The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern (23 page)

Public dissent and
expression
—Would a citizen of London or Amsterdam feel more secure in violent public protest of Israeli foreign policy or in peacefully criticizing Islamic sharia law and its contributions to terror abroad and repression at home? Note again in this regard how the Swedish newspaper
Aftonbladet
ignored Israeli protests and published a controversial blood libel article alleging that Israelis harvest the organs of Palestinian dead, but it would not publish the incendiary Muhammad caricatures.

Each age has its demons of either laxity or authoritarianism. But our era in the West has fostered a peculiar form of self-censorship that far exceeds anything dreamed up by the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, or the Pentagon. The only mystery about our reluctance to speak honestly and freely about particular issues is why we are so eager to give up on free expression, especially when it comes to radical Islam, which fuels much of the world’s terrorism in the post–September 11 landscape?

The New –isms

O
THER THAN FEAR
of bodily harm, one reason for curbing criticism of radical Islam surely is contemporary postmodern ideologies such as multiculturalism (the notion that the West is just one of many cultures, no better or worse than any other); utopian pacifism (wars can be eliminated through diplomacy and the teaching of nonviolent arbitration); and moral equivalence (those with power and influence in the West, given its own sins, cannot legitimately calibrate, much less condemn, the distasteful practices of other cultures).

What these notions have in common are particular views of radical egalitarianism and Western culpability for the inability to achieve equality on a global scale. Multiculturalism—whether found in Edward Said’s
Orientalism
, or “black liberation theory,” or various indictments of European colonialism of Africa and the Americas—grew up in an age of postwar affluence. It perhaps was fueled by Western guilt over past colonialism, imperialism, and global exploitation. And it argues that the sins of humankind—slavery, sexism, racism, and imperialism—are to be more emphasized as Western-inspired rather than equally innate to all cultures. Therefore, we could hardly use our own arbitrary standards of freedom or equality to judge other cultures, a practice that in the past had led to the subjugation and oppression of others under dishonest banners such as “civilization.”

In its most radical manifestation, the idea that all cultures are de facto of equal pedigree and moral thought would mean that Westerners could not arbitrarily define what distinguishes the methodology of a contemporary Islamic terrorist from, say, the revolutionary generation of 1776 or a B-17 bombardier over Dresden or an American G.I. at Hue. Or more broadly, the multiculturalist alleges that the West has neither the moral capital nor the intellectual deftness to condemn foreign practices such as suicide bombing, religious intolerance, female circumcision, and honor killings, and so must allow that these endemic practices and customs are merely different rather than necessarily repugnant across time and space.

The practical consequence is that millions in the West have been taught not to believe in Western exceptionalism, and thus insidiously convey that message to millions of immigrants who seek to enjoy the benefits of European and American life, but who feel no pressing need to fully assimilate into it, and in some cases, thrive on being antithetical to it, albeit without forfeiting the undeniable material benefits that residency within Western borders conveys.

Many Westerners are now hesitant to condemn something like sharia law in abstract terms as an enemy of freedom, or to say Islamic suicide bombers kill barbarously for an evil cause. Some in the West don’t think jihadists necessarily pose any more of a threat than their own industrial capitalist state, abortion protesters, or right-wing militias. And some who do simply feel that they lack the knowledge, or have previously lost the moral capital, to do anything about it.

Utopian pacifism was always innate in Western civilization, given its propensity to wage horrific wars, and in response to seek transnational legislative means to prevent the reoccurrence of such catastrophes. From classical times, there has been a strain in Western letters and thought that a natural human, freed of the burdens of an oppressive civilization, might find a blissful existence without war, hunger, injustice, or the stress of the nation-state—should he be properly educated and replace wild emotion with a certain sort of pseudo-reason that borders on romance. Elite urban Romans often romanticized shaggy Germans bathing in ice-cold, pure mountain rivers. Plato’s
Republic
was the beginning of a number of never-never speculations about how properly educated and trained elites could construct a society without war and poverty.

In revulsion at the carnage of the European twentieth century, and given the respite at the end of an existential threat from a nuclear Soviet Union, these old ideas about the perfectibility of human nature through education, energized by a vast increase in national income, have again taken hold. Sometimes we see these hopes manifested in world government. Many Westerners advocate sharing some national sovereignty with the United Nations, or allowing American soldiers to be subject to edicts arising from the World Court at The Hague.

Sometimes they are more pedagogical and more ambitious, establishing “peace studies” programs to inculcate our youth that, with proper study and counsels, war can be outlawed, as if the carnage is a result of misunderstanding rather than evil leaders knowing exactly what they want and planning how to get it. At other moments, diplomats convince themselves that controversial leaders of autocratic states—Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, or Bashar Assad of Syria, or Kim Jong-Il of North Korea—either may have some understandable complaints against the West, which explains their hostility, or appear more bellicose than they really are, largely through misunderstanding and miscommunication or the efforts of Western rightist zealots. In fact, the utopian believes that such autocrats may no more wish to harm us than we do them. Such bogeymen perhaps resort to the alarmist rhetoric of armed threats largely as a legitimate reaction to the military preparedness of the United States.

Utopian pacifism has had the effect within Western societies of defining difference down. In the present post-9/11 world, it deludes Western publics into thinking that problems with radical Islam are as much of our own making as they are a result of aggressive jihadist doctrines. In practical terms, utopianism translates into an influential segment of the public that does its best to convey the message that Western and radical Islamic cultures are roughly similar—and that any differences that arise can be adjudicated through greater understanding and dialogue. Therefore, novelists, filmmakers, journalists, or politicians who believe otherwise should not voice their sentiments out of concern for the greater ecumenical good—or at least exercise prudence by curtailing free expression, in recognition that their blunt talk may evoke a counterresponse quite injurious to the Western public in general.

As for such moral equivalence, or the inability to discern Western and non-Western pathologies, it begins as a strain of cultural neutrality. “They do it, but we do it” thinking seeks to do away with any notion of relative magnitude in hope of achieving global ecumenicalism—and yet thereby places impossible burdens of perfection on Western societies.

Sometimes the Western misdemeanor is defined as equivalent to another culture’s felony. Prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, for example, was rephrensible and abhorrent to any sense of decency, but no Iraqi detainees were seriously injured nor perished. Nevertheless, it was treated in popular media as the equivalent of either a Nazi stalag or Soviet gulag, or a continuation of Saddam Hussein’s torture center, where thousands were tortured or executed. Evidently, all were penal camps and therefore roughly all equivalent in ethical terms. Thus Senator Ted Kennedy fulminated, “Shamefully, we now learn that Saddam’s torture chambers reopened under new management: U.S. management.”

Context must become less important. The invasion of Iraq—approved by an elected Senate and House, argued over at the United Nations, intended to remove a genocidal dictator and leave a constitutional government in its wake—becomes not much different from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the result of a Communist dictatorship’s desire to crush an anti-Soviet neighbor, waged ruthlessly against a civilian population, and resulting in the installation of an authoritarian puppet government. When the Russians went into Georgia in summer 2008, an autocracy seeking to destroy a republic, many in America said they were emulating our example in Iraq—a democracy trying to destroy a dictatorship in order to foster a democracy.

Standards of censure are never quite equally applied: We worry whether an errant bomb killed Iraqi civilians; silence ensues when Russians nearly obliterate Grozny and kill tens of thousands of civilians. The mishandling of the federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina, one of the five worst natural disasters in the nation’s history, in which 1,836 Americans were killed, is singular evidence of American racism and incompetence. Yet not much later, 300,000 were lost in an Indonesian tsunami, a Burmese hurricane accounted for 100,000 dead, and a Chinese earthquake took 50,000 lives—and few remarked on either the incompetence of those governments in reacting to such a staggering loss of life or the failure of such states to provide safe and adequate housing for their populations in the first place.

Despite the veneer of internationalism and caring, moral equivalence is predicated on a sort of condescending notion of low expectations—that an educated and affluent Western society must not err, while the “other” is apparently always expected to commit felonies. Once the doctrine of moral equivalence is adopted, it becomes again impossible to abide by any abstract standards of censure or calibration of blame.

We circumcise infant males, so why shouldn’t the Sudanese “circumcise” female infants? We have bombed civilians from Tokyo to Hanoi, so why shouldn’t suicide bombers do the same? Timothy McVeigh was a religious, right-wing terrorist, so why are the thousands of Islamic terrorists deserving of any special censure? Much of the effort to hold the West to an unambiguously higher standard of being near perfect to qualify as being merely good speaks well of our values and aspirations. But in times of war, such requisites can endanger the lives of those entrusted with ensuring that we the public can entertain such exalted moral ambitions.

The aggregate result of multiculturalism, utopian pacifism, and moral equivalence among its cultural elites and leadership is that philosophically and ethically the Western public becomes less well-equipped to condemn antithetical ideologies and to defend itself against their aggression. In Western consensual societies this so-called political correctness likewise permeates the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government. For a variety of reasons we voluntarily restrict our own free speech and expression; and we do not expect our governments to have the intellectual and moral wherewithal to protect the safety of writers, filmmakers, intellectuals, and journalists who choose to express themselves candidly and incur the wrath of radicals abroad.

But Why Now?

A
QUESTION LOOMS:
Why have these doctrines become so popular in our own era? First, in the general sense, the wealthier, freer, and more leisured a society becomes—and none is more so on all three counts than twenty-first-century America—the more its population has the leeway, the margin of error, so to speak, both to question and to feel guilty over its singular privilege.

Abstract doctrines that allow one to vent remorse over our riches, without denying our enjoyment of them, satisfy a psychological need to reconcile what is intrinsically irreconcilable. We see the same sort of phenomenon in early Roman imperial literature—Petronius, Juvenal, Suetonius, and Tacitus—where wealthy elites engage in a sort of nihilism or cynicism in matters concerning their own culture, as if ridiculing luxury means that they are exempt from criticism of enjoying it.

Second, with the collapse of Communism and the rise of globalized capitalism, Marxism as a formal doctrine was formally discredited. But its underlying and more vague assumptions that the state must enforce an equality of result among all the citizenry remain attractive to many, especially once the doctrinaire baggage of the millions killed by Soviet and Maoist Communism is removed.

One way of encouraging Western societies to redistribute their wealth both at home and abroad is to argue that it is not earned—or the result of practices not at all different from, much less better than, what is found in non-Western societies. And if non-Western societies appear to us to be more violent and unfair than our own, such perceptions need to be contextualized as legitimate responses to prior Western sins, ranging from colonialism and imperialism to unfair commercial protocols arising from globalization.

The Western military tradition assures Western states that they could, if they so wish, become almost immune from foreign attack. Consensual governments can, in extremis, craft security legislation consistent with constitutional principles that will protect citizens without eroding their rights. But government has no remedy once citizens voluntarily begin to abandon freedom of expression out of fear or guilt—or misguided ideologies designed to deny the singularity of their civilization. More important still, as the use of military force in unconventional landscapes becomes increasingly problematic, the power of rhetoric, sloganeering, and public opinion in the conduct of wars becomes even more critical.