If you don't understand this, then there is no hope for you...

I've posted here on what I've called the Culture of Deception.

This is the WSJ online underscores my thesis, that Anti-Americanism is by far less the result of American policies as much more the result of concerted action aimed at isolating the US and making US foreign policy as difficult as possible.

It's not that the world hates us: it doesn't. The world is filed with countries who keep their citizens, by one way or another, under control (not necessarily police states: look at Brazilian overregulation of businesses, for example, or Italian taxation policies), while the US remains the land of opportunity.

Not guarantee, but opportunity. There are simply too many success stories to deny this: it's not the mythical dishwasher-to-millionaire story, but rather the ambitious immigrant who ends up with the two-car garage and kids in college. The American middle-class life style is the most subversive, the most dangerous life style in the world to those who seek to control and manipulate.

That's what drives Anti-Americanism today, after the collapse of the facade of communism and its inevitability of history. It's always been about control and manipulation, always: be it Chavez in Venezuala, Castro in Cuba, or Putin in Russia. The mindset of the old KGB and its modern-day successors and wanna-bes lives on.

The real tragedy is that you have an entire generation of politicians in the US who also subscribe to this, people who have betrayed their own history and see the world as something to be controlled and manipulated to prevent opportunity, preferring instead to inculcate ignorance and systematic denial of what makes America great.

They're called Democrats.

Here are two quotes from someone who knows what the story really is, from the link given above:

Sowing the seeds of anti-Americanism by discrediting the American president was one of the main tasks of the Soviet-bloc intelligence community during the years I worked at its top levels. This same strategy is at work today, but it is regarded as bad manners to point out the Soviet parallels. For communists, only the leader counted, no matter the country, friend or foe. At home, they deified their own ruler--as to a certain extent still holds true in Russia. Abroad, they asserted that a fish starts smelling from the head, and they did everything in their power to make the head of the Free World stink.

and:

Unfortunately, partisans today have taken a page from the old Soviet playbook. At the 2004 Democratic National Convention, for example, Bush critics continued our mud-slinging at America's commander in chief. One speaker, Martin O'Malley, now governor of Maryland, had earlier in the summer stated he was more worried about the actions of the Bush administration than about al Qaeda. On another occasion, retired four-star general Wesley Clark gave Michael Moore a platform to denounce the American commander in chief as a "deserter." And visitors to the national chairman of the Democratic Party had to step across a doormat depicting the American president surrounded by the words, "Give Bush the Boot."

Now, the point is this: that the war in Iraq is America's war, not that of Bush or the "Neocons". Ignore this at your peril: if you do not understand that, then there is no hope for you.

Oh, and a PS: that the Left wants to inculcate ignorance is the only way to understand modern education, with its emphasis on feel-good issues and a lack of training in hard sciences and reasoning.