Some of My Favorite Themes

These are a few of my favorite themes-- to coin a phrase.

At the risk of being slightly repetitious, I devote this column to some of the themes I have used in my analysis of the situation in Israel and Gaza. These themes become more salient as other writers employ them. 

So, readers of my blog or my Substack can consider themselves to be ahead of the game. They had a chance to deploy analytic tools before many others did. 

In a New York Post column yesterday, Richard Lowry offers one of my favorite themes. That is, however much the reaction to the Hamas massacre manifests anti-Semitism, it also involves a fundamental hatred of Western civilization. 

The American university system has been systematically deriding and defaming Western civilization for decades now. The result has been bands of crazed students manifesting for a terrorist group that has committed unspeakable atrocities.

Worse yet, students who believe that they are fighting the good fight against fascism suddenly, when faced with real fascism, join together to praise it. And join together to ensure that those who committed the abominations not be punished.

Lowry points out the following point, one that we have made ourselves:

This point of view loves Gaza for its failure and hates Israel for its success; loves Gaza for its terror and hates Israel for its self-defense; loves Gaza for its vicious anti-Western sponsors and hates Israel for its Western allies, especially the United States.

Lowry calls it perverse, and surely that is the least you can say about the attitude.

Obviously, none of it represents a struggle against colonialism, because Jews inhabited the region well before Islam existed.

But then, there is the struggle between Israel and Hamas, yet another chapter in the clash of civilizations. This concept, introduced by Samuel Huntington, was intended to provide a counterweight to the thesis, propounded by Francis Fukuyama that liberal democracy was the best form of governance and would prevail-- because the arc of history was pointing in that direction.

Of course, we can spend some considerable time debating what constitutes the end of history. Fukuyama made it a question of belief. People all believe, he suggested, that liberal democracy was the best form of governance.

This implies that a society that is based on liberal ideals, ideals about democracy, free expression and human rights, will win out over one that disparages those values?

Then again, we ought to understand that the value system based in Western idealism is not the same as the value system based on Western empiricism. Over the past several decades China has adopted something of a capitalist economy. It did so on pragmatic, not idealistic grounds. It has not, however, embraced ideals concerning democracy, free expression and human rights.

As for the question of whether free enterprise requires free elections and free speech, dare we say that the question remains open.

So, has Israel succeeded because it is democratic or has it succeeded because it is capitalistic?

And then, there is another issue, hinted at in these pages. When one culture outcompetes another, will the losing culture adopt the habits that produced the winning culture? And, given the example of China, can you adopt some aspects of Western culture and ignore others?

To the chagrin of many, Saudi Arabia is currently modernizing, in economic terms, but without very much democracy or free expression. 

As I have pointed out, Hamas, through Iran, represents a refusal to adopt to the modern world, a refusal to emulate one’s betters, with an effort to destroy it. In other terms, to deconstruct it. 

Joel Kotkin raised the issue:

In Clash, Huntington predicted the Ukrainian conflict as well the resurgence, at the expense of the West, of many cultures, including Indian, Chinese, Arab and Turkish. He noted all seek recompense for steep declines during the period of European predominance. Rather than a world shaped by the logic of markets and the rule of law, this is engendering the ascendency of autocrats and intensifying tribalization and primitivist religious movements.

So, seeing other cultures emerge victorious in the clash of civilizations, some cultures have chosen to return to what I would call pharaonic and multicultural Egypt. They have employed the tactics of primitive religions, as in the human sacrifice practiced by Hamas. They have been trying to assert their own power, or a perverse version of same, by showing that they can be more brutal than the most brutal. They have been trying to out-Nazi the Nazis.

To be fair, the acolytes of Islamic culture, facing a choice between a reformation led by Saudi Arabia and the raw brutality of Hamas, are rallying to the cause of Hamas.

Of course, murdering babies and raping women count as cowardly actions. And yet, they are far easier to commit than building a modern nation. Committing atrocities makes people feel powerful without their having to compete in the arena. It's a self-esteem boost.

One suspects that, behind this terrorism lies a suspicion that if one is playing fair by civilized rules one cannot compete. Better to destroy what others have built than to try to build something oneself and to fail.

Besides, if you reform your traditional culture you run the risk of offending the spirits of your ancestors. And, we cannot have that.

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