Anti-Americanism: As German as Apple Strudel | Homeland Security
"...Eighty-five percent of respondents in an Atlantik-Brücke survey, reported FAZ, view the U.S. either “negatively” or “very negatively.”
Many
Germans look more favorably upon Communist China than upon the U.S.; more than half would like Germany to distance itself further from the U.S., with only thirteen percent wanting a closer relationship.
Germans aren’t big on NATO, either:
Only a quarter of those surveyed think their country
should pay its agreed-upon share of the NATO budget.
...None of this is remotely surprising.
The recent discovery that Claas Relotius, a star reporter for Germany’s leading newsmagazine, Der Spiegel, had
invented more than a dozen negative news stories about America drew renewed attention to the fact that, with or without Relotius onboard, Der Spiegel has long been a poisonously anti-American rag whose cover stories routinely depict America as a cartoon villain.
As James Kirchick wrote in a commentary for The Atlantic, “Relotius told them what they wanted -- what they expected -- to hear about America.”
The fact that his stories, many of them patently absurd,
not only made it past Der Spiegel’s editors and fact-checkers but also didn’t raise readers’ eyebrows “revealed ugliness,” argued Kirchick, “within the publication as well as German society more broadly.”
Yep.
...But in fact
German anti-Americanism has nothing to do with Trump.
Of course anti-Americanism exists everywhere in the world, and especially in Europe, whose political and cultural elites viewed the democratic U.S. from the moment of its founding with aristocratic disdain.
But contempt for the U.S. has always been especially intense -- and irrational -- in
Germany, which has its own distinctive reasons (if that’s the right word) for despising the superpower across the sea..."
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