There were three terrible things about 9/11.
The first was the apocalyptic barbarism, the destruction of 3,000 innocent lives. The second was the pummeling of the New York City skyline, the greatest thing yet conceived by human minds and constructed by human hands, as outrageous as if a few thousand years ago someone had blown up the pyramids.
And the third was the way this atrocity allowed Western progressives to externalize the threat to our values. To treat the withering of the Western Enlightenment as something brought about by bearded foreigners who seem to have been time-warped from the 7th century.
That third terrible thing about that terrible day might prove to be 9/11’s most toxic legacy. For not only did those plane-weaponizing madmen end lives and take down metal, glass, and concrete structures”they also helped to warp politics itself, inciting onetime critical thinkers to ditch the thought in favor of simplistically reciting that they, like an exotic virus, are destroying our values.
With 9/11, Westerners of a liberal, democratic bent seemed finally to find an answer to that most troubling question: “Who killed the Enlightenment?”
It was Islamists. Outsiders. Extremists under the spell of faraway death cults. If we in the actual West bear any bit of responsibility, apparently it’s only insofar as we have “appeased Islamism””that is, facilitated them, the destroyers of liberal values. Sadly”tragically”this is the wrong answer to the question of who killed the Enlightenment, and we”ll pay a high price for answering incorrectly.
In many ways, 9/11 was a good thing for the beleaguered liberals of the West, for it meant they could finally put a name and face to what had until then been an amorphous, elusive phenomenon: the slow-motion, Ballardian death of Western reason.
There suddenly appeared to be some agency behind the walloping of the modern ideals of tolerance, liberty, and democracy, and it was a brilliantly ugly agency, all long beards and wagging fingers. The reason so many Western liberals describe 9/11 as a turning point, a personal wake-up call, is because it’s the moment their niggling concerns about the undermining of Enlightenment values were finally given some clarity”a narrative, even. And the fact that the narrative is wrong? Don”t mention that.
The post-9/11 urge to externalize the threat has been much in evidence since the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Everywhere one turns, there are concerned Westerners, of both the right-wing and left-wing varieties, projecting the collapse of their value system onto three psychos with guns. We have not been “robustly confronting the cancer in our midst,” says British columnist Richard Littlejohn in the Daily Mail. This is what must be done to destroy the foreign body attacking the liberal Western nervous system: “[C]lose down Islamist websites … shut down mosques and religious schools which foment terrorism; prosecute and deport foreign hate preachers.” This, apparently, will resuscitate our flagging liberalism.
In the Daily Telegraph, Allison Pearson bemoans Muslim communities” “grievance narrative” (as though Muslims were the only adherents of the culture of complaint and self-esteem-stroking censorship), and says this narrative is damaging “European nations which afford [us] remarkable freedoms and benefits.” She slams the non-Westerners who demand “ever more shrilly that we bow to [their] worldview.” So they are forcing us to bend our once-enlightened knee at the altar of intolerance and backwardness.
Another angry observer, Ian O”Doherty, said after Charlie Hebdo that “those who don”t like freedoms can return to the repressive countries they love so much.” Too many of us are bowing at the “altar of appeasement.” It’s time we “took our heads out of the sand” and told the extremists to “f*** off.” This, apparently, will allow us to get our values and liberties back into rude health.
The outsourcing of the West’s crisis of meaning can be seen in the way our leaders respond to Islamist outrages. In France and Britain, the Charlie Hebdo massacre has been swiftly followed by campaigns to cure or expunge the foreign bodies allegedly eating our Enlightenment. French leaders accuse Islamists of undermining the Republic and everything it stands for. The British PM, David Cameron, gave the nod to the writing of a letter to Islamic leaders across the UK, calling on them to encourage their followers to embrace British values. Pretty much every brow-furrowed liberal says the same thing: Islam needs to have an Enlightenment, and quick.
Does it? Maybe. Who knows? But one thing I do know is that all this talk of Islam’s need to get enlightened is a displacement activity of gobsmacking proportions. It masks as a clash of civilizations what is in truth a clash”or rather a corrosion”within one civilization: the Western one, the once enlightened one, the one that lost its way and its values and its liberal, democratic soul when those Charlie Hebdo killers were still in nappies.
To hold Islamism, and the Western fools who apologize for it, responsible for the moral and spiritual disarray of the West is to ignore the funk our societies had sunk into long before 9/11. In fact, it gets things the wrong way round. The medieval death-wishers with planes and bombs are not the authors of the Enlightenment’s demise”they are the beneficiaries of it, coming after it, and from it.
Who killed the Enlightenment? We did. Universities did. Relativists did. Multiculturalists did. Environmentalists did. Schools did. Politicians did. No external cancer was needed to pollute the Western body; it was already sick.
For years before 9/11, the Western academy”once charged with upholding the best of human knowledge”had been promoting the noxious notion that the Enlightenment was a con, a bizarre and human-centric elevation of reason over emotion, of knowing stuff over being an ignorant asshole, which is apparently as admirable a way to life your life as being a professor of Goethe.
For years, the environmentalist strain in the West had been redefining mankind as a toxin, a pollutant, an arrogant son of a bitch who believes he has the right to “extract nature’s secrets” (Francis Bacon).
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Have you Tweeted, Facebooked, YouTubed, Instagrammed, or LinkedIn (LOL) your hatred of Boko Haram yet? If not, why not? What is wrong with you?
Scowling through social media at the Islamist crazies who kidnapped 276 schoolgirls in Nigeria is all the rage. Everyone’s at it, from the FLOTUS to the inhabitants of Celebville to civilians who love the idea of being part of a political movement that demands nothing more of us than that we pound out the occasional Tweet and take sad-eyed selfies.
You could literally stay in your pajamas all day, watching TV and gorging on Doritos, and still be a key member of the BringBackOurGirls movement. Just so long as you have in the palm of your hand a gadget that allows you to use your thumb”hard work, I know”to remind the world every couple of hours that you”re still upset by the absence of these girls.
The amateur does his Boko Haram bashing with a Tweet, always careful to include the BringBackOurGirls hashtag (while never making clear what political force he wants to do the bringing back, or how on earth these girls came to be “ours”).
But the pro does it with a photo of him- or herself holding up a placard with the hashtag emblazoned across it. This is the best way to register your disgust with Boko Haram, because it allows people to see your face so they can appreciate how pained and wonderful you are.
Michelle Obama gave a master class in the politics of holding up placards on the Internet with her wildly shared BringBackOurGirls mug shot. The lightly furrowed brow, the wide eyes asking “Why?!”, the disapproving pout … The eye is immediately drawn to Michelle’s face rather than to the placard in her hands”which is the whole point of this webby phenomenon. Don”t bother to take to the streets to wave placards with thousands of other people, like we used to do in the old days; just hold one on your lonesome indoors while a technical timer snaps a pic. “Look at me … no, up here, at my face! See how tortured I feel about that bad thing that happened?”
Now we even have political photobombing. Last Sunday on a British political chat show, Christiane Amanpour, CNN’s chief international correspondent, asked UK PM David Cameron to hold up a BringBackOurGirls placard. He did (of course he did”it’s pretty much a crime against humanity not to), but Ms. Amanpour refused to let go of the placard; she kept a grip on one side of it, no doubt conscious that this image would travel through the Twitterverse, and keen to ensure that her practiced political pout would travel with it. And so has Ms. Amanpour promoted herself to the premier league of Internet faces made angst-ridden by Boko Haram.
Some are starting to criticize the hashtag politics of the BringBackOurGirls pseudo-movement, on the grounds that “it won”t bring back our girls.”
But they miss the point. The aim of BringBackOurGirls is not to bring back those girls. It has very little to do with Nigeria, in fact. The point is not to achieve something measurably progressive in the real world, but rather to draw attention to our virtual personas, to our virtual selves, to our own capacity to hurt and show willingness to advertise that hurt. It is Oprah-ite emotional literacy dolled up as radical politics.
The BringBackOurGirls frenzy is entirely in keeping with the narcissism of most modern-day social activism. Just as AIDS ribbons are more about drawing attention to oneself than about curing AIDS”just as the recent fashion among men for photographing their cocks in a sock to raise awareness of testicular cancer was really a way for them to show off their gym-buff bodies”so the selfies for Nigeria are all about making a big, fat, re-Tweetable advert of how emotionally switched-on we are.
But the Boko selfies also unwittingly display how alarmingly individuated and ephemeral our activism has become. Where once politics were about individuals forming a crowd to demand a real thing or policy, now we stay home and pull sad faces into our webcams for other individuals to look at, not giving a thought to whether any of this will change anything. It’s the classic lonely crowd”people virtually gathered together but fundamentally all alone.
But just because the BringBackOurGirls movement won”t bring back those girls, that doesn”t mean it won”t have an impact on the world at all. It will; it has already, in fact, and the impact has been entirely negative.
For what this narcissistic posturing against the evils of Boko Haram has done is given Boko Haram everything it ever dreamed of. It has provided this most nutty and eccentric of Islamist groups with copious amounts of the main fuel that drives such outfits: Western outrage.
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The West used to send Bible-waving missionaries to Africa to try and pry open the natives” eyes to the truth. Now it sends scientists.
US Secretary of State John Kerry has said he will dispatch scientific experts to Uganda to try and convince its president, Yoweri Museveni, that homosexuality is not a choice”as Museveni seems to believe”but is rather an inherited genetic trait.
So we have gone from foisting God to shoving Gaga down Africans” throats”it’s the Lady Gaga Gospel about gays being “Born This Way” that the Dark Continent’s inhabitants are now being pressured to embrace. We used to teach them, among other Biblical things, that it’s a sin to sleep with a member of the same sex; now we tell them that it’s a sin to think it’s a sin to sleep with a member of the same sex.
Kerry announced his plan to use science to help deliver Ugandans from their ignorance during a BuzzFeed-moderated debate at the State Department this week. Gay-rights activists are cheering this as a victory for enlightenment. He is taking a “strong and intelligent approach“ to Ugandan leaders” recent legal assaults on the rights of homosexuals, says website The New Civil Rights Movement.
But how enlightened, really, is Kerry’s claim that science can prove homosexuality is a genetic or biological characteristic with which people are born?
Herein lies the massively ironic rub: In taking this “gay is natural” stance, Kerry is echoing an attitude to homosexuality that is older and more backward than President Museveni’s talk about gayness being a choice.
Museveni, in an irony that will no doubt make the homo-hater want to take a very long shower, is more in line with the original gay-liberation movement when he talks up the “choice” element of homosexuality, whereas Kerry’s scientific stuff harks back to a darker, pre-liberation view of gayness as an inherent thing that can be studied, measured, and potentially eradicated. Yep, it’s possible Kerry has a more archaic view of gayness than Museveni does.
Museveni is extremely intolerant of homosexuality. Last month he signed into law a deeply disturbing bill that makes having gay sex punishable by life imprisonment.
The bill defines homosexual acts very broadly, so that even touching another person “with the intention of committing the act of homosexuality” could potentially land you in jail for life. The bill punishes freedom of thought and speech, too, making it a crime, punishable by seven years in jail, to promote homosexuality or to set up a gay-rights organization. It is a repugnant, misanthropic law.
But that doesn”t mean that all opposition to it, or to Museveni’s claim that homosexuality is a “matter of choice,” is by definition good and progressive. Museveni has outraged Western liberals not only by enacting a law that strips Ugandan homosexuals of their dignity and liberty, but also by daring to question what has become an article of faith in influential Western circles in recent years: namely, that some people are born gay, just as surely as others are born female or black or with ginger hair.
Strikingly, Museveni says he has changed his mind on homosexuality in recent years: Where he says he used to think gayness was an “inborn problem,” a “genetic distortion,” he now says he has realized it is a chosen lifestyle. Is it not very odd that supposedly enlightened Westerners should chide Museveni for saying this and implicitly insist that he go back to seeing homosexuality as a “genetic distortion” like many in the West now do?
The idea that homosexuality is a fixed, birth-inherited trait, an inescapable quirk of a person’s genes, has been gaining ground in the West for more than two decades. It has moved from a claim made in dense studies by scientists to being a truism of popular culture”consider the pro-gay-marriage Australian ad in which an ultrasound technician tells a pregnant woman: “You”re having a lesbian!” No one seemed to balk at the notion that a fetus is capable of any kind of sexual feeling, whether of the gay or straight variety.
The view of homosexuality as a genetic thing might be popular, but that doesn”t make it right or decent. You”d never know it from the speedy spread of the “Born This Way” outlook across the cultural landscape, but there’s still much controversy and doubt around the idea that homosexuality is determined by nature rather than being influenced and shaped by a person’s environment, experiences, desires, and, yes, possibly his or her choices.
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Today we have the American Promise. Unveiled by Barack Obama in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, the Promise is about balancing freedom with responsibility, cutting taxes, installing a government that “helps” people rather than “hurts” them, and ending U.S. dependence on Middle Eastern oil. According to Obama, the very “essence” of the American Promise is this: “Individual responsibility and mutual responsibility.”
I can”t see it catching on. I cannot envisage a situation where the American Promise “ which apparently involves the U.S, government keeping “our water clean and our toys safe” while also “rebuilding the military” in order to “deter Iran and curb Russian aggression””enthuses and inspires people as the American Dream once did.
Indeed, in many ways, the birth of this “American Promise” signals the death of the American Dream, and confirms that we now live in an era of American defensiveness and fear.
The differences between the American Dream and Obama’s American Promise are striking. The American Dream, one of the purest expressions of people’s desire for more prosperity and more liberty, emphasised our capability“what each of us could achieve or attain or win if we put our minds to it and if society were truly equal. As James Truslow Adams said, the American Dream was of a society where “each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.”
That Dream both fascinated and frustrated millions of people, not only in America but across the world. As Adams points out, it made little sense to the Great and the Good in 19-century and early 20-century Europe, who could not grasp the idea of everyone having”at least in theory”the right to rise above their station and realise their ambitions. “It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately,” he said. At the same time, the American elite itself”its officials and thinkers”sometimes lost faith in the Dream. “Too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it,” wrote Adams in 1931.
Yet for ordinary people, keen to make something of their lives and improve on their economic conditions and social clout, the American Dream inspired. From America’s own poor to persecuted Jewish communities in Eastern Europe to poverty-stricken families in Latin America, the promise of a land in which life would be “better and fuller and richer for everyone,” and where your “innate capabilities” were far more important than your surname, school tie, or skin colour (at least ostensibly), was enticing and exciting.
Some argue that the American Dream was exclusionary. For example, from the Declaration of Independence through to Adams” articulation of the American Dream in 1931, black people and women were shut out from this hoped-for land of better, richer, more equal living. This is of course true, but to blame the American Dream itself for this exclusion is to miss the point. These groups of people eventually came to be included in American society (though still not to a satisfactory degree) not in spite of the American Dream, but because of it.
The assurance in the Declaration of Independence that every man has “unalienable Rights,” including “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” coupled with the American Dream’s promise that everyone should be able to attain what he or she is capable of, implicitly encouraged excluded sections of society to demand access. The American Dream acted as a green light (or perhaps a red rag) that gave excluded people the authority to fight back and force the American elite to make good its historic promise of equality and opportunity. It is striking that the civil rights protestors of the 1950s and 60s used the language of the American Dream in their struggle for equality, as captured in Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream“ speech. This and other episodes in American history, from the struggles of slavery abolitionists to the Suffragettes, gave fuller meaning to the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the American Dream. The Dream has been made more real by every progressive struggle in American history.
Perhaps the most positive thing about the American Dream is that, essentially, it celebrated human subjectivity. Its premise was that every man should be free to carve out for himself the life that he desires. Even during the darker periods of American history, many were keen to keep alive this idea that all should be able to reach their “fullest stature.” Writing during the Great Depression, the novelist Thomas Wolfe said the American Dream should grant to every man””regardless of his birth”””the right to live, to work, to be himself, and to become whatever thing his manhood and his vision can combine to make him.”
Manhood… vision… work… the right to be oneself “ these were the ingredients of the American Dream, a dream which emphasised people’s resourcefulness, zeal, inner drive, and, above all, their capability.
“The American Promise” could not be more different. Of course, Obama paid lip service to the idea of America “ensuring opportunity” for all: “because I want my daughters to have exactly the same opportunities as your sons”; he also said that part of the American Promise is that everyone must have “the freedom to make of our lives what we will.” Yet aside from these platitudes, his speech was shot through with a conception of people as essentially weak and under threat rather than possessed of vision; a view of people as having to be delivered from harm rather than as the makers of their own destinies. Indeed, even the terminological shift from “Dream” to “Promise” reveals much about how the Obama camp views Americans: as people who must be paternalistically rescued rather than individuals who can combine manhood and vision to become “whatever thing” they wish.
Obama’s speech gave an impression of America, not as a land of opportunity, but as a land under threat”from terrorists; from the carbon footprints of businesses and individuals; and from a general, free-floating, oil-related “insecurity.” Part of the American Promise, he said, is a recognition that “government cannot solve all our problems,” but what it should do, he argued, is “that which we cannot do for ourselves”protect us from harm…”
These harms are apparently numerous and amorphous. For example, one of the key elements of Obama’s American Promise””in 10 years we will finally end our dependence on oil form the Middle East””is built on the simplistic, possibly even simple-minded notion that the politics of oil, or what he refers to as America’s “oil addiction,” is a threat to “our economy, our security, and the future of our planet.” Where the American Dream was about what individuals might achieve once the barriers of privilege and discrimination had been removed, the American Promise whispers darkly about what might become of individuals, and our entire planet, if America does not kick its “oil addiction.”
Another harm is the product of the American people themselves: CO2 emissions. Grandly, Obama said the American Promise would require “a renewed sense of responsibility from each of us to recover what John F Kennedy called our “intellectual and moral strength.”” And for what purpose must this strength be harnessed today? For reducing our “impact” on the planet. “Yes, government must lead on energy independence,” said Obama, “but each of us must do our part to make our homes and businesses more efficient.” The “future of the planet,” no less, is at stake, he argued.
In this new eco-terminology, people are looked upon not so much as the makers of history but as potential polluters”as Scud missiles of carbon who must be decommissioned and decontaminated. Where the American Dream was about “unleashing people’s potential,” the green-tinted American Promise is about “reducing people’s impact”; where the American Dream celebrated gumption, Obama’s Promise encourages a new kind of environmentally-aware meekness, where we should be forever conscious about how much energy we use and waste we produce.
The American Dream was about removing all barriers to people’s material and social advancement; today’s new green morality, which has clearly been embraced in Obama’s American Promise, imposes the new barrier of eco-guilt, in which material desire”for a bigger house, car, refrigerator, etc”comes to be seen as “anti-environment” and ultimately destructive.
The American Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights and American Dream were beacons to the world. The oppressed, the poor, the radical and the aspirant were frequently inspired by the words of America’s Founding Fathers and by the idea of the American Dream. Obama’s American Promise, by contrast, treats the world “out there” with disdain and suspicion. Obama mainly opposes the continuing American presence in Iraq because, as he said in his American Promise speech, he wants to free up US troops so that they can “finish the fight against al-Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan,” and possibly to “protect Israel,” “deter Iran,” and “curb Russian aggression.”
In other words, one of the key components of the American Promise is more military ventures and “tough diplomacy” overseas. Where the American Dream inspired people around the globe, the American Promise is likely to alienate and infuriate them.
Obama’s American Promise speech exposes his elitism. The American Dream was aspirational: its focus was on the individual aspiring“that is, dreaming”to become successful, fulfilled, happy, and so on. The American Promise, by contrast, is essentially elitist: it takes a top-down approach to “protecting people from harm.” Even its promise of liberty comes with a rider: as well as having freedom, “we also have the obligation to treat each other with dignity and respect,” said Obama. America’s Founding Fathers never felt the need to inject morality into their promise of liberty, to advise people on how they should behave with their newfound freedoms. This, too, expresses Obama’s innate distrust of the American people: concerned that they might run riot with their liberties, he reminds them of their obligation to be decent. The shift from “Dream” to “Promise” is telling. “To dream” is something that individuals do, as they map out their futures; “to promise” is something Obama will do, as he looks after Americans”and the world”from on high.
Of course, the American Dream had numerous faults. For many millions of people, it simply never came true. American society has, thus far, proved itself incapable of making everybody’s dreams into reality. This tension between people’s aspirations and what American society can deliver was captured brilliantly in the song “America“ in West Side Story, in which the Puerto Rican women clash with the Puerto Rican men over the promise of America. “Industry boom in America,” sing the women… “Twelve in a room in America,” reply the men. “Life can be bright in America,” the women say… “If you can fight in America,” the men retort. Yet for all its faults and failings, the Dream spoke to people’s desires to be free and prosperous.
Today, the American Dream has been killed off by the American Promise. And again, it is the American elite itself”the new Democrats, various thinkers, commentators”who have “grown weary and mistrustful of it.” Today, aspiring to material wealth (though as James Truslow Adams pointed out, the American Dream was “not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely”) is described as greedy or environmentally irresponsible. Aspiring to be equal doesn”t fit well in an age in which we are encouraged to “embrace our differences” and celebrate them. And aspiring to be free is inappropriate, apparently, since security”in relation to oil, terrorism, the threat from Iran, or whatever”is more important than freedom. Obama can only make promises; America needs a leader who has a dream.
Brendan O”Neill is editor of spiked in London; his journalism is collated here.
]]>Inexorably, the Beijing Olympics“which are now in full swing”have been turned into an all-purpose platform for moral posturing about China’s pollution levels, industrial arrogance, interference in Africa, lack of free speech, human rights record and general wickedness. In America and Europe, the Great and the Good, offended by China’s rise and its apparently bad habits, no longer talk about “the Olympics””they talk about the “Genocide Olympics,” the “Smog Olympics,” or the “Human Rights Olympics.”
What ought to be The Greatest Show on Earth has been transformed into The Most Politicised Spectacle in the Universe, as every Western anxiety and prejudice about the East has been cynically attached to the Games.
I am no supporter of the illiberal Chinese regime, which continues to deny millions of people basic freedoms and choices. But nor am I remotely interested in taking part in what we might term the “Orientalist Olympics””the use of the Games to spread irrational fears about the Chinese.
This China-bashing is underpinned by fear, envy, double standards and a dash of old-fashioned prejudice. It is driven, not by a genuine commitment to liberty or solidarity with the Chinese masses, but by cheap moralism. Western observers pontificate about China in order to make themselves feel like medal-winning moralists taking a stand against Evil Far Easterners. Some have accused the Chinese of “betraying Olympic values” with their bad behaviour “ in truth, Western elements” relentless politicisation of the Games has done more to undermine the “Olympic values” of universality and good sportsmanship than anything the Chinese might have done.
Now, in the hope that over days remaining people might enjoy “the Olympics””both the sport and the spectacle”let us pick apart the fears and prejudices behind the various Orientalist Olympics that have been launched by Western activists in the past six months.
The Genocide Olympics
Morally pure, implacably outraged activists in Hollywood and elsewhere want the Beijing Olympics to be rebranded the Genocide Olympics, on the basis that China is funding “Khartoum’s genocide” in Darfur. Nothing better captures the childish moralism and double standards underpinning contemporary China-bashing than this relentless campaign to have Beijing 2008 lumped together with Berlin 1936.
In February, Steven Spielberg pulled out of his role as artistic adviser to Beijing 2008 over China’s support for “unspeakable crimes” in Darfur. On 8 August, the day the Olympics kicked off, Mia Farrow held an “alternative opening ceremony“: her Webcast showed refugees from Darfur playing sports in the barren deserts of eastern Chad. Dream for Darfur, a New York-based campaign group staffed by worthy students and celebs, says its message on China and Darfur is as follows: “Genocide bad; China helping.” That about sums up the cartoonish nature of the anti-Chinese “Save Darfur” lobby.
The double standards behind this attachment of the genocide tag to Beijing 2008 are gobsmacking. Celebrity do-gooders are actually calling on President George W Bush and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to take the opportunity of the Olympics to put pressure on China over its “unspeakable crimes” in Darfur. This is the same Bush and Brown who launched the Iraq War, where they didn”t simply do oil deals with a government involved in a dirty civil war”the accusation made against China over Darfur”but actually fought the war themselves, leaving Iraq a bombed-out, burnt-up mess and around 400,000 of its citizens dead. Calling on Bush and Brown to save the people of Darfur from “genocidal China” is a bit like asking Ted Bundy to open a halfway house for young female runaways.
The hysterical campaign to brand China as “genocidal” is built on myth and misinformation. It is true that China has trade and arms relations with Khartoum, but to leap from this fact to the insistence that China is “supporting genocide” is to overlook two inconvenient truths.
The first of these is that, outside of the organic coffee shops of Beverley Hills and NYC, very few experts or international organizations, including the UN, describe Darfur as a “genocide.” Indeed, the evidence suggests that Save Darfur activists have grossly exaggerated the death rates in Darfur in order to bolster their bizarre claim that the situation there is “comparable to the death camps in Nazi Germany”. Last year the UK Advertising Standards Authority chastised the Save Darfur Coalition for placing adverts in the British press which claimed that “400,000 innocent men, women and children have been killed” when, in fact, expert opinion estimates that around 120,000 people”including combatants as well as civilians”were killed in the conflict period of 2003-2005.
There was indeed a horrendous civil war in Darfur, but it reached its nadir five years ago. As Jonathan Steele argued in the Guardian earlier this year: “Today’s Darfur is still appalling, but not so bloody a place [as it was in 2003 and 2004.]” In the current issue of The Spectator, Justin Marozzi argues that “the mass slaughter took place in 2003-2004,” and yet “Darfur has become an emotive campaign in which awkward truths”not least that the genocide is over”have become hostage to a more superficially exciting story.”
That trendy Western activists want to use a five-year-old, all-too-familiar civil war in Africa to brand China as “genocidal” and comparable to Hitler in 1936 exposes their dishonesty, dimwittery, and moral turpitude. Their campaign is motivated, not by truth, but by a feverish international search for a wicked bogeyman which they, the bored elites of Hollywood and the chattering classes of NYC, can shadow-box with. And who better than the Chinese, who, you know, are so strange-looking, different, and most importantly over there“a million miles from what Mahmood Mamdani labels “the messy politics” of America and Iraq.
The second inconvenient truth is that China’s role in the events in Darfur is far from clear-cut. As Jonathan Steele writes, it is naïve to pin the blame for this extremely messy conflict solely on Khartoum, much less on the Chinese officials with whom Khartoum does business: “There are around a dozen different rebel groups currently fighting the government. To put the blame on only one party makes no moral or political sense.”
In fact, according to Justin Marozzi, there are now more than a dozen rebel groups; “as many as 30.” The conflict is fast, and depressingly, become Monty Pythonesque, says Marozzi: originally there were two main rebel groups, the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM). Now there is the SLM-Minni, SLM-Unity, SLM-Mother, SLM-Free Will, SLM-Peace, the United Revolutionary Front, JEM-Peace, JEM-Unity and others, many of which are fighting each other as well as Khartoum. And amidst this mess, what was the hard evidence that the BBC’s investigative show Panorama recently discovered to show that China is “funding a genocide” in Darfur? Two Chinese-made army trucks in the hands of some of the Darfurian rebels.
The labelling of a bloody, confusing, dwindling civil war in Africa as a China-funded genocide””Genocide bad; China helping””should expose what lies behind the campaign against China in relation to Darfur: a simple-minded attempt to demonise China’s role in Africa and in international affairs more broadly.
Indeed, the China-bashing over Darfur is driven, not by any genuine anti-imperialist sentiment, but by a cynical desire to preserve Africa as the playground of Western activists rather than Chinese officials. Farrow, George Clooney, Human Rights Watch and their supporters in positions of influence might pose as anti-colonialists who want China to release Darfur from its “grip,” but in truth they are motivated by the concern that China’s dealing with Khartoum and other African governments is undermining the power and impact of Western intervention on the African continent.
As the Washington Post complained: “Sudan’s government feels it can ignore Western revulsion at genocide because [thanks to China] it has no need of Western money… China, along with Sudan’s other Arab and Asian partners, feels free to trample on basic standards of decency.” Those horrible, indecent, no-standards Chinese, standing in the way of the politics of “Western revulsion”… don”t those uppity Easterners know that only white, well-educated NGO activists and LA trendies should have the right to interfere in Africa?
Human Rights Watch has been even more explicit in its real concern about Chinese investment, involvement and intervention in Africa. It believes that China’s “non-political” trading and aiding with African states might nurture more dictatorships on the continent: “China’s growing foreign aid programme creates new options for dictators who were previously dependent on those who insisted on human rights progress.” In short, Chinese investment in Africa is a problem because, unlike “enlightened” Western investment, it doesn”t use financial and political blackmail as a way of keeping naughty African rulers in line. In one fell swoop”or perhaps one foul swoop”the Africa-concerned China-bashers reveal both their distrust of African leaders and the fear of the rising Chinese. It is almost a form of double racism: Africans cannot be trusted to run their own affairs and China cannot be trusted to get involved in Africa. Only decent, latte-drinking Westerners, well-educated in Human Rights 101, should decide how African wars should be resolved and how aid and trade to Africa should be organised.
This gets to the essence of China-bashing over Darfur: it is about jealously guarding the power of “Western revulsion” and Western financial blackmail on the African continent, which the Chinese are seen to be undercutting. What dresses itself up as a liberal campaign to raise awareness about China’s antics in Darfur is actually a fact-lite, hysterical exploitation of an African civil war to demonise the Chinese and keep Africa as the political backyard of decent-minded Westerners. This is about ensuring that Africa remains the White Man’s Burden rather than becoming the “Yellow Man’s Burden.”
The Smog Olympics
When China is not being accused of destroying the people of Darfur, it is being accused of destroying the entire planet. Numerous Western commentators have seized the opportunity of the Beijing Games to scaremonger about China’s allegedly scandalous levels of pollution.
Again, this section of the “Orientalist Olympics” is underwritten by some disturbing double standards, as Western activists who live lives of supreme comfort in industrialized, modernized, super-technologized societies express horror at China’s attempt to achieve a similar level of development. It also reveals that one of the main driving forces behind contemporary China-bashing is Western society’s own discomfort with modernity and progress, and its conviction that China will make the same “mistakes” as us if it continues to pursue economic growth and material wealth.
In the run-up to the Games, and since they started, Western observers have used the most shrill, borderline misanthropic language to describe the “dirtiness” of China’s economic “leap forward.”
One writer argues that the Games will “showcase pollution as well as world-class athletes.” Reporters claim “the effects of pollution can be seen everywhere… smokestack factories spew toxins into the air… rivers teem with sewage.” The environment correspondent of the UK Guardian recently reported on the outcome of China’s “economic miracle””no, he didn”t focus on the millions of people lifted from absolute poverty and the fact that more and more people now work in cities rather than subsisting on farms, but on China’s “dust, waste and dirty water.” Some in the West seem capable of seeing only the dirty downsides of economic growth rather than its benefits for millions of people; they look at China, not through rose-tinted spectacles, but through grime-stained Ray-bans.
And apparently, it isn”t only the people of China and Olympian athletes in Beijing who will suffer as a result of China’s filthy economic miracle “ everyone in the world is under threat. One British journalist says China”that “rapidly advancing dystopia where rivers run black” “ is putting the entire planet on the “fast track to irreversible disaster” with its rush to use “the dirtiest fossil fuel of all: coal.” A news report warns us that China is about to become even more of a planetary threat than the United States: “China’s emissions of carbon dioxide, the most important global warming gas, are expected to surpass those of the US in 2009.”
In the recurring discussion of China’s “toxic toys” “ the billions of toys with loose magnets and lead paint that China exports around the world “ many Western commentators have argued that the Chinese are literally poisoning us. The evidence, however, suggests that the scare about China’s lead-painted toys was blown out of proportion. Though it went largely unreported, at the end of last year the toy-maker Mattel publicly apologised to the Chinese for recalling 20 million of their toys and thus spreading fear about Chinese products, since in truth 17.4 million of those toys were recalled because of a design fault by Mattel rather than a sinister manufacturing mistake by the Chinese. Mattel has admitted that “no cases of any harm to children have been reported.”
Yet that hasn”t stopped many Western writers from treating China’s “toxic toys” as an invasion of poisonous substances from the weird, exotic East”there was even a serious discussion about American children possibly suffering a fall in their IQ levels if they chewed on too many lead-painted Chinese toys (some believe a lead overload can lower one’s intelligence.) It was like the return of the old, foul Fu Manchu scare, only this time the Chinese are not going to send ships and guns to conquer Western civilisation but boxes of Thomas the Tank Engines and Teletubbies to damage the minds of our next generation. Those devious Chinese!
The depiction of China as a black-rivered dystopia that is polluting the West and the world has eerie echoes of the old “Yellow Peril” view of the Chinese. In the past, too, the Chinese were viewed as “pollutants” who might weaken the standing, authority and general health of Western civilisation.
At the end of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth century, when many in the insecure, fin-de-siècle West feared the possibility of a “Yellow Invasion” of workers and goods from the East, the Chinese were looked upon as cultural “pollutants.”
As one author says, they were considered “racial, social and physical pollutants” who might cause the “demise of Western civilisation.” In his book Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture, Robert L Gee says Chinese domestic servants in turn-of-the-century America were seen as representing “a threat of racial pollution within the household.” Lee says the view of the Chinese as “pollutants” was telling: “Pollutants are anomalies in the symbolic structure of society, things that are out of place and create a sense of disorder. A mere presence in the wrong place, the intentional or unintentional crossing of a boundary, gives offense.” Today, too, in the more PC lingo of environmental pollution, the Chinese are accused of creating “disorder” in the world and of being “out of place” with their irresponsible, un-ethical industrialisation.
The academic Monica Chui has shown that the China-bashing dimestore literature of the “Yellow Peril” era was packed with images of the Chinese as “filth, pollutants and toxins.” In her study Fit to be Citizens: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles 1879-1939, Natalia Molina writes about the American public health officials who spread scare stories about Chinese immigrants as “carriers of diseases and pollutants,” giving rise to a “popular perception of the Chinese as a literal as well as metaphorical threat to the health of the body politic.”
Such scares were rehabilitated, albeit in more “acceptable” language, during the mad toxic toy scare of 2007″then, too, American public health officials did little to challenge the idea that Chinese-exported lead was a serious health problem, thus nurturing the perception that “they” over there are a threat to the health of “us” over here.
While the language has changed over the past hundred years”from “Yellow Peril“ to “environmental menace” (or Green Peril, perhaps?)”the view of the Chinese as pollutants and toxins has remained. This demonstrates an important historical fact: very often, Western views of China are forged, not so much by hard facts or evidence about China’s threat to the world, but by Western society’s internal fears for its own standing and survival.
During the “Yellow Peril” era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the fear of the Chinese invader”in the shape of weird-looking workers, drug-addicted gambling addicts, or diseased prostitutes”was driven by a powerful fin-de-siècle sense in the capitals of the West that Western civilisation was fragile and losing its authority. The Western elites” own fear for the survival of their way of life was projected on to the Eastern outsider, who was transformed into an all-purpose bogeyman who was said to be racially polluting the Western race pool and culturally polluting Western society.
Today, too, the more scientific-sounding discussion about contemporary Chinese pollutants “ whether it’s the lead content of their toys or the pollutant particles they are expelling into the global atmosphere”is underpinned by overblown Western angst for the safety and security of the globe. Our own culture of fear, our heightened sense that the world will shortly end in a fireball of our own making, has been projected on to the Chinese, who have become convenient symbols of human destruction and rapaciousness. And why? Simply because they are seeking to do what America and most of Europe have done already “ industrialise, develop, and become more prosperous. How dare they!
These “Smog Olympics“ are fuelled by double standards and by historic prejudices dusted down and dolled up in eco-garb. It requires a startling combination of arrogance and lack of self-reflection for well-to-do activists in the West, sitting in cushioned, air-conditioned offices as they sip on a five-dollar macchiato, to demonise China for its effort to join the twenty-first century and enjoy some of the luxuries we enjoy.
Human Rights Olympics
Finally, many are seeking to turn Beijing 2008 into Human Rights 2008 “ an indictment of the Chinese regime’s continuing denial of democracy, choice and basic rights to its citizens.
This seems like the most convincing politicisation of the Games. After all, there is no question that China remains an undemocratic state, ruled over by one, unchallengeable party that has little respect for people’s fundamental freedoms.
Still, even this exploitation of the Olympics to say “j”accuse“ to China ought to be challenged by those of us who genuinely care about liberty and democracy for the Chinese”because in the relentless politicisation of the Olympics “freedom” has been transformed into a weapon to be wielded by cynical and hypocritical Western governments against their alleged inferiors “over there.” The “Human Rights Olympics” are meant to expose Chinese authoritarianism”yet they also expose Western hypocrisy and, once again, Western double standards.
Various human rights activists are calling on American and European governments, and the corporations sponsoring the Beijing Games, to “pressurise” China over its human rights abuses. Yet the West has no moral authority to lecture anyone about rights and democracy.
Respect for liberty is at an historic low in Europe and the U.S. In Britain, the New Labour government has obliterated some of our most basic legal rights over the past 10 years. It has introduced 42 days” detention without charge (the highest in any Western state), watered down the right to trial by jury, and brought in new legislation severely restricting free speech and effectively introducing new thought crimes (most notably the Racial and Religious Hatred Act and the Terrorism Act.) Many are attacking China for putting up CCTV cameras to spy on people attending the Beijing Games”yet Britain has five million CCTV cameras, or one for every 12 citizens. We have more than 20 per cent of the world’s CCTV cameras, which, considering that our tiny island occupies just 0.2 per cent of the world’s inhabitable landmass, is a quite remarkable achievement. The average Londoner is filmed by 300 CCTV cameras a day as he goes about his business. What right Gordon Brown has to lecture China about rights or the problem of spying is anybody’s guess.
Across the European Union, government ministers and officials have become decidedly sniffy about democracy, too, over the past five years. Earlier this year, when the Irish electorate dared to reject the EU’s Lisbon Treaty in a referendum, they were roundly denounced by EU bigwigs as “plebs,” “clowns,” and “ungrateful” wretches, whose ignorant voting choices show that giving the plebiscite too much say is “absurd” because “when there is popular consultation, you get populism, nationalism, xenophobia, all sorts of lies.” European elites seem to view democracy as a terrible burden, a pain in their collective ass”who are they to demand that the Chinese live up to democratic ideals?
The double standards of the Human Rights Olympics are revealed in one awkward fact: during the last Games, in Athens in 2004, the Greek government introduced extraordinarily stringent forms of spying and surveillance and yet it was not subjected to criticism by an army of Western campaigners and journalists. Apparently it is okay for Western, white governments to be authoritarian, but not those sinister Easterners in Beijing.
The Greek transformed Athens into what one Greek academic labelled a “superpanopticon””that is, an open prison where everyone was monitored around the clock by the authorities. The academic says the Athens Olympics were turned into a “testing ground for the latest anti-terrorist superpanoptic technology,” which involved “exploiting real and perceived terrorist threats to prescribe extremely high security requirements.”
If the Chinese want to spy on people, they could learn a lot from Athens 2004. The authorities there installed a vast computer surveillance network, consisting of thousands of hidden cameras and microphones across the city that could analyse dozens of languages for any hint of “terrorist chatter.” Under the advice of the British authorities”the kings of CCTV”the Greek also introduced hi-tech CCTV cameras on the streets and roads around the Olympic village.
Greece spent an Olympics-record $1.5 billion on security. More than 70,000 security personnel, including 16,000 soldiers, patrolled the country’s borders and the perimeter of Athens. American troops assisted Greek troops in a mammoth three-week training exercise codenamed Shield of Hercules 2004, teaching them how to respond to potential “catastrophic scenarios” (there was none, of course.) Fighter planes patrolled the skies, and a naval ship”armed to the teeth”sat waiting in the docks. The then US ambassador to Greece was pleased with the results of the joint American-EU-Greek clampdown in Athens, arguing: “The job here is to put as many locks, sirens and alarms on the house called the Olympics so that the burglar goes to some other house.”
Do you remember journalists complaining about a culture of spying or the presence of so many menacing-looking armed forces? Do you remember angry global campaigns against the Greeks for “betraying Olympic values” with their locks, sirens, alarms, cameras, microphones and fighter planes? No”because there was none.
The message of the disturbingly differing judgement of China as against Greece”where Greece was assisted by the West in its Olympian authoritarianism whereas China is condemned by the West for its Olympian authoritarianism”seems clear: it is acceptable for “us” to sacrifice liberty in the name of security but not “them.” Our denigration of rights is somehow more legitimate and well meaning than theirs. Inexorably, perhaps unwittingly, the judgement of China by an entirely different standard to Western countries is rehabilitating the old idea that Easterners are in some way more naturally wicked than we Westerners: that we are morally pure with decent motivations, and they are a “cruel race.”
Worse, this use of the issue of freedom as a pulpit for Western rulers to hector China, despite the fact that our rulers wouldn”t know what liberty was if it jumped them in an alley, denigrates the universality of freedom, turning it ultimately into a weapon of re
Realpolitik. This undermines the potential for solidarity between Chinese people and people in the West, as all of us ought to fight back against our authoritarian, terror-obsessed, killjoy elites. In the Human Rights Olympics, the Chinese are treated once again as somehow different to and more unusual than us, rather than as our potential allies in the defence of freedom against fearful governments on both sides of the West/East divide.
This is where the Orientalist Olympics have taken us: to a situation where the Chinese are attacked as toxins, pollutants and genocidaires who must allow someone like George W. Bush to talk down to them about freedom; where the people of China are treated, in Rudyard Kipling’s words, as “half devil” (they are strange and wicked) and “half-child” (they are pathetic victims of their ruling regime.) Who will agree with me that this perverse politicisation of the Beijing Games has done far more to undermine human solidarity and respect than the Beijing Games themselves?
Brendan O”Neill is editor of spiked in London.
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