[First published March 12, 2005 by the Yorkshire Post. Copyright Pulford Media Ltd. This article may not be reprinted or distributed either electronically or on hard copy without permission]

The United States was founded to promote the ideals of liberty and dignity, yet is loathed as a tyrant by much of the world. CEDRIC PULFORD, author of a new book, Siren Society: America v The World, argues that the country deserves its bad reputation

I WAS at the US embassy in 1968, the year when Vietnam protesters battled with police. Except that, immune to the political turmoil, I was applying to go to America as an immigrant.

In February 2003 I was among the million-plus marchers in London protesting at another of America’s wars.

Why the change? In the years between I had come to realise that it really is “America v the world” – the subtitle of my book, Siren Society. In this I ask how a country founded on the idea of liberty and dignity has come to be loathed by much of the world.

In Britain, loathing for the United States is an issue that joins the far left with the double-dyed right, and as those marchers showed it reaches more widely below the surface

At the political level, however, Britain is America’s most zealous ally, and is caught in the backwash of opposition to America. This month the government responded to the threat of Islamist terror by forcing the Prevention of Terrorism Act through Parliament. It allows British citizens to be deprived of liberty indefinitely without charge or trial.

The United States has a military presence in 153 countries, including of course our own. Hardly promising for the rest of the world. Then there is the US habit of intervening in others’ affairs. No-one likes to be free at the point of a gun. This habit reaches back into the 19th century. Since 1890 military interventions have been running at the astonishing rate of more than one a year (including within the United States and American dependencies), according to findings cited by William Blum in Rogue State (Zed Books).

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall interventions have increased to 2.0 a year, suggesting that an unconstrained United States is even more likely to do as it pleases.

America likes to cloak its activities with internationalism. Tony Blair’s greatest contribution to the US cause in Iraq is the C (for coalition) word.
However, America doesn’t like to submit itself to international institutions. US troops don’t serve under the command of other nations although it constantly expects this of others. It has declined to join two of the most important accords of recent times - the International Criminal Court and the Kyoto climate change treaty. Arrogance like this is another reason why the United States is so disliked by so many.

At the other end of the scale, American braggadocio produces irritations like the refusal of many of its citizens to say so much as “good morning” in a foreign language or the White House demand that Buckingham Palace should reinforce its roof during President Bush’s visit (in case of missile attack).

The US veneration of free speech often means the freedom to give offence, as with this “aren’t the natives hopeless?” type of remark from an American expatriate in London: “When I first moved here, nine years ago, London was a drab place. To get anyone to do anything took forever.”

My three years in America were happy ones, but I never came to terms with the ostentatious, flag-waving patriotism. This too easily turns into inwardness and self-regard – the American problem, and hence the world’s.

The US and its boosters like to say that America is making the world free. But true freedom consists of finding one’s own way. For all its surface, siren-like appeal, a society based on rampant capitalism, wholesale privatisation and a culture that eschews overt sexuality but condones where it doesn’t glorify violence isn’t the only way.

America’s urge to remake the planet in its own image impacts most harshly on the Third World. Mired in debt, these countries have little choice but to accept the prescriptions of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank as the price of financial support and debt relief. Even taking US rhetoric at face value, tough prescriptions such as an end to tariff barriers and state support for industries are premature for less developed economies: they are like exposing a stripling tree to a gale.

Almost as much anguish in the Third World is caused by bio-piracy carried out under the World Trade Organisation’s trade related intellectual property agreement (TRIPS). This allows researchers, with American corporations and universities to the fore, to take out patents on the natural processes of trees and plants.

The controversy has focused on the neem tree, India’s ancient “tree of life”. On this tree alone Western interests have reportedly taken out more than 70 patents.

Asian and African farmers may not know a patent but they know a pirate.
They face with disbelief the prospect that they will have to pay for activities that have been carried out for generations.

Meanwhile, Britain’s role is that of the “useful idiot”. Tony Blair is known in Continental Europe as the Poodle, but he is only the poodle in place at the time. Any other prime minister under the present dispensation would have acted the same. It’s Trident submarines and the intelligence services, ain’t it? Both depend on American support.

We need, however, a new dispensation in which we remove or reduce these macho symbols. Other nations get along just fine without them.

One of my surprises in writing Siren Society was to discover how much sovereignty the UK has abdicated to the United States. An example is the arrest of veteran campaigner Lindis Percy at Mildenhall in 1996. The British government confirmed that under the Visiting Forces Act – still in place – US military police were within their rights to arrest Ms Percy. Some may say she had it coming, but it certainly matters that foreigners have the power to arrest British citizens on British soil.

The Blair government added another layer of enormity with the unequal Extradition Act of 2003. This allows Britons to be extradited to the United States without a prima facie case having been made out, although the same does not apply in reverse. So far this has netted no terrorists but three bankers caught up in the Enron scandal.

Senator George Mitchell was brought in to broker the Good Friday Agreement. Six years later, the Americans are still there. We should ask why it is always the Americans who are the honest brokers in the world’s trouble spots. It is impossible to imagine the US government being as complaisant if a Briton was brought in to mediate between Washington and Native Americans. Reciprocity is usually a good test of rightness.

Perhaps that symbolises the world’s difficulties with America. The traffic is all one way, and we aren’t on board.

Siren Society: America v the World, by Cedric Pulford. Ituri Publications, ISBN 0953643069. Paperback, £7.50. Also as a pdf direct from Ituri, £5

Cedric Pulford is a freelance journalist and author who has worked in America and across the Third World. He was educated at Oxford University, and was on the staff of the Yorkshire Post, where he was a sub-editor and feature writer, and the Guardian in London.

In America, he served on the Cleveland Plain Dealer and also took a postgraduate degree in political science at Case Western Reserve University

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