Selt-Hating Americans

By Michael Medved
Monday, August 4, 2008

Do angry critics of U.S. policy qualify as anti-American?

Not always, but on occasion they do.

Leftists love to assert that "dissent is patriotic," but that's not invariably true. Some dissenters may see themselves as patriots, but others most certainly deserve identification as anti-American. I much prefer the term "anti-American" to the term "unpatriotic" because it's an attitude that's easier to identify. The word "unpatriotic" lends itself to multiple interpetrations, but "anti-American" specifically defines an attitude suggesting the U.S. constitutes a malevolent, destructive force in the world.

For instance, a reader who identified himself as "paxnow" responded to my recent USA Today columns (July 22, 2008, comparing America's role in Iraq and the Philippines) by posting the following comment on the newspaper’s website: “Any honest review of he 20th century to date would conclude the Evil Empire is the US. There is virtually no country which was not attacked by the US or whose government was not overthrown. The U.S. has over 1,000 military bases in over 130 countries to date. We are 3% the population of earth, but spend 51% of the entire military budget. The enemy is US.”

In a similar vein, Jake Irwin, a student at Evergreen State College in Olympia Washington, and an outspoken admirer of Venezuelan demagogue Hugo Chavez, told the Wall Street Journal: "My political belief is that the U.S. is a horrendous empire that needs to end."

Could anyone characterize this sort of "dissent" as patriotic or, more to the point, pro-American?

For more than a century, psychologists have described a syndrome by which some members of the Jewish community have adopted self-hate (Selbsthass in the original German) as an attitude toward their own people.

Today, it's even more common to find a similar derangement in the fetid, paranoid fever swamps of the extreme left: self-hating Americans.