 book
"Hitler’s Willing Executioners" deprived the Germans of the belief
that they didn’t know what was going on back in the day, is currently
studying the history of genocides in the 20th century. One of the
things he has noticed is that the politicians or military leaders who
planned genocides and had them carried out rarely concealed their
intentions in advance. Whether the victims were Hereros, Armenians,
kulaks, Jews or later Bosnians, the perpetrators generally believed
that they were justified and had no reason to hide their murderous
intentions.
Today, when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad talks about a world
without Israel while dreaming of an atom bomb, it seems obvious that
we — as Germans of all people — should be putting two and two
together. Why shouldn’t Ahmadinejad mean what he says? But we Germans
only know what we believe.
The Americans are more dangerous than the ayatollahs? Perhaps the
Americans should take the Germans at their word for a change. It’s
high time for a new round of re-education. The last one obviously
didn’t do the job.
Claus Christian Malzahn is SPIEGEL ONLINE’s Berlin bureau chief.
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