Being hated is no fun. Few of us are like those pantomime villains who glory in the hisses and boos of an audience. And few people hate being hated more than Americans. I wish I had a dollar for every time I've been asked the plaintive question: "Why do they hate us?" and another for each of the different answers I've heard. It's because of our foreign policy. It's because of their extremism. It's because of our arrogance. It's because of their inferiority complex. Americans really hate not knowing why they're hated.
The best explanation is in fact the simplest. Being hated is what happens to dominant empires. It comes - sometimes literally - with the territory. George Orwell knew the feeling. As a young man he served as an assistant police superintendent in British-run Burma, an experience he memorably described in his essay "Shooting an Elephant". Called upon to kill a rogue pachyderm that had run amok, Orwell was suddenly aware "of the watchful yellow faces behind" him:
"The sole thought in my mind was that if anything went wrong those two thousand Burmans would see me pursued, caught, trampled on and reduced to a grinning corpse like that Indian up the hill. And if that happened it was quite probable that some of them would laugh."
Eric Blair, as Orwell was known then, could scarcely have been better prepared for his role as a colonial official. Born in Bengal, the son of a colonial civil servant, he had been educated at Eton, where boys learn not to worry much about being hated. Yet even he found the resentment of the natives hard to bear: "In the end the sneering... faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves ... [It] was perplexing and upsetting."
That's a feeling American soldiers in Baghdad must know pretty well. How does that old Randy Newman song go? "No one likes us - I don't know why. / We may not be perfect, but heaven knows we try."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3637925/Hatred-of-America-unites-the-world.html
