"I believe it is one of democracy's failings that it seeks to make scapegoats for its own weaknesses. "--Kennedy--(216)
The Harvard Political scientist, Samuel P. Huntington argues in his essay, "The clash of Civilizations,' that the primary modes of conflict in the post cold war world will be primarily be cultural,--involving the clash of modernity and globalisim versus tradition and fundamentalism. Huntington argues that globalization has entirely replaced the traditional Westphalian balance of power system, along with it traditional definitions of nation and statehood. Huntington proposes though that now with Globalization, we have arrived at a critical juncture in which the west as the Occident and definer of modernity has created its own antithesis, third world nationalism and along with it economic and political fault lines. Huntington also argues that economics is the great equalizer of cultural divides however, he may have a liberal western bias that favors the west over the rest, i.e., his passive support for deregulated globalization and his theory that the Orient is the repository of the innate sense of Asian cruelty, incapable of having a high regard for human life. So while his theory as to where the definable nodes of political and cultural conflict are in fact mostly correct, he discerns an ethnocentric bias that may be damaging to potential US coalitional allies when it comes to policy consensuses on how best to avert terrorism. He also does not admit US collective responsibility for the current conflict, approaching the angle from the view of a football coach who can only see adversaries where they may be potential allies.
Huntington in his own words does not deny this bias when he is describing how western ideals, such as the civil society, democracy,.etc., have no Asian equivalents.
"Western Concepts differ fundamentally from those prevalent in other civilizations. Western ideas of individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, the separation of church and state, often have little resonance in Islamic, Confucian, Japanese, Hindu, Buddhist or orthodox cultures. Western efforts to propagate such ideas produce instead a reaction against 'human rights imperialism' and a reaffirmation of indigenous values, as can be seen in the support for religious fundamentalism by the younger (child races) generation in nonwestern cultures. "(The Clash of Civilizations?, pg. 28)
It was Karl Marx who said that ideas are not independent of experience. It was Siddhartha said that all that we are is a direct result of what we have thought. Both are correct though no doubt their motives for saying roughly the same thing are distinctly different. Marx was an imperialist when it came to the theory of Indian independence, requiring British railroads to facilitate the transfer of Indian wealth in the name of divine economic progress back to England.
This myth of the morally exalted superior west is a holdover from the Crusades when Europe finally learned how to use mounted cavalry. The myth of the distinct west is erroneous to suppose given that with globalization and the increasingly international flavor to domestic production and trade inevitably favors more contact and more acculturation. Ideals are truly universal they just need historical and cultural context to be meaningful. It was Siddhartha and not Solon, Socrates or Kliesthenes who first promoted introspection and though the Socratic Method bears the name of a Greek it originated in India. Of course the civic minded republicans tout these qualities as commensurate necessary for qualified citizenship the essential requirement for a democracy: to be able to question and change power. It was with the myth of the West that spawned our conception of the Socratic method as having a distinct western basis for origination that lies at the root of the problem and the chief impediment to cultural dialogue among the people's of the world. Western civilization in its pursuit of utilitarian profit created its own antithesis modernity spawned from the superficial morally amoral aesthetic western scientific method. Please see Edward Said on the French philosophers Buffoon and Linnaeus for the impact of imperialism on global culture. "Orientalisim, By Edward Said)'
So is global neo-ricardoian economics the great homogenizing force of cultural heterogeneity? Huntington argues that the 'velvet curtain of culture has replaced the iron
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Also see this washington post feature on Cults and mindcontrol
Footnote # 1 [From 'Orientalism,' New York: Vintage, 1979.]
Unlike the Americans, the French and British--less so the Germans, Russians, Spanish, Portuguese, Italians, and Swiss--have had a long tradition of what I shall be calling Orientalism, a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient's special place in European Western Experience. The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe's greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other. In addition, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience. Yet none of this Orient is merely imaginative. The Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture. Orientalism expresses and represents that part culturally and even ideologically as a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles. . . .
It will be clear to the reader ... that by Orientalism I mean several things, all of them in my opinion, interdependent. The most readily accepted designation for Orientalism is an academic one, and indeed the label still serves in a number of academic institutions. Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient--and this applies whether the person is an anthropologist, sociologist, historian, or philologist-either in its specific or its general aspects, is an Orientalist, and what he or she says or does is Orientalism. .
Related to this academic tradition, whose fortunes, transmigrations, specializations, and transmissions are in part the subject of this study, is a more general meaning for Orientalism. Orientalism is a style of thought based upon ontological and epistemological distinction made between "the Orient" and (most of the time) "the Occident. " Thus a very large mass of writers, among who are poet, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and imperial administrators, have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, "mind," destiny, and so on.... the phenomenon of Orientalism as I study it here deals principally, not with a correspondence between Orientalism and Orient, but with the internal consistency of Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient. . despite or beyond any correspondence, or lack thereof, with a "real" Orient. (1-3,5)
end of footnote # 1
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curtain of ideology as the most significant dividing line in Europe." (24) Huntington ,refers to Bosnia fiasco of 1992 which later spilled out into the 1994-1996 genocide in which the US and UN international peace keeping efforts failed mostly due to ideological disdain for Croat Muslims and our passive support for Serbian Catholics, even though it was the Serbian Catholics who officiated the genocide of Muslims. Ultimately in 1998 we intervened in Kosovo under the pretext of preventing the balkanization of the Balkans, inherently an oxymoron though no doubt Balkan instability was the cause of WWI. Our failures necessitated the Kosovo incident in which the precedent for bilateral Russian NATO K4 cooperation was established at Rambouillette in 1998. The current conflict, i.e., the war on terror and terrorism truly stems from the uneven economic mode of development sustained during the Cold War where our success stories succeeded only because we wanted them too. The rest of the world is angry about that, and the bland argument that they just don't think like us, is just cunningly disguised racism.
To quote John F. Kennedy this Orientalist pedagogical mentality is a culturally biased red herring that defeats the attempted moral initiative of the west and rather invites a do-nothing approach. "The feeling was very similar to that in the United States during 1937 and 1938 when most of our opposition to Nazism was based on its injustices to its own people rather than on any potential menace which it might be to us. Like England's, ours was a detached criticism of a form of government, rather than a realistic grasp of the implications of that form of government on the welfare of the world. And this is not the sort of feeling that calls for building up armaments for defense, but rather for speeches pointing out how fortunate we are not living in Germany."(108)" Why England Slept," by JFK, 1961 ed
Huntington seems to agree. So then now with all of past forecasts of unlimited corporate national global growth, in reality just the prosaic waxing of the high priests of globalization, the speculators and oil traders have strangely become silent in the current recession, since they know that increase in the Iraqi oil supply benefits them and few others.
Kennedy on Balance of Payments
"There was the closeness to the Government of the English aristocracy which was opposed so strongly to war: some because they had strong 'rightists' sympathies with Germany, some because they realize it would mean the end of their particular position, and some because they had a clear conception of what it would mean to England as a whole..These are..the factors that contributed to England's tardiness in rearming..On the other hand, we can attribute our failure to rearm in part to factors that have no English counterpart, such as the strong feeling of isolation which exists in the Middle West, and the reaction of many people tom the failure of European countries to pay their World War debts to the United States, which was one of determining to have no further share in European troubles."
Kennedy on Capitalism .."In regard to capitalism, we observe first that
it was obedience to its principles that contributed so largely to England's
failure. It has been estimated in authoritative circles that Hitler has spent
anywhere from, $50,000,000,000 to $100,000,000,000 in building
up Germany's armaments. He ran Germany's debt to skyrocket heights and saved
Germany from suffering violent inflation only by rigid state control."(220-221)
Arguably our current free trade policies are creating the same rearmament scenario today visa via our 100 billion dollar trade deficit fueling China's annual 8-10% trade surplus, which goes directly to the modernization of the PLA. China has its rabid supporters, the free trade china lobby, it has benefited from this lobby through the sale of numerous dual use technological items intended to theoretically restore democracy to china through expansionistic capitalism, rather the Chinese neo-mercantile fascist state has always had the same prerogatives from antiquity: It views itself like the west to be the center of civilization. Hence the US NMC's who have relocated production facilities overseas, have theoretically become loyal subjects of China. (see footnote # 2)
Jean Baudrillard writing for writing for the French newspaper Le monde, and also author of a recently released book, "Impossible Exchange," argues that: the phantasmagoria of the current deregulated globalization fanatical zeal is fundamentally flawed. "..There is no longer a boundary that can hem terrorism in; it is at the heart of the very culture it's fighting with, and the visible fracture (and the hatred) that pits the exploited and underdeveloped nations of the world against the west masks the dominant system's internal fractures. It was as if the very means of domination secreted its own antidote .... This the clash of triumphant globalization at war with itself "(Baudrillard, "L' Esprit Du Terrorisime, " Harpers Magazine, Feb. 2002 p 14)
It is strange to think that formerly Maoist China poses a threat to the United States. In reality the failure for us to fully capitalize on the Sino Soviet Divide of 1960 no doubt requires tough choices on the part of US overall strategy towards US- global and regional Asian security.
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2. See this url for more info: http://www.nytimes.com/library/opinion/roesenthal/102299rose.html
"More often now, the special cargo arrives in China from Israel - files from Israeli military computers, crates with the makings of missiles and other weapons, and the men in the lab coats, the engineer,,, and scientists who know how to put it all together.
Many other countries send that kind of cargo purchased by the Chinese for the same reason, clearly understood by the vendors -- to add to the accuracy, skills and range of the Communists' armed forces.
That’s the way it is -- once again democracies, their friends and beneficiaries are strengthening a dictatorship that governs by fear and force. They do it for money."
We tend to regard evil, metaphysically, as an accidental smudge, but this axiom is illusory. Good does not reduce evil, or vice versa, they are at once irreducible, the one and the other, and inextricably linked. In the end Good cannot vanquish evil without declining to be Good, since in monopolizing global power, it entails a backfire of proportional violence." (L'Esprit Du Terrorisime, 15) Inherently since we have become the world's most technologically advanced army the question now comes to mind is the US to dependent on Push button warfare more so than actual field combat given that since Vietnam most American's profess little heart for an immoral war or are willing to support a war that they deem to be without morals.
Kennedy describes this scenario as one of the short term liabilities of a democracy, however in reality though this contributes to the long-term preservation of that system in that intervention has inherently stemmed from our moral regard for life. "In the first place, democracy is essentially peace-loving; the people don't want to go to war. When the do go, it is with a very firm conviction, because they must believe deeply and strongly in their cause before they consent. This gives them an advantage over a totalitarian system, where the people may find themselves in a war in which they only half believe."(Why England Slept, 222) "For the long run, then, democracy is superior. But for the short run, democracy has great weaknesses. When it competes with a system of government which cares nothing for permanency, a system built primarily for war, democracy, which is built primarily for peace, is at a disadvantage. An democracy must recognize its weaknesses; it must learn to safeguard its institutions if it hopes to survive."(224)
Huntington is right in pointing out that an economically marginalized Japan, Taiwan, S. Korea is an invitation for them to integrate the economies and political alliances more so with China out of fear of losing out on the burgeoning endless supply of cheap exploitable Chinese labor. Hence Huntington should reevaluate his free trade produces democracy argument given that greater economic reforms and 'economic liberalization does not entail political reform, rather it can solidify the current system of inequity. More so importantly is the unreasoning bias of the statement that 'they, the Chinese just don't think like us,' which is just a slippery slope argument that attests that the Chinese must be green blooded when in fact they do bleed like us.
Huntington is correct in pointing out that the Cold War has never in fact truly ended, rather Russia presents itself as an equal partner to US hegemony visa via its rich supplies of oil and natural gas and a nearly inexhaustible science talent pool for a fraction of the cost. "A new cold War, Deng Xiaoping reportedly asserted in 1991, is under way between china and America."(Huntington, 25) Huntington also further argues that the US 's current foreign policy stance has encouraged proliferation of nuclear weapons in N. Korea and Pakistan. However, he does not make the link explicit between how the N. Koreans or rather how the Pakistani's received nuclear weapons, which was directly through the china trade and the sell of dual use technology. North Korea may be an exception but in reality they have no love for the Chinese either. According to the 1999 Cox Report, the Cox-Porter Goss committee determined that US companies were instrumental in developing China's neutron bomb through the sale of super computers, and the launching of Chinese satellites improving ballistic missile design at the behest of American companies.
For more information please see the Cox report at this url:
http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/resources/1999/cox.report/overview/pgl.html
Furthermore, China's neutron bomb while yielding low TNT mega tonnage, emits high rates of radioactive fallout designed to kill people but preserve infrastructure. In some circles it has also been asserted that the Chinese have used these weapons or have toyed with using these weapons in the event of another uprising in one of their 10 major mega cities all dotting the Chinese coast, all dependent upon the foreign transfer of wealth from American shores.
Kennedy on the Middle east was right in pointing out the historical inconsistencies of British foreign policy that more or less created the moral and political quagmire of middle east terrorism. "Pg.55: "Indeed, during this period, the fear of Communism, not of Nazism, was the great British Bogey. Germany under Hitler, with its early program of vigorous opposition to communism, was already looked on as a bulwark against the spread of the doctrine through Europe. Sir Arthur Balfour, [Creator of the Balfour Declaration, which created the present day boundaries of the middle east In speaking of the Russian danger, said, "One of the greatest menaces to peace today is the totally unarmed condition of Germany." Today that is strangely ironic."(Why England Slept, 55) For history of the Balfour declaration and its ensuing aftermath please see this url:
http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/5ba47a5c6cef541b802563e000493b8c/aeac80e740c782e4852561150071fdb0!OpenDocument
Baudrillard argues that deregulated globalization requires a globalized police
state predicated on conflict to sustain the demands of expansionistic capitalism.
He in fact argues that capitalism, at least in its current unregulated form
is inherently undemocratic. It is as if we have created: "A fiction plus,
fiction that goes beyond fiction. Something like what Ballard (after Borges)
had in mind when he spoke of reinventing reality as the ultimate and most formidable
fiction ... We have reached the point that the idea of liberty, an idea
relatively recent and new, is already in the process of fading from our consciences
and our standards of morality, the point that neoliberal globalization is assuming
the form of its opposite: that of a global police state, of a terror
of [maintaining that] security. Deregulation has ended in maximum security,
in a level of restriction and constraint equivalent to that found in fundamentalist
societies. A downturn in production, consumption, speculation, growth--all indications
suggest that the global system is making a strategic retreat, a wrenching revision
of its values. "(Harpers Magazine, Feb., 2002, p. 18)
China is a unipolar political government in which the dictatorship of the proliferate has in fact been replaced by the dictatorship of the Communist Party. This dictatorship presently limited to 56 million members in the face of a 100 million landless peasants in north china, and the countless others throughout southern china who have been idle since CCP state privatization efforts first began in the 1980's under Deng, and then later skyrocketed by China's ascension to the WTO in 2000 requiring more labor cuts.
Huntington does make a realistic assessment of China's human rights abuses especially in Western China, Muslim XinJiang and Buddhist Tibet. The history of this regional nationalism goes back to Mao's 17 point plan which more or less was a revision of Lenin's nationalities policy: offer autonomy prior to consolidation of political power then withdraw it. (please see Dru Gladney foot note # 3) "China has outstanding territorial disputes with most of its neighbors. It has pursued a ruthless policy toward the Buddhist people of Tibet and it is pursuing an increasingly ruthless policy towards its Turkic Muslim minority."(25) However, it seems that he has fatalist premonitions about rectification, other than increased globalization.
In reality that ideology was no different from the ideology that existed in the Cold War, its current form still touts free trade to be equivalent to the 19th century practice of the European missionaries acts involving a dual system of ethics, i.e., the practice of Protestant capitalism in China during that period was hypocritical and morally base during China's opium wars where they were first taught to view the West as a threat to traditional Chinese society. Case and point: Missionaries would often unload Protestant bibles on one side of the missionary ship and on the other side unload opium. So
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foot. 3. http://www.chinesestudies.hawaii.edu/community/faculty/gladney_dru.html
for list of books by this author: http://www2.hawaii.edu/~dru/publications.html
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inherently the ideology of the zone of conflict between east and west is predicated on its mutual security liabilities to keep the security gurus in Washington and around the world employed. This social class elitism to the already globalized westernized global intelligentsia is in fact a social and political discourse of knowledge and power, as a means of global societal class control, as a means to constrain meaningful dialogue, the discourse between the powerful and the weak, the fundamental ventricle needed to sustain a true pluralistic democratic system, rendered null by the paranoia of imminent national security concerns overriding and at times legitimizing more repressive systems than democracy. Fear is the means in which conquerors of the past have purged their social and bureaucratic ranks, some for legitimate reasons, and others due to ideology, and then from those others, whose reasons for purge generally stem from paranoia or disingenuous intent. Strangely though it is Kennedy who suggests that only in warfare is bureaucratic intuitive or reform capable of being accomplished, or taken seriously in the modern political system which requires to some extent Weber's iron cage. This may explain why Stalin purged his military during WWII of rightist leaning Russian generals and perhaps this also illustrates why the Russians were such formidable allies during WWII.
So is this all truly a relativists game, one kinship culture deserves another, or is America ready willing and able to decide its own existence. If it is unable to do so it will become a tributary fiefdom of multinational corporations, and like the fall of powerful Chinese dynasties, the immediate aftermath will result in chaos and atrocity par excellence. For China despite its long continuous civilization has endured this ordered chaos unmoved at least from the perceptions of its current leaders. Nomadic Invasions of China have most often come from the North at least until the 19th century when Britain’s Navy ruled the global waterways.
Historically, china's attempts to repulse these nomadic invasions involved to methods, construction of the Great Wall, and secondly, pacification by assimilation. The Great Wall of China once the defining line of Chinese civilization was in fact built to keep the Uighurs of XinJiang, the Mongols and the Tibetans from raiding and sacking china. This tribute by empire was a process that began during the Chin dynasty all the way to the beginning of the Qing dynasty in 1644 when Dorgan and Norhaichi, the first Manchurian nomads conquered China. So inherently Huntington misses the point when he labels Tibet and Xinjiang (Huns) as part of traditional Han culture when in fact they have Central Asian and South Asian (related to the Rajputs) cultural ties.
The Han Chinese world view equates itself as the master race of Asia, equating 'foreign devils' to be both Caucasians as well as Mongolian Turko-nomadic Tibetan peoples. In theory they benefit from the US's current war on terror as much as we do not benefit from the unwarranted sacrifice of our civil liberties. In practice then the Chinese state is an exercise of neoimperialist colonialism. The population transfers by China of Chinese settlers to Tibet, (currently @ 8-6 million, favoring now the Chinese,) is intended to make the Tibetans a minority in their own homeland and it is akin to 300 years of British resettlement policies of English protestants in formerly Catholic Ireland.
Huntington unfortunately lumps Tibet unfairly with Han Chinese Confucian culture. Linguistically, there is a dramatic difference in the Chinese and Tibetan languages, the Tibetan writing script which includes an alphabet, comes from a 7th century Sanskrit writing script called Devanagari. Linguistically, the spoken Tibetan language is not related to the sinic family of languages. Tibet was declared to be virtually independent by FDR during WWII. Furthermore, numerous UN and US congressional resolutions have decried the current state of tyrannical rule by the CCP in Tibet. The chief architect of Mao's policies in Tibet was Deng Xiaoping, and later passed to Hu Jin Tao, neither is remembered fondly in Tibet.
It was Dean Acheson Truman's secretary of State who first pointed out America's first major foreign policy blunder after WWII. Inherently Acheson argued that communist China was no different than Qing China and that soon they would modernize into a Fascist state. "In Asia, population, differences in race, ideas, languages, religion, culture, and development are vast. But, throughout, run two deep common attitudes-revulsion against the poverty and misery of centuries and against more recent foreign domination. Blended, they had evoked throughout Asia the revolutionary forces of nationalism. Resignation had given way to hope and anger. Many, I continued, bewildered by events in China, failed to understand this background, looked for esoteric causes, and charged American bungling. No one in his right mind could believe that the Nationalist regime had been overthrown by superior military force. Chiang Kai-shek had emerged from the war as the leader of the Chinese people, opposed by only one faction, the ragged, ill-equipped, small Communist force in the hills. Chiang controlled the greatest military power of any ruler in Chinese history, supported and given economic backing by the United States. Four years later his armies and his support both within the country and outside it had melted away. He was a refugee on a small island off the coast. To attribute this to inadequate foreign support, I said, was to miscalculate entirely what had been going on in China and the nature of the forces involved. The almost inexhaustible patience of the Chinese people had ended. They had not overthrown the Government. There was nothing to overthrow. They had simply ignored it. The Communists were not the creators of this situation, this revolutionary spirit, hut had mounted it and ridden to victory and power. This, I suggested, was a realistic explanation of what had been going on in Asia and of the attitudes of its people."
Dean Acheson, 'Present at the Creation: My Years at the State Department '(New
York: W.W. Norton, Inc., 1969), pp. 355-358. url link:
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/acheson4.htm
Huntington does elaborate on economic development theory in the sense that global development has always afforded uneven strategies towards development. But he offers no solution though be points out that non western people's would characterize the IMF as an institution of 'neo-Bolshevism' and that the greatest obstacle to freedom is regulated trade, -even though the IMF regulates trade according to the dictates of the UN security council but that is just a political nicety. True Mexico is as Turkey does and NAFTA expansion does not bode favorably for indigenous peoples but favors the maquiadoras, or deflated labor market more so than true corporate or free market productivity long term schemes or even free labor, tired euphemisms for globalization proper as well.
footnote 4 http://www.monthlyreview.org/0102jbf.htm
excerpt: "Thus the World Bank quoted from The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels on the opening page of its 1996 World Development Report, arguing that the transition from planned to market economies and the entire thrust of neoliberal globalization was an inescapable, elemental process, lacking any visible hand behind it:
Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation…All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices, and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air…
Gone—spirited away by ellipses in the World Bank quotation from the Manifesto—were
Marx and Engels’ allusions in the same passage to “the bourgeois
epoch” and their subsequent reference to how “the need for a constantly
expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface
of the globe.”
conclusion:
The US had its rude awakening on 9/1 1/0 1. Most policy pundits of the time framed this debate in terms of the struggle of good versus evil, revisionist culture versus Western secular technological modernity, i.e., recycled Marxist ideas concerning historical materialism and a dialectic that cultural differences and nationalism fades under theoretically socialist and evolved capitalist conditions. In reality globalization, and its advocates while unknowingly favoring Marx's own ideas, historical materialism, economic development as cultural progress in reality that cultural bias of both capitalism and Marxism must be addressed and viewed through the ideology of academia itself which seeks to insulate itself from the realm of common sense. In reality though global policy will either be decided by war, mass starvation, labor unrest or revolt or it can be averted if we bring back a morally astute ideal to capitalism and spearhead a drive towards economic regulation as an offset to unfettered capitalism which is inherently self destructive Fascism.