On rewriting history and the clash of civilizations

This week marked the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp at Auchwitz, and it has been marked by commemorative events, speeches by political leaders, articles about the Holocaust and the like.

Among these was a speech by Russian President Vladimir Putin, Putin: Those who rewrite history attempt to hide own disgrace. “The Russian president has blasted attempts to rewrite the history of WWII and hide the crimes of Nazism as inadmissible and immoral, adding that people who do this often try to distract attention from their nations’ collaboration with Hitler.”

“Direct attempts to silence history, to distort and rewrite history are inadmissible and immoral. Behind these attempts often lies the desire to hide one’s own disgrace, the disgrace of cowardice, hypocrisy and treachery, the intent to justify the direct or indirect collaboration with Nazism,” the Russian leader stated.

“In places where they imprint the ideas of ethnic and moral supremacy into people’s heads, where they destroy or scoff at human values, civilization is being quickly and inevitably replaced by barbarity,” Putin noted, adding that the process is often accompanied with war and aggression.

Well, one can’t cavil at those sentiments, and I wouldn’t want to, but the problem is the subtext. All historical writing carries what one historian called “the burden of the present”, and this is no exception. If you want to understand Putin’s words, you must read them in context, and the context is the present, and relations between Russia and Ukraine.

Putin is talking about the past, but in the present there is a fight going on, and Putin has a dog in that fight, and his words need to be interpreted in that light. In his words he is having a dig at Ukraine, which, when occupied by the Nazis in WWII, in some places welcomed the occupiers and collaborated with them, including collaboration in the Holocaust.

And in this he has a point, as this article shows: How the world teaches the Holocaust – or ignores it.

Ukraine and Norway are two European countries where the Holocaust is not explicitly taight in school history textbooks

So what Putin is apparently implying about Ukraine might be true, but it is nevertheless disingenuous.

I was recently told by a Ukrainian nationalist that I “supported Putin” because I referred to a civil war in Ukraine. I suppose that in the nationalist worldview anything less than enthusiastic support must mean that one sides with the enemy.

But this article illustrates what so many people seem to be at pains to deny: that there is a clash of civilizations. The conflict in Ukraine bears out, with uncanny accuracy, what Samuel Huntington wrote about “the clash of civilizations” twenty years ago.

Huntington pointed out that where a civil war took place entirely within a civilization, it would be less likely to become a clash of civilizations. The civil wars in Rwanda and Burundi 20 years ago bear this out.

But where the “fault lines” between civilisations run through a country, as they do in Ukraine, then such a civil war is likely to become a proxy war for the wider civilizations, and others become involved. The fact that most of much of the “news” about the Ukraine conflict in the Western media was composed of attacks by Western politicians on Putin bears this out. And this article on Putin’s speech about historical revisionism bears it out too, because Putin is clearly using it to have a dig at the Ukrainian leaders.

So Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” theory is being demonstrated every day, not merely by actual violence, but by the media spin put on events, and even the denialists sometimes show by their very denials that it is true.

 

 

Who won the Cold War?

Who won the Cold War? In a book I read recently, Book review: A history of the English-speaking peoples | Khanya the author was in no doubt that Maggie Thatcher and Ronnie Reagan “won” the Cold War, but the author’s worldview was utterly anachonistic, and can only be described as neojingoism.

Clarissa takes a somewhat different view of it in Clarissa’s Blog: Who Caused the Collapse of the Soviet Union? Part I:

Nothing annoys me more than hearing people discuss completely in earnest whether the collapse of the Soviet Union was brought about by Ronald Reagan or by somebody else. Such discussions make just as much sense as trying to figure out whether world peace was achieved by this or some other politician. ‘Well, there is no world peace,’ you’d say. Right you are. And there was no collapse of the Soviet Union. Not in any meaningful sense, that is. As to the end of the Cold War, if you seriously think it’s over, you need to stop spending so much time listening to the American media and turn to some external sources of information every once in a while. The winner of the Cold War is yet to be decided but I somehow doubt that you can win any war by pretending it isn’t taking place.

I think her whole article is worth reading, though I disagree with the premiss that the Cold War is continuing.

To that extent I agree with the late Samuel Huntington, who said that the Cold War was primarily a clash of ideologies, while what we are seeing in the post-Cold War world is a clash of civilizations.

One of the relics of the Cold War is the term “Third World”, which still seems to persist, though its meaning seems to have changed, or rather dissipated. The “three worlds” view of geopolitics was composed of

• First World: the capitalist world
• Second World: the communist world
• Third World: the non-aligned states

The Third World was founded by India, Indonesia and Yugoslavia, and Yugoslavia was the only Third-World state in Europe, and, in a sense, its disintegration, like that of the Soviet Union, marks the end of the Cold War.

If the Cold War was a war of ideologies, as Huntington says, then one could say that Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher “won” the Cold War, because their brand of free marketism is the dominant religion in the world today. That is where Huntington got it wrong; he posits Western Christianity as the religion of Western Civilization. It isn’t. Free Marketism is.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and Bolshevik rule in Russia is a somewhat different matter. By Brezhnev’s time, if not before, faith in communism had grown cold. The leaders of the ruling Communist Party uttered all the old slogans, but the conviction had gone out of them. All that was left was a clinging to power, and, as Clarissa points out, the most powerful men in Russia today resemble nothing so much as the Vicar of Bray.

The Orange Revolution, Peeled

The Orange Revolution, Peeled by Justin Raimondo — Antiwar.com:

To recall the media hype that accompanied Ukraine’s ‘Orange Revolution’ of 2004, which propelled Viktor Yushchenko, a former central banker and alleged liberal democrat, into power, is like remembering a fever-dream in the morning: the memory of the details are blurred, and all that really remains is the sense that something strenuous, and ultimately unreal, has been passed through. The disputed election of 2004 – eventually decided in Yushchenko’s favor on account of mass street protests – ended with the defeat of Viktor Yanukovich, the candidate of the Russian-speaking eastern section of the country – the man whose comeback in Sunday’s election represented a stunning repudiation of the Orange Revolution and the regime that was born in its wake. How that ‘revolution’ came to be, and what it really represented, is about to undergo a major revision, one in striking contrast to the instant narrative provided by the Western media six years ago.

Hat-tip to A conservative blog for peace

And now it appears that Yanukovich, the candidate the Western media wanted us all to hate, has won the election. Is it just that I’m getting more cynical as I’m getting older, or is the media hype getting worse?

Ukraine seems to exist as a case-study for Samuel Huntington’s Clash of civilizations thesis, with the fault line between Western and Orthodox civilisations running right through the country. If anything can confirm Huntington’s thesis, the Western media spin does.

Another commentator comments on the spin in this article: News Analysis – For Kremlin, Ukraine Election Cuts Two Ways – NYTimes.com

On Monday, for example, European election monitors praised the election that was held Sunday, calling it an impressive display of democracy. Ukraines election, in other words, did not follow the Kremlin blueprint…

What a bizarre statement. A Russian-favored candidate wins in a fair election, and somehow that is supposed to be evidence that Russia is in favor of unfair elections. In fact, their candidate winning in a fair election is the best possible blueprint for Russia.
Imagine what the NY Times would be saying if the election had been unfair!

In the short term, the Kremlin may have benefited from the election. Relations were tense under the incumbent president, Viktor A. Yushchenko, an Orange leader who wanted to pull Ukraine away from Moscows orbit by joining NATO.

Mr. Yanukovich does not support NATO membership and has indicated that he will abandon some other initiatives opposed by Russia. This is the only real news in the whole NY Times story. This was a major geopolitical / energy-politics victory for Russia. Once again a CIA-engineered Colored Revolution has been turned back. The NY Times does its best to bury this news near the bottom of their story, and even then they downplay it by saying the Kremlin ‘may’ have benefitted, but only in the ‘short term’.

What is lost in all this rhetoric about whether “the West” or “the Kremlin” benefited is what is surely more important: whether the people of Ukraine benefited.

Gaza clash of civilizations gets most media coverage

Though its originator died last year, the media coverage given to the Gaza conflict shows that the “clash of civilizations” thesis put forward by Professor Samuel Huntington is still valid.

The Guardian reported Ugandan rebels kill scores of civilians in Congo and Sudan:

Between last Friday and Sunday, rebel fighters killed 13 people in attacks on three villages in north-east Congo. A spokesman for the Congolese army said tracking the rebels, who are renowned for their bush skills, was difficult due to the lack of roads in the area. The worst attack occurred at Nagero, the headquarters of Garamba national park, where the LRA leader, Joseph Kony, was believed to be hiding. Among the eight victims were two park rangers and the wives of two wardens.

Kony, a self-proclaimed mystic, began his rebellion in northern Uganda against President Yoweri Museveni in the late 1980s, but soon turned on the local population. More than 20,000 people, mostly children, were kidnapped, becoming sex slaves, porters or fighters. At least 10,000 people died, while 1.6 million were forced into displacement camps.

But by far the greater media coverage is given to the intercivilizational conflict in Gaza, whereas the one in central Africa is intracivilizational, and therefore attracts less media attention.

Where there is a local conflict that does not involve different civilisations, there is less interest and participation by other countries – in Rwanda or the Congo, for example. Though other countries have become involved either in supporting one side or the other in the conflict or in trying to bring about peace between the belligerent parties, these are usually neighbouring countries from the same civilisation.

Huntington likened the different civilizations to geological tectonic plates, and predicted that most conflicts, and the most severe ones, would take place on the “fault lines” between civilizations. Gaza is on one of the fault lines, and the north-east Congo is not.

Congo church massacre: witnesses

Though the death toll and the destructiveness has been comparable, the conflict going on on the borders of Uganda, Sudan and the DRC has had far less media coverage than the comparable conflict of Israel and Gaza. This tends to confirm the “clash of civilizations thesis of Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, who died last week.

The Times – Congo church massacre: witnesses:

Attackers hacked to death scores of people who sought refuge at a Catholic church in remote eastern Congo the day after Christmas, officials and witnesses said on Monday, and the Ugandan army and a rebel group accused each other of carrying out the massacre.

Survivors and witnesses said the killings occurred close to Congo’s border with Sudan, near to where the armies of those two countries and Uganda began an offensive this month to root out the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army, according to Ugandan army spokesman Capt. Chris Magezi.

A UN spokesman, Ivo Brandau, said 120 homes were set ablaze in the area and that thousands of people have fled for fear of further attacks.

The latest massacre is part of an upsurge of violence that has lasted a week. The Times – LRA rebels rampage in Congo:

Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army rebels killed almost 200 people in a campaign in northeast Congo, a UN agency said in a report released Monday.

Since December 25, the rebels have killed 40 people in the Faradje district, 89 around Doruma and 60 in the Gurba area alone, said the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Professor Huntington argued that in the post-cold-war world, violent conflict would come not from ideological friction between nations, but from cultural and religious differences among the world’s major civilizations.

He identified those civilizations as Western (including the United States and Europe), Latin American, Islamic, African, Orthodox (with Russia as a core state), Hindu, Japanese, “Sinic” (including China, Korea and Vietnam) and Jewish.

While not every conflict since the Cold War ended in the early 1990s has been a conflict between civilisations, it is the inter-civilisational clashes that get the most media coverage. The Lord’s Resistance Army represents a conflict within the African civilisation, even though it crosses national borders. It therefore draws less media coverage than the Israel-Palestine one in Gaza, even though the number of deaths is roughly the same.

Clash of civilizations redux

A new book on the role of the Orthodox Church in the new Russia seems to confirm Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis.

Garrard, J. and Garrard, C.: Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent: Faith and Power in the New Russia.:

In the new Russia, the former KGB who run the country–Vladimir Putin among them–proclaim the cross, not the hammer and sickle. Meanwhile, a majority of Russians now embrace the Orthodox faith with unprecedented fervor. The Garrards trace how Aleksy orchestrated this transformation, positioning his church to inherit power once held by the Communist Party and to become the dominant ethos of the military and government. They show how the revived church under Aleksy prevented mass violence during the post-Soviet turmoil, and how Aleksy astutely linked the church with the army and melded Russian patriotism and faith.

Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent argues that the West must come to grips with this complex and contradictory resurgence of the Orthodox faith, because it is the hidden force behind Russia’s domestic and foreign policies today.

Thus far, however, all the glowing comments and reviews seem to be from Western scholars. It would be interesting to see what Orthodox scholars have to say about it.

Hat tip to Eastern Orthodox Librarian.

Kosovo UDI: the Clinton legacy

Notes from a Common-place Book: Kosovo: The Real Clinton Legacy just about says it all.

According to Kosovo Travelogue this is certainly not one of the things that Hillary Clinton is hoping to reverse. Under Bill Clinton the US bombed Belgrade and under Bush the US bombed Baghdad, and there is really little difference. Is that one of the things Barack Obama wants to change? I hope so.

Links to a news report with my own comments on the Kosovo UDI are in my Khanya blog.

Other comments:

• The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle compares the Kosovo UDI to Sudetenland.
• Jams O Donnell in The Poor Mouth: UDI says “I hope to God it’s peaceful”
• A Lanson Boy worries that it might be an unviable state and a drain on Western taxpayers
• David Lindsay criticises the BBC for giving a wholly-false version of the history of Yugoslavia
• Chekov writes of the hypocrisy of the Western cheerleaders for Kosovo’s independence
• The Western Confucian is sickened by the USA’s siding with terrorism and pravoslavophobia.

One thing that needs to be borne in mind is that though the majority of the population of Kosovo speak Albanian, they lack the religious tolerance of Albania.

The Albanian government deported Iranian Islamist teachers who incited young people attending a Muslim youth camp at Voskopoje to destroy Christian ikons that had survived the Turks and the Communists. In Kosovo dozens of Christian churches have been destroyed under the noses of Nato troops.

US, Germany agree to recognize Kosovo after Serbia elections – The Boston Globe

The US and Germany, which fuelled the Wars of the Yugoslav succession in the 1990s, are planning to fan the embers to a flame again.

US, Germany agree to recognize Kosovo after Serbia elections – The Boston Globe:

LJUBLJANA, Slovenia – The United States and Germany have agreed to recognize Kosovo and get the rest of Europe to follow suit after the province declares independence following the Serbian elections next month, according to senior European Union diplomats close to negotiations over the future of Kosovo.

In a recent conversation about the future of Kosovo, EU officials said President Bush and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany had agreed it was imperative to secure the stability of the western Balkans by coordinating the recognition of Kosovo after the second round of Serbian elections planned for Feb. 3.

They said Washington was aggressively pressing the EU to ensure that the recognition of Kosovo was not delayed by even a week.

Remember how it started?

As Samuel Huntington (1998:282) described it in his book The clash of civilizations:

The breakup of Yugoslavia began in 1991 when Slovenia and Croatia moved toward independence and pleaded with Western European powers for support. The response of the West was defined by Germany, and the response of Germany was in large part defined by the Catholic connection. The Bonn government
came under pressure to act from the German Catholic hierarchy, its coalition partner the Christian Social Union Party in Bavaria, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and other media. The Bavarian media, in particular, played a crucial
role in developing German public sentiment for recognition. ‘Bavarian TV’, Flora Lewis noted, ‘much weighed upon by the very conservative Bavarian government and the strong, assertive Bavarian Catholic Church which had close connections with the church in Croatia, provided the television reports for all of Germany when the war began in earnest. The coverage was very one-sided’… Germany pressured the European Union to recognise the independence of Slovenia and Croatia, and then, having secured that, pushed forward on its own to recognize them before the Union did in December 1991.

Austria and Italy promptly moved to recognize the two new states, and very quickly other Western countries, including the United States, followed. The Vatican also played a central role. The Pope declared Croatia to be the “rampart of Christianity,” and rushed to extend diplomatic recognition to the two states before the European Union did. The Vatican thus became a partisan in the conflict, which had its
consequences in 1994 when the Pope planned visits to the three republics. Opposition by the Serbian Orthodox Church prevented his going to Belgrade, and Serb unwillingness to guarantee his security led to the cancellation of his visit to Sarajevo. He did go to Zagreb, however, where he honored Cardinal Alojzieje Stepinac, who was associated with the fascist Croatian regime in World War II that persecuted and slaughtered Serbs, Gypsies and Jews.

The focus then moved to Bosnia, where John Major agreed to recognise Bosnia’s independence in return for German support for Britain’s position on the Maastricht Treaty, thus condemning Bosnia-Herzegovina to a bloody civil war. And what was the result?

As Brendan O’Neill (Comment is free: The Bosnian connection) notes:

Far from being radicalised by the failure of the west to act, large numbers of Muslims were radicalised by western intervention in the Balkans. Their movement to Bosnia was facilitated by Washington’s support for a military gateway between the Islamic world and Bosnia, and inside Bosnia they fought with a military outfit that Washington armed. They were also inspired to take up arms against the Serbs by western media depictions of the Serbs as sub-human savages who deserved ‘punishment’. The mujahideen meted out such punishment, in the form of stabbings, beheadings and forced circumcisions, as well as ordinary warfare.

Many of the mujahideen who fought in Bosnia went on to become al-Qaida operatives. They learned their trade of simplistic moral fury and brutal violence on the battlefields of Bosnia, where they were enticed and inflamed to execute holy war against the Serbs by western meddling and western media coverage.

And now it’s Kosovo — deja vu all over again!

Last remaining superpower crumbles

Since the end of the Cold War at the beginning of the 1990s, the Western media have referred to the USA as the “last remaining superpower“. But, as Notes from a Common-place Book: Vlad to the Rescue points out, that is no longer the case. There are no more superpowers, and “balance of power” tactics among ordinary powers have once again taken the place of the “superpowers”.

Though many Americans have not realised it yet, one US columnist notes that from afar, America resembles a 2nd-rate power. And meanwhile, the civilizations are still clashing.

Christianity, North and South

A long time ago I wrote an editorial for a magazine called Ikon, which is reproduced below. It was for the Summer 1970 Issue (published in about January/February 1970)

One hears much these days of the “New Theology”. There is a great debate about God. Is God dead? Is he up there or down here or in here? And this debating makes the fundamental assumption that God can be known by talking about him. This seems to be especially affecting white Christian students in South Africa. There is a demand for a theology which is relevant to secular man. This demand was created by the theologians, and they are now doing their best to fulfil it by creating a god in the image of modern secular man.

But this demand for a modern secular God is the demand of a minority. Modern secular man is white, prosperous, and has the leisure to engage in theological debates. The ‘new theology’ is another product of Western neo-colonialist society, and for the vast majority of mankind this theology is totally irrelevant. They are not so much looking for a revolution in theology as for a theology of revolution.

For decades now we have been conditioned to think of a world divided into two opposing camps — East and West. The East consists of “democratic” peoples republics, and the West likes to call itself the “free” world. This distinction has been fostered by power politicians to keep people ignorant, and to serve their own ends. The real division, however, is not between East and West, but between North and South. In the North live the haves, and in the South live the have-nots. Most of the wealth of the world is concentrated in the North — Europe, Russia, North America. The bulk of the world’s population, and the poorest, live in South Asia, Africa and South America.

The poor of the world are not interested in singing anthems to the status quo, as the secular theologians would have us do. They look to a God who changes things, who upsets the existing order. They look to a God who will depose the mighty and exalt the poor and powerless, who will literally turn the world upside-down, putting the poor south at the top in place of the rich north.

Theology is important, but the Church makes two great mistakes. The theologians are generally set apart from the rest of the Church. They engage in debates in a cosy academic setting, in the calm unhurried atmosphere of ripe scholarship. They throw away years of research into trivialities, which have nothing to do with the proclaiming of the Gospel of the Kingdom. And the rest of the Church suffers, because it has nothing to guide it. Christians go on doing things that were done by their forefathers, but they have no idea why their forefathers did these things, and therefore have no idea why they themselves do them. We need something more than academic theology — we need applied theology — a Christian ideology which can interpret events and forces in the world in the light of the Kingdom of God. Up till now they have been kept separate — “Religion and politics don’t mix”.

Theology is important. And it is important that theology should be capable of application in the world in which we live. The ‘Message to the people of South Africa’ is the first step towards such a theology, but it must not be the last. It will be noted that the Message is not debate-theology. It makes a series of proclamations about what the Gospel of Jesus Christ is. To the academic or the secular theologians this is arrogant. One cannot make proclamations, one can only make a tentative contribution to the debate. But the world does not have time for drawn-out debates. We have to act on the answers to these questions now. To the Christian theologian there is only one relevant question — What is the Gospel of Jesus Christ? To the Christian activist, only one course of action is open — proclaim the Gospel, and make visible God’s revolution in the world.

Perhaps Abraham is a good model for theologians, and for all Christians. Abraham was not seeking a way — he was on the way. He was aware of direction, but not of his ultimate destination. He did not know what the promised land was to be like; all he knew was that God was leading him there. It is important for Christians to know where they are going, for they cannot be effective otherwise. We should stop playing around with ideas around an abstract God, and rather concentrate on where God is leading us. Action which is not based on sound theory is what the Marxists call adventurism. For Marxists all action must be directed towards a goal — the revolution and the classless society. For Christians likewise, all action and theologising must be directed towards a goal — the revolution and the Kingdom of God.

Well, that is ancient history. It was written more than 37 years ago. The world has changed then, and I have changed. If I were writing it now, I would not have written it in the same way, and would be more aware of how I have allowed myself to be caught in the trap of academic theology. But it is worth asking what has changed? What has remained the same?

Some answers may be found in an article mentioned on another blog, Believing in the Global South, by Philip Jenkins. Jenkins says

some western Christians have since the 1960s expected that the religion of their Third World brethren would be fervently liberal, activist, and even revolutionary, the model represented by liberation theology. In this view, the new Christianity would chiefly be concerned with pulling down the mighty from their seats, through political action or even armed struggle. All too often, though, these hopes have proved illusory. Frequently, the liberationist voices emanating from the Third World proved to derive from clerics trained in Europe and North America, and their ideas won only limited local appeal. Southern Christians would not avoid political activism, but they would become involved strictly on their own terms. While many espoused political liberation, they made it inseparable from deliverance from supernatural evil. The two terms are indeed related linguistically and often appear together in biblical texts, but the juxtaposition of the two thought-worlds of liberation and deliverance seems as baffling for many Euro-Americans as it is natural for Christians in the Global South.

The last part was obvious to me when I first went to study theology in England in 1966. The first essay I was asked to write was on “Jesus and the demons”, and when I had finished reading it to the college principal he said, “But you haven’t told me whether you think demons exist or not.” I replied that I didn’t think it was important. When you have been run over by a bus, you don’t think to ask philosophical questions about the existence of a bus. Coming from South Africa, I was aware of our conflict being against principalities and powers, which were bigger than Mr Vorster’s flesh and blood security police, but nevertheless inextricably linked with them. One of the things I find interesting is that this kind of thinking is beginning to penetrate Europe as well, if the film Pan’s labyrinth is anything to go by (see review in an earlier post). Whether the director is a Christian or not I don’t know, but his vision seems far more in tune with the South African experience of the 1960s than the Western secular theology of the 1960s ever was.

Actually Jenkins is a bit off the mark when he said “some western Christians have since the 1960s expected that the religion of their Third World brethren would be fervently liberal, activist, and even revolutionary, the model represented by liberation theology.” That kind of liberation theology only penetrated the consciousness of Western theologians in the 1970s. In the 1960s they were too busy uttering paeans of praise to the status quo. Liberal theology led to conservative politics and vice versa. As G.K. Chesterton put it: the modern young man will never change the world, for he will always change his mind. Western theologians were concerned to change their theology to fit the world, and the last thing on their minds was to change the world to fit any theological vision. They wanted a revolution in theology, not a theology of revolution.

But for the most part Jenkins gets it exactly right. Over the last 37 years the differences between Western and African Christianity have become clearer. Neither is monolithic, of course, and Jenkins points this out. But if we want to know what Christianity will be like in the 21st century, Africa rather than Europe or North America will be the model. One question, however, may be whether South Africa will continue to fit that model. South Africa is becoming increasingly secular. People have long said that South Africa is both “First World” and “Third World”. Outmoded as such Cold War terminology may be, there is nevertheless some truth in it.