Karl Kraus was known to have said (naughty man): "psychoanalysis is the mental illness it purports to cure."As you know, my long (probably too long) experience in Italy has opened mine eyes to the aberration that is anti-Americanism. I can thus paraphrase that bad boy Karl and say: "anti-Americanism is the mental illness it purports to cure." How is that?
Anti-Americanism is a mental illness, in the sense that it is a thoroughgoing, systematic structure held up not by reality but by irrational, private needs. Its equivalence with its "enemy" is shown by the fact that its impulse is aggression, destructiveness, the very impulse it accuses Americans of. In other words, anti-Americanism is hatred and the consequent need to destroy.
How bad was this bad boy? Another quote: "The trouble with Germans is not that they fire shells, but that they engrave them with quotations from Kant." The Eggplant laughed its head off when it read this, being a former philosophy student.
