A recent poll in Germany shows that 48% of Germans think America is more dangerous than Iran. Writer Claus Christian Malzahn says that periodically, Germans need to be re-educated about the United States, and Germany's own hypocritical behavior in the world.
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!
I've written before about how so many people hate America because we are Americans. And let's face it, it's much easier to do nothing if you can blame every problem in the world on the United States. If it is always the Americans' fault, then other nations have a free pass to do nothing but wring their hands at every nasty event in the world. It is only the U.S. that is expected to actually do something about the nasty events.
Got a genocide going in Europe? Expect the Americans to send troops. Homicidal dictator threatening his own subjects, his neighbors, and countries around the globe? The U.S. will send in its military. Need humanitarian relief? No problem, the Americans will send 20 times the aid of other countries. All this, and then the Europeans can bash the U.S. for some perceived wrong-doing.
I would suggest that we just withdraw from the international stage and say FU to Europe, but the last time we did it, we got Bosnia.
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