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Death of the West
Barfly DM came up with this cite by Pat Buchanan:
Under a global democracy, India and China, with 2.5 billion people, would be the dominant powers, and peoples of color, five-sixths of all mankind, would enter a claim for a more equitable distribution of the world’s wealth now held by that shrinking one-sixth of all mankind that is of European descent. Global democracy is the death of the West.
Kofi’s not the problem, the United Nations is
Six people in the room and six apples. One person of European descent has 5 apples and 5 persons of color have a fifth apple each. Now introduce democracy and you may have to share more – incredible thought.
DM says:
I fear that (however awkwardly this is put) – that this is the mindset of too many USA/UK plebs and pseudo-intellectuals alike – and that the denoument to this sort of color-conscious thinking will be when they learn that they don’t have the mettle of a master-race.
Kennan said it in the Forties. Kissinger said it in the 70’s. The object of US policy is and has been to “keep the peasants in their place,” to continue consuming six or seven times their share of the global pie, and under no circumstances to share with “the lesser races”. Same as the agenda of all aristocracies in all countries from the year Dot. What bugs the heck out of me — aside from the brutal amorality of the basic concept — is doing all this under the shallow veneer of “democracy and freedom”. If we are to be brutes, for godssakes let us be honest brutes and not hypocritical, smiley-faced, plastic-turkey brutes.
Every now and then someone like Kennan or Kissinger (or Pat B) lets the mask slip, makes a frank and revealing comment. But then it’s back to Enclosure and repression in happyface drag, as usual.
Aristocracies tend over time to self-destruct for various reasons that far more scholarly people than I have written about at great length. Inbreeding, arrogance, laziness, delusion, incompetence, vicious infighting… some of which I think can be seen at work among the American aristocracy. If we were only honest with ourselves we’d see the Famiglia Bush for what it is — a Royal (or at least Ducal with ambitions) House, aiming to capture the crown. Also a fairly decayed family already, in only a few generations — Dubya is hardly a splendid specimen of homo politicus, and the foolhardiness of his regime mirrors some of the follies of kingly arrogance, ignorance, and stubbornness in the histories of other empires whose names and geography only scholars know today.
So I like to think that “this too shall pass,” as inexorably it will; but in the meantime such waste, such horror, such stupidity, such ugliness and wicknedness loosed again on the innocent… when all the time we know better and, I do believe, we can do better — and sometimes have done better. It’s maddening.
There comes a point (“dog in the manger” syndrome) when the cost of not sharing, the cost of excluding those despised Others from the feast, the cost of armaments and fences and the destruction of not only one’s own economy but the soul of one’s own culture, far exceeds the cost of sharing. Just as the real profits from the insane HMO-based US medical system are dwarfed by the cost of all the mechanisms of exclusion devoted to depriving the ‘unworthy’ of medical care, the cost to ‘the West’ of the walls (material and virtual) we build to keep the peasants at bay exceeds the cost of making those peasants’ lives comfortable enough that we need not greatly fear them. The figures have been proposed often enough — a mere fraction of the US military budget would provide every family on Earth with clean water and adequate food. And so on.
There is a mindset which we Brits call “cutting of your nose to spite your face,” a kind of mania of spitefulness that accepts enormous harm to the self if only harm can be done to some hated Other. There’s also the Aesop-like anecdote about the monkey who reaches into a jar for a fistful of nuts and finds that the fist will not pass the jar mouth again — refusing to let go of his precious stash of nuts, he nevertheless cannot enjoy them, unable to get them out of the jar.
No one has a patent on these follies — it seems to be a universal human madness. A common illustration — I wonder if it only happened or was an urban legend — in the 60’s was of the White person so deeply racist that s/he would refuse a blood transfusion and risk death, if the blood came from a Black donor. The fear of Taint, the rejection of the Other, so complete that death would be preferable…
In the end I think there may be an axiom, as generally reliable as most of the axioms of physics, that the long-term cost of perpetuating injustice is always higher than the long-term cost of sharing, equalising, accommodating, making peace. That arms races are always ruinous, and walls of exclusion inevitably cost more than the cost of absorbing or assisting those whom we wished to exclude. That purity — racial, religious, political, national — pure monoculture, exclusivity, the fantasy of invulnerability and absolute privilege — is always in the long term unaffordable.
Which means that I think “the West” (as an armed redoubt of staggering privilege) is indeed doomed. And the cost of un-dooming it, i.e. abandoning the “gated community” attitude and admitting that the world is our neighbourhood, would (a) be far less than the cost of maintaining the pretence and (b) also mean the “doom” of the “West,” because the cosmopolitan and multilingual society that would result would no longer be a White-dominated, exclusive little enclave.
Posted by: DeAnander | Dec 8 2004 19:28 utc | 14
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