Posted on 10/10/2001 11:43:52 PM PDT by MadIvan
'THE dangerous clashes of the future are likely to arise from the interaction of Western arrogance [and] Islamic intolerance." With that prediction, and with the phrase "Islam has bloody borders", Samuel P. Huntington's book The Clash of Civilisations (1996) has soared to cult status.
Huntington forecasts a bleak future. He divides humanity into seven civilisations (the West, Islam, Russian/Orthodox, Hindu/Indian, Chinese, Japanese and African) and he forecasts that they will fight each other indefinitely. To Huntington, these civilisations are super-tribes that, like primitive tribes, will attack each other until the end of time.
Only poverty restrains super-tribal aggression, believes Huntington, but he assumes that all seven civilisations will grow rich without losing the cultural differences that provoke super-tribal war. Huntington argues that there are many different types of capitalism and that each super-tribe will find the type that suits it.
The West is unique in its individualism and its rule of law, and the West invented capitalism. But because the West was individualistic and was ruled by law before it was rich, Huntington denies that those properties are important to the creation of wealth.
To prove his argument, Huntington pointed in 1996 to the "Tigers" of the Pacific Rim. Their cultures are collective and authoritarian, and they ignore the individual's rights under the law, yet they were growing so rich that, by 1996, they were beginning to ape the Muslims in their defiance of the West.
Yet where are the Tigers now? Japan is locked in economic stagnation, while Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia struggle with economic disaster. Only the West continues to grow.
Even in the West, people have championed more than one type of capitalism. Once, we were urged to admire Germany's Rhenish capitalism. Under Rhenish capitalism, competition and individual property rights are minimised. Instead, companies collude in cartels, their shares are owned by the banks that fund them and the nation is organised by the government as a corporate conspiracy.
Yet, contrary to myth, the German economy was, until recently, a relative failure. In 1830, Britain was 25 per cent richer than Germany per capita, and was still so in 1914 and in 1939. Germany was a threat because it was big in toto, but the Germans overtook us only when, after 1945, we forced them to adopt the liberal Anglo-American market model - at precisely the time that we, under Labour, abandoned it.
The great capitalist success has been the United States, which in 1830 was as poor as Germany but which, by 1890, had overtaken Britain per capita. American capitalism was fiercely laissez faire, being rooted in property rights, the rule of law and a ferocious individualism.
What so many writers ignore is that "catching up" is easy. A country, when poor, can enrich itself simply by copying its rich neighbours. Such catching up can be achieved by any regime - during the 1920s and 1930s even the Soviet Union grew swiftly.
But once a country has caught up, it can further enrich itself only by innovation, entrepreneurism and risk-taking. Those activities flourish only within an individualistic culture where property is secure under the law.
In his analysis, Huntington overlooked a simple historical principle: causes precede consequences. Western individualism and the rule of law preceded, and therefore did cause, its wealth. Successful capitalism, therefore, is rooted in Western values, and the powerful peoples of the future will be only those with whom we can do business.
The power of Islam is deceptive. It is not rich because it is dynamically capitalist, but because of the oil that the West discovered. The rage of the fundamentalist is born of having to choose between his culture and his prosperity.
The one point two-five billion -- for-five-thousand-years-already-enslaved -- population of the captured, colonised and brutalized territories, states and countries usually referred to as "China" outnumber the population of The FRee Republic Of China -- AKA The FRee Republic of Taiwan -- by fifty-seven to one.
And if the Peking-based gang of mass-murdering psychopathological bastards that owns operates and controls the ChiCom population ordered it into action aganst Taiwan, the yip-yip-yapping pekenese gangsters and their much-vaunted "peoples' liberation 'army'" would get their arses kicked all the way to Kunming or -- more likely -- to Llasha, capital of imperialistically and brutally-colonised Tibet!
Similarly six million Israelis and four-hundred million Arabs!
Slaves will NEVER defeat FRee Men!
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