Some seven months ago, Stephanie Wang wrote an opinion column in these pages titled `Fear of the Flag,' in which she argued that the outpouring of nationalistic sentiment during the previous several months had more to do with a personal impulse to establish group identity than with any political decision to support the United States. Ironically, the reaction in the letters page exemplified the very confusion of personal and political that Miss Wang had been criticising. I would like to take the occasion of this month of September to re-examine that confusion.

Americans as a group don't pay a lot of attention to what's going on in the world -- until, that is, it leaps up and bites them. Ignorance can be bliss, and to a large extent it's fuelled by geography. With the national borders so remote from most of the country, Americans hardly ever experience life in other places. When they do go anywhere, often it's just Canada, or perhaps some squalid Mexican border town that only reinforces preconceptions. Everywhere else is only an image flickering past on a television screen. (Compare the UK where even our football hooligans are, unfortunately, world travellers!) Ambrose Bierce wrote that `War is God's way of teaching Americans geography,' and indeed, in a country whose economic, military, and cultural powers are so overwhelming, the person on the street has little use for places that are so far away as to seem abstract and unreal. This insularity breeds a peculiarly American form of hubris, a belief among most Americans that the world is limited to two sorts of people: Americans, and those who wish they were.

American politicians and the mainstream American media, both of which are in the business of telling people what they want to hear, are quick to capitalise on such feelings of national supremacy, to entwine political identity with personal pride. Early on in the absurd tragedy that has been the past year of American history, your president declared to all who would listen that those who had attacked the United States `hate our freedoms.' In fact, they likely couldn't care a whit about Americans' domestic freedoms. What they hate, rightly or wrongly, is their perception that the United States has been interfering with their own freedoms -- by giving economic and political support to Israel while it occupies Palestinian lands, by continuing trade sanctions against Iraq, by stationing troops in Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries. Casting the conflict as one between the forces of freedom and the forces of evil, though it makes good media play, only perpetuates Americans' ignorance of the conflict's true nature.

In such a climate of disinformation, Americans are astonished to learn of the depth of others' hatred of their country. Indeed, they seem to take personal offence at political opposition to their government's institutions and policies. In the heat of their passion, they fail to make any connection between the terror that has been visited on them of late and the terror visited by their government on large parts of the world. The United States has aided corrupt or abusive regimes and militants in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Colombia, Nicaragua, and countless other locales, has shredded a series of inconvenient treaties, has refused to participate in major world agreements such as the Kyoto Accords and the International Criminal Court. In Afghanistan, American bombs have destroyed a UN demining operation, set fire to Red Cross warehouses and, most recently, decimated the guests at a wedding celebration -- a pattern of errors that demonstrates, at best, a relative lack of concern for Afghan lives.

Even within its own borders, the United States has wrecked countless lives with its misguided War on Drugs, and has gutted its Bill of Rights with the hasty passage of the so-called USA PATRIOT Act and other laws and regulations expanding domestic spying, secret searches, roving wiretaps, and detentions without charge or review. (Here in the UK, similar battles were fought over the Anti-Terrorism Bill, the worst provisions of which were reined in by an odd alliance of Tories and Liberal Democrats and by an appeal to the European Convention on Human Rights.)

In short, the United States' actions belie the very values of freedom that it professes to hold so dear -- and it is this apparent hypocrisy that drives much of the world's resentment of the United States. In times past, the United States used the threat of communism to justify the contradictions between its actions and its rhetoric. Now that communism is all but gone, a `War on Terror' has been constructed to fill the void. Americans in their easy chairs, bombarded with images of Osama bin Laden or whoever is America's latest Emmanuel Goldstein, clutch their flag icons and secure themselves with the thought that, as Miss Wang put it, `I am not one of them. I am one of you.'

If anything good can come of the events of one year ago, perhaps it will be the eventual recognition among the people of the United States that the actions and policies of their government have repercussions within a global community, that unilateralism breeds alienation and anger, and that lasting stability cannot be achieved in the absence of dialogue and understanding. Unfortunately, the rhetoric flowing from Washington this past year has been anything but conciliatory: `Either you are with us,' Mr Bush has announced to the world, `or you are with the terrorists.'

On an individual level, the people of the United States are some of the kindest and most generous in the world. It is a tragedy that their government continues to represent them to the world as arrogant, unfeeling, and hypocritical.

Matthew Belmonte
September 2002