Hatred of a country is a strange one , as i grew up, i was feed with WW2 war films and it was off to the fields with are sticks as guns and go and shoot as many Germans as possible , i hated Germans and i`d never met one .
I treat people as they treat me ,and it dos`nt matter to me what colour , country they come from i, have respect for anyone, and who has  respect for me .
I was once proud to be English , not any more , when `ive been abroad and seen how English treat people, with no respect and no courtrsey and it upsets me .
But not all English are like that ? i guess not .
When i went to New York i could`nt get over how friendly the people were , doe`s that mean all New Yorkers are like that ?
Hate Americans , no , only small minded people who hate someone for the only reason that they live in another country , and are proberly wishing they were living there and its just jeaousy , i hate living here now and i`d leave tomorrow if i could .
Any Offers  
As Goerge said , "its easier to critisise someone else than to see yourself "
Love and peace , heres hoping      

here, here. x

Ignorance ard racism ara closely related.  Puerto Rico is a territory of the US and there's always controversy over the political status of the island.  But I've notieced that  lot of people in PR who are pro independence who are very attached to American lifestyle and values.  But again I can't make generalizations, that's the problem with religion and other matters.  Everybody has the right to have their own believes.  Maybe some of the policies followed by the American governement are not the best but that doesn't mean Americans are bad,  The same happens with Muslims, we can't say all Muslims are terrorist but yes, there's a lot of people in the world that hate Americans probably because they want for their nations what US has achieved...

There are many paralells with Britain.....just one for example; Mexican immigrants resemble our own British immigrant issues...Does it portray modern slave labour? have we become complacent & lazy as countries? Some of you guys round here can speak about it with more depth & knowledge than I can..I am now really interested in this whole concept of Anti-Amercanism as I have neve seen so many uncensored views together in one place. The fact it has not degenerated into a slanging match shows the greatness of this forum.

I'd love to hear what Lennon or the rest of the beatles would say about this...My bet is they would be ambigious! lol

I have a feeling Lennon would be very Americanized at this point in his life. Which would actually depress me. I mean because it wouldn't really be him I guess. If that makes any sense.

yassir individual merits....

I feel that on some level, Americans have deserved their bad rap, though. I'm American myself, but at the moment I'm really not proud of it. My country isn't a great place to be right now in my opinion - our government is doing some very disturbing, terrible things to people in Guatanamo Bay, Iraq, etc. and interfering in other countries' business, and I can understand why some people don't like us for that.

Still...I think that many people who are just ignorant stereotype us so much that they'll call us (them? I don't even like to associate myself with my country...) names even if they don't know what they're talking about, and that's the thing that gets me. *shrug*

People are entitled to say whatever they want, really. I don't mind if they insult America simply because I'm not at all patriotic, but if you're going to insult the country, at least have some background knowledge, please.

Quoted from The Fox Drummer

I feel that on some level, Americans have deserved their bad rap, though. I'm American myself, but at the moment I'm really not proud of it. My country isn't a great place to be right now in my opinion - our government is doing some very disturbing, terrible things to people in Guatanamo Bay, Iraq, etc. and interfering in other countries' business, and I can understand why some people don't like us for that.

Still...I think that many people who are just ignorant stereotype us so much that they'll call us (them? I don't even like to associate myself with my country...) names even if they don't know what they're talking about, and that's the thing that gets me. *shrug*

People are entitled to say whatever they want, really. I don't mind if they insult America simply because I'm not at all patriotic, but if you're going to insult the country, at least have some background knowledge, please.

It's not the country that's being insulted so much as the people in it. That's what bothers me. I feel sad that you are not proud to be from here. I mean, we've accomplished many great things as well, but it's overshadowed by all the negativity. If people don't like what's going on, then they should stand up for change. It's been done before and it will be done again. I feel there is a definite mood building up which will result in something positive. That's the way I choose to look at it instead of choosing to feel guilty because that's what people tell me I should feel. I refuse to be suckered in by all the media hype.

Quoted from Sandra

It's not the country that's being insulted so much as the people in it. That's what bothers me. I feel sad that you are not proud to be from here. I mean, we've accomplished many great things as well, but it's overshadowed by all the negativity. If people don't like what's going on, then they should stand up for change. It's been done before and it will be done again. I feel there is a definite mood building up which will result in something positive. That's the way I choose to look at it instead of choosing to feel guilty because that's what people tell me I should feel. I refuse to be suckered in by all the media hype.

I said I don't feel very proud to be part of my country now - I'm very proud of the fact that it was founded by a revolutionary change of ideas that included efficient democratic systems, freedom of speech, expression, and identification, etc., and I believe that we have contributed successfully to the world in a great many ways that few people choose to acknowledge today, but right now, I'm downright ashamed to be an American. I feel that we're represented by a corrupt government and the mistakes it's made in the Middle East and other parts of the world, and the American people aren't doing anything to change that in this moment in history, which I think is just sad. I don't want to associate myself with those kinds of people because I feel that we're dishonouring and dismantling our revolutionary and intellectual past by doing nothing. Like you, I'm hoping and working for a change, but the very things that people stereotype about us - greed, intolerance, self-centredness - are heightened by today's American culture and are therefore preventing us from doing anything.

Also, this is just my personal views, but I disagree with some basic fundamentals that have prevailed throughout our history, e.g. capitalism. *shrugs* But that's my personal bitching - it works for some people and doesn't for others.

Here is something may or may not be of interest that a friend of mine posted on myspace. It bears resonance with my own feelings.

Vonnegut's Blues For America - Read It (Or Don't) L x
No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious and charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful.

If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:

THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC

Now, during our catastrophically idiotic war in Vietnam, the music kept getting better and better and better. We lost that war, by the way. Order couldn't be restored in Indochina until the people kicked us out.

That war only made billionaires out of millionaires. Today's war is making trillionaires out of billionaires. Now I call that progress.

And how come the people in countries we invade can't fight like ladies and gentlemen, in uniform and with tanks and helicopter gunships?

Back to music. It makes practically everybody fonder of life than he or she would be without it. Even military bands, although I am a pacifist, always cheer me up. And I really like Strauss and Mozart and all that, but the priceless gift that African Americans gave the whole world when they were still in slavery was a gift so great that it is now almost the only reason many foreigners still like us at least a little bit. That specific remedy for the worldwide epidemic of depression is a gift called the blues. All pop music today  jazz, swing, be-bop, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Stones, rock-and-roll, hip-hop, and on and on  is derived from the blues.

A gift to the world? One of the best rhythm-and-blues combos I ever heard was three guys and a girl from Finland playing in a club in Krakow, Poland.

The wonderful writer Albert Murray, who is a jazz historian and a friend of mine among other things, told me that during the era of slavery in this country  an atrocity from which we can never fully recover  the suicide rate per capita among slave owners was much higher than the suicide rate among slaves.

Murray says he thinks this was because slaves had a way of dealing with depression, which their white owners did not: They could shoo away Old Man Suicide by playing and singing the Blues. He says something else which also sounds right to me. He says the blues can't drive depression clear out of a house, but can drive it into the corners of any room where it's being played. So please remember that.

Foreigners love us for our jazz. And they don't hate us for our purported liberty and justice for all. They hate us now for our arrogance.



What is radically new today is that my daughter, Lily, who has just turned 21, finds herself, as do your children, as does George W Bush, himself a kid, and Saddam Hussein and on and on, heir to a shockingly recent history of human slavery, to an Aids epidemic, and to nuclear submarines slumbering on the floors of fjords in Iceland and elsewhere, crews prepared at a moment's notice to turn industrial quantities of men, women, and children into radioactive soot and bone meal by means of rockets and H-bomb warheads. Our children have inherited technologies whose by-products, whether in war or peace, are rapidly destroying the whole planet as a breathable, drinkable system for supporting life of any kind.

Anyone who has studied science and talks to scientists notices that we are in terrible danger now. Human beings, past and present, have trashed the joint.

The biggest truth to face now  what is probably making me unfunny now for the remainder of my life  is that I don't think people give a damn whether the planet goes on or not. It seems to me as if everyone is living as members of Alcoholics Anonymous do, day by day. And a few more days will be enough. I know of very few people who are dreaming of a world for their grandchildren.

Many years ago I was so innocent I still considered it possible that we could become the humane and reasonable America so many members of my generation used to dream of. We dreamed of such an America during the Great Depression, when there were no jobs. And then we fought and often died for that dream during the second world war, when there was no peace.

But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts us absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many lifeless bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.

Human beings have had to guess about almost everything for the past million years or so. The leading characters in our history books have been our most enthralling, and sometimes our most terrifying, guessers.

May I name two of them? Aristotle and Hitler.

One good guesser and one bad one.

And the masses of humanity through the ages, feeling inadequately educated just like we do now, and rightly so, have had little choice but to believe this guesser or that one.

Russians who didn't think much of the guesses of Ivan the Terrible, for example, were likely to have their hats nailed to their heads.

We must acknowledge that persuasive guessers, even Ivan the Terrible, now a hero in the Soviet Union, have sometimes given us the courage to endure extraordinary ordeals which we had no way of understanding. Crop failures, plagues, eruptions of volcanoes, babies being born dead ­ the guessers often gave us the illusion that bad luck and good luck were understandable and could somehow be dealt with intelligently and effectively. Without that illusion, we all might have surrendered long ago.

But the guessers, in fact, knew no more than the common people and sometimes less, even when, or especially when, they gave us the illusion that we were in control of our destinies.

Persuasive guessing has been at the core of leadership far so long, for all of human experience so far, that it is wholly unsurprising that most of the leaders of this planet, in spite of all the information that is suddenly ours, want the guessing to go on. It is now their turn to guess and guess and be listened to. Some of the loudest, most proudly ignorant guessing in the world is going on in Washington today. Our leaders are sick of all the solid information that has been dumped on humanity by research and scholarship and investigative reporting. They think that the whole country is sick of it, and they could be right. It isn't the gold standard that they want to put us back on. They want something even more basic. They want to put us back on the snake-oil standard.

Loaded pistols are good for everyone except inmates in prisons or lunatic asylums.

That's correct.

Millions spent on public health are inflationary.

That's correct.

Billions spent on weapons will bring inflation down.

That's correct.

Dictatorships to the right are much closer to American ideals than dictatorships to the left.

That's correct.

The more hydrogen bomb warheads we have, all set to go off at a moment's notice, the safer humanity is and the better off the world will be that our grandchildren will inherit.

That's correct.

Industrial wastes, and especially those that are radioactive, hardly ever hurt anybody, so everybody should shut up about them.

That's correct.

Industries should be allowed to do whatever they want to do: bribe, wreck the environment just a little, fix prices, screw dumb customers, put a stop to competition, and raid the Treasury when they go broke.

That's correct.

That's free enterprise.

And that's correct.

The poor have done something very wrong or they wouldn't be poor, so their children should pay the consequences.

That's correct.

The United States of America cannot be expected to look after its own people.

That's correct.

The free market will do that.

That's correct.

The free market is an automatic system of justice.

That's correct.

I'm kidding.

And if you actually are an educated, thinking person, you will not be welcome in Washington, DC. I know a couple of bright seventh graders who would not be welcome in Washington, DC. Do you remember those doctors a few months back who got together and announced that it was a simple, clear medical fact that we could not survive even a moderate attack by hydrogen bombs? They were not welcome in Washington, DC.

Even if we fired the first salvo of hydrogen weapons and the enemy never fired back, the poisons released would probably kill the whole planet by and by.

What is the response in Washington? They guess otherwise. What good is an education? The boisterous guessers are still in charge  the haters of information. And the guessers are almost all highly educated people. Think of that. They have had to throw away their educations, even Harvard or Yale educations.

If they didn't do that, there is no way their uninhibited guessing could go on and on and on. Please, don't you do that. But if you make use of the vast fund of knowledge now available to educated persons, you are going to be lonesome as hell. The guessers outnumber you  and now I have to guess  about 10 to one.

I'm going to tell you some news.

No, I am not running for President, although I do know that a sentence, if it is to be complete, must have both a subject and a verb.

Nor will I confess that I sleep with children. I will say this, though: My wife is by far the oldest person I ever slept with.

Here's the news: I am going to sue the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company, manufacturers of Pall Mall cigarettes, for a billion bucks! Starting when I was only 12 years old, I have never chain-smoked anything but unfiltered Pall Malls. And for many years now, right on the package, Brown and Williamson have promised to kill me.

But I am now 82. Thanks a lot, you dirty rats. The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.

Our government's got a war on drugs. That's certainly a lot better than no drugs at all. That's what was said about prohibition. Do you realise that from 1919 to 1933 it was absolutely against the law to manufacture, transport, or sell alcoholic beverages, and the Indiana newspaper humourist Ken Hubbard said: "Prohibition is better than no liquor at all."

But get this: The two most widely abused and addictive and destructive of all substances are both perfectly legal.

One, of course, is ethyl alcohol. And President George W Bush, no less, and by his own admission, was smashed, or tiddley-poo, or four sheets to the wind a good deal of the time from when he was 16 until he was 40. When he was 41, he says, Jesus appeared to him and made him knock off the sauce, stop gargling nose paint.

Other drunks have seen pink elephants.

About my own history of foreign substance abuse, I've been a coward about heroin and cocaine, LSD and so on, afraid they might put me over the edge. I did smoke a joint of marijuana one time with Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, just to be sociable. It didn't seem to do anything to me one way or the other, so I never did it again. And by the grace of God, or whatever, I am not an alcoholic, largely a matter of genes. I take a couple of drinks now and then and will do it again tonight. But two is my limit. No problem.

I am, of course, notoriously hooked on cigarettes. I keep hoping the things will kill me. A fire at one end and a fool at the other.

But I'll tell you one thing: I once had a high that not even crack cocaine could match. That was when I got my first driver's licence  look out, world, here comes Kurt Vonnegut!

And my car back then, a Studebaker as I recall, was powered, as are almost all means of transportation and other machinery today, and electric power plants and furnaces, by the most abused, addictive, and destructive drugs of all: fossil fuels.

When you got here, even when I got here, the industrialised world was already hopelessly hooked on fossil fuels, and very soon now there won't be any left. Cold turkey.

Can I tell you the truth? I mean this isn't the TV news is it? Here's what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial. And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we're hooked on.

I turned 82 on November 11, 2004. What's it like to be this old? I can't parallel park worth a damn any more, so please don't watch while I try to do it. And gravity has become a lot less friendly and manageable than it used to be.

When you get to my age, if you get to my age, and if you have reproduced, you will find yourself asking your own children, who are themselves middle-aged: "What is life all about?'" I have seven kids, three of them orphaned nephews.

I put my big question about life to my son the pediatrician. Dr Vonnegut said this to his doddering old dad: "Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is."

Extracted from A Man Without A Country: A Memoir Of Life In George W Bush's America, (Bloomsbury).

I've always respected Vonnegut as an author, but he had some pretty dim views about human beings in general.
Especially toward the end. And his own personal experiences in the war jaded him against his own country. He never left though as far as I know. That's always curious.  
Here's something from one of your countrymen that reflects some of my own feelings. As you say. Either way, my original point has been completely missed.

Anti-Americanism Is Racist Envy
Paul Johnson, eminent British historian and author.

Anti-Americanism is the prevailing disease of intellectuals today. Like other diseases, it doesn't have to be logical or rational. But, like other diseases, it has a syndrome--a concurrent set of underlying symptoms that are also causes.

• First, an unadmitted contempt for democracy. The U.S. is the world's most successful democracy. The right of voters to elect more than 80,000 public officials, the length and thoroughness of electoral campaigns, the pervasiveness of the media and the almost daily reports by opinion polls ensure that government and electorate do not diverge for long and that Washington generally reflects the majority opinion in its actions.

It is this feature that intellectuals--especially in Europe--find embittering. They know they must genuflect to democracy as a system. They cannot openly admit that an entire people--especially one comprising nearly 300 million, who enjoy all the freedoms--can be mistaken. But in their hearts these intellectuals do not accept the principle of one person, one vote. They scornfully, if privately, reject the notion that a farmer in Kansas, a miner in Pennsylvania or an auto assembler in Michigan can carry as much social and moral weight as they do. In fact, they have a special derogatory word for anyone who acts on this assumption: "populist." A populist is someone who accepts the people's verdict, even--and especially--when it runs counter to the intellectual consensus (as with capital punishment, for example). In the jargon of intellectual persiflage, populism is almost as bad as fascism--indeed, it's a step toward it. Hence, the argument goes, the U.S. is not so much an "educated democracy" as it is a media-swayed and interest-group-controlled populist regime.

The truth is, on the European Continent there is little experience of working democracy. Italy and Germany have had democracy only since the late 1940s; Spain, since the 1960s. France is not a democracy; it is a republic run by bureaucratic and party elites, whose errors are dealt with by strikes, street riots and blockades instead of by votes. Elements of the French system are being imposed throughout the EU, even in countries such as Denmark and Sweden that have long practiced democracy with success. In a French-style pseudodemocracy, intellectuals have considerable influence, at both government and street levels. In a true democracy, intellectuals are no more powerful than their arguments.

• Second, anti-Americanism is a function of cultural racism. An astonishingly high proportion of European elites know very little about U.S. history or culture and even deny that they have a separate existence apart from their European roots. It is strange that those seeking to bring about a European federal state or union have at no stage sought to study the lessons Americans learned during the creation of the U.S. in the 1780s. After all, the U.S. Constitution (suitably amended) has lasted for more than 200 years, and within its framework the country has emerged as the richest and most powerful society in world history. You might think, therefore, that European elites would seek to learn something from such a successful process. Not at all: The view is that sophisticated, civilized Europe has nothing to learn from "adolescent" America. What these Euro-elites particularly abhor is the way in which the framers of the Constitution made every effort to involve the population through the process of public debates, town meetings and ratification votes--and this at a time when Europe was still governed (for the most part) by the absolute sovereigns of the ancien régime.

This cultural racism is particularly directed at the supposedly "know-nothing" President George W. Bush and his "gung ho" Texas background. The European intelligentsia gets its notion of America chiefly from Hollywood, TV soaps like Dallas and fiction. Few of them have any experience of America, outside of three or four big cities. Middle America is unexplored territory. The fact that the U.S. has proved a highly efficient crucible for melding different peoples into a human sum greater than its constituent parts is seen as a misfortune in Europe because it produces a cultural stew that lacks purity of any kind and is therefore at the mercy of commercial forces.

• Third, European elites tend to look at Americans as a subcivilized mass, whose function is to be obedient consumers in a system run by big business. The role of competition in U.S. economic life--and in every other aspect of life--is ignored, because competition is something Continental Europeans like to keep to a minimum and under careful control.

Although Americans are seen as highly materialistic consumers, they are also despised and feared for their spiritual interests, their participation in religious worship and their subscription to creeds of morality. Europeans see no inconsistency in their condemnation of the U.S. for being at one and the same time paganly unethical and morally zealous.

The truth is, any accusation that comes to hand is used without scruple by the Old World intelligentsia. Anti-Americanism is factually absurd, contradictory, racist, crude, childish, self-defeating and, at bottom, nonsensical. It is based on the powerful but irrational impulse of envy--an envy of American wealth, power, success and determination. It is an envy made all the more poisonous because of a fearful European conviction that America's strength is rising while Europe's is falling.

^How much did he get paid to fashion that nonsense?! lol

I do see what you are saying Sandra though & thanks for the insight on Vonegut. It's all intereting stuff.  
The whole EU thing is a shambles I must confess.
I must find out more about Paul Johnson,,,,,,eminent? Sounds like he is making a good living feeding the need for that opinion.  
Maybe it's easy for people to confuse anti-war with anti-americanism? Just another ponderer to throw into the pot.
My brother is now back from Afghanistan thankfully.

Dude, it's just more ramblings from another half senile old man. There's always someone with a counter arguement is all and I wasn't talking politics. All I was saying when I started this thread is that I think it sucks that people think it's okay to call Americans derogitory names in response to them not liking a song or not liking a joke. I mean, somehow it's become okay to completely insult Americans and because of all the guilt Americans either just ignore it or insult themselves. It's just pure hatred. Or like someone else on this thread said and that writer I quoted said, a form of racism. Why should that be okay? That's all I was asking. I said from the beginning I wasn't talking about politics. I don't think I confuse peoples hate for the war with pure bigotry. Here's a comment from YouTube: "America is falling down around your ears and you're all too busy blaming each other to even notice it. You're all overly sensitive about people making jibes at you... massively insecure race of people with no friends in or outside you're own borders." Now what does that have to do with being anti-war? So whatever. It's become a moot point.

On a more positive note, I'm happy that your brother is back and safe. I agree with you about this war being nonsensical and it's sad that not all of the families with loved ones over there are as lucky. But that is another issue and has many threads already devoted to it.

Thanks for the good wishes Sandra. The anti-war & anti American theory was only that...Not aimed at you but something worth a mention. I mean I never questioned anti this or that until this thread and got myself in a right posting exchange with you to discover that perhaps thats what I was feeling.
It's always better if I button it anyway! lol   x

Re Sandra's comment "Although Americans are seen as highly materialistic consumers, they are also despised and feared for their spiritual interests, their participation in religious worship and their subscription to creeds of morality. Europeans see no inconsistency in their condemnation of the U.S. for being at one and the same time paganly unethical and morally zealous. "
I think bewilderment would be a better word. how is it that the most technologically advanced nation on earth is talking about teaching creationism against evolution and banning scientific research. It seems such a backward step. You're the nation that fostered minds like Einstein and Hubble. religion, in western europe at least, is dead in the water.
And i would point out that when Britain was the world superpower US views towards it weren't exactly charirtable. I think it comes with the territory. Bobber summed it up so well with his "tall trees catch the most wind" quote.