HIDDEN UNITIES Alternative Strategic Divisions (Please see reply #1) (Food for thought)

This study was created for The Center For Emerging Threats and Opportunities HIDDEN UNITIES Alternative Strategic Divisions By Ralph Peters
Note: The purpose of this study is to provoke innovative thought in readers, and to help strategists and planners consider the world from a fresh vantage point. It does not pretend to be definitive; rather, this paper is experimental and unconstrained, meant as a starting point for discussion and a foundation for further critical elaboration by others.
It is intended to be challenged, rather than simply accepted, in the hope that doing so will force critics to examine their own long-standing views anew and to help uncover not only unsuspected threats, but previously-unnoticed opportunities, as well.

A More Unified World Than We Know Perhaps the finest painting of a prize fight hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Titled “Both Members of the Club,” the work is by the American painter George Bellows. The painting shows two old-fashioned sluggers in poses of ferocious contact, figures that are nearly identical, pounding each other to a pulp.
Both the painting and its title might serve as a perfect metaphor for the long enduring and now renewed violence between Muslim countries and those that are, by heredity, Christian or Jewish or Judeo-Christian.

Everybody in the fight is a member of the same club: The grand and hyper-violent club of monotheist cultures. The vast territory between Ireland in the west and Afghanistan in the east, between Scandinavia in the north and the long transition zone of the southern Sahara, is one “club,” a single strategic zone (North America is an adjunct to it, but increasingly separate from this macro-region).
The countless wars within those boundaries all have been family feuds within the dynamic and long-expansive domain of monotheism. Centered historically on the Eastern Mediterranean, this is a single civilization that has mutated, along its expanded frontiers, into a wide range of cultures that may claim, in some respects, to be civilizations in their own right.
But the distinctive characteristic of this there-is-only-one-god strategic region has been its aggressiveness, both toward other “members of the club” and toward other civilizations. This historical predisposition to conquer and convert shapes the behavior even of those members of this vast community who have turned their back on active religion, as is the case with the states of northern Europe.
Europe’s superficial pacifism of the moment lacks only the right provocation, the right historical circumstance, to turn again to violence directed at non-Europeans. One of the worst mistakes today’s strategic analysts make is to assume that, since Europe is so piously anti-military and “soft” today, it will remain so tomorrow.
This is the same assumption that the Japanese made about the United States six decades ago, and which Osama bin Laden made about America more recently. Violence toward other cultures is deeply—ineradicably—embedded in the European branches of monotheist civilization. It is only a matter of when the violence will re-emerge, what form it will take, and whether that violence will prove antithetical to U.S. values and interests.
The Europeans who pretend to the moral high ground today are the heirs of those Europeans who, in 1912, insisted that the continent’s nations were too civilized ever to make war on one another again.

While we may recognize, at least in less-controversial historical terms, that both Christianity and Islam have been fierce, messianic, driven faiths, the long sweep of history has obscured the similar nature of the other great monotheist religion, Judaism.
Long strategically dormant, Judaism has returned as a strategic factor with a vengeance in the Middle East, where, despite Israel’s veneer of secularization, the deeper struggle remains one between two monotheist faiths—which are, by their essential nature, incapable of peaceful co-existence. We tend to view Judaism as a passive faith suddenly converted to defensive violence by the Holocaust, but this is a short-sighted reading of history:
All monotheist religions produce cultures that are furiously aggressive and missionary. Even after their societies secularize, the mindset lingers. Only the powerlessness of Jewish communities scattered in the Diaspora tempered their ingrained impulse to conquer and convert.
Judaism hasn’t re-imagined itself in Israel; rather, it has rejoined the club from which centuries of powerlessness had excluded it.
Prior to the Roman destruction of the Jewish state, whenever Jewish political entities were not subjugated by intrusive empires, they behaved very aggressively, indeed, toward their neighbors—as Israel has done in our lifetimes (and, of course, as its monotheist, Islamic neighbors do toward Israel, less rationally and far more vindictively). Each of the three great monotheist religions has a history of atrocity, if one goes back far enough. It appears to be only a matter of who held power when.
Today, “Western” cultures, Christian, Judeo-Christian and Jewish, behave more humanely, as a rule, than do Muslim cultures. But that is, at least partly, because we are so powerful and wealthy we can afford this indulgence. Much of the Islamic world is in the throes of a complex, multi-layered, psychologically-devastating crisis.
And, when in crisis, monotheist cultures default to collective violence toward non-believers, whether in their midst or abroad. The United States (and Canada), with its uniquely inter-mingled society, is in the least danger of turning on its minorities.
But any member of a religious or ethnic minority in Europe had best be doing all he or she can to prop up the wealth and social accord of the state and the rule of law. Europe does not, will not and cannot assimilate immigrant communities from other cultures. While we should not exaggerate the power of current rightward trends in the European political environment (the danger is not short-term, unless a very great provocation occurs, such as a cataclysmic terrorist act), in the long term, European societies may become, at best, cellular and informally segregated.
At worst, we may see the rigorous, even violent, exclusion of unassimilated minorities and the establishment of a buffer zone, with puppet regimes that serve Europe’s security needs, along the Mediterranean littoral. Without drawing any premature conclusions, Americans would be foolish not to recognize that Europe is far more volatile than those endless, soporific pronouncements from Brussels would have it.

All cultures generated by only-one-god religions—Christian, Muslim or Jewish—believe in one path to the truth. The debate—often bloody--is over which path is best, not over the equivalent value of alternate paths. These are all-or-nothing cultures.
This “one true path” mentality compels them to inflict their vision of both religious and secular order on others. Even now, when Europe is “de-religioned,” by and large, and the United States would find it inconceivable to launch an overt religious crusade, this our-way-is-the-only-way subconsciously informs our actions.
We still want things our way, and cannot really accept that the differing ways of others have full validity; rather, we assume that they are only less-developed and must, eventually, learn our way of doing things and come to appreciate that our approach is the only right approach. Our desire to create democracies and market economies abroad, laudable though such systems may be, is an inheritance from 19thcentury missionaries yearning to convert the “heathen Chinese” or the African tribesman.
Our most bellicose armchair strategists make much of supposed Chinese aggressiveness, but, to date, no Chinese government has insisted that the United States or anyone else adopt Chinese behaviors, social views, governmental forms and business practices: Our way may, indeed, be for the good of all, but the alacrity with which we insist on it is unmistakably intolerant and close-minded missionary behavior. We are programmed to insist.
The all-or-nothing nature of our current, post-modern war against terrorism is masked by diplomatic manners, and that, in turn, obscures the fundamental and fateful division between Judeo-Christian culture and Islamic culture today:
The historic break over the role of women in society. This is the one truly irreconcilable difference between “Western” societies and Middle-Eastern Islam. Although it may appear absurd to many a strategist, the current war against terror, and the recent fighting in Afghanistan, is, essentially, a war over women’s rights and women’s roles.
The alteration in women’s roles in the West is the most profound advance in human social history—more revolutionary even than the advent of democracy—and the most unsettling change to traditional societies. A male in a traditional Islamic society can more easily accept a monstrous dictator above him than a wife who insists on standing beside him.
Although Islam’s complaints about the West are couched in terms of sin and corruption, the real fear is of female freedom. The battle for hegemony between the great monotheist religions—the imposition of social order, when not religious practice—will continue to be the defining struggle of our time. It will wear a variety of disguises.
But it is a struggle between stubborn, self-righteous cultures, our own included. Our great advantage is that our own culture evolves constantly, and has not closed the door on change; still, we must be fair and note that no cultures except the monotheists are currently attempting to force their values on others beyond their borders, whether we speak of the terrorist’s brutal, oppressive version of Islam, or of our own belief in democracy and markets for all.
I do not suggest we are wrong in our prejudices, only that we must recognize them as prejudices if we want to understand the hostile reactions our proselytizing elicits from much of the world.
We imagine ourselves as a sort of strategic Santa Claus, bearing a sack full of better ways to do things, but much of the world sees a fire and brimstone preacher with a Big Mac in one hand and a precision-guided bomb in the other.

In the short through mid term, at least, violence will continue to erupt primarily from the self-destructive, humiliated Muslim territories, but, in the grand historical arc, it would be folly to imagine that today’s passive—when not pacifist—Europe will always remain so.
Europe has turned inward before and it remained so through much of the Middle Ages, only to look outward with a vengeance during its five-hundred-year colonial phase. And even the introverted Middle Ages produced the Crusades--so startling because they were a sudden, expansionist aberration during a period of strategic introspection.
Because Europe is passive today does not mean Europe will be passive against future threats—or even in the face of future opportunities. If we examine history objectively, Europe has been the least consistent, least predictable sub-region of the world, full of nasty surprises for everyone else. Europe is history’s manic-depressive.
Contrary to the popular wisdom, Europe is far less steady and dependable than the United States. While Europeans view themselves as the masters of the arts of civilization, their historical behavior has more closely resembled that of today’s soccer hooligans.

If we sweep our hand across the map, from the lands of the Celts to the extremes of Central Asia, we will not pass over a single people who have not, at one time or another, behaved with extreme aggression toward their neighbors and, in the European instance, toward the entire world.
In our anger at the savagery of Islamic terrorists and our disgust at the social orders in so many Middle Eastern states, we are best served by the cool-headed recognition that, for all its unacceptable brutality, Middle Eastern Islam is fighting a defensive battle against the overwhelming cultural superiority and practical power of the Judeo-Christian band of states and nations.
This recognition does not excuse terrorism, but may help us better understand it. Islamic terrorism is the violence of extreme desperation, symptomatic of the startling failure of Middle Eastern Islamic culture to compete with “the West” on a single productive front. Their failure is not our fault, but it is certainly our problem.
For all their documented violence, the Crusades are a red herring when invoked by Muslims to explain away their contemporary failures. Compared to a thousand years of Muslim attacks against and occupation of Europe’s borderlands, from the Iberian Peninsula to the gates of Vienna to the Crimean khanate—and the occupation of Greece, the “cradle” of Western civilization into the 19thcentury--the Crusades amounted to little more than a long weekend during which a loutish collection of European tourists behaved particularly badly.
Of course, the role of the Crusades in Islamic myth is far more important than the historical reality, but the critical point, at a time when the word “crusade” is so geo-politically loaded, is that these three monotheist religions have all produced crusader cultures (and Israel’s West Bank settlements should be viewed in this context), from Joshua leveling the walls of Jericho, to the early Muslims thrusting up into France, to British missionaries (and soldiers) in Africa, to Osama bin Laden.
Whatever our personal religious convictions, we would do well to recognize that, strategically, the exclusive nature of monotheist religions makes them particularly ferocious, messianic and…prone to crusading, no matter the name with which they cover it over.
Our current war against terror is a civil war on a very grand level, fought against irreconcilable brothers. In Cain and Abel country.

I may take the time to read the whole diatribe (that seems to be an appropriate description - in the good sense) but I have to say that on the basis of what is here,I see many parallels to the Unibomber Manifesto, obviously not in the subject matter, but in the manner of presentation.

These habits of thought and expression make reading somewhat tedious.

This is post-graduate level geo-political social history. Peters is a pretty smart dude who can write novels, op-ed pieces for the New York Post, and heavy stuff like this, tailored to his intended audience. I think this was targeted for the War College.

That's pretty harsh to compare Peters to the Unibomber.

I think you are right and I am gripped with regret for my remark.

Still, if I put two representative paragraphs up for stylistic comparison, I think you would agree that I can make my point.

The fact is that I agree with much of what Peters is saying. It's just his presentation that my comment was aimed at, not the substance.

This is actually a plea for religious persecution, since all the problems in the world are supposed to be due to montheistic religions.

This is nonsense.

First, even the most left wing athiest knows that it was non religious/athiestic communism that has killed 100 million people...and the pagan fascism of Hitler killed another 40 million people...

Second, it ignores the wars of China. China is not monotheistic. It isn't even theistic. Ever read chinese history? It's full of wars and rebellions and massacres. Ditto for Japanese history and Korean history

And then there is India. Of course, some of their recent "wars" were Islamic/Hindu. But there are lots of Hindu massacres of Muslims too...last time I looked, Hinduism is NOT a monotheistic religion...

And what about Africa? The present day massacres of Burundi/Ruanda/Congo are between tribes who are mixed Christian/pagan in religion...(much to the shame of Christians). And Christianity there is a new religion. What about the millions killed by Shaka Zulu? Or Matabele?

In other words, this guy has an agenda and changes the facts to suit his bigotry...

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