The U.S. seen as 'the big devil' but also still 'a dream of hope'

By Barry Sussman
Editor, The Watchdog Project
editor@niemanwatchdog.org

Nieman fellows from Canada and Latin America report deteriorating, often hostile feelings toward the United States in their countries. ‘Disbelief,’ ‘regret,’ ‘incalculable damage to its image’, ‘universally unpopular’ and ‘the big devil’ are descriptors used in response to this Web site’s survey of perceptions of America.

At the same time, some of those taking part, especially in Canada, note widespread sympathy, closeness and fondness toward Americans. And south of the border, despite misgivings, the U.S. continues to be seen as a magnet for the poor.

If the views are mixed, the disappointment is sometimes extreme.

Bill Schiller of Toronto, a 2006 fellow who has just finished his stay at Harvard, said that, speaking from “our front-row seat: today’s America under the leadership of George W. Bush is almost unrecognizable from the America we knew under previous administrations… It isn’t just the internal divisiveness that disturbs, it’s America’s relinquishing of the very democratic norms for which it has rightly held the world’s respect and admiration: free speech and the rule of law.”

Schiller wrote, “When Canadians look south, we have always seen “a beacon of democracy for the world. Increasingly, however, when America is discussed in Canada the subjects that now spring to mind are torture, extraordinary rendition and wiretaps.”

In all, five Canadians and five from Latin America responded in May to this Web site’s one-question survey of Nieman fellows around the world. The question was:

Please share with us your thoughts about people’s main perceptions of America where you live, and how their perceptions have changed in recent years, say since 9/11.

One Canadian, John Geddes, a 2003 Nieman fellow and now Ottawa bureau chief for Maclean’s, said the picture of Canadian views toward the U.S. is not a simple one. “I know many Americans fear that President Bush has squandered the international goodwill that followed 9/11. No doubt that’s true to a large degree at the level of coalition-building among national governments. But the shock and grief that washed over Canadians in the minutes and hours and days that followed the attacks never had much to do with government-to-government ties anyway…

“At its root, our reaction to your tragedy had nothing to do with nationality, everything to do with—I don’t know, fellow feeling, a shared sudden awareness of mortality, black anger with no outlet… There was also, expressed over and over in different ways, this element to the way many responded: poor Americans, they didn’t deserve this.”

And a third Canadian, Douglas Leiterman, a 1954 Nieman fellow, said, “There is a deep-rooted understanding in Canada that, notwithstanding blunders in execution, the war on Islamic extremism is the battle of our times and the rest of the world will continue to rely on America to contain it.”

In Latin America, Dina Fernandez Garcia, a 2003 Nieman from Guatemala, said the Bush administration “has made people more critical and suspicious of the U.S.” But the fact is, she wrote, “there are more than one million Guatemalans living in the United States, and every day there are hundreds of them trying to cross the American border, no matter how dangerous it gets.” For the Guatemalan poor, she wrote, “The United States still represents a dream of hope and opportunity, the possibility of a better life.”

From Mexico, Alma Guillermoprieto, a 2005 Nieman, a distinguished author and contributor to the New Yorker and New York Review of Books, took a dimmer view: “I don’t think the United States has ever been so universally unpopular, among rich and poor, conservative and progressive alike – not in my lifetime, at least.”

Monica Flores Correa, a 1990 Nieman from Argentina who now lives in Brooklyn, said that because of the Bush administration’s foreign policy, “the habitual mistrust against the U.S. has ballooned to extraordinary proportions.”

Flores Correa also was highly critical of the American news media: “I stopped watching American news on TV after the beginning of this war. Now I watch the BBC, the French channel and the Italian news. I don’t want to offend my American colleagues because I know that they are honest professionals. But I have been amazed by their determination of not questioning ‘the official story’ of the war, Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, etc., and their incapacity to understand other people’s cultural and national identities.”

Next: Africa and Oceania

Barry Sussman is the editor of the Nieman Watchdog Project. He is the author of The Great Cover-Up: Nixon and the Scandal of Watergate, now in its fourth edition. E-mail: sussmanb1@gmail.com

Comments

Jump to bottom of list