The Nature of Anti-Americanism

“Anti-Americanism is at base a totalizing, if not totalitarian, vision.  The peculiar blindness of fanaticism can be recognized in the way it seizes on a certain behavior of the hated object and sweepingly condemns it, only to condemn with equal fervor the opposite behavior shortly after–or even simultaneously….According to this vision–in the sense that Littre confers on the word: a ‘phantom projection, a credulous fantasy of fears, dreams, delusions, superstitions’–Americans can do nothing but speak idiocies, make blunders and commit crimes; and they are answerable for all the setbacks, all the injustices and all the sufferings of the rest of humanity.” — Jean-Francois Revel, Anti-Americanism, p. 143.