Iraq and Afghanistan

I have recently been looking back over a book that I enjoyed in the past: Theodore H. Van Laue, The World Revolution of Westernization (1987). It is a review of the history of the last few centuries from the standpoint of the effect of Western Civilization on the rest of the world. One of the author’s most interesting theses is the idea that all peoples and cultures and religions try to expand over as much of the world as possible. From this standpoint, he argues that Western imperialism was inevitable. It helped millions and hurt millions. But once it got going no one, neither the imperialists nor those they conquered, could resist it.

His second thesis is that ideological movements such as Fascism and Communism and Maoism and third-world nationalisms of all kinds were essentially reactions against this all-consuming "revolution".

What makes Van Laue’s work germane to our discussion is the evidence that he brings forth that the greatest harm that this revolution did to the rest of the world was to humiliate its peoples. The Chinese even celebrated a "day of humiliation". He points out that the United Nations and the humanitarian efforts of the West are seen by other peoples as all part of the process of devaluing their abilities and contributions. They are ashamed of their poverty and ineffectiveness and poor leadership, but still do not appreciate saviors from the West that would save them from all this. The United States has been particularly enamored of its role in the world as the leader of the West, and has gone beyond this to see its version of Western Civilization as inevitably superior, its democracy the goal of all peoples. In the long run, the Americans may be right. They may only want to help, to bring freedom to enslaved peoples, but too many of these peoples inevitably see this as condescending, devaluing their traditions. This is the essential reason that the cheering in Iraq was so short-lived — and for many never began.

Under his pen the many isms that have bedeviled the world in this century come to be seen as part of the same reactive phenomenon. In the face of the onslaught, a small number in many countries essentially became Westerners, wherever they might live. Small in numbers, these often play a large role in emigré communities (and were the majority of the people the government talked with before the invasion of Iraq). (In some countries such as India this group may become so large and powerful that it can continue to play a major role in the evolving society.) A larger group consist of persons who live their lives caught between the new world opened up by the West and the traditional world with which they still identify. Many of these develop or gravitate to doctrines that mix their own tradition with the imported or imposed tradition. They tend, for example, to accept the ideas of material progress and equality. But they also see the need for rapid change, to “catch up” so that their people can hold up their heads again. Their impatience leads them to understand "democracy" in a Rousseauian sense of the "General Will", discovered in their case by a vanguard class that will unite and lead the society in spite of itself. A "true democracy" is defined as a society in which the people are expected to unanimously acclaim a savior that will lead them out of the wilderness. In this "democracy", political rights and civil liberties as we understand them have little place. People in this group can take this position because the third group in their societies, the great "mass" (which is often a maze of people with local traditions without a concept of a national community or freedom as we understand it) are without the knowledge, experience, or organization that would make possible resistance to the “new order”, whether explained in terms of Nazism, Maoism, Stalinism, Nasserism, or Baathism.

Van Laue’s treatment helps to explain why two groups so different in apparent ideology, the Baath and the Jihadist Muslims, can cooperate together on the task of "expelling the foreigner", or perhaps in another sense, simply "taking down the Americans a notch". The more they seem to succeed, even temporarily, the more they can see themselves as defenders of the honor of the Iraqi people. One could only wish our government planners of the Iraq invasion had spent a little time with this book.