Why the Middle East hates the West - Part III

Right... American imperialism... the wars of the American empire, the "empire of oil". [Hey, wasn't there a company called "Imperial Oil" in Canada? Ed.] Yes, Ed., indeed there was! It was part of the Standard Oil empire, and retains the brand name "Esso" to this day. But let's move on...

If you buy Walt's argument that the USA is fighting in the Middle East to protect its empire against Islamic nationalist fanatics, you might pause to consider the fate of previous empires. The Russians and "Soviets" tried twice to invade and conquer Afghanistan. So did the British, who in the first half of the 20th century considered all of the Middle East, from the Gulf to Pakistan, to be within their sphere of influence.

Going back to ancient history, the Greeks had some success in that region. Alexander the Great penetrated as far as Kafiristan, a historical region that covered present-day Nuristan Province in Afghanistan. (If you've seen the admirable movie version of Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King, you'll know where I'm going with this.)

The Roman Empire, at its greatest extent, included the Holy Land, as well as Syria and "Mesopotamia" (more or less the same as northern Iraq), the very land which ISIS is fighting to take over today. That area was one of the first parts of the Roman Empire to fall. The Romans just gave up on it. They didn't know about the oil!

As Edward Gibbon tells us -- click here to read The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as an e-book -- the Roman Empire imploded. It decayed and crumbled from within, doomed by its abandonment of the principles and policies that made it great. The Romans lost their respect for their gods and for decent living. They put pleasure ahead of civic duty, and gave themselves over to hedonism and excess.

The same thing happened in America, then "the rest of the West", in the 1960s. I refer to the rise of the hippie "movement" and the era of "flower power". Sex, drugs and indolence became a way of life for hundreds of thousands of (mostly white, middle-class) American youths. Such gurus of hippiedom as Timothy Leary encouraged young people to "turn on, tune in and drop out", and that's exactly what they did.

So what (I hear you ask). The toxins of those days have been neutralized by the materialism and hard times of the 80s and 90s. Yes, the drugs are still there, but you don't see all those dirty kids panhandling on the streets any more. Young people are going to school, working, having families, much as before. The hippie daze was just a blip.

Maybe so (I answer), but the West never recovered its respect for religion, its sense of community and ideals of civic duty and national pride. Mark Steyn and others have quite rightly drawn parallels with the decline of Rome and the decline of America today. See also James Burnham's Suicide of the West (Random House 1970), written at the height of the hippie craze.

What does the hippie craze have to do with the hatred of America exhibited in much of the world -- especially the Middle East -- today? It's this. How can you love or even respect a nation which does not love or respect itself?

A half-century ago, before the hippies exported their scruffy lifestyle to the rest of the world, Americans were generally respected, even admired. Foreigners had never seen Americans wandering around their streets naked and stoned, begging for spare change, epitomizing decadence. Then came the hippies.

The reaction of people in places like Afghanistan was summed up by a director of that country's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, quoted by Suzanne Labin in Hippies, drogues et sexe -- translated in English as Hippies, Drugs and Promiscuity (Arlington House 1972):

The West [he said] has always been the symbol of culture, of enterprise, of civility, of power, of artistic splendor for us. And now we have the children of this West in the streets of Kabul: dressed  like tramps, stretched out on tables, begging in the streets, scornful of learning, spending full-time on drugs or, at best, guitars. We have the impression that the marrow of your civilization is rotting. [Emphasis mine. Walt]

The sons of our more prominent families have traditionally had only one aspiration: to go study in the brilliant West. Now they don't want to go any more, and besides, their families -- in whom the traditions of good breeding, of order, and of respect for the traditional ways are still very much alive -- agree that their  children should not go off into your world of perdition. The hippies have turned our youth away from the West.

The people of the Middle East -- "moderate Muslims" as well as Islamic extremists -- reject Western society as it now appears, dominated by what I'll call the American "culture of whatever". There is no sense of responsibility, only of "rights". There is no morality, no sense of right and wrong, not even in the Church. ("Who am I to judge?")

What is left of the "hippie culture" is the idea that anything goes. "If it feels good, do it." And, "If you don't want to do it, you don't have to." The people of the Middle East -- not to mention the rest of Asia, Africa and Latin America -- don't want their society to become like ours. Who can blame them?!

It's NOT about "black lives"

Walt waited 24 hours to see if the rioting and looting in Ferguson MO would get worse or better [better rioting? better looting? Ed.] but last night was quiet, by comparison with the night before. Al Sharpton appeared. The Prez said (not in so many words, since the words are copyrighted by Bill Clinton) that he felt the pain of "the community", which Walt understood to mean not the entire community of Ferguson, but the black part of it.

And 1000s of people marched, danced and boogied through the streets carrying signs which read "Black lives matter!" There were relatively small and peaceful marches in other US cities and even in Canada's blackest city, Toronto. Marchers in those places carried the same signs. Walt suspects there's a factory somewhere -- probably in China -- that turns them out for sale at dollar stores. [Now there's an entrepreneurial idea! Ed.]

What's wrong with these pictures? Specifically, what's wrong with these signs? Walt will tell you. It's not about black lives or even the life of Michael Brown. It's about a breakdown of law and order in the black community. And it's about that community being a crime-ridden, undisciplined underclass.

How did it get like that? How did they get like that? Walt will tell you that too. For 50 years the majority (read "white") community has been bending over backwards [and forwards! Ed.] to accommodate the "civil rights" of every minority group ever conceived -- not just blacks, but gays, wimmin, non-English speakers, Muslims, refugees, atheists, etc etc and so forth.

Nowadays everyone -- except straight white males -- has not just rights but "entitlements". They are all "entitled", all "owed" everything from food and housing to preferred admission to college, where their education will, of course, be free. The world owes them a living! Well, not the world actually, but the rest of us -- the majority -- as embodied in The Government. After all, it was The Government who (especially around election time) promised all these minorities the sun, moon and stars. And if those who feel entitled have received only the moon, of course The Government is to blame.

Notably absent from the half-century of yammering and promises about "civil rights" has been any talk of civic responsibility, or civic duty. When I took civics in grade school [long, long ago. Ed.], I was taught that a good citizen had certain responsibilities and duties which he owed to his community. For instance, a good citizen should keep his home and neighbourhood clean and tidy. He should get a job and do his best to support himself and his family, so as not to be a burden on the community or the state. (After all, the tax monies used to support those who could not support themselves came from the community.)

A big part of civic duty was promoting and maintaining law and order. In the 19th century, many parts of the country did not have police forces, as we understand them today. Perhaps there was a marshal or sheriff or chief magistrate who, if there were criminals to be dealt with, would swear in a posse of ordinary citizens to do the necessary. And criminals would be brought before the courts to be further dealt with by judges and juries. Serving on a jury was part of one's civic duty. But who wants to do one's "duty" any more?

The Prez, in his mushy and caring plea for calm, said that the black community needs "good policing" -- quite a remarkable statement for him to make, when you think about it. If Michael Brown's lawyers, the "Reverend" Al Sharpton et al. complain that they are getting "bad policing", that the cops a bunch of white racists, could they answer a simple question.

Where are the black police officers? Where are the black National Guards? Why is the black community not able to police itself? Isn't that a part of civic duty -- particularly in Ferguson MO, at this very moment?

Further reading: Walt recommends The Police Officer's Dilemma, a landmark study by Joshua Correll, Bernadette Park, and Charles M. Judd (University of Colorado at Boulder) and Bernd Wittenbrink (University of Chicago) published in 2002. Once you get through the academic jargon -- the subtitle is Using Ethnicity to Disambiguate Potentially Threatening Individuals -- you'll learn that participants in the authors' study "fired at an armed target more quickly if he was African-American than if he was White, and decided to not shoot an unarmed White target more quickly than an unarmed African-American target".

And -- here's the "Wow!" -- a test with actual police officers, conducted give years later, showed that it didn't matter whether the cop was white or black! A black cop was just as likely as a white cop to shoot a young black man. Young black men are much more likely to die of lead poisoning (i.e. gunshot wounds) than young white men. And when you look at all the shooters, not just police, the shooter of a young black man is more likely to be another young black man than a white. And that's a fact.

Still more reading (added 29/11): "Progressive Mythography", by  Andrew C. McCarthy, on the National Review website. Mr. McCarthy explodes the myth that white cops kill black kids.