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Thursday, May 04, 2006
The New Burden
Hearken to the least well appreciated of all English-language poets, the great Rudyard Kipling:
Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go, bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait, in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.Take up the White Man's burden--
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain,
To seek another's profit
And work another's gain.Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine,
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
(The end for others sought)
Watch sloth and heathen folly
Bring all your hope to nought.Take up the White Man's burden--
No iron rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper--
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go, make them with your living
And mark them with your dead.Take up the White Man's burden,
And reap his old reward--
The blame of those ye better
The hate of those ye guard--
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:--
"Why brought ye us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?"Take up the White Man's burden--
Ye dare not stoop to less--
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloak your weariness.
By all ye will or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent sullen peoples
Shall weigh your God and you.Take up the White Man's burden!
Have done with childish days--
The lightly-proffered laurel,
The easy ungrudged praise:
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years,
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers.
Say what you will about the era of European imperialism, the banner Kipling raised with the words above is a noble standard by anyone's evaluation. Indeed, for a nation to send forth the strongest and brightest of its sons for the benefit of others unable to appreciate their service and dedication gives new luster to the word "noble."
The intentions expressed above were sometimes spoiled by covert motives that were considerably less noble. They were often marred by misperceptions our present-day perspective allows us to see, but that those colonial administrators could not. But not only were the intentions themselves of the very highest; the results of British imperialism compare favorably with any other course of development in any comparable land.
Confirmation of Britain's beneficence is clearest when one surveys those African states where British-derived "white governments" relinquished power to native "black" rule. Not one remained peaceful or prosperous. Not one is even able to maintain order in its streets. The most egregious case, Zimbabwe, where famine, filth, and murderous tyranny are the rule, forty years ago was Rhodesia, the jewel of Africa: safe, clean, orderly, and prosperous. Similar observations could be made about several other African nations.
Imperialism, like the Crusades, has a very bad odor today. Virtually no one is willing to give it the credit it's due. Because of the abysmal treatment the history of imperialism is given by our "schools" -- yes, those are sneer quotes -- virtually no one under the age of fifty has access to the factual details about it, which would make it possible to speak of the good it did for colonized lands.
Your Curmudgeon has never been afraid to express a controversial position, but even he expects the above "racist" sentiments to generate a torrent of hate mail. The detractor is unlikely to stir himself to learn that the imperialist pattern, before, during, and after British dominance of any chosen place, was independent of the race of the subject people. In every case, Britain raised its colonies from squalid savagery to something approaching civilization. In every case, once the British withdrew, the natives reverted to their pre-colonial ways. Whether the natives' skins were white, brown, black, red, or yellow affected matters not at all.
But imperialism of the British variety is a dead letter, isn't it? Not only is it considered politically beyond the pale; only one nation extant today, the United States, possesses the vitality or the resources to embark on such a mission, and its ruling concepts make the notion unthinkable. So why this subject today?
Because of this powerful essay by Dr. Serge Trifkovic, author of The Sword Of The Prophet. The essay is largely about the way Western states are endangering themselves by their flaccid attitudes toward expansionist Islam, but in its latter half Dr. Trifkovic touches on a matter of extreme importance for America's response to Islamist aims:
The loss of a sense of place and history experienced by millions of Westerners, whether they are aware of that loss or not, follows the emergence of a trans-national hyper-state in Europe and the notion of "benevolent global hegemony" in Washington. These two mindsets, seemingly at odds, are but two aspects of the same emerging globalized universe. The former advocates "multilateralism" in the form of an emerging "international community" controlled by the United Nations and adjudicated by the International Criminal Court (ICC), with the EU acting as an interim medium for transferring sovereign prerogatives to a supra-national body; the latter prefer to be the only cop in town. Both share the same distaste for traditional, naturally evolving societies and cultures. Echoing the revolutionary dynamism and historicist Messianism of their common Marxist roots, Michael Ledeen asserted that "creative destruction" is America’s eternal mission: "We have a glorious opportunity to improve life on our planet, and we are the right people, at the right time, to pull it off. The most dangerous threat to our success is limited vision and insufficient ambition. If we act like the revolutionary force we truly are, we can once again reshape the world…"American proponents of this breathtakingly hubristic agenda have de facto allies among Europe’s neo-Marxist leftists of Prodi’s and Solana’s ilk. Divisions between them refer not to the common goal of advancing a global revolutionary project but only to the ways and means of doing so. The end of the Cold War has cleared the way for them to move beyond the Gramscian "long march." In the apparent defeat of revolutionary struggle – epitomized by the triumph of liberal capitalism over Bolshevism – the neo-Marxist axis has found the seeds of future victory for their universalist paradigm, which globalization makes possible by eradicating traditional structures capable of resistance. Globalization, both in its Eurocratic and pax Americana guise, is "objectively" an ally of the revolutionary change desired by neo-Marxists, not only because it destroys the remnants of the old order, as Ledeen gloats, but also because it contains the germ of another form of globalization: the counter-Empire that will be made possible by the ongoing rapid demographic change within the Western world.
Dr. Trifkovic has fingered an unpleasant possibility. In attempting to win the War on Terror by deposing the governments that support Islamist terrorism and remaking those countries as liberal capitalist democracies, we are trying to transplant our conceptions of freedom and justice into soil that might not be ready to support them. What if, in doing so, we simultaneously unmake whatever traditional structures might have mitigated the Islamic venom toward alternative faiths? Would we not reap the worst of both worlds?
Later in the same essay:
"Historians in free countries have a moral and professional obligation not to shirk the difficult issues and subjects that some people would place under a sort of taboo," Bernard Lewis warned over two decades ago, "not to submit to voluntary censorship, but to deal with these matters fairly, honestly, without apologetics, without polemic, and, of course, competently."...The main problem is with ourselves, with those among us who have the power to make policy and shape opinions, and who will reject and condemn our diagnosis. Having absorbed postmodernist assumptions, certain only of uncertainty, devoid of any serious faith except that in their own infallibility but loath to be "judgmental," members of our own elite class treat the jihadist mindset as a pathology that can and should be treated by treating causes external to Islam itself. The result is a plethora of proposed "cures" that are as likely to succeed in making us safe from terrorism as snake oil is likely to cure leukemia.
Abroad, we are told, we need to address political and economic grievances of the impoverished masses, we need to spread democracy and free markets in the Muslim world, we need to invest more in public diplomacy. At home we need more tolerance, greater inclusiveness, less profiling, and a more determined outreach to the minorities that feel marginalized and threatened by the war on terror.
The predictable failure of such cures leads to ever more pathological self-scrutiny and morbid self-doubt. This vicious circle is untenable and must be broken.
Viewed thus, what we should be thinking and talking about is not how to rebuild nations such as Afghanistan and Iraq, but rather whether we should make the attempt. If the effort would rebound to our detriment, then what of a cordon sanitaire, to prevent the violently inclined emissaries of savage lands from wreaking harm upon us as they've done so many times in recent years? America's about to fence its southern border for weaker reasons; how should our relation to world Islam differ?
Afghanistan is largely behind us. What's done there is done, and the results, while not all bad, certainly are not all good. Islamism is experiencing a grass-roots resurgence; the government of Hamid Karzai appears incapable or unwilling to face it down. Though it was fully justifiable to depose the murderous Taliban, which openly celebrated and harbored Osama bin Laden, the most evil individual alive today, we must face the reality on the ground: Afghan society will not approach modern standards for freedom or tolerance for many years to come.
However, Iraq is an "ongoing concern." The insurgency there has largely been quelled, as recent emissions from Ayman al Zarqawi indicate. Something like a democratic order has formed and appears to have prospects for the future. But there are still over 100,000 American soldiers there, for peacekeeping duties and to deter acts of aggression by neighboring states. On what conditions ought they to be returned home? When Iraq's own army and police forces have reached a certain size? When all jihadi bombings and kidnappings have ceased for some arbitrary period? Or some other criterion?
This could be the most important foreign policy question of our time. The answer will determine whether we've decided to take up a New Burden, premised upon an obligation similar to the one felt in Kipling's time.
It makes Americans uneasy to contemplate an American Empire. A Pax Americana, though it's been an established fact for some time now, is only marginally more palatable. Mostly, we'd prefer to leave other lands to go their own way, if they'd only allow us the same privilege. But global interconnectedness, resulting in part from the very humanitarian impulses celebrated by Kipling's poem, has made that a very hard stance to maintain.
Evil will not disappear from the world, no matter how many Islamic dictatorships we destroy. Our ability to thwart it is the main focus of our interests; the extent of our responsibility to unmake it for the good of the world is a lesser one.
Ought we to continue to regard the anti-terror campaign in the terms of a war? Does an emphasis on the use of military means best suit this undertaking, or might there be another, ultimately more effective approach?
"...you don't understand the principles of assassination as a political weapon.... If I were knocked off, our organization wouldn't even hiccup, but organizations for bad purposes are different. They are personal empires; if you pick the time and the method, you can destroy such an organization by killing one man -- the parts that remain will be almost harmless until assimilated by another leader -- then you kill him. It is not inefficient; it's quite efficient, if planned with the brain and not with the emotions." [Robert A. Heinlein, Gulf]
Heinlein's prescription is both cold and efficient. Beyond that, it is defensive: its objective is to neutralize a threat, rather than to spread freedom, justice, democracy, capitalism, or NFL-rules football. If coupled to appropriate barriers to the further spread of Islam through the West, it might be the appropriate response to new Islamic threats that will arise in the near term.
In retrospect, America may have followed exactly the right course in dealing with both the Taliban's Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein's Iraq. We might have pulled out of Afghanistan too quickly, but then, given the essential savagery of any and all Islamic societies, we might not have been able to produce any better outcome than what we can observe there today; at this point, it's impossible to know. As for Iraq, the withdrawal of our presence there must be judiciously timed. Too quickly, and Iran and Syria will flood the country with bombers and saboteurs. Too slowly, and the fledgling Iraqi state might not become firm enough to be self-sustaining. It's a decision your Curmudgeon is profoundly grateful is not his to make.
But for the future, whatever "forward" steps we take to stem the Islamist plague should be coupled with a greatly improved filter against Islamic incursions into our homeland. Islam is a jealous master; it permits the Muslim no other allegiances of any sort. Therefore, as Dr. Trifkovic proposes, adherence to Islam ought to be considered a disqualifying condition for entry to these United States.
As for those forward steps, among the measures that ought to be continually "on the table" for dealing with Islamic lunatics is the ".50 caliber Miltown:" a sniper's bullet. The threat is most obvious at an individual level, as is the cleanest and most efficient response. Surely if Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's head were to be vaporized in the middle of one of his tirades, his successor would consider his public statements more carefully:
By all ye will or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent sullen peoples
Shall weigh your God and you.
Quarantining Islamic madness, and picking off the worst of its evangelists, is a far easier burden to carry than remaking a fifth of the world.
Comments
Thank you for typing this. It is some of what I’ve been thinking (not the intellectual bits, of course!;)) as the alarm bells over Iran have been going off across the globe.
I was just reading (RET) Gen. MacCaffery’s report on the situation in Iraq and it has hopeful as well as negative information. He suggests a small force in the next 2-3 years as the Iraq military and police take the ball.
I think our withdrawal should start there and it’s interesting to see the reports from Iraq have begun to feature so many Iraqi troops leading the way. They are getting the hang of it and we should let them continue until they are on their feet and capable.
HOWEVER, we are under no obligation to do this again, in Iran for example. The American public doesn’t seem able to stomach it and Iraq has proven some things we really need to take note of before continuing this war.
The question now isn’t can we do it; it’s should we bother? And if the American public is so darn squeamish, perhaps going forward this would be better handled by special forces causing unfortunate accidents to happen amongst an amazingly similiar group of individuals?
Posted by Lana on 05/04/2006 at 07:00 PM
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