The accusation is as predictable as late trains. You are arguing in a pub, or addressing a smaller audience on the wee-small-hours show on Radio 5. The chat may be about economics or multinationals or the entertainment industry or foreign policy or the corruption of politics – the subject is increasingly and revealingly irrelevant. Just when you are flattering yourself that you have got to the very nub of the issue, your opponent breaks in with a voice somewhere between a sneer and bray and announces that “your problem is that you’re anti-American”. To right-thinking – that is, left-leaning – people, the insult should be absurd. To be anti-American rather than, say, anti-corporate, is to make a reactionary substitution of nationality for politics. Like anti-Semitism, it is “the socialism of fools”.
Deployers of the jeer assert racism and more: they are certain that anti-Americanism is the modern equivalent of collaborating with Hitler. I’ve been trying to keep count of the number of intellectuals who have responded to 11 September by disinterring George Orwell’s worst piece of Second World War writing. So far, the Observer and Sunday Times, America’s Voice and two other conservative websites have used his condemnation of conscientious objectors, in an admittedly tense 1941, as a text for our times. “In so far as it hampers the British war effort,” Orwell said, “British pacifism is on the side of the Nazis and German pacifism, if it exists, is on the side of Britain and the USSR. Since pacifists have more freedom of action in countries where traces of democracy survive, pacifism can act more effectively against democracy than for it. Objectively the pacifist is pro-Nazi.”
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