Trip Report:
Minsk, Belorussia

Coming to Minsk brought back memories from my childhood after the second world war: memories of suffering from the cold, the gusting wind, the freezing snow. … It was 2 degrees Celsius below zero in Minsk, and I was told that this was warm for the season: it sometimes gets down to 30 degrees Celsius below zero.

In such weather I had no desire to get out and visit anything. So at night I watched lots of television. And an insight came to me.

Before I left home for this trip, American newspapers were criticizing Ms. Karen Hughes, who was President Bush’s director for public diplomacy, claiming that she had failed to project a positive image of the United States. Furthermore, the papers said, no one has ever really succeeded in this job, and the United States has done a terrible job in promoting its image.

Why does America have such a negative image? Is it that the people assigned to promote a good image are incompetent, or is something else involved? Granted, we are engaged in an unpopular war – but could there be more to it? How was this terrible image created?

As I was surfing the television channels in Minsk, I noticed something I have noticed all over the world: at least sixty percent of what is being broadcast abroad is American movies for television, either dubbed or with subtitles. Channel after channel, I saw American movies made for TV, filled with lots of sex, promiscuity, infidelity and insensitive violence. Television programs also project a strong attitude of anti-authority: anti-establishment as well as anti-parent.

Have you ever seen America applauded or appreciated on an American television show? In Eastern Europe, authority is respected. They broadcast sing-alongs in which they extol the virtues of their country. They are proud of their heritage, their flag, their national costume. In America, in contrast, we allow people to burn the flag. Our TV series “Married with Children,” which I have seen on TV in at least a dozen countries, is not always understood as a parody. Abroad, it looks like the real thing. And what about “Desperate Housewives” and “Sex and the City”? Think about the values they seem to accept as normal and acceptable.

And the image we project goes beyond TV. Look at our movies. We present our elected leaders as corrupt and/or incompetent, and constantly portray corruption inside the CIA, the FBI, and the White House.

We are sending the world a specific image of America, on television and in movie houses. The world’s view of America comes from Hollywood – the best machine for projecting images in the world.

These media convey an image of America that must scare other cultures, because it can impact their own families. Imagine how people in other countries must perceive some of these programs, especially those cultures where the male is a dominant figure. A male in a male-dominated culture must feel threatened by American culture to the point that he is willing to die, or send someone else to die, to stop what he considers our “satanic culture” from spreading to his country.

And it gave me another insight. I watch Israeli television and I can only imagine how a Moslem must feel: he sees homosexuals and lesbians starring in lots of shows, women dominating and screaming at their husbands, and children rejecting the authority of their parents. In a Moslem’s eyes, Israel is not only a country that displaced the Palestinians. It is not only perceived as a base of American military imperialism. It is a cultural threat to the values of the region – because the values broadcast by Israeli TV resemble those of American broadcast media, and Israeli television broadcasts across borders. It is hardly strange that Israel looks alien and culturally threatening to its neighbors.

One more point: When I watch the credits of these TV shows, I see many Jewish names, which embarrasses and scares me. When will the backlash happen? When will latent anti-Semitic forces come out into the open and say, “The Jews are ruining our children, our way of life.” Sometimes, something positive does squeeze through. In my travels, people have told me how impressed they were that Nixon was forced to resign because he lied and violated the Constitution that he’d sworn to defend. That happens only in America, they tell me. And when Al Gore conceded to Bush in the 2000 Presidential election – an election that raised questions about whether the votes had been counted accurately – the people I talked to around the world were moved by how conscientiously and automatically we abide by the rule of law. In other countries, there would have been riots or even a civil war.

I watched from my hotel in Berlin the YouTube debate among the Republican presidential candidates. I could not imagine such a civilized debate taking place anywhere else in the world. In Serbia, a Serbian Romney would have punched a Serbian Giuliani’s nose, right then and there, when Giuliani accused Romney of giving illegal aliens sanctuary at his governor’s mansion. But in America, after the debate the two men actually shook hands. Unbelievable. You could not have seen this in Israel or Mexico or Greece or Italy, or anywhere else in the world for that matter. Americans know how to disagree without being disagreeable. Watch, in comparison, a political debate on Israeli television. You cannot even understand a word of what is being said, because they all talk at the same time and raise their voices to out-shout each other.

Why don’t we promote our positive culture, our democratic system: not just how it works mechanistically but as a cultural phenomenon?

The cultural war is on, and the TV programming and movies are pouring oil on the fire instead of promoting coexistence and common values.