By George Monbiot, Outlook India
Something unprecedented will happen in Britain this week. An American president will arrive here and be greeted not by cheering crowds but by howls of execration. The protests in London against George Bush are likely to be the biggest Britain has seen since the anti-war marches in February. The people of the United States will be deeply shocked to see how the image of their government has changed.
Those of us who oppose George Bush's policies are often accused of being "anti-American". It's an odd charge. No one suggests that people who don't like Tony Blair are "anti-British". It seems to be an attempt to discredit us by suggesting that we are motivated not by reasonable political objections, but by an old and visceral contempt for an "upstart nation".
But perhaps the gravest of the charges we can lay against George Bush is that he is himself an anti-American. His style of government stands at odds with everything we were led to believe the United States of America represents. There is first the question of his election. The evidence that the electoral roll in Florida was rigged in order to exclude black voters appears to be compelling. The conduct of his party both during and after that election appears to be a grotesque insult to the nation which invented modern, Jacksonian democracy.
Then there is his assault upon civil liberties. The Patriot Act he pushed through Congress erodes many of the freedoms the American constitution appears to guarantee. In the offshore prison camp of Guantanamo Bay, Bush appears to have built his own Bastille, in which people are jailed indefinitely without charge or trial. George Washington and Thomas Paine must be turning in their graves.
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