I’m not pro-American because there are a lot of things in the America of today that I dislike and that I’m very strongly against. First of all: the war in Iraq, which I opposed from the first day. I thought it was a terrible mistake, a terrible political mistake. Also, as my friend Peter Schneider just said, you don’t fight antidemocratic movements with antidemocratic means. The status of the prisoners in Guantánamo, for instance, is a scandal. It’s a shame for the Bush Administration. You cannot be pro-American when America is the country of death penalty—this relic of barbarism does not belong to the culture of America. There are many reasons that I feel offended to be considered pro-American. What I’m saying is something else. I’m anti-anti-American, and for a very simple reason: I know as a French intellectual what anti-Americanism is because French intellectuals invented it eighty years ago. But not we, a part of us: the fascist extreme rightist French intellectuals in the ’20s, in the ’30s.

In their minds, America was a nightmare. It was Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s social contract: people gathering, coming from everywhere, and deciding “Okay, we make a nation.” The French extreme right wanted nationhood rooted in race, blood, common ground, and so on. This idea of people of various identities coming from everywhere without common identity, deciding to form a nation, was an insult, a scandal for them. And right or wrong, they found the embodiment of their nightmare in America. And this is true not only in Europe. I traveled a little during these last years in Asia, in Africa, in many parts of the world, and I often saw that this anti-Americanism was a magnet for the worst hatred of democracy, hatred of freedom of spirit, hatred of the bare faces of women, hatred of an idealistic nightmare of America. I am very much anti-anti-American.