Newsletter: April, 02

Table of Contents:

[Classics and War] [China: With the Mask Off] [On the Fighting of Fanatics] [Voices of Freedom]

Editor’s Remarks

The modern liberal (Canadians, please note the small case ‘l’) has a remarkably poor track record at recognizing evil until it is too late. Mackenzie King thought Hitler a rough but admirable fellow until the war began; he was not unique in this. Others in the 1930s considered the Soviet Union to be a fine society aimed at human weal, and damn all evidence to the contrary. Sixty years later, the same inability persists.

Yasser Arafat is considered a leader and someone for our diplomats to consult, not an inadequate and corrupt thug on the make. The Chinese government is seen as a potential business partner, not as a foe ultimately bent on our humiliation and destruction. Fundamentalist zealots are a regrettable but sometimes legitimate outgrowth of deprivation. We found no end of excuses to avoid swift and decisive action against a host of murderous, corrupt or dangerous actors in the last few decades — some of whom could have easily been prompted into moderating their behavior.

In our Western societies, political and diplomatic careers attract those schooled in political science, law, and administrative principles. They soon become involved in process and network with others like them. Intelligence, shaped by contemporary rationalism, and general impulses of progression and goodwill decides their worldview. When they travel, they tend to meet other people much like themselves, or who at least convincingly act like them. Thus arises the modern liberal conceit that all intelligent people are rational (as the liberal understands rationalism) and can be dealt with accordingly. Alas there are plenty of intelligent people who have no truck with our kind of rationalism — and many of them are evil indeed.

The following is an abridged version of a speech by Victor Davis Hanson delivered at Hillsdale College on November 11^th,2001 and is reprinted with permission from IMPRIMIS, the national speech digest of Hillsdale College (www.hillsdale.edu)

The study of Classics — of Greece and Rome — can offer us moral lessons as well as a superb grounding in art, literature, history and language. In our present crisis after September 11, it also offers practical guidance — and the absence of familiarity with the foundations of Western culture in part may explain many of the disturbing reactions to the war that we have seen on American campuses.

If more in our university really understood the Greeks and Romans and their legacy in the West, then they would not see this present conflict through either therapeutic or apologetic lenses. As Classics teaches us, war in classical antiquity — and for most of the past 2,500 years of Western Civilization — was seen as a tragedy innate to the human condition — a time of human plague when, as the historian Herodotus said, fathers bury sons rather than sons fathers. In other words, killing humans over disagreements should not happen among civilized people. But it does happen. So war, the poet Hesiod concluded, was "a curse from Zeus."

Tragically, the Greeks tell us, conflict will always break out — and very frequently so — because we are human and thus not always rational. War is "the father, the king of us all," the philosopher Heraclitus lamented. Even the utopian Plato agreed. "War is always existing by nature between every Greek city state." How galling and hurtful to us moderns that Plato, of all people, once called peace not war, the real "parenthesis" in human affairs. Warfare could be terrifying — "a thing of fear" the poet Pindar summed up — but not therein unnatural or necessarily evil.

No, the rub was particular wars, not war itself. While all tragic, wars could be good or evil depending on their cause, the nature of the fighting, and the ultimate costs and results. The Greek defense against Persian attack in 480 BC, in the eyes of the playwright Aeschylus (who chose as his epigram mention of his service at the battle of Marathon, not his dramas), was "glorious." Yet the theme of Thucydides’ history of the internecine Peloponnesian wars was folly and sometimes senseless butchery. Likewise, there is language of freedom and liberty associated with the Greeks’ naval victory at Salamis, but not with the slaughter at the battle of Guagamela — Alexander the Great’s destruction of the Persian Army in Mesopotamia that wrecked Darius III’s empire and replaced eastern despots with Macedonian autocrats.

If war was innate, and its morality defined by particular circumstances, fighting was also not necessarily explained by prior exploitation or legitimate grievance. Nor did aggression have to arise from poverty or inequality. States, like people, the historian Thucydides tells us, can be envious — and even rude and pushy. And if they get away with things, they most surely will. Thucydides later says states battle out of "honor, fear, and self-interest." How odd to think that the Japanese and Germans were not starving in 1941, but rather were proud peoples who wanted those whom they deemed inferior and weak to serve them.

To the Greeks, such rotten peoples also fought mostly over tangible things — more land, more subjects, more loot. Wars were a sort of acquisition, Aristotle said. Bullies, whether out of vanity or a desire for power and recognition, will take things from other peoples unless they are stopped. And if they are to be stopped, citizens — among them good, kind and well-read men like Socrates, Sophocles, Thucydides, and Demosthenes — must fight to protect their freedom and to save the innocent.

To a student of the Classics who trusts Thucydides and Plato more than Marx, Freud, or Michel Foucault, the present crisis, I think, looks something like this: The United States being a strong and wealthy society, invites envy because of the success of its restless culture of freedom, constitutional democracy, self-critique, secular rationalism, and open markets that threaten both theocracy and autocracy alike. That we are often to be hated — and periodically to be challenged by those who want our power, riches, or influence and yet simultaneously hate their own desire — is to be often regretted, but always expected. Our past indulgence of Osama bin Laden did not bring us respect, much less sympathy. Rather, human nature being what it is, our forbearance invited ever more contempt and audacity on his part — and more dead as the bitter wages of our self-righteous morality and tragic miscalculation.

The enemies of free speech and tolerance — German Nazis, Italian fascists, Japanese militarists, Stalinist communists, or Islamic fundamentalists — will always attack us for what we are, rather than what we have done, inasmuch as they must hate freedom and the liberality which is its twin. Only our moral response — not our status as belligerent per se — determines whether our war is just and necessary. If, like the Athenians, we butcher neutral Melians for no good cause, then our battle against the innocent is evil and we may not win. But if we fight to preserve freedom like the Greeks at Thermopylae and the GIs on the beaches of Normandy, then war is the right and indeed the only thing we can do. Caught in such a tragedy, where efforts at reason and humanity fall on the deaf ears of killers, we must go to war for our survival and to prove to our enemies that their defeat will serve as a harsh teacher — at least for a generation or two — that it is wrong and very dangerous to use two kilotons of explosives to blow up 5,000 civilians in the streets of our cities.

This depressing view of human nature and conflict is rarely any longer with us. It was not the advent of Christianity that ended it, Christian philosophers and theologians long ago developed the doctrine of "just war," having realized that nonresistance meant suicide. More likely, the 20^th Century and the horror of the two World Wars — Verdun, the Somme, Hiroshima —put an end to the tragic view of war. Yet out of such numbing losses — and our arrogance — we missed the lessons of the World Wars. The calamity of 60 million dead occurred not because we went to war, but also because we were naïve and deemed weak by our enemies well before 1914 and 1939 — at a time when real resolve would have stopped Prussian militarism and Nazism before millions of blameless perished.

The deviant offspring of the Enlightenment — Marxists and Freudians — gave birth to even more pernicious social sciences that sought to ‘prove’ to us that war was always evil and therefore — with some help from PhDs — surely preventable. Indeed, during the International Year of Peace in 1986, a global commission of experts concluded that war was unnatural and humans themselves unwarlike! Unfortunately, innocent people get killed because of that kind of thinking. Many, especially in our universities, now are convinced that war always results from real, rather than perceived, grievances, such as poverty arising out of the usual list of sins: colonialism, imperialism, racism and sexism. In response, dialogue and mediation have been elevated to the grand science of "conflict resolution", a sort of marriage counseling or small claims court taken to the global level.

Rich and conceited Westerners simply could not accept the idea that more people in the twentieth century were killed by Hitler, Stalin, and Mao off the battlefield than on it. How depressing to suggest that the Khmer Rouge, the Hutus and the Serbians went on killing when left alone — and quit only when either satiated or stopped!

In the new moral calculus of the American university, bin Laden figures to be no Xerxes or Tojo. He is not even an inherently evil man who hates us for our clout and our influence. Far too few in the university understand that bin Laden wishes to strut over a united Middle Eastern caliphate under his brand of medieval Islam, and to make decadent Westerners cower in fear. Instead, they insist that he is either confused (call in Freud) or has legitimate grievances (read Marx), and so we must find answers within us for what he does. Western importation of Arab oil? Stolen land from the Palestinians? Decadent democracy and capitalism? Jewish-American women walking in the land of Mecca? Puppet Arab governments? Take your pick — bin Laden has cited them all.

To stop the evil of Islamic fundamentalism, the tragic Greeks would make ready the 101^st Airborne and the Rangers, while too many in academia would rather that we chit-chat with him, fathom him, or accommodate him as did the Clinton State Department. Seeing war as "Zeus’s curse" in this age of our greatest learning and wealth — and pride — is to descend into "savagery," when our sophisticated elite promise that prayer, talk or money can yet prevail. But if we deem ourselves too smart, too moral, or too soft to stop killers, then — as Socrates and Pericles alike remind us — we have become accomplices to evil through inaction. Generations slaughtered in Europe, incinerated Jews, massacred Russians and Chinese, and the bleached bones of Cambodians are proof enough of what the Greeks once warned us.

Finally, classics teaches how unique the Greeks and Romans were among the peoples of the ancient world, theirs was an anti-Mediterranean culture whose approach to politics, culture, literature, and religion was antithetical to almost every state in Africa, Asia, and the tribal confines of northern Europe. In our ignorance, too many Americans have made the fatal mistake of assuming that our enemies are simply different from us, rather than far worse than us — as if the current war in the Middle East is largely due to a misunderstanding among equals, rather than reflective of a vast fault line that goes back to the very origins of our civilization. Athens was a democracy; Sidon was not. Farmers owned their own property in Greece, voted, and formed the militia of the polis; not so in Persia and Egypt. Thucydides was able to criticize his mother country, Greece. Persian clerks who recorded Darius’s res gestae on the walls of Persepolis were not. The Greek language and its European descendents have a rich vocabulary of words for "constitution," "citizen," "freedom," and "democracy"; this is true of neither old Persian nor modern Arabic. Such differences are not perceived, but real and critical, for they affect the manner in which people conduct their daily lives — whether they live in fear or in safety, in want or in security.

If our students and professors today would study the Classics, they might rediscover the origins of their culture — and in doing so learn that we are not even remotely akin to the Taliban or the Saudis, but are in fact profoundly different in the manner we craft our government, treat our women, earn our living and set the parameters of our religion. Modern cultural anthropology, social linguistics, cross-cultural geography, sociology and nearly any discipline with the suffix "studies" would lecture us that the Taliban’s desecration of the graves of the infidel, clitorectomies of infants, torture of the accused, murder of the untried, and destruction of the non-Islamic is merely "different" or "problematic" — almost anything other than "evil." Yet a world under the Taliban or its supporters, like the satrapy Xerxes envisioned for a conquered Greece, would mean no free expression, no voting, no protection from arbitrary and coercive government, but instead theocracy, censorship, and brutality in every facet of daily life. Such were the stakes at Salamis, and so too is the contest now with Islamic fundamentalists, who are as akin to ancient absolutists as we are to the Greeks.

Such ignorance of one’s own past can weaken a powerful society such as ours that must project confidence, power, humanity — and hope — to those less fortunate abroad. This new species of upscale and pampered terrorist hates America for a variety of complex reasons. He despises, of course, his own attraction towards our ease and liberality. He recognizes that our freedom and affluence spur on his appetites more than Islam can repress them. But just as importantly, he realizes that there is an aristocratic guilt within many comfortable Americans, who are too often ashamed of, or apologetic about, their culture. And in this hesitance, our enemies sense not merely our ignorance of their own foundations, but also both decadence and weakness. Rather than appreciating Americans’ self-confidence or simple manners when we accept rebuke so politely, our enemies despise us all the more, simply because they can — and can so easily, and without rejoinder.

Classics, then, can teach us who we once were — and thus who we are now in the present war. The ancients not only teach us that life is spirited and tragic, but also that what was created in and followed from Greece and Rome was, and is, man’s last and greatest hope on earth.

Of every nine people on the planet today, two are Chinese. At the end of 2000, the World’s population was estimated to be 6,091 million people. The population of the People’s Republic of China was around 1,276 million, of whom 92% were "Han" Chinese alone. Adding the Chinese of Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and elsewhere, it would be reasonable to conclude that there are another 80 million Chinese around. Beijing knows these numbers and knows its potential power.

Added to these massive numbers are several other impulses. China’s culture is ancient and well defined — clearly identifiable at a time when the Greeks (the co-founders of Western civilization) were first shuffling into the light of history and the Israelites were just another scruffy bunch sandwiched between Mesopotamia and Egypt.

Yet China as a modern nation-state is very new and was hardly a going concern through the first half of the 20^th Century. When it finally tottered upright (under its new Party Dynasty), it still spent about 25 years in relative isolation. While its numbers and antiquity tell Beijing that it deserves deference and power, it does not know what the "rules" are in international behavior (something which was clearly evident during last year’s collision between a hot-dogging Chinese fighter pilot and a US Navy reconnaissance aircraft). Instead, China’s government turns to history rather than to foreign guidelines for instruction, and these tell China’s rulers to expect deference and obeisance because of their power and superior culture.

Additionally, the covenant between the citizen and the state is far different in China from that in the Western world. We understand that the authority of the government derives from the consent of the governed, and that there is a partnership between the two, because the citizen is expected to exercise his or her political power. In Chinese culture, the arrangement is quite different — the government doesn’t need consent so long as it has "the Mandate of Heaven", and it can enjoy the benefits of power only as long as it sees to the stability of the realm. The citizen is under no real obligation to the government provided that he does not question their authority. If the government appears too weak, then its mandate is obviously failing, and the ambitious or discontented will rapidly undermine it. China’s history is a cyclical one of strong central government alternating with anarchy.

China is large, preoccupied with keeping an appearance of strength, convinced that to do otherwise is an invitation to collapse, absolutely sure of its cultural superiority but inexperienced as a nation state: A formula for disaster, but there is more to add to the mix.

In its urgent quest for the legitimacy bestowed by hosting the Olympic Games, Beijing was desperate to show its best side to the world. It is fairly certain that the IOC contained few people who could speak Mandarin or Cantonese, and were prepared to wander loose in China to listen to ordinary people. A couple of acquaintances of the author (both Northern European in origin) speak Mandarin and have wandered widely in Asia — including much of China. Ordinary Chinese do not expect foreigners to speak their own languages, and tend to take advantage of this supposition.

The correspondence from these acquaintances speaks for itself.

"On the street, I often am called a 'Fan' or 'Hu' [Names of barbarian races that were erased from history over two and half thousand years ago]. The message is to let me know that not only am I a savage, but am to be eliminated."

"He [a young child] said that he hated all Americans (which here is a kind of general term for whites), and one day Chinese would kill them all, because Chinese are strong. He said his parents told him all this, and that one day soon there would be no more Americans."

[I] was referred to by family members of people whom I've known for almost four years as 'baibaide, maomaode, chouchoude' (like whitey, furry stinky one - used for Caucasians), the family joins in snickering gleefully."

Some observers of China have noted, somewhat euphemistically, that Mainland Chinese are ‘Xenophobic’. True, in the same way that an Alabama Klansman of the 1960s might be considered as being slightly bigoted.

Actually, widespread opinion among Chinese classifies humanity into three groups: ‘Humans’ (Han and the Han-like people who melded with them in the formative period between two and three thousand years ago); ‘savages’ (ethnically Han, but not acculturated — such as Americans or other Westerners of Chinese descent); and ‘devils’ (non-Han). People of mixed Chinese-European descent are usually considered as savages or devils, especially if they were raised outside of Chinese culture — a point that reflects the fact that the Han were originally an amalgam of peoples with a common culture. By the same standard, a Westerner could be anyone of any ethnic background, as it is Western culture (its institutions and ways of thinking) that define our common identity, not ancestry.

In some recent films, usually from filmmakers in southern China, there are some indications that these attitudes are weakening. But these are light comedies and martial arts flicks for an international audience. Other films — such as the government-produced epic on their version of the Opium Wars of the 1840s — are about as innocent as films like "Triumph of the Will" or "Alexander Nevsky" were.

These belligerent and supremacist attitudes are certainly not universal among the Chinese, but they are common enough, most especially among Mainlanders. However, the Chinese government appears to have been encouraging a belief that the 21^st Century will belong to China, and that all Chinese, regardless of nationality, are going to be the agents of its ascension to primacy.

China is going to present an enormous security challenge in the 21^st Century. With a hegemonic master race instinct tied to all other dimensions of risk, when push comes to shove things may turn ugly indeed.

Crouched in their caves; well armed though ragged and hungry, and determined to kill an American before dying in combat; al-Qaeda terrorists today or an Imperialist Japanese soldier of 1945? The latter were fanatical, cruel, tenacious and very brave. They also died in droves.

The Japanese soldiers that the Western Allies confronted in WW-II in Asia were indoctrinated in a belief that willpower could compensate for material shortcomings. The Japanese insisted that self-sacrifice implied a moral strength superior to that of Western soldiers. They also believed that the Allies were soft, decadent and unable to face the sternest tests of war.

There was probably no battle in the Pacific War as fierce as that on Okinawa in April to June of 1945. The Japanese hoped to break America's will to fight by imposing unacceptable casualty rates and tailored their defences accordingly. Suicide tactics, thousands of Kamikaze aircraft, and cunningly designed defences filled with soldiers prepared to fight to the end -- these killed over 12,500 American airmen, sailors and troops. Over 100,000 Japanese servicemen died, as did a similar number of hapless Okinawans caught in the fighting.

In the fighting on Okinawa, the Americans used their enormous material superiority, and deluged much of the island in shells and bombs (causing many civilian deaths). Yet riflemen still had to push forward in a search for a hidden enemy, be shot at from ambush, and then claw forward to knock out sniper-nests and pillboxes one by one.

Men prepared to fight to the death normally have to be obliged, which is exactly what the Americans had to do -- as did the Australian, African, British, Indian and other Allied troops engaged elsewhere in the Pacific War at that time.

There are a lot of parallels between the Al-Qaeda and the thoroughly militarized Japanese of 1945. Even the attacks of September 11th could be characterized as the use of Kamikaze suicide pilots. The same cruelty, determination and disdain for Western material superiority are there. So is the same miscalculation about Westerners' determination.

When encouraging the Somali Warlord Muhammed Farrah Aidid to lay a trap for American troops in Mogadishu in October 1993; Osama Bin Laden calculated that the characteristic Western determination to recover their wounded could be used against them to inflict even more casualties.

The tactic worked more or less as planned (and is more or less faithfully depicted in the current movie "Black Hawk Down"). The net effect was that one Malaysian and 18 American soldiers were killed -- as were hundreds of Somali gunmen. Politically, the tactic worked because President Clinton pulled US troops out, but the fighting spirit of the troops who endured the savage 18-hour battle was undiminished at the time.

The situation in Afghanistan is different, not least because the resolve of American political leaders shows no signs of diminishing any time soon. It will be a long time before the anger generated by September 11th will abate. On the ground, things are also a little different.

The special forces and elite troops from the nine nations (including Canada) currently involved in the fighting enjoy a technological edge far greater than that which existed between the US and Imperial Japan in 1945. A Coalition soldier has secure communications, high quality sensor equipment and better weapons than an aspiring al-Qaeda martyr. He is also a professional who has received years of carefully crafted training and physical conditioning. While both sides have to endure winter conditions at a high altitude, the Coalition soldier is better supplied with food and equipment to withstand the environment.

In the Okinawa campaign, approximately eight Japanese soldiers and eight Okinawan civilians were killed for every dead American. While hundreds of civilian fatalities have occurred in Afghanistan because of errors by the Coalition; thousands and thousands of Al-Qaeda and Taliban members have been killed in combat so far -- in return for a scant handful of deaths inflicted on American servicemen and their Coalition partners. This imbalance will continue; but it might continue indefinitely.

Japanese resolve showed no clear signs of cracking after the carnage of Okinawa. Their public and much of their military believed that the war was still going their way (despite all evidence to the contrary) right up until the Emperor's surrender broadcast immediately after the Atomic Bombings. Besides killing them in their thousands, how do we eventually convince Al-Qaeda fanatics that the game is over without having to kill every single one of them?

"Just as no Roman citizen was left unaffected by the barbarian invasions, so in vast parts of the world no man, woman or child alive today will be spared the consequences of the newly-emerging forms of war."

- Martin van Crevald, The Transformation of War

"Democracy is the best system of government yet devised, but it suffers from one great defect — it does not encourage those military virtues upon which, in an envious world, it must frequently depend for survival."

And from the "That’s-the-spirit" File:

"I am always prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter."

John Thompson is President of the Mackenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: institute@mackenzieinstitute.com

The Mackenzie Institute

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