Letter to ‘Ugly Americans’ in The Alternative Media

Prime Minister Harold Wilson. Photograph Allan Warren Public Domain

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by Richard Steinhardt

Americans in the alternative media and catastrophisers in Europe, both on the left and on the right, have been anything but fair in their criticism of Europe and European nations. If our countries’ leadership behaves like proxy compradors, it is because you have made them in your image, just as you did in Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere. Only Harold Wilson and De Gaulle had the guts to refuse to go into Vietnam with you, and Harold Wilson was nearly overthrown in a very British coup, allegedly led by Mountbatten, who had tanks sent to Heathrow Airport as a threat.

Your so-called multipolar progressive claims that Europe is disintegrating are utter nonsense. You do not know Europe. You have not lived here properly, but you blather on about it endlessly as if you did know.

Frankly, your stances on Europe are racist, xenophobic, and anti-migrant to such a degree that even those of you who are on the left in the USA in the alternative media who advocate for a multipolar world end up sounding like National Socialists or fascists.

In other words, if Europe was an empire and Europe has accepted migrants from that former empire (people who have been coming here for over a hundred years or more), then what we have is an evolving Europe. The movement of people from the Caribbean, South Asia, Africa, and the Maghreb into Britain, France, Spain and other European countries is not a ‘shock’ to European societies, but the gradual continuation of a relationship Europe initiated.

The first generation struggles and works hard to find a place in the new society, but the second and third generations of migrants are not “outside” British society looking in; they are products of it. Migration is not a loss for the UK it is a gain. Soon all the people who come here go through our education system and become part of our society. I am one of them. My wife is one of them, and so are many others. How dare you say, you ugly Americans living in a country where you genocided the natives and enslaved millions, that I am not English, or that my wife is not English, that my children are not English, and that we do not have a right to live here. Frankly, you can get lost.

The Reality of Life in London

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So let us just do a rundown. Speaking from decades of experience as an intelligent observant human being who has travelled to and lived in many countries, I can vouch for my city. I can walk through almost any part of London without any fear of people attacking me with a knife, a gun, or anything else. The only homeless people I see are very few, and those people tend to be alcoholics, drug addicts, people who have run away from abusive homes, or people who have come here from Romania and Eastern European countries who do not have a place to stay. And we do try to look after them. We have parks, free museums, and facilities. We have pensions, we have a free National Health Service, and on the whole, for all our problems, we have a happy, integrated society with a massive transport infrastructure.

All this talk about going to Moscow and seeing something wonderfully built up with clean streets, or going to China, which looks like a flamboyant toy store, misses the point. When you walk through London, you walk through layers and layers of history that we have conserved. You walk through park after park, past café after café, restaurant after restaurant, historical place after historical place. Compare that with Moscow and you cannot, because it is beyond comparison. London is a far greater city than Moscow or Beijing. And what respect do the Chinese have for their own culture when they build over it with towers of glass and steel?

British Innovation and Civic Strength

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In London, we have around forty higher education institutions, most of which rank among the best in the world. Do you think the fact that Londoners, as they have done since the time the city was founded by the Romans, come from different backgrounds is a disadvantage? Do you think it was a disadvantage in the time of empire? Do you think it is a disadvantage in terms of geopolitics?

Yes, I know about the money going to Ukraine, the more expensive energy, the disinvestment that is a problem for us, and the cost of housing. Yes, I could tell you about all our problems. But you know what? For all our problems, relative to many countries, especially yours, we are doing just fine. Rumours of our death are exaggerated. And those of you who consider yourselves to be on the left yet talk about the destruction of European society can sling your hook.

Look at all the innovation that has come out of Britain. Peter Drucker said in the nineties that if we had greater productivity of knowledge in the UK, we would still be a formidable superpower. Well, we are still innovators. We are still innovating. We are still researching. The vaccine for Covid came out of Oxford (the one that actually was trialled properly). And we have committed ourselves to being carbon neutral because we are trying to develop alternative forms of energy. We are trying to develop more civilised forms of society. We are trying to stop hate speech. We are not encouraging it. You do encourage it: you and Galloway in his double discourse with people like Tucker Carlson. Galloway the left figure performing anti-imperialism acceptable to a right-wing American audience

You can go anywhere as a hungry person or as someone without a job in the UK and you can find support. There are no tent cities in the UK, no drugged-up zombie encampments as there are in your cruel society. You can get help from many different places as well as from the government. You can get retraining. You can get free education to retrain and get a job in all kinds of areas, because we are a civilised country. That is why.

Whoever is in charge doesn’t change that, whether it is a dangerous clown like Boris Johnson or whoever else. Yes, okay, we can be ashamed of the deals our leaders make with the devil. But who is the devil? It is US capitalism and the rootless City of London and the armaments industry. We can be ashamed of lots of things in this country. But at root, the fabric of our society, which has developed over millennia, is strong and intact. When you spout rubbish about how it isn’t from across the Atlantic, all you do is make British people with an ounce of intelligence scratch their heads. What silly pictures you paint in your imagination!

In this country, we are kind and helpful to each other. And if you see a small bunch of haters walking around with black masks (possibly paid for and egged on by someone like the Daily Mail to do so) in some tiny seaside town, that does not represent almost seventy million of us. Do not pretend it does. Tread carefully!

National Resilience and European Sovereignty

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You are supposed to be in the alternative media giving objective views on what is going on. Why don’t you damn well come here and find out what it is like to be living in Great Britain before you cast aspersions and start talking about how we and Europe are on the decline? We are not on the decline! We are growing and changing for the better. We have the sea, we have oil, we have rain and greenness. We have links with everyone around the world. We have culture. And if we do not have a massive military, so what? Ugly Americans seem to like macho posture contests. Is it a bad thing that we have a small military? Most of us don’t think so. A small military is not a symptom of decline; it is a choice.

So our government is doing things in Ukraine and doing things in Israel because it does not have a spine and it has caved in to our American overlords, not because it wants to. Nobody here for a moment wants to support the murderous Israelis apart from the ultra-right and a few people lost in the psychodrama of family histories. Nobody does. We do this nonsense because our arm is being twisted, because you share intelligence with us, and because there are all sorts of reasons and ways in which the United States could make life difficult for the UK if we do not. That is why we help you. We do the least we can because we are forced to, otherwise US corporate capitalism will make sure there are consequences for us. That’s the reality Burnham faces. Otherwise, you will short our government bonds, call the IMF dogs in, all the standard ploys.

And when it comes to Ukraine, on the one hand, we have fallen into the American trap and we are acting as a US proxy in the war to dismember the Russian Federation. But on the other hand, since the beginning of the foundation of Europe, as a group, a community of nations, we have always wanted our own foreign policy, our own defence, and our independence. But from whom? Not just from the Russians, but from you: the USA, who in the time of the Cold War sited 100 military bases in our country, making us a prime target of the Soviets. And now you want to do this again!

Britain is growing and changing, not declining; its government’s complicity in Ukraine and Israel is coerced by American capitalism’s instruments of leverage, not chosen by its people; and the alternative media, which pronounces without observing, has mistaken a hostage for a collaborator

Protests and the Future of European Society

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And as for the riots that we have had in Europe recently, well, we had revolutions in 1848. We had the Paris uprising in 1968. We have had plenty of revolutions and upheavals here, and they have all been with one purpose: setting something right that was wrong. When Thatcher tried to introduce her Poll Tax she was stopped because people protested against it. A society that never protests is not stable; it is stagnant. A society that protests is one that has a population that believes society can be fixed.

If people demonstrate against neoliberalism, Macron, Merz, and all the rest of that pile of steaming neocon garbage, and protest against the neocons in our society, the Atlanticists, the warmongers, and the bought-off compradors in your pocket, then what is wrong with that? There is nothing wrong with that. The demonstrations do not show the fabric of our society being destroyed; they show the fabric of our society in the process of being mended.

If you imagine you are on the left, or if you even imagine that you have an ounce of objectivity about what is going on in Europe, then you would understand that European and British society is astoundingly resilient.

Instead, look at what you are doing in the alternative media in the USA: attacking Europe, telling tall stories about the Rothschilds and the City of London, and gaslighting the ordinary people of this continent. Europe is not its neocon comprador elites, and you know it. But because you come from the USA, your bread is buttered that way. Your dirty little secret is that you would not mind a regional nuclear war in Europe because, in part, you have civilisational envy, and in part, you want to escape: along with your neocon ‘opponents’ and the rest of your true patriotic American nationalists on the other side of the ocean, the consequences of wars your elites provoked, not ours.

To mask this, you invite ridiculous conspiracy theorists onto your programmes: German revanchists from the Schiller Institute, racist, homophobic nationalist Russians like Andrei Martyanov and Stanislav Krapivnik (all deeply anti-communist), former City traders, like Patrick Henningson, stuffed full of conspiracy theories, and a bevy of former CIA agents. There is no such thing as ex-CIA; for goodness’ sake, Joe Kent! You even invite repentant ultra-nationalist war criminals like Scott Ritter who wish for the destruction of Europe onto your programmes to gloat about it.

You do all this because you can offer no real, honest, cold-blooded critique of global corporate capitalism headed up by your own capitalist class without deflecting blame onto Europe and the UK and gaslighting our whole continent of 550 million people.

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Richard Steinhardt is a committed socialist and a radical humanist and has published in the Morning Star and a variety of other communist and socialist publications. He believes that human conscience and understanding should always precede dogma and deterministic formulas posturing as ‘social science’.