The Islamofascists Are The Fascists, Not Geert Wilders

From The Brussels Journal:


The Islamofascists are the Fascists, Not Geert Wilders



From the desk of A. Millar on Tue, 2009-07-14 08:09





Last month’s EU election results saw the press reacting with horror at the rise of “far-Right” parties. However, while some parties (such as the anti-Semitic Jobbik, which created a paramilitary wing in 2007) are indeed far-Right, some others described as such, are, as Soeren Kern has observed, among “[…] the best allies that Jews (and Israel) will find in Europe today.”



The most egregious piece of propaganda I saw during the recent EU election period was an article on EUobserver.com about Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom. Written by one Andrew Willis, and entitled “Netherlands embraces far right in EU elections,” the author decried the party as “far-Right” and “xenophobic.” This despite the fact that the Party for Freedom is a staunch defender of Israel, and that Wilders spent some of his youth in the country, and still visits it regularly.



Particularly troubling, however, was a photograph of a group of skinheads accompanying the text, along with the caption: “Neo-nazi youth look on as Geert Wilders campaigns in Leeuwarden, Netherlands.” The suggestion was of course that “neo-Nazi youth” are the real voters of the Party for Freedom, because the party is really neo-Nazi. Yet, nothing could be further from the truth (and curiously, there is not the slightest hint of Wilders or his party in the photograph).



Although it opposes mass immigration, especially from Muslim countries, the Party for Freedom wants its immigrants to assimilate into Dutch society and enjoy the benefits of democracy and liberty. The party also ran on an essentially libertarian platform of defending women’s rights and protecting gays from street violence perpetrated by Muslim gangs (the extent of the latter problem was revealed last year after fashion model Mike Du Pree was dragged from the catwalk and assaulted by ten Muslim youths, shocking the Netherlands).



And Wilders has also been careful to distance himself from actual far-Right parties, for example, telling the Guardian last year that, “My allies are not [Jean-Marie] Le Pen or [Jorg] Haider, We'll never join up with the fascists and Mussolinis of Italy. I'm very afraid of being linked with the wrong rightist fascist groups.”



Fascists, the far-Right, neo-Nazis and skinheads aren’t really fond of Israel, Jews, women’s rights, or gay rights. They aren’t interested in the West’s Judeo-Christian heritage, democracy, or freedom. As it turns out, they’re fond of Islamism. Islamism and Nazism have had an on-off relationship since the 1930s. However, only last year Abraham H. Foxman, the National Director of the Anti-Defamation League, observed a “[…] burgeoning relationship of far-right and Muslim extremists who increasingly are working together to promote anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.”



The Holocaust is key to Islamist and neo-Nazi propaganda, and the latter has enthusiastically adopted the arguments of the former. If supporters of Israel are now portrayed as far-Right, the Jews are portrayed as the new Nazis, or “Zio-Nazis” by pro-Hamas agitators in Britain and Europe. At Durban II recently, a member of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's entourage even accosted Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Elie Wiesel, and repeatedly screamed “Zionazi” at him. In this applied historical revisionism – aided by the useful idiots of Britain’s and Europe’s politicians and media – Muslims must be portrayed as the new Jews, and Palestine, the new or real Holocaust.



Catherine Heseltine of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPACUK), justified the banning of Wilders from the UK on Sky News in February [video], calling him a “fascist,” and asserting that his view of Muslims “is precisely what Hitler said about the Jewish population in Europe sixty years ago, and it led to the horrors of the Holocaust.”



At the time of the Jyllands-Posten Mohammed cartoons controversy, Asghar Bukhari, a founder member of MPACUK, also went on television [video] to confront the editor of a German newspaper that had reprinted them:



“I would have thought that someone from Germany would understand the danger of these type of images,” he said, “Haven’t you learned a lesson from the past?”



Bukhari is clearly alluding to the Holocaust (and implying that publishing the cartoons is the first possible step toward an eventual genocide of Europe’s Muslims). However, in 2005, MPACUK published an article entitled “Zionists Behind Terror Attacks,” along with a cartoon of a grotesque “Jewish” devil, obtained from a neo-Nazi website. The next year Bukhari sent funds and messages of support to neo-Nazi-connected Holocaust denier David Irving, encouraging him in his “fight for the Truth.”



Again, although Lord Ahmed complained to the Home Office about Wilders visiting Britain to show his short movie Fitna, by invitation of Lord Pearson of Rannoch, already in 2005 Ahmed had held a book launch in the House of Lords for anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist Israel Shamir.



According to the Anti-Defamation League, Shamir is “[…] a longtime supporter of leftist causes, [who] believes that the U.S. government and Israel created 9/11 to carry out anti-Muslim policies.” He also has neo-Nazi connections. And in the same year that he accepted Ahmed’s invitation, Shamir spoke at a conference co-hosted by former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke. The conference was entitled “Zionism As the Biggest Threat to Modern Civilization.”



Remarkably, it is Wilders who will be prosecuted for “hate speech,” for his movie Fitna, for calling the Koran a “fascist book,” and for suggesting – rhetorically, I imagine – that it should be banned for violating the Netherlands’ hate speech laws.



However, Wilders is not the only one to raise the subject of banning the Koran due to it possibly violating hate speech legislation. In 2005, as the British government was seeking to introduce the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill, the then future Mayor of London Boris Johnson challenged the proposal in the House of Commons, reading out extracts of the Koran degrading to Christians and Jews. Johnson then continued, again rhetorically:





Mr. Deputy Speaker, that that is pretty strong stuff. I see the Minister scratching his head. I do not see him leaping to his feet to elucidate whether he believes that that is inflammatory and inspirational of hatred against the believers of those religions. I would like him to explain to us all here and now why and how he thinks the repetition of those words [of the Koran] in a public or private place does not amount to incitement to religious hatred of exactly the kind that the Bill is supposed to ban. If this Bill is to make any sense at all, it must mean the banning of the reading of such things in public or in private […]





It is no secret that al-Qaeda and Muslim terrorists draw inspiration from the Koran for attacks on non-Muslims, just as the Taliban and clerical fascist regime of Iran, for example, find in the Koran, sharia law, etc., justification for violence against the people of their own countries, including fellow Muslims.



That the Koran is interpreted fascistically by the Islamofascist movement is entirely clear. Hamas cites the Koran in its charter along with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic forgery used by the Nazi Party for propaganda, and, moreover, links them ontologically:





The Zionist plan is limitless. [It] is embodied in the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ […] Leaving the circle of struggle with Zionism is high treason, and cursed be he who does that. ‘for whoso shall turn his back unto them on that day, unless he turneth aside to fight, or retreateth to another party of the faithful, shall draw on himself the indignation of Allah, and his abode shall be hell; an ill journey shall it be thither.’ (The Spoils - verse 16).





Again, the Hilali-Khan translation of the Koran even introduces modern militarism into the text. Thus 8:60 reads “And make ready against them all you can of power, including steeds of war (tanks, planes, missiles, artillery, etc.) to threaten the enemy of Allah and your enemy.” Tanks, planes, etc., obviously aren’t mentioned in the original Koran.



Nevertheless, some non-Muslims argued that banning Fitna, or banning Wilders from entering the UK, was right, even if the Muslim-run, counter-jihad, Quilliam Foundation did not. Staunch defender of some free speech Chris Huhne felt that, with its “shocking images of violence,” Fitna incited hatred against Muslims and, as such, that the Home Office had acted correctly in preventing him from visiting the UK. Nevertheless, Huhne was keen to highlight his free speech credentials, pointing out that he had, “[…] defended people with some particularly odious views, such as the recent case of the Australian Holocaust denier Dr Frederick Toben.”



Although he acknowledged not having watched the 15 minute long movie (though he had heard Huhne saying that it promulgated hate), former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone remarked [video] that “The British government has fairly consistently –Tory and Labour – argued that you shouldn’t allow people a platform to say anything that incites hatred because that can often lead to violence.” Peculiarly, Livingstone neglected to mention his 2004 invitation to notorious anti-Semite and terrorism promoter Yusuf al-Qaradawi to speak in London – an invitation that the extremist cleric gladly accepted.



There are, of course, many Muslims in the West who reject Islamic militancy. And there are also a number of outspoken reformist Muslims, such as Irshad Manji, and reformist groups such as Muslims Against Sharia, which are standing up against the Islamic fascist movement, despite receiving death threats.



But just as the West seems so thoroughly unwilling to support Iran’s democracy movement over the Islamofascist regime, so the same governments, political parties, and much of the media, have shunned moderates and reformers in Western countries. It is the extremists that the authorities appear keen to appease or promote, and the Islamic fascism of Hamas and Hezbollah that they appear keen to accommodate in their own countries.



If such Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites are considered moderate, then Wilders might well be considered extremist. However, in reality, Wilders is broadly in line with reformist Muslims. If Fitna ends with the call for “[…] Muslims themselves to tear out the hateful verses from the Quran” – and while many Western liberal politicians no doubt think this “hate speech” – Muslims Against Sharia has posted a Koran online, with the violent passages removed as part of an attempt to modernize Islam. Manji also has a “progressive, 21st-century translation” of the Koran on her website (the US publisher backed out of the project after seeing the riots over the Mohammed cartoons).



In the name of “community cohesion” Britain has consistently failed to stand up for the values of liberty and justice, and indeed even for free speech, rational inquiry, or for the truth. Instead we see more and more the façade of a liberal society, “celebrating diversity” yet turning a blind eye to anti-Semitism, honor violence against Muslim women, forced marriage of Muslim girls, calls for the murder of homosexuals and the subjugation of all non-Muslims, or “kuffar.”



In 2007, for example, the Historical Association found that a number of British schools had even stopped teaching the Holocaust because of “anti-Semitic sentiment and Holocaust denial among some Muslim pupils.”



Earlier this year we saw thousands protesting in support of Hamas in London, with violent outbreaks at the Israeli embassy, and attacks on British Jews.



Last year, the Independent revealed that 17,000 girls and women are victims of “honor violence.”



Again, the archconservative Telegraph pointed out a few days ago, that the major parties clamor for the gay vote, but refuse to address the hatred of homosexuals among a disproportionately high percentage of Muslims, and, moreover, the incitement of violence against them by a number of British imams (as was exposed in the documentary Undercover Mosque).



Would British teachers stop teaching the Holocaust if they thought “neo-Nazi youth” would air anti-Semitic or Holocaust denial sentiments? Would Britain’s feminist or Leftwing stay silent if 17,000 girls and women were the victims of “honor violence” perpetuated by, and against, Catholics or Evangelicals? Would Britain’s political parties turn a blind eye to the “average” citizen inciting violence against homosexuals? No. No. No. And they would be right not to.



Yet the problem is not limited to Britain. As Wilders said about the other parties in the Netherlands recently, they like to call themselves “progressive,” but “We [in the Party for Freedom] are doing their work. Why are we the largest party (in a poll held) on the website of (gay magazine) Gay Krant? Is anybody thinking? Because homosexuals experience the consequences of Islamisation every day in their neighbourhoods.” The other parties, he said, “should be combating […] the dire position of women, unbelievers and homosexuals.”



I think we can safely say, these are not the sentiments of a politician on the “far-Right.”



Fitna contains “shocking images,” yes. But those images are not only real, they expose the violence and hate of Islamic fascists against non-Muslims and even Muslims themselves. Not only do we see images of 9/11, the London bombing, the Madrid bombing, clerics calling for violence against the West, etc., we also see the image of a Muslim woman’s severed head; another woman in a burka about to be executed; female genital mutilation, Muslim children covered in blood from the Ashura ritual, and so on.



A healthy society would be stirred by such images to stand for freedom, to support moderates and reformers, and tackle the fascists of our own time, not least of all by exposing their aims, ideology, and crimes. Yet, the response of Britain and the Netherlands has been to attempt to prevent Wilders from speaking, and to force their societies to turn a blind eye to the most grotesque injustice.



The political class will of course allow “some particularly odious views” on the Holocaust, Zionism, etc., to be aired, but this has nothing to do with believing in free speech, and everything to do with avoiding a confrontation with the Islamofascists.

Liberals And Islamofascists

From The American Thinker:

September 29, 2005


Liberals and Islamofascists

By Jonathan David Carson, Ph.D.









What merit is there in not stealing because you fear that your hand will be cut off? In not drinking because you have no alcohol? In not being aroused by a woman in a burqa?



An Islamofascist walks the streets of America and sees a man enter a massage parlor. "What an immoral society!" he thinks. He does not notice the men who do not go in. He sees the temptations Americans are subject to, but not their resistance to those temptations. He sees their immorality, but not their morality.



Americans are free to be either moral or immoral. How immoral would our enemies be if they were free?



America is free to be immoral, but when America is moral, its morality is genuine—because it is free to be immoral. No one praises prison inmates for not breaking into houses—or Saudi women for not having automobile accidents.



The Islamofascist cannot conceive of morality without coercion. To the Islamofascist, coercion is morality, and freedom is immorality. Freedom is license to him, not the arena in which we choose good or evil. Morality is imposed and external, not free and internal.



To the Biblically—grounded Christian or Jew, 'the battle line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man,' in the glorious words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. For too many Muslims, the battle line between good and evil runs between the Islamic world and the world yet to be conquered.



Christians and Jews do have a duty to fight evil outside themselves, but their primary adversary must always be the enemy within. The rhetoric of Islamofascists reverses this priority, sometimes to the point of completely forgetting their own sins. America does not need lessons in sexual morality from men who take baths and perfume themselves in expectation of the seventy—two virgins they will each enjoy as soon as they blow themselves up next to Christians or Jews.



Ideological Affinities



Unfortunately, many in the West also see only the sins of America. They also confuse license and freedom, repression and self—control, taxation and charity. They also equate good conduct motivated by fear of temporal rulers and good conduct motivated by love of God and man.



Above all, they too focus on the sins and alleged sins of others to the exclusion of their own sins and thereby equate changing someone else's behavior with doing the right thing. The most moral people are, in their view, the people who most vigorously condemn traditional American values. An ordinary person might strive to benefit society by giving to a charity or volunteering; they strive to benefit society by promoting political and social change.



They confuse poverty imposed by an economic system and voluntary poverty, destitution and poverty of spirit, backwardness and protection of the environment. They think that Americans are more materialist than people with fewer material goods—as if people in other countries don't desire the same things. They think that socialism is compatible with Christianity and capitalism is not, forgetting that socialism is as much a system for producing material goods as capitalism is, just a less efficient one. They think that there is something inherently wrong with wanting a car that does not break down or a computer that does not crash, but cars, computers, and other consumer goods are not evil. Making idols of them is evil; putting them to good use is not. They think that because Native Americans were technologically backward, they must have been environmentalists. Again and again, they confuse morality with constraint: the constraint of poverty, the constraint of inefficiency, the constraint of backwardness, ultimately the constraint of tyranny.



To their way of thinking, the Internal Revenue Service is a charitable organization, like the Red Cross or the Salvation Army; indeed it is more charitable because contributions to it are involuntary. Charity consists precisely in the taking of the money. Taxation is thus a virtue in and of itself, reflecting the merit of the society imposing it.



Money that is freely given falls short of true charity because it lacks the element of coercion essential to their morality. How can a society be moral if it allows people to forgo charity? What kind of charity is it that allows people not to give?



Morality consists in telling other people what to do, and charity consists in aiding the poor with other people's money. Thus, Hillary Clinton says that conservatives place too much emphasis on 'private morality' (obeying the Ten Commandments) and not enough emphasis on 'public morality' (obeying her).



But surely I am being unfair. What, other than enemies, does Hillary Clinton share with Islamofascists? Liberals in America support gay rights; Islamofascists want to stone homosexuals. Liberals are feminists; Islamofascists don't want to let women out of the house. Liberals hate war; the terrorists want to set the world ablaze with it.



Well, similar contradictions were not too much for liberals in the Cold War. The Soviet Union did not embody their values. Or so they tell us.



On the other hand, the communists did hold up before their apologists a utopian vision, while the Islamofascists don't even bother to present a positive message. It turns out that the Islamofascists know a lot of things that we don't. For instance, that a message of pure negativity has as much appeal as the demagogic ideal of a world without poverty or strife. Liberals are just as energetic in explaining away the mass murder of Kurdish villagers by Saddam Hussein as they were in praising Potemkin villages in the Soviet Union. How long does it take a liberal to turn a discussion of the use of poison gas on Kurds to a discussion of the evils of Reagan and Bush?



So perhaps liberals are not responding to the Islamofascist message after all. They will simply excuse the behavior of enemies of the United States no matter how opposed the values of those enemies are to the values of liberals. Indeed, liberals and Islamofascists are opposites. Or so they tell us.



However, as the agreement between liberals and Islamofascists on the fundamental issue of the relationship between freedom and morality suggests, there is a deep ideological affinity between liberals and Islamofascists. They do not simply share hatred of President Bush. They are bound by more than their enemies.



An examination of the history of Islam and of the relationship of the West to it shows that there are always those in the West who will make common cause with Islam. Without their aid, Islam would have long ago collapsed.



Out of pure expediency or Realpolitik, Western merchants will trade with Islamic enemies of the West and even sell them arms, and Western powers will ally themselves with Islam, as when the Austro—Hungarian Empire allied with the Ottoman Empire in World War I or when the United States and the Soviet Union vied for allies in the Middle East during the Cold War.



Out of what might be called ideological expediency, some in the West have attempted to take ideological advantage of the Islamic threat. During the height of religious strife in Europe, for instance, many Protestants saw in Islam a critique of Catholicism similar to their own, and many Catholics saw in it a warning against schism and heresy. This ideological expediency can develop into a genuine ideological affinity, as is happening today and has been happening for hundreds of years.



For a striking example of this ideological expediency/affinity, ask yourself who wrote the following poem, translated from the original German. Hint: the author was not a Muslim.





A Song to Mahomet



See the mountain spring

Flash gladdening

Like a glance of stars;

Higher than the clouds

Kindly spirits

Fuelled his youth

In thickets twixt the crags.

Brisk as a young blade

Out of cloud he dances

Down to marble rocks

And leaps again

Skyward exultant.

Down passages that hang from peaks

He chases pebbles many—coloured,

Early like a leader striding

Snatches up and carries onward

Brother torrents.

Flowers are born beneath his footprint

In the valley down below,

From his breathing

Pastures live.

Yet no valley of the shadows

Can contain him

And no flowers that clasp his knees,

Blandishing with looks of love;

To the lowland bursts his way,

A snake uncoiling.

Freshets nestle

Flocking to his side. He comes

Into the lowland, silver sparkling

And with him the lowland sparkles,

And the lowland rivers call,

Mountain freshets call exultant:

Brother, take your brothers with you,

With you to your ancient father,

To the everlasting ocean,

Who with open arms awaits us,

Arms which, ah, open in vain

To clasp us who are craving for him;

Avid sands consume us

In the desert, sun overhead

Will suck our blood, blocked by a hill

To pools we shrink! Brother, take us,

Take your lowland brothers with you,

Take your brothers of the mountains,

To your father take us all!

Join me then!

And now he swells

More lordly still; one single kin,

They loft the prince and bear him high

Onward as he rolls triumphant,

Naming countries, in his track

Towns and cities come to be.

On he rushes, unrelenting,

Leaves the turrets tipped with flame,

Marble palaces, creation

Of his plentitude, behind him.

Cedar houses he like Atlas

Carries on his giant shoulders;

Flags a thousand rustling flutter

In the air above his head,

Testifying to his glory.

So he bears his brothers, bears

His treasures and his children surging

In a wave of joy tumultuous

To their waiting father's heart.



Who is it who says that Muhammad makes the lowland sparkle, that flowers spring from his footsteps and cities from his track? Who is it who celebrates the tumultuous joy of Muhammad's followers and the plenitude of his creation?

"A Song to Mahomet" was written in 1772—1773 by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the least romantic of the German Romantics, the least insane of the German intellectual giants of the last 250 years.



Goethe was not an aberration. Anyone wishing to understand the long tradition of Western affinity with Islam, a tradition that is as old as Islam itself, should read Islam and the West by Bernard Lewis, especially the chapter "Gibbon on Muhammad," in which Lewis says





"the image of Muhammad as a wise, tolerant [!], unmystical [!], and undogmatic [!] ruler became widespread in the period of the Enlightenment, and it finds expression in writers as diverse as Goethe, Condercet, and Voltaire." [exclamation points added]



What started as the (rather absurd) idea that Muhammad was a forerunner of Luther and Calvin and that Islam could as a result be an ally of the Protestants against Roman Catholicism morphed into the (also absurd) idea that Islam was refreshingly free from the dogmatism of Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular and that it could as a result be an ally of the Enlightenment against the forces of darkness, that is, Christianity, which in turn morphed into the (beyond absurd) idea that Islam is an innocent victim of the warmongering Bush Administration and that as a result progressives in the United States should stand with the resistance in Iraq against imperialism, Zionism, Neo—Conservatism, capitalism, globalism, unilateralism, consumerism, racism, sexism, speciesism, heterosexism, homophobia, Halliburton, homework, hot weather, hurricanes, homemakers, electoral fraud, SUVs, McDonalds, AIDS, Starbucks, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, conservative bloggers, censorship, carnivorousness, second—hand smoke, the CIA, cell phone rays, and impurities in paint thinner.



George Orwell said that only university professors could be stupid enough to believe that the capitalist democracies were no better than Nazi Germany. Stupidity, or at least education, must be more widespread in our day because an equivalent belief is held by respectable churchman and tenured radical alike. America is no better than Iraq under Saddam Hussein or Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini, they think, and we should not impose our way of life on others.



Of course, most Americans had more in mind imposing death on Hussein and Khomeini than our way of life on Iraq and Iran, but the charm of this belief is that it appeals to robed religious leaders as much as to campus radicals in academic gowns, not to speak of similarly appareled sheiks.



Liberals posing as Christians reason, if one can call it reason, as follows: Sexual exploitation is all around us, along with crass materialism and a callous disregard for the unfortunate. Americans are spoiled, selfish, and stupid. Our insatiable desire to remake the world in our image is matched only by our ignorance of it. Who are we to tell people how they should live? The United States is the only country ever to drop atomic bombs on anyone. We have tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, but we begrudge other nations even a few. What hypocrites! What right do we have to tell Iran and North Korea that they can't have nuclear weapons?



The radicals fear that we will create a virtuous Iraq, these Christians that we will create an immoral one. The trouble is that nowadays one can hardly tell the difference between the radicals and some religious leaders. Certainly the difference between debauched sinners and Anglican bishops is increasingly indiscernible. Madonna is a slut who found religion and went whoring after false gods; they might as well make her an archbishop of certain denominations.



The bishops of some churches think that we could have peace for the asking. We have asked. Have they not heard the answer? "Peace! Peace!" they cry, though there is no peace. They fancy themselves prophetic witnesses to an unjust society. Unjust it may be, though not as unjust as they think, but if they are prophets, all that is necessary for prophecy is to repeat what network anchors say. They style themselves learned and get their information from newspapers, television, government radio, and oddball magazines. What have these prophets ever foreseen?



They call us to charity and denounce us for donating our best blood and hundreds of billions of dollars to the freedom of Iraq. They say that we are addicted to consumer goods and shriek when we spend our money to help the most downtrodden. They call us racists when we fight for the well being of Arabs. They call us Crusaders as we spread religious freedom. They call us selfish as we give them money. They attribute our prosperity to exploitation of the Third World, but never refuse the donations we give them out of our allegedly ill—gotten gains. They repeat enemy propaganda and huffily complain that we doubt their patriotism.



Islamofascists, religious big wigs, and campus radicals say that America is ruled by plutocrats who use sex to sell to a consumer society. Then Saudi moneybags buy girls from India and Pakistan, American prelates hide child molesters from the police, and campus radicals, who say that what they do in the privacy of their own bedrooms is none of our business, celebrate 'transgressive' sexual acts in public. Certainly, these groups deserve each other. But do the rest of us deserve them?



on "Liberals and Islamofascists"









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Defending "Islamofascism"

From Slate:

Defending Islamofascism


It's a valid term. Here's why.

By Christopher Hitchens

Posted Monday, Oct. 22, 2007, at 11:33 AM ET



Osama Bin LadenThe attempt by David Horowitz and his allies to launch "Islamofascism Awareness Week" on American campuses has been met with a variety of responses. One of these is a challenge to the validity of the term itself. It's quite the done thing, in liberal academic circles, to sneer at any comparison between fascist and jihadist ideology. People like Tony Judt write to me to say, in effect, that it's ahistorical and simplistic to do so. And in some media circles, another kind of reluctance applies: Alan Colmes thinks that one shouldn't use the word Islamic even to designate jihad, because to do so is to risk incriminating an entire religion. He and others don't want to tag Islam even in its most extreme form with a word as hideous as fascism. Finally, I have seen and heard it argued that the term is unfair or prejudiced because it isn't applied to any other religion.



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FacebookDiggRedditStumbleUponCLOSEWell, that last claim is certainly not true. It was once very common, especially on the left, to prefix the word fascism with the word clerical. This was to recognize the undeniable fact that, from Spain to Croatia to Slovakia, there was a very direct link between fascism and the Roman Catholic Church. More recently, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, editor of the Encyclopaedia Hebraica, coined the term Judeo-Nazi to describe the Messianic settlers who moved onto the occupied West Bank after 1967. So, there need be no self-pity among Muslims about being "singled out" on this point.





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Related in Slate

Christopher Hitchens outlined the schism between Sunnis and Shiites and pinpointed what we mean when we say "terrorism." Lee Smith identified the Islamist origins of the Darfur genocide. Jack Shafer classed the word islamofascism as "unspeak," a phrase that attempts to sneak a political argument into a seemingly neutral conversation.The term Islamofascism was first used in 1990 in Britain's Independent newspaper by Scottish writer Malise Ruthven, who was writing about the way in which traditional Arab dictatorships used religious appeals in order to stay in power. I didn't know about this when I employed the term "fascism with an Islamic face" to describe the attack on civil society on Sept. 11, 2001, and to ridicule those who presented the attack as some kind of liberation theology in action. "Fascism with an Islamic face" is meant to summon a dual echo of both Alexander Dubcek and Susan Sontag (if I do say so myself), and in any case, it can't be used for everyday polemical purposes, so the question remains: Does Bin Ladenism or Salafism or whatever we agree to call it have anything in common with fascism?



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I think yes. The most obvious points of comparison would be these: Both movements are based on a cult of murderous violence that exalts death and destruction and despises the life of the mind. ("Death to the intellect! Long live death!" as Gen. Francisco Franco's sidekick Gonzalo Queipo de Llano so pithily phrased it.) Both are hostile to modernity (except when it comes to the pursuit of weapons), and both are bitterly nostalgic for past empires and lost glories. Both are obsessed with real and imagined "humiliations" and thirsty for revenge. Both are chronically infected with the toxin of anti-Jewish paranoia (interestingly, also, with its milder cousin, anti-Freemason paranoia). Both are inclined to leader worship and to the exclusive stress on the power of one great book. Both have a strong commitment to sexual repression—especially to the repression of any sexual "deviance"—and to its counterparts the subordination of the female and contempt for the feminine. Both despise art and literature as symptoms of degeneracy and decadence; both burn books and destroy museums and treasures.



Fascism (and Nazism) also attempted to counterfeit the then-success of the socialist movement by issuing pseudo-socialist and populist appeals. It has been very interesting to observe lately the way in which al-Qaida has been striving to counterfeit and recycle the propaganda of the anti-globalist and green movements. (See my column on Osama Bin Laden's Sept. 11 statement.)



There isn't a perfect congruence. Historically, fascism laid great emphasis on glorifying the nation-state and the corporate structure. There isn't much of a corporate structure in the Muslim world, where the conditions often approximate more nearly to feudalism than capitalism, but Bin Laden's own business conglomerate is, among other things, a rogue multinational corporation with some links to finance-capital. As to the nation-state, al-Qaida's demand is that countries like Iraq and Saudi Arabia be dissolved into one great revived caliphate, but doesn't this have points of resemblance with the mad scheme of a "Greater Germany" or with Mussolini's fantasy of a revived Roman empire?



Technically, no form of Islam preaches racial superiority or proposes a master race. But in practice, Islamic fanatics operate a fascistic concept of the "pure" and the "exclusive" over the unclean and the kufar or profane. In the propaganda against Hinduism and India, for example, there can be seen something very like bigotry. In the attitude to Jews, it is clear that an inferior or unclean race is being talked about (which is why many Muslim extremists like the grand mufti of Jerusalem gravitated to Hitler's side). In the attempted destruction of the Hazara people of Afghanistan, who are ethnically Persian as well as religiously Shiite, there was also a strong suggestion of "cleansing." And, of course, Bin Laden has threatened force against U.N. peacekeepers who might dare interrupt the race-murder campaign against African Muslims that is being carried out by his pious Sudanese friends in Darfur.



This makes it permissible, it seems to me, to mention the two phenomena in the same breath and to suggest that they constitute comparable threats to civilization and civilized values. There is one final point of comparison, one that is in some ways encouraging. Both these totalitarian systems of thought evidently suffer from a death wish. It is surely not an accident that both of them stress suicidal tactics and sacrificial ends, just as both of them would obviously rather see the destruction of their own societies than any compromise with infidels or any dilution of the joys of absolute doctrinal orthodoxy. Thus, while we have a duty to oppose and destroy these and any similar totalitarian movements, we can also be fairly sure that they will play an unconscious part in arranging for their own destruction, as well.

The Muslim Mainstream And The New Caliphate

From The American Thinker:

April 27, 2007


The Muslim Mainstream and the New Caliphate

By Andrew G. Bostom









Writing in 1916, C. Snouck Hurgronje, the great Dutch Orientalist, underscored how the jihad doctrine of world conquest, and the re-creation of a supranational Islamic Caliphate remained a potent force among the Muslim masses:







...it would be a gross mistake to imagine that the idea of universal conquest may be considered as obliterated...the canonists and the vulgar still live in the illusion of the days of Islam's greatness. The legists continue to ground their appreciation of every actual political condition on the law of the holy war, which war ought never be allowed to cease entirely until all mankind is reduced to the authority of Islam-the heathen by conversion, the adherents of acknowledged Scripture [i.e., Jews and Christians] by submission.





Hurgronje further noted that although the Muslim rank and file might acknowledge the improbability of that goal "at present" (circa 1916), they were,







...comforted and encouraged by the recollection of the lengthy period of humiliation that the Prophet himself had to suffer before Allah bestowed victory upon his arms...





Thus even at the nadir of Islam's political power, during the World War I era final disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, Hurgronje observed how







...the common people are willingly taught by the canonists and feed their hope of better days upon the innumerable legends of the olden time and the equally innumerable apocalyptic prophecies about the future. The political blows that fall upon Islam make less impression...than the senseless stories about the power of the Sultan of Stambul [Istanbul], that would instantly be revealed if he were not surrounded by treacherous servants, and the fantastic tidings of the miracles that Allah works in the Holy Cities of Arabia which are inaccessible to the unfaithful. The conception of the Khalifate [Caliphate] still exercises a fascinating influence, regarded in the light of a central point of union against the unfaithful (i.e., non-Muslims). [emphasis added]





Nearly a century later, the preponderance of contemporary mainstream Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia, apparently share with their murderous, jihad terror waging co-religionists from al-Qaeda the goal (if not necessarily supporting the gruesome means) of re-establishing an Islamic Caliphate. Polling data just released (April 24, 2007) in a rigorously conducted face-to-face University of Maryland/ WorldPublicOpinion.org interview survey of 4384 Muslims conducted between December 9, 2006 and February 15, 2007-1000 Moroccans, 1000 Egyptians, 1243 Pakistanis, and 1141 Indonesians-reveal that 65.2% of those interviewed-almost 2/3, hardly a "fringe minority"-desired this outcome (i.e., "To unify all Islamic countries into a single Islamic state or Caliphate"), including 49% of "moderate" Indonesian Muslims. The internal validity of these data about the present longing for a Caliphate is strongly suggested by a concordant result: 65.5% of this Muslim sample approved the proposition "To require a strict [emphasis added] application of Shari'a law in every Islamic country."





Notwithstanding ahistorical drivel from Western Muslim "advocacy" groups such as the Muslim Association of Britain, which lionizes both the Caliphate and the concomitant institution of Shari'a as promulgators of "a peaceful and just society" , the findings from the University of Maryland/ WorldPublicOpinion.org poll are ominous.





The Prototypical Caliphate





Umar Ibn al-Khattab (d. 644), was the second "rightly guided" caliph of Islam. During his reign, which lasted for a decade (634-644), Syria, Iraq and Egypt were conquered. Umar was responsible for organizing the early Islamic Caliphate. Alfred von Kremer, the seminal 19th century German scholar of Islam, described the "central idea" of Umar's regime, as being the furtherance of "...the religious-military development of Islam at the expense of the conquered nations." The predictable and historically verifiable consequence of this guiding principle was a legacy of harsh inequality, intolerance, and injustice towards non-Muslims observed by von Kremer in 1868 (and still evident in Islamic societies to this day):







It was the basis of its severe directives regarding Christians and those of other faiths, that they be reduced to the status of pariahs, forbidden from having anything in common with the ruling nation; it was even the basis for his decision to purify the Arabian Peninsula of the unbelievers, when he presented all the inhabitants of the peninsula who had not yet accepted Islam with the choice: to emigrate or deny the religion of their ancestors. The industrious and wealthy Christians of Najran, who maintained their Christian faith, emigrated as a result of this decision from the peninsula, to the land of the Euphrates, and ‘Umar also deported the Jews of Khaybar. In this way ‘Umar based that fanatical and intolerant approach that was an essential characteristic of Islam, now extant for over a thousand years, until this day [i.e., written in 1868]. It was this spirit, a severe and steely one, that incorporated scorn and contempt for the non-Muslims, that was characteristic of ‘Umar, and instilled by ‘Umar into Islam; this spirit continued for many centuries, to be Islam's driving force and vital principle.





During the jihad campaigns of Umar's Caliphate, in accord with nascent Islamic Law, neither cities nor monasteries were spared if they resisted. Thus, when the Greek garrison of Gaza refused to submit and convert to Islam, all were put to death. In the year 640, sixty Greek soldiers who refused to apostatize became martyrs, while in the same year (i.e., 638) that Caesarea, Tripolis and Tyre fell to the Muslims, hundreds of thousands of Christians converted to Islam, predominantly out of fear.





Muslim and non-Muslim sources record that Umar's soldiers were allowed to break crosses on the heads of Christians during processions and religious litanies, and were permitted, if not encouraged, to tear down newly erected churches and to punish Christians for trivial reasons. Moreover, Umar forbade the employment of Christians in public offices.





The false claims of Islamic toleration during this prototype "rightly guided" Caliphate cannot be substantiated even by relying on the (apocryphal?) "pact" of Umar (Ibn al-Khattab) because this putative decree compelled the Christians (and other non-Muslims) to fulfill self-destructive obligations, including: the prohibition on erecting any new churches, monasteries, or hermitages; and not being allowed to repair any ecclesiastical institutions that fell into ruin, nor to rebuild those that were situated in the Muslim quarters of a town. Muslim traditionists and early historians (such as al-Baladhuri) further maintain that Umar expelled the Jews of the Khaybar oasis, and similarly deported Christians (from Najran) who refused to apostasize and embrace Islam, fulfilling the death bed admonition of Muhammad who purportedly stated: "there shall not remain two religions in the land of Arabia."





Umar imposed limitations upon the non-Muslims aimed at their ultimate destruction by attrition, and he introduced fanatical elements into Islamic culture that became characteristic of the Caliphates which succeeded his. For example, according to the chronicle of the Muslim historian Ibn al-Atham (d. 926-27), under the brief Caliphate of Ali b. Abi Talib (656-61), when one group of apostates in Yemen (Sanaa) adopted Judaism after becoming Muslims, "He [Ali] killed them and burned them with fire after the killing." Indeed, the complete absence of freedom of conscience in these early Islamic Caliphates-while entirely consistent with mid-7th century mores-has remained a constant, ignominious legacy throughout Islamic history, to this day.





Unto the Ages





During the long twilight of the last formal Caliphate under the Ottoman Turks, Sir Henry Layard, the British archeologist, writer, and diplomat (including postings in Turkey), described this abhorrent spectacle which he witnessed in the heart of Istanbul, in the autumn of 1843, four years after the first failed iteration of the so-called Tanzimat reforms designed to abrogate the sacralized discrimination of the Shari'a:







An Armenian who had embraced Islamism [i.e., common 19th century usage for Islam] had returned to his former faith. For his apostasy he was condemned to death according to the Mohammedan law. His execution took place, accompanied by details of studied insult and indignity directed against Christianity and Europeans in general. The corpse was exposed in one of the most public and frequented places in Stamboul [Istanbul], and the head, which had been severed from the body, was placed upon it, covered by a European hat.





Salient examples from within the past 25 years confirm the persistent absence of freedom of conscience in contemporary Islamic societies, in tragic conformity with a prevailing, unchanged mindset of the earliest Caliphates: the 1985 state-sponsored execution of Sudanese religious reformer Mahmoud Muhammad Taha for his alleged "apostasy"; the infamous 1989 "Salman Rushdie Affair", which resulted in the issuance of a fatwa by Ayatollah Khomeini condemning Rushdie to death; the July 1994 vigilante murder of secular Egyptian writer Farag Foda-supported by the prominent Egyptian cleric, Sheikh Muhammad al-Ghazali, an official of Al Azhar University, who testified on behalf of the murderer, "A secularist represents a danger to society and the nation that must be eliminated. It is the duty of the government to kill him."; and the recent (March, 2006) tragic experience of Abdul Rahman, an unassuming Afghan Muslim convert to Christianity, forced to flee his native country to escape the murderous wrath of Muslim clerics and the masses they incited in "liberated", post-Taliban Afghanistan.





An even more alarming and utterly intolerable phenomenon was on display just this week in the United States when a Johnstown (western Pennsylvania) area imam Fouad El Bayly openly sanctioned the punishment by death of former Dutch Parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali-born and raised a Muslim in Somalia-for her open avowal of secularism.





Individualism and Freedom of Conscience



Ibn Warraq has observed aptly that the most fundamental conception of a Caliphate, "...the constant injunction to obey the Caliph-who is God's Shadow on Earth", is completely incompatible with the creation of a "rights-based individualist philosophy." Warraq illustrates the supreme hostility to individual rights in the Islamic Caliphate, and Islam itself, through the writings of the iconic Muslim philosopher, jurist, and historian, Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406), and a contemporary Muslim thinker, A.K. Brohi, former Pakistani Minister of Law and Religious Affairs:









[Ibn Khaldun] All religious laws and practices and everything that the masses are expected to do requires group feeling. Only with the help of group feeling can a claim be successfully pressed,...Group feeling is necessary to the Muslim community. Its existence enables (the community) to fulfill what God expects of it.





[A.K. Brohi] Human duties and rights have been vigorously defined and their orderly enforcement is the duty of the whole of organized communities and the task is specifically entrusted to the law enforcement organs of the state. The individual if necessary has to be sacrificed in order that that the life of the organism be saved. Collectivity has a special sanctity attached to it in Islam.





In contrast, Warraq notes, "Liberal democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom and attaches all possible value to each man or woman." And he concludes,







Individualism is not a recognizable feature of Islam; instead the collective will of the Muslim people is constantly emphasized. There is certainly no notion of individual rights, which developed in the West, especially during the eighteenth century.





Almost six decades ago (in 1950), G.H. Bousquet, a pre-eminent modern scholar of Islamic Law, put forth this unapologetic, pellucid formulation of the twofold totalitarian impulse in Islam:









Islam first came before the world as a doubly totalitarian system. It claimed to impose itself on the whole world and it claimed also, by the divinely appointed Muhammadan law, by the principles of the fiqh, to regulate down to the smallest details the whole life of the Islamic community and of every individual believer....the study of Muhammadan law (dry and forbidding though it may appear to those who confine themselves to the indispensable study of the fiqh) is of great importance to the world today.





The openly expressed desire for the restoration of a Caliphate from two-thirds of an important Muslim sample of Arab and non-Arab Islamic nations, representative of Muslims worldwide, should serve as a chilling wake-up call to those still in denial about the existential threat posed by the living, uniquely Islamic institution of jihad.





Andrew G. Bostom is the author of The Legacy of Jihad (2005), and the forthcoming The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism (2007), which can be previewed here.

The Clash Of Civilizations And The Re-Making Of World Order, By Samuel P. Huntington

From The Washington Post:

The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order


By Samuel P. Huntington

Chapter One: The New Era in World Politics



On January 3, 1992 a meeting of Russian and American scholars took place in the auditorium of a government building in Moscow. Two weeks earlier the Soviet Union had ceased to exist and the Russian Federation had become an independent country. As a result, the statue of Lenin which previously graced the stage of the auditorium had disappeared and instead the flag of the Russian Federation was now displayed on the front wall. The only problem, one American observed, was that the flag had been hung upside down. After this was pointed out to the Russian hosts, they quickly and quietly corrected the error during the first intermission.



The years after the Cold War witnessed the beginnings of dramatic changes in peoples' identities and the symbols of those identities. Global politics began to be reconfigured along cultural lines. Upside-down flags were a sign of the transition, but more and more the flags are flying high and true, and Russians and other peoples are mobilizing and marching behind these and other symbols of their new cultural identities.



On April 18, 1994 two thousand people rallied in Sarajevo waving the flags of Saudi Arabia and Turkey. By flying those banners, instead of U.N., NATO, or American flags, these Sarajevans identified themselves with their fellow Muslims and told the world who were their real and not-so-real friends.



On October 16, 1994 in Los Angeles 70,000 people marched beneath "a sea of Mexican flags" protesting Proposition 187, a referendum measure which would deny many state benefits to illegal immigrants and their children. Why are they "walking down the street with a Mexican flag and demanding that this country give them a free education?" observers asked. "They should be waving the American flag." Two weeks later more protectors did march down the street carrying an American flag--upside down. These flag displays ensured victory for Proposition 187, which was approved by 59 percent of California voters.



In the post-Cold War world flags count and so do other symbols of cultural identity, including crosses, crescents, and even head coverings, because culture counts, and cultural identity is what is most meaningful to most people. People are discovering new but often old identities and marching under new but often old flags which lead to wars with new but often old enemies.



One grim Weltanschauung for this new era was well expressed by the Venetian nationalist demagogue in Michael Dibdin's novel, Dead Lagoon: "There can be no true friends without true enemies. Unless we hate what we are not, we cannot love what we are. These are the old truths we are painfully rediscovering after a century and more of sentimental cant. Those who deny them deny their family, their heritage, their culture, their birthright, their very selves! They will not lightly be forgiven." The unfortunate truth in these old truths cannot be ignored by statesmen and scholars. For peoples seeking identity and reinventing ethnicity, enemies are essential, and the potentially most dangerous enmities occur across the fault lines between the world's major civilizations.



The central theme of this book is that culture and cultural identities, which at the broadest level are civilization identities, are shaping the patterns of cohesion, disintegration, and conflict in the post-Cold War world. The five parts of this book elaborate corollaries to this main proposition.



Part I: For the first time in history global politics is both multipolar and multicivilizational; modernization is distinct from Westernization and is producing neither a universal civilization in any meaningful sense nor the Westernization of non-Western societies.



Part II: The balance of power among civilizations is shifting: the West is declining in relative influence; Asian civilizations are expanding their economic, military, and political strength; Islam is exploding demographically with destabilizing consequences for Muslim countries and their neighbors; and non-Western civilizations generally are reaffirming the value of their own cultures.



Part III: A civilization-based world order is emerging: societies sharing cultural affinities cooperate with each other; efforts to shift societies from one civilization to another are unsuccessful; and countries group themselves around the lead or core states of their civilization.



Part IV: The West's universalist pretensions increasingly bring it into conflict with other civilizations, most seriously with Islam and China; at the local level fault line wars, largely between Muslims and non-Muslims, generate "kin-country rallying," the threat of broader escalation, and hence efforts by core states to halt these wars.



Part V: The survival of the West depends on Americans reaffirming their Western identity and Westerners accepting their civilization as unique not universal and uniting to renew and preserve it against challenges from non-Western societies. Avoidance of a global war of civilizations depends on world leaders accepting and cooperating to maintain the multicivilizational character of global politics.



A Multipolar, Multicivilizational World



In the post--Cold War world, for the first time in history, global politics has become multipolar and multicivilizational. During most of human existence, contacts between civilizations were intermittent or nonexistent. Then, with the beginning of the modern era, about A.D. 1500, global politics assumed two dimensions. For over four hundred years, the nation states of the West--Britain, France, Spain, Austria, Prussia, Germany, the United States, and others--constituted a multipolar international system within Western civilization and interacted, competed, and fought wars with each other. At the same time, Western nations also expanded, conquered, colonized, or decisively influenced every other civilization (Map 1.1). During the Cold War global politics became bipolar and the world was divided into three parts. A group of mostly wealthy and democratic societies, led by the United States, was engaged in a pervasive ideological, political, economic, and, at times, military competition with a group of somewhat poorer communist societies associated with and led by the Soviet Union. Much of this conflict occurred in the Third World outside these two camps, composed of countries which often were poor, lacked political stability, were recently independent, and claimed to be nonaligned (Map 1.2).



In the late 1980s the communist world collapsed, and the Cold War international system became history. In the post--Cold War world, the most important distinctions among peoples are not ideological, political, or economic. They are cultural. Peoples and nations are attempting to answer the most basic question humans can face: Who are we? And they are answering that question in the traditional way human beings have answered it, by reference to the things that mean most to them. People define themselves in terms of ancestry, religion, language, history, values, customs, and institutions. They identify with cultural groups: tribes, ethnic groups, religious communities, nations, and, at the broadest level, civilizations. People use politics not just to advance their interests but also to define their identity. We know who we are only when we know who we are not and often only when we know whom we are against.



Nation states remain the principal actors in world affairs. Their behavior is shaped as in the past by the pursuit of power and wealth, but it is also shaped by cultural preferences, commonalities, and differences. The most important groupings of states are no longer the three blocs of the Cold War but rather the world's seven or eight major civilizations (Map 1.3). Non-Western societies, particularly in East Asia, are developing their economic wealth and creating the basis for enhanced military power and political influence. As their power and self-confidence increase, non-Western societies increasingly assert their own cultural values and reject those "imposed" on them by the West. The "international system of the twenty-first century," Henry Kissinger has noted, ". . . will contain at least six major powers--the United States, Europe, China, Japan. Russia, and probably India--as well as a multiplicity of medium-sized and smaller countries." Kissinger's six major powers belong to five very different civilizations, and in addition there are important Islamic states whose strategic locations, large populations, and/or oil resources make them influential in world affairs. In this new world, local politics is the politics of ethnicity; global politics is the politics of civilizations. The rivalry of the superpowers is replaced by the clash of civilizations.



In this new world the most pervasive, important, and dangerous conflicts will not be between social classes, rich and poor, or other economically defined groups, but between peoples belonging to different cultural entities. Tribal wars and ethnic conflicts will occur within civilizations. Violence between states and groups from different civilizations, however, carries with it the potential for escalation as other states and groups from these civilizations rally to the support of their "kin countries." The bloody clash of clans in Somalia poses no threat of broader conflict. The bloody clash of tribes in Rwanda has consequences for Uganda, Zaire, and Burundi but not much further. The bloody clashes of civilizations in Bosnia, the Caucasus, Central Asia, or Kashmir could become bigger wars. In the Yugoslav conflicts, Russia provided diplomatic support to the Serbs, and Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, and Libya provided funds and arms to the Bosnians, not for reasons of ideology or power politics or economic interest but because of cultural kinship. "Cultural conflicts," Vaclav Havel has observed, "are increasing and are more dangerous today than at any time in history," and Jacques Delors agreed that "future conflicts will be sparked by cultural factors rather than economics or ideology." And the most dangerous cultural conflicts are those along the fault lines between civilizations.



In the post--Cold War world, culture is both a divisive and a unifying force. People separated by ideology but united by culture come together, as the two Germanys did and as the two Koreas and the several Chinas are beginning to. Societies united by ideology or historical circumstance but divided by civilization either come apart, as did the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Bosnia, or are subjected to intense strain, as is the case with Ukraine, Nigeria, Sudan, India, Sri Lanka, and many others. Countries with cultural affinities cooperate economically and politically. International organizations based on states with cultural commonality, such as the European Union, are far more successful than those that attempt to transcend cultures. For forty-five years the Iron Curtain was the central dividing line in Europe. That line has moved several hundred miles east. It is now the line separating the peoples of Western Christianity, on the one hand, from Muslim and Orthodox peoples on the other.



The philosophical assumptions, underlying values, social relations, customs, and overall outlooks on life differ significantly among civilizations. The revitalization of religion throughout much of the world is reinforcing these cultural differences. Cultures can change, and the nature of their impact on politics and economics can vary from one period to another. Yet the major differences in political and economic development among civilizations are clearly rooted in their different cultures. East Asian economic success has its source in East Asian culture, as do the difficulties East Asian societies have had in achieving stable democratic political systems. Islamic culture explains in large part the failure of democracy to emerge in much of the Muslim world. Developments in the postcommunist societies of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union are shaped by their civilizational identities. Those with Western Christian heritages are making progress toward economic development and democratic politics; the prospects for economic and political development in the Orthodox countries are uncertain; the prospects in the Muslim republics are bleak.



The West is and will remain for years to come the most powerful civilization. Yet its power relative to that of other civilizations is declining. As the West attempts to assert its values and to protect its interests, non-Western societies confront a choice. Some attempt to emulate the West and to join or to "bandwagon" with the West. Other Confucian and Islamic societies attempt to expand their own economic and military power to resist and to "balance" against the West. A central axis of post--Cold War world politics is thus the interaction of Western power and culture with the power and culture of non-Western civilizations.



In sum, the post--Cold War world is a world of seven or eight major civilizations. Cultural commonalities and differences shape the interests, antagonisms, and associations of states. The most important countries in the world come overwhelmingly from different civilizations. The local conflicts most likely to escalate into broader wars are those between groups and states from different civilizations. The predominant patterns of political and economic development differ from civilization to civilization. The key issues on the international agenda involve differences among civilizations. Power is shifting from the long predominant West to non-Western civilizations. Global politics has become multipolar and multicivilizational.



Other Worlds?



Maps and Paradigms. This picture of post--Cold War world politics shaped by cultural factors and involving interactions among states and groups from different civilizations is highly simplified. It omits many things, distorts some things, and obscures others. Yet if we are to think seriously about the world, and act effectively in it, some sort of simplified map of reality, some theory, concept, model, paradigm, is necessary. Without such intellectual constructs, there is, as William James said, only "a bloomin' buzzin' confusion." Intellectual and scientific advance, Thomas Kuhn showed in his classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, consists of the displacement of one paradigm, which has become increasingly incapable of explaining new or newly discovered facts, by a new paradigm, which does account for those facts in a more satisfactory fashion. "To be accepted as a paradigm," Kuhn wrote, "a theory must seem better than its competitors, but it need not, and in fact never does, explain all the facts with which it can be confronted."



"Finding one's way through unfamiliar terrain," John Lewis Gaddis also wisely observed, "generally requires a map of some sort. Cartography, like cognition itself, is a necessary simplification that allows us to see where we are, and where we may be going." The Cold War image of superpower competition was, as he points out, such a model, articulated first by Harry Truman, as "an exercise in geopolitical cartography that depicted the international landscape in terms everyone could understand, and so doing prepared the way for the sophisticated strategy of containment that was soon to follow." World views and causal theories are indispensable guides to international politics.



For forty years students and practitioners of international relations thought and acted in terms of the highly simplified but very useful Cold War paradigm of world affairs. This paradigm could not account for everything that went on in world politics. There were many anomalies, to use Kuhn's term, and at times the paradigm blinded scholars and statesmen to major developments, such as the Sino-Soviet split. Yet as a simple model of global politics, it accounted for more important phenomena than any of its rivals, it was an essential starting point for thinking about international affairs, it came to be almost universally accepted, and it shaped thinking about world politics for two generations.



Simplified paradigms or maps are indispensable for human thought and action. On the one hand, we may explicitly formulate theories or models and consciously use them to guide our behavior. Alternatively, we may deny the need for such guides and assume that we will act only in terms of specific "objective" facts, dealing with each case "on its merits." If we assume this, however, we delude ourselves. For in the back of our minds are hidden assumptions, biases, and prejudices that determine how we perceive reality, what facts we look at, and how we judge their importance and merits. We need explicit or implicit models so as to be able to:



1. order and generalize about reality;



2. understand causal relationships among phenomena;



3. anticipate and, if we are lucky, predict future developments;



4. distinguish what is important from what is unimportant; and



5. show us what paths we should take to achieve our goals.



Every model or map is an abstraction and will be more useful for some purposes than for others. A road map shows us how to drive from A to B, but will not be very useful if we are piloting a plane, in which case we will want a map highlighting airfields, radio beacons, flight paths, and topography. With no map, however, we will be lost. The more detailed a map is the more fully it will reflect reality. An extremely detailed map, however, will not be useful for many purposes. If we wish to get from one big city to another on a major expressway, we do not need and may find confusing a map which includes much information unrelated to automotive transportation and in which the major highways are lost in a complex mass of secondary roads. A map, on the other hand, which had only one expressway on it would eliminate much reality and limit our ability to find alternative routes if the expressway were blocked by a major accident. In short, we need a map that both portrays reality and simplifies reality in a way that best serves our purposes. Several maps or paradigms of world politics were advanced at the end of the Cold War.



One World: Euphoria and Harmony. One widely articulated paradigm was based on the assumption that the end of the Cold War meant the end of significant conflict in global politics and the emergence of one relatively harmonious world. The most widely discussed formulation of this model was the "end of history" thesis advanced by Francis Fukuyama. "We may be witnessing," Fukuyama argued, ". . . the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." To be sure, he said, some conflicts may happen in places in the Third World, but the global conflict is over, and not just in Europe. "It is precisely in the non-European world" that the big changes have occurred, particularly in China and the Soviet Union. The war of ideas is at an end. Believers in Marxist-Leninism may still exist "in places like Managua, Pyongyang, and Cambridge, Massachusetts," but overall liberal democracy has triumphed. The future will be devoted not to great exhilarating struggles over ideas but rather to resolving mundane economic and technical problems. And, he concluded rather sadly, it will all be rather boring.



The expectation of harmony was widely shared. Political and intellectual leaders elaborated similar views. The Berlin wall had come down, communist regimes had collapsed, the United Nations was to assume a new importance, the former Cold War rivals would engage in "partnership" and a "grand bargain," peacekeeping and peacemaking would be the order of the day. The President of the world's leading country proclaimed the "new world order"; the president of, arguably, the world's leading university vetoed appointment of a professor of security studies because the need had disappeared: "Hallelujah! We study war no more because war is no more."



The moment of euphoria at the end of the Cold War generated an illusion of harmony, which was soon revealed to be exactly that. The world became different in the early 1990s, but not necessarily more peaceful. Change was inevitable; progress was not. Similar illusions of harmony flourished, briefly, at the end of each of the twentieth century's other major conflicts. World War I was the "war to end wars" and to make the world safe for democracy. World War II, as Franklin Roosevelt put it, would "end the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries--and have always failed." Instead we will have "a universal organization" of "peace-loving Nations" and the beginnings of a "permanent structure of peace." World War I, however, generated communism, fascism, and the reversal of a century-old trend toward democracy. World War II produced a Cold War that was truly global. The illusion of harmony at the end of that Cold War was soon dissipated by the multiplication of ethnic conflicts and "ethnic cleansing," the breakdown of law and order, the emergence of new patterns of alliance and conflict among states, the resurgence of neo-communist and neo-fascist movements, intensification of religious fundamentalism, the end of the "diplomacy of smiles" and "policy of yes" in Russia's relations with the West, the inability of the United Nations and the United States to suppress bloody local conflicts, and the increasing assertiveness of a rising China. In the five years after the Berlin wall came down, the word "genocide" was heard far more often than in any five years of the Cold War. The one harmonious world paradigm is clearly far too divorced from reality to be a useful guide to the post--Cold War world.



Two Worlds: Us and Them. While one-world expectations appear at the end of major conflicts, the tendency to think in terms of two worlds recurs throughout human history. People are always tempted to divide people into us and them, the in-group and the other, our civilization and those barbarians. Scholars have analyzed the world in terms of the Orient and the Occident, North and South, center and periphery. Muslims have traditionally divided the world into Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb, the abode of peace and the abode of war. This distinction was reflected, and in a sense reversed, at the end of the Cold War by American scholars who divided the world into "zones of peace" and "zones of turmoil." The former included the West and Japan with about 15 percent of the world's population, the latter everyone else.



Depending upon how the parts are defined, a two-part world picture may in some measure correspond with reality. The most common division, which appears under various names, is between rich (modern, developed) countries and poor (traditional, undeveloped or developing) countries. Historically correlating with this economic division is the cultural division between West and East, where the emphasis is less on differences in economic well-being and more on differences in underlying philosophy, values, and way of life. Each of these images reflects some elements of reality yet also suffers limitations. Rich modern countries share characteristics which differentiate them from poor traditional countries, which also share characteristics. Differences in wealth may lead to conflicts between societies, but the evidence suggests that this happens primarily when rich and more powerful societies attempt to conquer and colonize poor and more traditional societies. The West did this for four hundred years, and then some of the colonies rebelled and waged wars of liberation against the colonial powers, who may well have lost the will to empire. In the current world, decolonization has occurred and colonial wars of liberation have been replaced by conflicts among the liberated peoples.



At a more general level, conflicts between rich and poor are unlikely because, except in special circumstances, the poor countries lack the political unity, economic power, and military capability to challenge the rich countries. Economic development in Asia and Latin America is blurring the simple dichotomy of haves and have-nots. Rich states may fight trade wars with each other; poor states may fight violent wars with each other; but an international class war between the poor South and the wealthy North is almost as far from reality as one happy harmonious world.



The cultural bifurcation of the world division is still less useful. At some level, the West is an entity. What, however, do non-Western societies have in common other than the fact that they are non-Western? Japanese, Chinese, Hindu, Muslim, and African civilizations share little in terms of religion, social structure, institutions, and prevailing values. The unity of the non-West and the East-West dichotomy are myths created by the West. These myths suffer the defects of the Orientalism which Edward Said appropriately criticized for promoting "the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, `us') and the strange (the Orient, the East, `them')" and for assuming the inherent superiority of the former to the latter. During the Cold War the world was, in considerable measure, polarized along an ideological spectrum. There is, however, no single cultural spectrum. The polarization of "East" and "West" culturally is in part another consequence of the universal but unfortunate practice of calling European civilization Western civilization. Instead of "East and West," it is more appropriate to speak of "the West and the rest," which at least implies the existence of many non-Welts. The world is too complex to be usefully envisioned for most purposes as simply divided economically between North and South or culturally between East and West.



184 States, More or Less. A third map of the post--Cold War world derives from what is often called the "realist" theory of international relations. According to this theory states are the primary, indeed, the only important actors in world affairs, the relation among states is one of anarchy, and hence to insure their survival and security, states invariably attempt to maximize their power. If one state sees another state increasing its power and thereby becoming a potential threat, it attempts to protect its own security by strengthening its power and/or by allying itself with other states. The interests and actions of the more or less 184 states of the post--Cold War world can be predicted from these assumptions.



This "realist" picture of the world is a highly useful starting point for analyzing international affairs and explains much state behavior. States are and will remain the dominant entities in world affairs. They maintain armies, conduct diplomacy, negotiate treaties, fight wars, control international organizations, influence and in considerable measure shape production and commerce. The governments of states give priority to insuring the external security of their states (although they often may give higher priority to insuring their security as a government against internal threats). Overall this statist paradigm does provide a more realistic picture of and guide to global politics than the one- or two-world paradigms.



It also, however, suffers severe limitations.



It assumes all states perceive their interests in the same way and act in the same way. Its simple assumption that power is all is a starting point for understanding state behavior but does not get one very far. States define their interests in terms of power but also in terms of much else besides. States often, of course, attempt to balance power, but if that is all they did, Western European countries would have coalesced with the Soviet Union against the United States in the late 1940s. States respond primarily to perceived threats, and the Western European states then saw a political, ideological, and military threat from the East. They saw their interests in a way which would not have been predicted by classic realist theory. Values, culture, and institutions pervasively influence how states define their interests. The interests of states are also shaped not only by their domestic values and institutions but by international norms and institutions. Above and beyond their primal concern with security, different types of states define their interests in different ways. States with similar cultures and institutions will see common interest. Democratic states have commonalities with other democratic states and hence do not fight each other. Canada does not have to ally with another power to deter invasion by the United States.



At a basic level the assumptions of the statist paradigm have been true throughout history. They thus do not help us to understand how global politics after the Cold War will differ from global politics during and before the Cold War. Yet clearly there are differences, and states pursue their interests differently from one historical period to another. In the post--Cold War world, states increasingly define their interests in civilizational terms. They cooperate with and ally themselves with states with similar or common culture and are more often in conflict with countries of different culture. States define threats in terms of the intentions of other states, and those intentions and how they are perceived are powerfully shaped by cultural considerations. Publics and statesmen are less likely to see threats emerging from people they feel they understand and can trust because of shared language, religion, values, institutions, and culture. They are much more likely to see threats coming from states whose societies have different cultures and hence which they do not understand and feel they cannot trust. Now that a Marxist-Leninist Soviet Union no longer poses a threat to the Free World and the United States no longer poses a countering threat to the communist world, countries in both worlds increasingly see threats coming from societies which are culturally different.



While states remain the primary actors in world affairs, they also are suffering losses in sovereignty, functions. and power. International institutions now assert the right to judge and to constrain what states do in their own territory. In some cases, most notably in Europe, international institutions have assumed important functions previous!! performed by states, and powerful international bureaucracies have been created which operate directly on individual citizens. Globally there has been a trend for state governments to lose power also through devolution to substate, regional. provincial and local political entities. In many states, including those in the developed world, regional movements exist promoting substantial autonomy or secession. State governments have in considerable measure lost the ability to control the flow of money in and out of their country and are having increasing difficulty controlling the flows of ideas, technology, goods, and people. State borders, in short, have become increasingly permeable. All these developments have led many to see the gradual end of the hard, "billiard ball" state, which purportedly has been the norm since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, and the emergence of a varied, complex, multilayered international order more closely resembling that of medieval times.



Sheer Chaos. The weakening of states and the appearance of "failed states" contribute to a fourth image of a world in anarchy. This paradigm stresses: the breakdown of governmental authority; the breakup of states; the intensification of tribal, ethnic, and religious conflict; the emergence of international criminal mafias; refugees multiplying into the tens of millions; the proliferation of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction; the spread of terrorism; the prevalence of massacres and ethnic cleansing. This picture of a world in chaos was convincingly set forth and summed up in the titles of two penetrating works published in 1993: Out of Control by Zbignew Brzezinski and Pandaemonium by Daniel Patrick Moynihan.



Like the states paradigm, the chaos paradigm is close to reality. It provides a graphic and accurate picture of much of what is going on in the world, and unlike the states paradigm, it highlights the significant changes in world politics that have occurred with the end of the Cold War. As of early 1993, for instance, an estimated 48 ethnic wars were occurring throughout the world, and 164 "territorial-ethnic claims and conflicts concerning borders" existed in the former Soviet Union, of which 30 had involved some form of armed conflict. Yet it suffers even more than the states paradigm in being too close to reality. The world may be chaos but it is not totally without order. An image of universal and undifferentiated anarchy provides few clues for understanding the world, for ordering events and evaluating their importance, for predicting trends in the anarchy, for distinguishing among types of chaos and their possibly different causes and consequences, and for developing guidelines for governmental policy makers.



Comparing Worlds: Realism, Parsimony, and Predictions



Each of these four paradigms offers a somewhat different combination of realism and parsimony. Each also has its deficiencies and limitations. Conceivably these could be countered by combining paradigms, and positing, for instance, that the world is engaged in simultaneous processes of fragmentation and integration. Both trends indeed exist, and a more complex model will more closely approximate reality than a simpler one. Yet this sacrifices parsimony for realism and, if pursued very far, leads to the rejection of all paradigms or theories. In addition, by embracing two simultaneous opposing trends, the fragmentation-integration model fails to set forth under what circumstances one trend will prevail and under what circumstances the other will. The challenge is to develop a paradigm that accounts for more crucial events and provides a better understanding of trends than other paradigms at a similar level of intellectual abstraction.



These four paradigms are also incompatible with each other. The world cannot be both one and fundamentally divided between East and West or North and South. Nor can the nation state be the base rock of international affairs if it is fragmenting and torn by proliferating civil strife. The world is either one, or two, or 184 states, or potentially an almost infinite number of tribes, ethnic groups, and nationalities.



Viewing the world in terms of seven or eight civilizations avoids many of these difficulties. It does not sacrifice reality to parsimony as do the one- and two-world paradigms; yet it also does not sacrifice parsimony to reality as the statist and chaos paradigms do. It provides an easily grasped and intelligible framework for understanding the world, distinguishing what is important from what is unimportant among the multiplying conflicts, predicting future developments, and providing guidelines for policy makers. It also builds on and incorporates elements of the other paradigms. It is more compatible with them than they are with each other. A civilizational approach, for instance, holds that:



* The forces of integration in the world are real and are precisely what are generating counterforces of cultural assertion and civilizational consciousness.



* The world is in some sense two, but the central distinction is between the West as the hitherto dominant civilization and all the others, which, however, have little if anything in common among them. The world, in short, is divided between a Western one and a non-Western many.



* Nation states are and will remain the most important actors in world affairs, but their interests, associations, and conflicts are increasingly shaped by cultural and civilizational factors.



* The world is indeed anarchical, rife with tribal and nationality conflicts, but the conflicts that pose the greatest dangers for stability are those between states or groups from different civilizations.



A civilizational paradigm thus sets forth a relatively simple but not too simple map for understanding what is going on in the world as the twentieth century ends. No paradigm, however, is good forever. The Cold War model of world politics was useful and relevant for forty years but became obsolete in the late 1980s, and at some point the civilizational paradigm will suffer a similar fate. For the contemporary period, however, it provides a useful guide for distinguishing what is more important from what is less important. Slightly less than half of the forty-eight ethnic conflicts in the world in early 1993, for example, were between groups from different civilizations. The civilizational perspective would lead the U.N. Secretary-General and the U.S. Secretary of State to concentrate their peacemaking efforts on these conflicts which have much greater potential than others to escalate into broader wars.



Paradigms also generate predictions, and a crucial test of a paradigm's validity and usefulness is the extent to which the predictions derived from it turn out to be more accurate than those from alternative paradigms. A statist paradigm, for instance, leads John Mearsheimer to predict that "the situation between Ukraine and Russia is ripe for the outbreak of security competition between them. Great powers that share a long and unprotected common border, like that between Russia and Ukraine, often lapse into competition driven by security fears. Russia and Ukraine might overcome this dynamic and learn to live together in harmony, but it would be unusual if they do." A civilizational approach, on the other hand, emphasizes the close cultural, personal, and historical links between Russia and Ukraine and the intermingling of Russians and Ukrainians in both countries, and focuses instead on the civilizational fault line that divides Orthodox eastern Ukraine from Uniate western Ukraine, a central historical fact of long standing which, in keeping with the "realist" concept of states as unified and self-identified entities, Mearsheimer totally ignores. While a statist approach highlights the possibility of a Russian-Ukrainian war, a civilizational approach minimizes that and instead highlights the possibility of Ukraine splitting in half, a separation which cultural factors would lead one to predict might be more violent than that of Czechoslovakia but far less bloody than that of Yugoslavia. These different predictions, in turn, give rise to different policy priorities. Mearsheimer's statist prediction of possible war and Russian conquest of Ukraine leads him to support Ukraine's having nuclear weapons. A civilizational approach would encourage cooperation between Russia and Ukraine, urge Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons, promote substantial economic assistance and other measures to help maintain Ukrainian unity and independence, and sponsor contingency planning for the possible breakup of Ukraine.



Many important developments after the end of the Cold War were compatible with the civilizational paradigm and could have been predicted from it. These include: the breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia; the wars going on in their former territories; the rise of religious fundamentalism throughout the world; the struggles within Russia, Turkey, and Mexico over their identity; the intensity of the trade conflicts between the United States and Japan; the resistance of Islamic states to Western pressure on Iraq and Libya; the efforts of Islamic and Confucian states to acquire nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them; China's continuing role as an "outsider" great power; the consolidation of new democratic regimes in some countries and not in others; and the developing arms competition in East Asia.



The relevance of the civilizational paradigm to the emerging world is illustrated by the events fitting that paradigm which occurred during a six-month period in 1993.



* the continuation and intensification of the fighting among Croats, Muslims, and Serbs in the former Yugoslavia;



* the failure of the West to provide meaningful support to the Bosnian Muslims



or to denounce Croat atrocities in the same way Serb atrocities were denounced;



* the unwillingness of Russia to join other U.N. Security Council members in getting the Serbs in Croatia to make peace with the Croatian government, and the offer of Iran and other Muslim nations to provide 18,000 troops to protect Bosnian Muslims;



* the intensification of the war between Armenians and Azeris, Turkish and Iranian demands that the Armenians surrender their conquests, the deployment of Turkish troops to and Iranian troops across the Azerbaijan border, and Russia's warning that the Iranian action contributes to "escalation of the conflict" and "pushes it to dangerous limits of internationalization";



* the continued fighting in central Asia between Russian troops and mujahedeen guerrillas;



* the confrontation at the Vienna Human Rights Conference between the West, led by U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher, denouncing "cultural relativism," and a coalition of Islamic and Confucian states rejecting "Western universalism";



* the refocusing in parallel fashion of Russian and NATO military planners on "the threat from the South";



* the voting, apparently almost entirely along civilizational lines, that gave the 2000 Olympics to Sydney rather than Beijing;



* the sale of missile components from China to Pakistan, the resulting imposition of U.S. sanctions against China, and the confrontation between China and the United States over the alleged shipment of nuclear technology to Iran;



* the breaking of the moratorium and the testing of a nuclear weapon by China, despite vigorous U.S. protests, and North Korea's refusal to participate further in talks on its own nuclear weapons program;



* the revelation that the U.S. State Department was following a "dual containment" policy directed at both Iran and Iraq;



* the announcement by the U.S. Defense Department of a new strategy of preparing for two "major regional conflicts," one against North Korea, the other against Iran or Iraq;



* the call by Iran's president for alliances with China and India so that "we can have the last word on international events";



* the new German legislation drastically curtailing the admission of refugees;



* the agreement between Russian President Boris Yeltsin and Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk on the disposition of the Black Sea fleet and other Issues;



* the bombing of Baghdad by the United States, its virtually unanimous support by Western governments, and its condemnation by almost all Muslim governments as another example of the West's "double standard";



* the United States' listing Sudan as a terrorist state and indicting Egyptian Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and his followers for conspiring "to levy a war of urban terrorism against the United States";



* the improved prospects for the eventual admission of Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia into NATO;



* the 1993 Russian presidential election which demonstrated that Russia was indeed a "torn" country with its population and elites uncertain whether they should join or challenge the West.



A comparable list of events demonstrating the relevance of the civilization paradigm could be compiled for almost any other six-month period in the early 1990s.



In the early years of the Cold War, the Canadian statesman Lester Pearson presciently pointed to the resurgence and vitality of non-Western societies. "It would be absurd," he warned, "to imagine that these new political societies coming to birth in the East will be replicas of those with which we in the West are familiar. The revival of these ancient civilizations will take new forms." Pointing out that international relations "for several centuries" had been the relations among the states of Europe, he argued that "the most far-reaching problems arise no longer between nations within a single civilization but between civilizations themselves." The prolonged bipolarity of the Cold War delayed the developments which Pearson saw coming. The end of the Cold War released the cultural and civilizational forces which he identified in the 1950s, and a wide range of scholars and observers have recognized and highlighted the new role of these factors in global politics. "[A]s far as anyone interested in the contemporary world is concerned," Fernand Braudel has sagely warned, "and even more so with regard to anyone wishing to act within it, it `pays' to know how to make out, on a map of the world, which civilizations exist today, to be able to define their borders, their centers and peripheries, their provinces and the air one breathes there, the general and particular `forms' existing and associating within them. Otherwise, what catastrophic blunders of perspective could ensue!"





© 1996 Samuel P. Huntington



Simon & Schuster

Samuel P. Huntington's Clash Of Civilizations, Part Two

From History Orb and Foreign Policy:

Samuel P. Huntington's Clash of Civilisations (Part 2)




by James Graham

Published: May, 2004









By simplifying the world Huntington's theory ignores culture's inclination to be fast changing and multi-dimensional (Herzfeld 1997:116). Most Western states are now multi or bi-cultural and becoming more so. They are thus potentially part of multiple civilizations, a situation he brushes over by designating religion as the deciding factor. A secular Arab immigrant living in an Arab community in England is just one example where this designation is inappropriate. Indeed situated in a highly religious country with a significant number of Christian fundamentalists he states confidently that the world is becoming un-secularised. His evidence to backup this claim is circumstantial a common fault with most of his supporting evidence and thus is as best highly tenuous.



Like many sweeping theories Huntington's suffers from being too vague to address many specific issues. His anecdotal approach is simply not robust enough to account for the explanations and arguments he presents (Fox 2002:423). A systematic quantitative analysis conducted by Jonathon Fox for the period 1989-2002 concluded that the exact opposite of what Huntington predicted actually occurred (Fox 2002:425). Not only did Fox find that civilizational conflicts were less common than noncivilizational conflicts but the end of the Cold War had no significant effect on the ratio between the two (Fox 2002:426). Traditional methods like the level of discrimination in a society and the characteristics of a regime proved more useful in analysing ethnic conflict than Huntington's Clash of civilizations. Most damning of all was the finding that where civilizational conflict did occur it was more likely to be between groups that were culturally similar (Fox 2002:429), that is within the same civilization and not between them. These findings directly contradict Huntington's theory.



The danger of the Clash of Civilization thesis is presented by the term "clash of civilizations" which is intuitively understandable. This has ensured the theory has been used to increase the fear in the West of an Islamic movement perceived as increasingly powerful and anti-Western. It is this fantasy that has provided much of the rationale for trying to limit and control the expansion of the Islam and Confucian civilizations of which the war on terror is but the latest and most extreme example. These policies were advocated by Huntingdon in the article to reduce the threat specific civilizations were perceived to hold (Huntington 1993:47). A reasonable argument can thus be made that this article and the storm of interest it created, generated a self-fulfilling prophecy. The power to make real what one merely theorises is immensely dangerous. When that theory is based on flawed and circumstantial evidence it is disastrous.



The clash of civilizations thesis while original and persuasive distorted reality. Its many flaws have been exposed by events since its publication. The theory has however forced people to examine more seriously non-Western cultures. Unfortunately the conclusions many have drawn from these examinations have been the wrong ones as they were conducted from the starting premise of a 'clash of civilizations.' Such is the power of a well written and persuasive article to distort individual's perception of culture and conflict.





References Cited



Fox. Jonathon, Ethnic minorities and the clash of civilizations: A quantitative analysis of Huntington's thesis. British Journal of Political Science, 32(3):415-435.



Herzfeld, Michael, 1997. Anthropology and the politics of significance. Social Analysis, 4(3):107-138.



Huntington. Samuel, 1993. The clash of civilizations. Foreign Affairs, 72(3):22-49.

Samuel P. Huntington's Clash Of Civilizations, Part One

From History Orb and Foreign Policy:

Samuel P. Huntington's Clash of Civilizations




by James Graham

Published: May, 2004









In the post Cold War world few articles have influenced how Western and especially American policymakers view the world more than Samuel P. Huntington's 1993 article, The Clash of Civilizations. Published in the influential Foreign Affairs journal the article suggested the world was returning to a civilization dominated world where future conflicts would originate from clashes between 'civilizations'. The theory has been broadly criticised for oversimplification, ignoring indigenous conflicts and for incorrectly predicting what has happened in the decade since its publication. The claim made by many that September the 11th has vindicated Huntington is simply not supported by the evidence. Published while a post Cold War world was searching for a new prism to view international relations through ensured it has however proved influential.











Who is Samuel P. Huntington?





Samuel P. Huntington



Born April 18, 1927.

Harvard based since 1950.

Founder and co-editor of the quarterly journal, Foreign Policy.

Currently Eaton Professor of the Science of Government at Harvard

C.V. reads like a description of the US foreign policy machinery.

Recieved $US 4,719,832 over 15 years from the John M. Olin Foundation, a right wing think tank that grew out of a chemicals and munitions business. More info here.

Policy adviser to U.S. Presidents Lynson Johnson and Jimmy Carter.

Has his own Yahoo category alongside Marx and Aristotle!





Huntington's thesis outlines a future where the "great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural" (Huntington 1993:22). He divides the world's cultures into seven current civilizations, Western, Latin American, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu and Slavic-Orthodox (Huntington 1993:26). In addition he judged Africa only as a possible civilization depending on how far one viewed the development of an African consciousness had developed. These civilizations seem to be defined primarily by religion with a number of ad hoc exceptions. Israel is lumped together with the West, Buddhist states and the whole religion is completely ignored.



Huntington argues that the end of ideological confrontation between liberal democracy and communism will see future conflict occurring along the borders between civilizations at a micro level. At a macro level he predicts conflict occurring between states from different civilizations for control of international institutions and for economic and military power (Huntington 1993:29). He views this mix of conflict as normal by asserting that nation-states are new phenomena in a world dominated for most of its history by conflicts between civilizations. This is a dubious statement as inter-civilizational conflict driven mainly by geo-political factors rather than cultural differences is an equally if not more persuasive way to view much of history.



The theory at least differentiates between non-Western civilizations rather than grouping them together. He also explains how the West presents pro-Western policies as positive for the entire world and that the very idea of a universal culture is a Western idea. This he argues is evidenced by most important Western values like human rights often being the least important values to other civilizations.



His escape from a Eurocentric bias is however only temporary. He completely fails to account for indigenous cultures even though one can argue they collectively comprise a separate civilization (Fox 2002:430). The article also predicts future conflicts will be started by non-Western civilizations reacting to Western power and values ignoring the equally plausible situation where Western states use their military superiority to maintain their superior positions. The policy prescriptions he suggests to counter this perceived threat equate to increasing the power of the West to forestall any loss of the West's pre-eminence. Thus he suggests the Latin American and Orthodox-Slavic civilizations be drawn further into the Western orbit and the maintenance of Western military superiority (Huntington 1993:47).