Posted on 08/03/2004 3:27:53 AM PDT by ejdrapes
Driven by history and hate: Islam's holy warriors It Is hard to think of anything positive to have come out of the assault on the West by revolutionary Islam. Perhaps just one thing: more people read books about the Muslim world — its history, its beliefs, its cultures — than ever. That this is done in the spirit of “knowing our enemy” is unfortunate, but that is one way to increase human knowledge. One of the classics of 20th-century anthropology is Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, a flawed but still masterful analysis of Japanese culture, written during the Second World War as a commission from the US Government. The point of knowing one’s enemies is not just to acquire knowledge, but to draw the right conclusions. It was often assumed during the Pacific War that Japanese behaviour could be explained by the ancient warrior tradition, that Japanese culture itself, rather than a sequence of bad political decisions, based on constantly changing circumstances, at home and abroad, was to blame for Japan’s war against the West. One of the flaws in Benedict’s work is that she rather encouraged this way of thinking. This is why, after 1945, the Americans, during their occupation of Japan, sought to overhaul Japanese culture. Certain kabuki plays were forbidden, as were swordfight movies, as were pictures of Mount Fuji as a “feudal” icon. Transforming Muslim or Arab culture is not one of the objectives of the Anglo-American troops in Iraq. It would certainly be foolhardy, as well as exceedingly arrogant, to attempt any such thing. But it would be easy to conclude, nonetheless, from our reading of Bernard Lewis and others on Arab history and culture that radical Islamism bears a similar relationship to Arab or Muslim civilisation as Japanese militarism had to the samurai codes. Books such as Professor Lewis’s bestseller What Went Wrong? suggest that there is some deep historical flaw in Arab civilisation, a festering wound that must be understood before we can cauterise it, or at least stop it from doing us more harm. It follows from this line of analysis that the clash between Islamism and the West has been determined by history, is indeed an inevitable consequence of ancient tensions between the Islamic world and Christendom. It was Bernard Lewis, after all, who coined the phrase “clash of civilisations”. Even if one disagrees with this bleak determinism, there is much to be learnt from historical scholarship, of which Lewis is one of the masters. Islamism may be an extremist movement, far removed from the mainstream Muslim faith, but its rhetoric, its purist aims, its old hostilities, cannot be totally separated from the history of Islam, or the Middle East in general. Most rebellions in Arab history have been inspired by purist religious ideals. The desire to purge the world of barbarism and restore the rule of God is nothing new. Likewise, in order to make sense of Middle Eastern politics, we have to be aware of the effects of Western imperialism, of 19th and 20th-century attempts at nation-building, of ethnic, tribal and religious rivalries, and the radical secularism of such leaders as Kemal Atatürk and Reza Shah. What is needed, in other words, to understand the current revolution is local context. But this can be overdone. For not everything in Islamism is rooted in Islam or the Arab world. There is another, wider, way of understanding what we are up against, and that is to look at European history as well. Restoring the Caliphate is clearly an Islamist goal, but the hostile image of the West, conceived by holy warriors as soulless, decadent, rationalistic, rootless, money-grubbing and corrupting, is an old one that is embedded in European history as much as in the Middle East. It was held by the 19th-century Slavophile worshippers of the Russian soul, who opposed the “corrupted” Westernisers. The same image was applied to “rationalistic”, “soulless” France by German romantics in the Napoleonic age. This contrast between pure spirit and corrupt reason goes back many centuries, perhaps as far even as the fury of pious Jews against Godless, rootless Babylon. The idea, offered by a Taleban warrior to a Western reporter, that Americans are addicted to Coca- Cola, whereas the jihadis loved death, was shared by radical German nationalists in the early 20th century. They did not talk about Coca-Cola, but about Amerikanismus, or more quaintly, Komfortismus, the Western bourgeois addiction to physical comfort, to security, to money, to individual privacy, to the pursuit, in short, of personal happiness, enshrined in the US Constitution. This was contrasted by these same thinkers with German heroism, cultural authenticity, spirit, pure blood and native soil, and above all to the will of every German hero to sacrifice himself to the higher cause of Volk and fatherland. The First World War was described by these radicals literally as a war against the West. The title of a famous book, written by the eminent German sociologist Werner Sombart, tells the story: Merchants and Heroes. Merchants defined the West, that is Britain, the US and France, mongrel nations, corrupted by greed and contaminated by foreign blood. Between the world wars, when ethnic nationalism of this kind curdled into Fascism and Nazism, the fantasy of racial purity became increasingly murderous, and it had a direct influence on Arab radicals, who felt inspired by German hostility to the liberal West. The main corrupters of the West were, of course, the Jews, who had to be cut out like dangerous parasites to restore Germany and then the world to a state of purity. Hitler was not the first to associate Jews with rootless cosmopolitan America. But his brand of holy war was certainly the most devastating. This is not to say that Nazism and Islamism are one and the same thing. They have different histories, and different aims. Although both gained recruits through more or less legitimate grievances against the main Western powers, these were not the same either. Germans resented the punitive Versailles treaty, and were impoverished by the crash of international capitalism. Many in the Middle East hate the corruption of their own elites by international capitalism, and feel humiliated by American double standards in Israel and Palestine. But just as Nazism cannot be explained by Versailles, we cannot reduce Islamism to the suffering of Palestinians, the legacy of European colonialism, or the effects of global trade. What Nazism, Islamism and all other forms of religious or racial war, have in common is a vision of purity that seeks to eradicate enemies who are deemed to be both polluting and corrupting. In this scheme of things, “Zionists”, “Crusaders”, infidels, Americans, or Westerners in general, are less than human, more like vermin, and thus to be destroyed. This is where criticism of American policies, or an aversion to Western culture, or a prejudice against Christianity, Judaism, atheism or whatnot, tips over into mass murder. This is when a hostile image of the West becomes Occidentalism. When people are in this state of mind, there is no room for negotiation, nor will a change of foreign policy — making the Israelis concede to all Palestinian demands, say — make the problem go away. To see it as an inevitable clash of civilisations is to deny that Islamist revolutionaries are the enemies not only of the liberal West, but of most Muslims too. The only antidote to Occidentalism is a political transformation in the Arab world. More political freedom, achieved by Muslims, will take the sting out of holy war. Trying to impose this transformation by the use of foreign force, however, is unlikely to have the desired result. On the contrary it reinforces the notion of a civilisational clash, which is one concept shared by all enemies of liberalism, in the West no less than the East.
Need more coffee for this one, bumping!
During WWII the Muslums had an SS division in the NAZI SS. See the link below and read past the news article for the post.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1161268/posts
Holy Warriors rely on financial contributions from other Muslims. Part of the religion of Islam requires all Muslims to contribute toward jihad by any means possible, by any means at their individual disposal.
By that extension, all Muslims are accessory to murder.
The article makes good points except for this last concept tacked on the end, which makes no sense.
Extreme amounts of time and cash have been tried in numerous ways to bring about liberalization of the mideast without force, and they have resulted in nothing. Where force has been used, positive results have occurred, even though they have been muddied by the cold war.
Since the end of the cold war, tell the Kuwaitis that outside force is not a liberalizing factor!
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