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The Change in World-Wide Perception of U.S. Behavior
(Updated below)
Citing worldwide polls of public opinion, Glenn Greenwald writes about The tragic collapse of America’s standing in the world.
While I believe that this is chiefly a result of a media and communication revolution, Glenn traces the serious decline of U.S reputation since 1999/2000 back to U.S. behavior (emph.add.):
The collapse of America’s moral standing in the world — the intense and widespread contempt in which we are held — is, without question, a direct by-product of our behavior over the last six years.
In an update he adds:
In comments, Che Pasa, echoing the objections of several other commenters, argues that this post conflates two logically distinct issues — how America is perceived in the world versus what America, in fact, is. Thus, he argues, simply because America was liked and respected around the world prior to the Bush administration does not negate the claim that America has been a net force for Evil, since public opinion may simply have been wrong.
Glenn does not buy this:
[W]hat is indisputably true is that world opinion regarding America has profoundly shifted — for the worse — since 2000. The question, then, is why has that happened? My answer is the simplest and most obvious one (which does not mean it is right): namely, public opinion of America has fundamentally changed over the last six years because our behavior in the world, our national character and our defining values have fundamentally changed.
I agree that the behavior of the U.S. in the world has deteriorated under Bush. But that change is not fundamental.
There is an even simpler answer for the crash of world public opinion about the U.S.: The revolution in information distribution through worldwide TV news and the Internet.
Before the late 1990s, access to international media and alternative views was difficult to get anywhere in the world. In my homecountry one could walk to major railway stations and buy a decent collection of international papers, or one could listen to BBC and a few other international views on the radio.
But now there are BBC, CNN, AlJazeera, Euronews, Arte and others on the regular cable TV. With a cheap satellite dish hundreds of international TV stations are available 24/7. Instead of a few expensive international papers from the international press kiosk, there now is instant access to hundreds of regular news-media on the web.
A billion people now have cheap and simple access to terrabytes of original data, making it much easier to verify the truthiness of what the news-media are disseminating. Millions of blogs add immediate commentary and analysis.
I agree with Glenn’s commentator Che Pasa. The behaviour of the U.S. has not changed that much. What has changed is the perception of this behavior. This because of new unfiltered and cheap access to information.
Wars of aggression have been fought by the U.S. for decades. A few days ago James Caroll wrote a recommendable piece about US intelligence agencies after World War II in the Boston Globe:
In Iraq, they have run the gamut from pre war falsification of weapons data to surveillance of American citizens to kidnapping to torture of prisoners. During the Cold War, it was "black operations" that included staging coups, assassinating foreign leaders, infiltrating American organizations, conspiring with Mafia groups, spying on journalists — perhaps even murder.
The atrocities of the war on Vietnam are not different from those in the war on Iraq. But while the facts of the massacre of My Lai took years to leak into some world knowledge, the pictures of torture at Abu Ghraib were seen by hundreds of millions within a few hours.
Colin Powell’s presentation before the U.N. Security Council was broadcasted live worldwide, as were the facts proving that it contained nothing but a bunch of lies.
For the U.S. to go back to political behaviour "before Bush" would therefore not help to change the world wide public opinion. Over decades the U.S. has eliminated one or the other South-American leader without much worldwide public noise. But the U.S. supported coup attempt against Chavez in Venezuela in 2002 was transmitted live. The documentary about it has been broadcasted worldwide and downloaded over and over.
While, as Glenn assumes, Bush’s political behaviour is certainly a part of a declining U.S. reputation, the much faster and wider distribution of knowledge about such behaviour is, in my view, playing an even bigger role.
To regain world wide reputation, the U.S. will therefore have to make an even deeper correction of its behavior than Glenn assumes. Bombing of pharmaceutical factories in Sudan like Clinton did will not regain the U.S. any good reputation. To publicly reject its inherent urge to imperialism would be a good start.
UPDATE
Citing some of the above, Glenn responds:
This is precisely the viewpoint I was describing, critiquing and refuting. Bernhard’s attempt to explain how it can be that worldwide perceptions of the U.S. have changed drastically since 2000 if our behavior is fundamentally the same is, in my view, completely unconvincing.
This explanation (which was echoed by several commenters and e-mailers yesterday) ascribes an ignorance to people around the world that is more fictitious than anything else. The pre-Internet era was not the Dark Ages. …
The times before Gutenberg also knew sunshine. But the arrival of the printing press certainly changed the fabric of the society. Without it, the Renaissance and the Reformation would not have happened.
With the arrival of the Interent the costs of consuming information has decreased by several orders of magnitude.
This morning, for the price of one copy of my local monopolistic rightwing fishwrap, I skimmed through some ten major papers from five different countries on three continents. By noon I had added a dozen blog posts and alternative magazine pieces.
Some 1,154,358,778 worldwide Internet users have the ability to do the same. Most of course don’t use the net with such an intensity, but the opinion leaders do and others use their access to check at least on major issues.
Of course this has changed the worldwide information level about and the perception of U.S. politics.
Why that is considered to be a "completely unconvincing" argument is beyond me.
41 was me, of course
fauxreal: any technology is neutral, to me, in any circumstance and it is the actors who employ the technology that determine its judgment
“every technology has inherent and indentifiable social, political, and environmental consequences”
from jerry mander’s four arguments for the elimination of television: The Illusion of Neutral Technology
If you accept the existence of automobiles, you also accept the existence of roads laid upon the landscape, oil to run the cars, and huge institutions to find the oil, pump it and distribute it. In addition you accept a sped-up style of life and the movement of humans through the terrain at speeds that make it impossible to pay attention to whatever is growing there. Humans who use cars sit in fixed positions for long hours following a narrow strip of gray pavement, with eyes fixed forward, engaged in the task of driving. As long as they are driving, they are living within what we might call “roadform.” Slowly they evolve into car-people. McLuhan told us that cars “extended” the human feet, but he put it the wrong way. Cars replaced human feet.
If you accept nuclear power plants, you also accept a techno-scientific-industrial-military elite. Without these people in charge, you could not have nuclear power. You and I getting together with a few friends could not make use of nuclear power. We could not build such a plant, nor could we make personal use of its output, nor handle or store the radioactive waste products which remain dangerous to life for thousands of years. The wastes, in turn, determine that future societies will have to maintain a technological capacity to deal with the problem, and the military capability to protect the wastes. So the existence of the technology determines many aspects of the society.
If you accept mass production, you accept that a small number of people will supervise the daily existence of a much larger number of people. You accept that human beings will spend long hours, every day, engaged in repetitive work, while suppressing any desires for experience or activity beyond this work. The workers’ behavior becomes subject to the machine. With mass production, you also accept that huge numbers of identical items will need to be efficiently distributed to huge numbers of people and that institutions such as advertising will arise to do this. One technological process cannot exist without the other, creating symbiotic relationships among technologies themselves.
If you accept the existence of advertising, you accept a system designed to persuade and to dominate minds by interfering in people’s thinking patterns. You also accept that the system will be used by the sorts of people who like to influence people and are good at it. No person who did not wish to dominate others would choose to use advertising, or choosing it, succeed in it. So the basic nature of advertising and all technologies created to serve it will be consistent with this purpose, will encourage this behavior in society, and will tend to push social evolution in this direction.
In all of these instances, the basic form of the institution and the technology determines its interaction with the world, the way it will be used, the kind of people who use it, and to what ends.
chandler: Technology as Neutral or Non-neutral
Many deterministic commentators on the ‘non-neutrality’ of tools argue that the tools we use determine our view of the world. Abraham Maslow, the psychologist, once said that to someone who has only a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail. And Neil Postman adds that ‘to a man with a pencil, everything looks like a list. To a man with a camera, everything looks like an image. To a man with a computer, everything looks like data’ (Postman 1993, p. 14).
I have already noted Postman’s acceptance of the notion of technology as an autonomous force acting on its users. He also presents technology as non-neutral. He insists that ‘the uses made of technology are largely determined by the structure of the technology itself’ (p. 7). The medium itself ‘contains an ideological bias’ (p. 16). He argues that:
(1) because of the symbolic forms in which information is encoded, different media have different intellectual and emotional biases;
(2) because of the accessibility and speed of their information, different media have different political biases;
(3) because of their physical form, different media have different sensory biases;
(4) because of the conditions in which we attend to them, different media have different social biases;
(5) because of their technical and economic structure, different media have different content biases.
(Postman 1979, p. 193)
Postman insists that ‘the printing press, the computer, and television are not therefore simply machines which convey information. They are metaphors through which we conceptualize reality in one way or another. They will classify the world for us, sequence it, frame it, enlarge it, reduce it, argue a case for what it is like. Through these media metaphors, we do not see the world as it is. We see it as our coding systems are. Such is the power of the form of information’ (Postman 1979, p. 39).
technology, violence, and peace
The word “technology” can be used to refer to both the artifact and its associated social aspects.
All technologies are social in this sense. They are created by humans and used by humans in social contexts. Therefore, in order to understand technologies it is necessary to understand their social contexts, including violence, peace, and conflict.
Technologies can be used for many purposes. For example, electronic mail can be used by armies and peace groups. Even so, every technology is typically easier to use for some purposes than others. Electronic mail is easy to use for sending messages but it doesn’t even make sense to use it to hit someone over the head. Thus, although technologies are multifunctional, they are never neutral.
Weapons are tools for inflicting violence. A bare hand or foot can be used as a weapon, but today the most commonly used weapons are technologies, such as knives, rifles, and bombers. It is true that weapons can be used for nonviolent purposes. For example, a grenade can be used as a paperweight and a fuel-air explosive can be used as a piece of art. It is even possible to caress someone with the barrel of a rifle. But it is far more common to use these technologies to inflict violence, since that is what they were designed for.
There are many different theories of technology; some are more useful for thinking about technology in relation to violence and peace than others. To treat technologies as inherently good or bad is not helpful, since technologies have multiple uses. A more common view is that technologies are neutral. It is true that many technologies can be used for both good and bad purposes, and for different purposes. But usually neutrality is taken to have a stronger meaning, such as that technologies are equally easy to use for different purposes, which is not helpful when comparing compact disks and cruise missiles. The approach taken here, a standard one in studies of technology, is that technologies are constructed for specific purposes and, as a result, are usually easier to use for those purposes. Users can choose and modify technologies for their own purposes, but are constrained by the physical reality of artifacts and the inertia of associated social systems.
There is a lot of writing about the ways that society influences technologies. On the one side is the view that technologies are autonomous, following their own trajectories. On the other side is the view that technologies are largely determined by their origins and inevitably serve the purposes of their creators. A middle view is that technologies are “shaped” by the social conditions and groups that led to their creation but, once created, they can, within limits, be directly used or modified for other purposes.
Checklist for technological democracy
Technology is political, therefore it should be democratic; it confers power, therefore it must be controlled equitably to ensure justice. At present, decisions on technological development are made almost entirely by those who stand to benefit from further progress in the current direction. Only by involving everyone affected by a technology in its development and use can society determine what is really beneficial as opposed to merely ‘efficient’. Such a development both requires and leads to changes in society’s power structures.
Checklist for technological democracy:
-Who owns it? (the hardware, the knowledge and the intellectual property rights)
-Who controls it? (who can switch it off?)
-Who profits from it? (directly, in money, or quality of life, and indirectly by opportunities created)
-Who loses by it? (directly in money or quality of life, indirectly through loss of opportunities)
-What has gone into it? (raw materials, ‘enclosed’ resources, cultural assumptions)
-What does it need? (power, space, time)
Posted by: b real | Jul 7 2007 4:55 utc | 42
Wrt to the original topic of the post, the question of what is mainly responsible for the decline of US popularity abroad, I’d have to side with B. US foreign policy since the turn of last century, in one hand the bible in the other a gun, has been a constant source of anguish for countless people on this planet, with the Bush Admin being simply the latest fashion in US imperialist wear. Not an entirely new trend, actually a bit more like the 80’s retro.
The widespread introduction of the www certainly is an important factor in the change of global opinions on US esteem. It provides the paparazzi photos of an uncombed USA getting out of bed in the morning before it puts its NYT or WaPo print media make-up on. Without it I wouldn’t be able to read this blog and its valuable writership, I wouldn’t be able to send an e-mail to my friends overseas sharing with them within an instant the latest piece of puzzle in the bigger picture I think to have stumbled across. In the category of eye openers, the www would have to be near the very top.
However, although it is a very powerful device in the hands of people who want to look and think outside the square, the following three points illustrate just how relative this power is. Firstly, as quickly as the internet was introduced it could also be switched off again (I believe one of Uncle $cam’s links was to this effect a while ago). If it will become too inconvenient for the Almighties, that’s it, shut the god damn thing down.
Secondly, the www has been around now say for nearly ten years, it certainly was around for the last two US elections (or Australia for that matter), and what did it get us? Bush (kind of) and Howard were elected and Re-elected (!!!!!).
And thirdly, despite the inconvenience the web’s represents with its growing threat to the near total media domination of the Capital and its puppet governments, the www is still up and running, meaning that the Cheneys of this world still perceive its existence as more of an advantage than a risk to their power. “Know your enemy” is the motto, and the www is the perfect tool to keep tabs on people (Echelon etc), track movements and sentiments within the masses, and again thanx to its associates in the msm and their major web presence, use it to counter any criticism with on-line spin and other red herrings. In other words, we wouldn’t have the free web as we know it if it wouldn’t be in the ruling elite’s best interest.
On the other hand, Glenn is also right to a point with his observation, Bush II and his administration of blood thirsty gargoyles are by no means a zero factor in this context, their blatant and shamelessly overt crimes have tipped the scale for many people towards dislike. What gets me though is that although that now, with the web’s information freedom and Bush’s in the face war crimes and human rights abuses, even blind Freddy and his dog can see how corrupt and war profiteering the Bush regime really is, but still the apparently so Bush critical people of Germany, England, France and so on all elect governments who are on rather friendly terms with his murderous government. Zarkozy, Merkel, Blair. Me wonders, just how meaningful are such surveys about US or GWB’s popularity, if when it comes down to it, national governments are elected which are in almost full support of US hegemony? Warme Luft, nix weiter.
Re #26 daveinboca’s “… the rest of the world is less “liberal” than the US….,” you made me laugh. This threat is about public perception of US foreign, not domestic, policies, and your comment therefore slightly OT, here are my thoughts on your argument. There is nothing liberating in a bullet through one’s head, or an unexploded cluster-bomblet found by a child playing in Iraqi fields. Quite contrary, depleted uranium ammunition and total destruction of essential services infrastructure ensure a long term environment in which the word “liberal” means jack.
I am not exactly sure how you define “liberal”, from your writing I assume it means favouring the idea that everyone everywhere can own a semi-automatic rifle or something along those lines, but in terms of state – citizen relationship in general, the US appears to be in some respect about as bad as some of the communist countries you mentioned. Ask a Cuban if his government allows him to live in the US, and then ask an US American if his gov allows him to live in Cuba. Pol Pot’s men tortured, George Bush’s men torture. The Patriot Act passed in the US is nothing short of the stunts the STASI (State Security Services in the former socialist East Germany) pulled. The NSA is listening in, reading the citizens e-mails. You get arrested for wearing a war protest t-shirt, get fired for not believing in God, as a coloured person face racial discrimination, get finger printed as a foreign national upon entry, and so on. When in the US allegedly independent court judges get fired for not matching a particular political profile, then that is just about what would happen in China. GOP or Chinese National Peoples Party, in many respects not a great deal of difference really. And funny enough, whilst in communist China they seem to be granting slowly but surely more liberties to the people, in the US it’s the other way round. How many laws have been passed lately in the US that granted liberties to the people instead of restricting them?
Posted by: Juan Moment | Jul 7 2007 5:33 utc | 44
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