Cultural Chauvinism: Intercultural Communication and the Politics of Superiority 9780367710026, 9781003148906

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
1 Many Faces of Cultural Chauvinism
2 Democracy is Western
3 All Things Modern are Western
4 All Things Nefarious are Non-Western
5 The Hell of War is Non-Western
6 All Things Decadent are Western
7 Immodest Dressers and Desecraters
8 Contention Not Confucian
9 As Democracies Turn
10 Dark History of Distinctions
11 Who Civilized the Greeks That Civilized the West?
12 Political Convergence
13 Onward from the Bridgehead
14 Cultural Humility
Postscript: An Oreo and Mozart
References
Index

Citation preview

Cultural Chauvinism

This book explores the concept of cultural chauvinism as the sense of superiority that ethnic or national groups have of themselves relative to others, particularly in the context of international relations. Minabere Ibelema shows the various ways that academics, statesmen, and especially journalists, express their cultural groups’ sense of superiority over others. The analysis pivots around the notion of “Western values” given its centrality in international relations and ­diplomacy. To the West, this stands for an array of largely positive political and civic values; to a significant portion of the global community, it embodies degeneracies. Ibelema argues that often the most routine expressions go under the radar, even in this age of hypersensitivity. This book throws a unique light on global relations and will be of particular interest to scholars and students in international relations, communication studies and journalism studies. Minabere Ibelema (Ph.D., Ohio State University) is a retired ­professor of communication studies. His book The African Press, Civic ­Cynicism, and Democracy won the U.S. Society of Professional Journalists’ Sigma Delta Chi Award for Research in Journalism.

Routledge Focus on Media and Cultural Studies

Community Media and Identity in Ireland Jack Rosenberry Cultural Chauvinism Intercultural Communication and the Politics of Superiority Minabere Ibelema

Cultural Chauvinism Intercultural Communication and the Politics of Superiority

Minabere Ibelema

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Minabere Ibelema The right of Minabere Ibelema to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-71002-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-14890-6 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by codeMantra

To Boma, Ibim, Sofiri, and Nimi

Contents

Preface Acknowledgments 1 Many faces of cultural chauvinism

ix xiii 1

2 Democracy is Western

10

3 All things modern are Western

21

4 All things nefarious are non-Western

30

5 The hell of war is non-Western

38

6 All things decadent are Western

43

7 Immodest dressers and desecraters

52

8 Contention not Confucian

57

9 As democracies turn

68

10 Dark history of distinctions

78

11 Who civilized the Greeks that civilized the West?

88

12 Political convergence

99

viii Contents

13 Onward from the bridgehead

108

14 Cultural humility

116

Postscript: an Oreo and Mozart

127

References Index

131 135

Preface

This preface dwells considerably on the novel coronavirus, though the book is not about the virus. It just happens that the challenges posed by the outbreak—specifically the absence of a collective global response—are emblematic of the core concern of this book. When a mysterious disease broke out in Wuhan, China, in January 2020, the global community largely saw it as a Chinese problem. As mega cities go, Wuhan was rather remote in the world’s consciousness. So, for most people, a disease that broke out in Wuhan would probably die in Wuhan. Not so, as it turned out. The disease that was subsequently named COVID-19 or SARS-CoV-2 was soon to spread around the world. U.S. President Donald Trump labeled it the Chinese virus. In clinical terms, this could mean that COVID-19 afflicts only the Chinese in much the same way that the mad-cow disease afflicts cows. But COVID-19 has proven not to have regard for nationality or geography. In fact, its subsequent outbreak in the European countries of Italy and Spain soon surpassed that of China. By June 2020, the outbreaks in the US had overtaken all others in number of cases and deaths. In due course, almost every country suffered outbreaks. Beyond its rapid global reach, the outbreak manifested two overarching takeaways. The first is that by exposing the underpreparedness of the richest countries to cope with a major medical challenge, it substantially erased the distinction between rich and poor countries. Some of the most advanced countries of Europe—Italy, Spain, and France in particular—were overwhelmed by the outbreak. Meanwhile, regions of the world that were known for their incapacity successfully forestalled the worst—at least at the time of this writing. Except for South Africa, even African countries have fared relatively well. That’s quite paradoxical for a continent that is most associated with diseases and incapacity. Then there was the anomaly

x Preface of Cuba—an impoverished country that has long borne the weight of U.S. sanctions—sending a medical contingent to Italy when that EU country was sorely distressed. The second and more pertinent takeaway is that the outbreak exposed a profound lack of global cohesion in the face of a collective threat. As the virus exploded in country after country, each one was essentially left to fend for itself. At the height of their afflictions, for example, Italy, Spain, and France all fumed at the EU for failing to come to their aid. To be sure, there were spotty gestures of assistance around the world, as illustrated by the Cuban example and others. But they lacked cohesion and an overall strategy. Rather than global coordination, individual countries shut their borders and banned international flights. There was little regard for the global implications or even patterns of transmission. Meanwhile, as the virus suffocated millions around the world, some world leaders traded barbs over its origin. President Trump’s on-againoff-again label of the novel coronavirus as “the Chinese virus” was the first shot. The Chinese—not ones to take any slight lightly—fired back that the United States is the source of the virus. Trump countered that China was not forthcoming on the operations of its virus research facility in Wuhan. China then threatened to stop all cooperation if the United States continued to blame it. And Trump threatened to toughen sanctions against China. It was a diplomatic fracas. Even more illustrative of the lack of collective action was the bidding war between the United States and Germany for a pharmaceutical company. As reported by Reuters in March 2020 (quoting German newspapers), President Donald Trump offered financial inducements to CureVac to lure the German pharmaceutical company to the United States. CureVac was believed to be at the cusp of developing a vaccine and Trump wanted it exclusively for the US. According to the accounts, the German government countered the U.S. bid. And so CureVac remained in Germany. U.S. officials in Berlin and Washington denied the reports outright or said they were exaggerated. CureVac itself said it was not for sale. But comments by German officials indirectly confirmed the thrust of the report. Whatever may have been the case, the mere fact that the issue arose at all is emblematic. In fact, the US/Germany quarrel became only one case of what came to be known as vaccine nationalism. Rather than collaboration, different countries raced to be the first to produce an effective vaccine. There were reports of countries hacking others’ labs with the presumed goal of stealing their formula. It was not just for purposes of first access, it was also a matter of bragging rights.

Preface  xi In all probability, the absence of a cohesive global response relates in part to Trump’s “America first” policy. When he touted that policy during the 2016 presidential election campaign, it sounded much like another campaign rhetoric. The expectation was that, at worst, Trump would tinker around the edges of global relations. Instead, he shattered it. Even before he was sworn into office in January 2017, Trump made clear that his “America first” policy entailed a dismantling of existing norms in world trade and diplomacy. First, he declared a trade war against China, the EU, neighboring Canada and Mexico, and many other countries and regions. Then he questioned the usefulness of NATO, the military alliance that has been the bedrock of European stability since World War II. Meanwhile, Trump courted friendship with Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un. And so, EU leaders began to wonder aloud whether they should begin to discount the trans-Atlantic bond that had underpinned Europe’s military, diplomatic, and economic policies for three-fourths of a century. It was in this context of diplomatic turbulence that COVID-19 struck. So, the lack of global solidarity in tackling it was hardly a mystery. An even more fundamental and enduring factor is what is referred to in this book as cultural chauvinism. This is the tendency of peoples of the world to think of themselves as superior to others and therefore more valuable. It is a tendency that manifests in matters of religion, social values, political culture, and even the extent that others are deemed human. The matter of vaccine nationalism may well be an example. The broader manifestations are what this book is all about.

Acknowledgments

The core research for this book was enabled by an award from the Faculty Development Grant at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. I received additional encouragement to further the project during a poster presentation session that was required of all recipients of the competitive annual grant. It was especially encouraging to hear the provost say that she was pleased that my research was funded with a grant that mostly went to the biological and physical sciences. I am also grateful to attendees of the Global Studies Conference at the University of California at Los Angeles in June 2016. A paper I presented there on aspects of this book received both favorable comments and helpful suggestions. The same was true of a similar presentation I made in April 2018 before the faculty of the Department of Mass Communication at Sam Houston State University. I am, of course, indebted to the many scholars whose works I have cited in this book. My greatest indebtedness in this regard is to Francis Fukuyama and Kwame Anthony Appiah, whose works are referenced throughout. I had hoped that Professor Fukuyama could take a look at the manuscript before it went for publication, but understandably he couldn’t. He was immersed in his own work, which he couldn’t do if he granted a fraction of such requests. I hope, nonetheless, that this exploration of cultural chauvinism is reasonably accurate in applying his analyses. I hope the same for all the other authors I have cited. My initial research drew heavily from the English-language press, and I had to find ways to mitigate the skew, especially with regard to the Islamic perspective. Muhammad Alqhtani, a Saudi graduate student in my communication theory and audience analysis classes, helped to fill this hole by securing information from the Arab press and related sources. Several friends and colleagues were also helpful in various ways. Some offered suggestions, some drew my attention to pertinent

xiv Acknowledgments sources, and all offered encouragement. I wish I can name them all, but I am especially grateful to Professors Jean Bodon, Steve Miller, Eduardo Neiva, Humphrey Regis, and Lisa Sharlach. It wouldn’t surprise me if I have missed some people I should have mentioned. I count on their pardon. My greatest indebtedness is to my four children, to whom I dedicate this book. At those moments when it has seemed that life is a run through the grinder, it has surprised that I have always emerged none the worse. The secret is the nourishing spring that my children provide. The final work on the manuscript was done amidst the novel coronavirus pandemic. With schools closed and a lockdown imposed, my children—like most others—had to endure months indoors. For me, that meant having to split time between working on the manuscript and helping to put content in the two youngest children’s lives. Like most teenagers, my 13-year-old son, Sofiri, often buried himself in electronics, and my job was to pry him away. It was my nine-yearold daughter, Nimi, who needed—and demanded—more attention. Often, when I was glued to my laptop, she would walk up to me, lean over, rest both hands affectionately on my shoulders, and ask, “Are you busy, Daddy?” She always knew the answer, of course, and I always understood the question. It was time to pack it up and attend to my primary duty. Usually, I would negotiate for 10 to 30 more minutes to tidy up whatever I was doing. And she would graciously, though not always enthusiastically, accept. It all worked out. We all made it through and you are reading this book.

1

Many faces of cultural chauvinism

Sometime in the late 1980s, a young North African woman was getting ready to journey to the United States to study. As parents are wont to do, the mother had some final advice for her. “Beware of the horde of American men who will be flocking to propose to you,” the mother cautioned her in Arabic. “But why?” she responded. “There are lots of beautiful women in America.” “That’s true,” the mother countered, “but they have HIV.” On the streets of Nairobi in 2014, there was a series harassment of young women by men who saw themselves as guardians of African values. The women’s offense was that they wore revealing attires. As punishment, the thugs stripped them almost naked. Their attires reflected Western values and flouted African decorum, they were admonished. During the U.S. presidential election campaign in 2016, then candidate Donald Trump vowed to build border walls between the United States and Mexico. The walls are necessary to keep away illegal immigrants, he said repeatedly, because they are responsible for rapes and murders in the United States. That claim resonated among quite a few American voters. In another era, the U.S. press extensively covered political reforms in post-communist Eastern Europe. Among the challenges the press noted was that of rooting out corruption and cronyism. The Eastern Europeans were beginning to learn that these things have no place in Western values, the Associated Press correspondent declared in a news story. These cases all have one thing in common: cultural chauvinism. It is the special sense that people have of themselves relative to others, the sense of superiority in the whole or in the particular. As should be evident from the examples above, cultural chauvinism is invariably based

2  Many faces of cultural chauvinism on readily discreditable assumptions, myths, and reductive logic. Only a tiny percentage of American women have HIV, immodest dressing by women may well be more African than Western, illegal immigration is not responsible for rapes and murders in the United States, and corruption and cronyism are not at all alien to Western societies. Yet these enduring myths that groups have of their own superiority underpin—or at least compound—global and international conflicts. The most recognizable and pernicious form of cultural chauvinism is, of course, racism, which is its expression by privileged cultural groups. Yet cultural chauvinism inheres in all cultures, even among the least privileged of nations. The Burmese believe they are superior to the Rohingyas, and vice versa. Rwanda’s Tutsi believe they are superior to the Hutu, and vice versa. Kenya’s Kikuyu believe they are superior to the Kalenjin, and vice versa. Christians believe their faith is superior to Muslims’, and vice versa. Iranians believe their culture is superior to America’s, and vice versa. The Chinese believe their political culture is superior to the West’s, and vice versa. And so on and so forth. Cultural chauvinism is obviously attitudinal. Yet, it has concrete— sometimes tragic—consequences. As an enabler of behaviors and policies, it underlies most communal, national, and international conflicts that masquerade as political differences or the quest to control resources. At the minimum, it fertilizes the mind for unprincipled political exploitation. That Muslims regard people of other faith as infidels, for example, is a mindset that Islamists exploit to fan hatred and perpetuate violence against people of other faith—or the lack thereof. And that includes Muslims of a different sect. Long before it manifests in violence and bloodshed, cultural chauvinism thrives in everyday life. It is regularly on display in the mass media contents that mirror the realities of society. Early in 2019, a Chinese detergent maker sought to impress potential users by running a commercial in which the detergent bleached an African into a Chinese. The commercial featured an African man and a Chinese woman who seem smitten by each other on first sight. Following exchanges of flirtatious stares, he dashed toward her. But as he closed in for a kiss, she popped a detergent tablet into his mouth and shoved him into a washing machine. When the man re-emerged seconds later, he had been washed into a Chinese man—to her delight; not just his dark brown skin, but his entire physical features. The commercial set off a row in social media, and the detergent company, as well as the Chinese government, issued apologies. The reality still was that the commercial could only have tapped into ingrained societal attitude. There was no public outrage while the commercial

Many faces of cultural chauvinism   3 ran for China’s homogeneous native audience. It wasn’t until it was posted on YouTube that it triggered wide condemnation. Ironically, studies of the dating preferences of people of various races have consistently shown that Asian men rank last in appeal.1 And then there is this case from a U.S. reality show that specializes in compassionate adjudication of cases. An episode of the court TV program “Caught in Providence” featured a recent African immigrant who received a traffic citation. He was evidently apprehensive, as the presiding Judge Frank Caprio asked him the opening question: “Did you make a righthand turn [on a red light]?” As the man began to answer the question, he interrupted himself and asked the judge: “I have a question, sir, am I going to go home from here or am I going to jail? I want to know my fate, sir.” Judge Caprio assured him that he wasn’t going to go to jail and subsequently dismissed the case. Then in his usual commentary after a case, Judge Caprio said: Every once in a while I am reminded just how fortunate I am to be an American. That was the case today when I was asked this question…. Now, I have no idea what country Mr. Ohkinalola is from, but apparently, it’s somewhere where there is a real risk of going to jail because of a minor traffic infraction. Well, rest assured Deno, that is not the case here in America. You said you wanted to know your fate. Well, long-term, sir, that’s up to you. Thankfully, you live in a country where your opportunities are only as limited as your imagination and ambition. So, good luck. The judge’s comments are, of course, common fare. However, the defendant’s apprehension most likely resulted from a diametrically opposite reason. The man’s name, Deno Ohkinalola, sounds Nigerian. And Nigeria happens to be a country where traffic rules are violated with impunity. So, it is improbable that his fear of going to prison had anything to do with his experience back home. More likely it was from his sense that American laws are overly strict and their enforcement unforgiving. Much like the other cases, the judge’s incorrect inference illustrates the impact of cultural chauvinism on interpreting other people. Ronald Reagan, the U.S. president credited with winning the Cold War for the West, was also known as the great communicator. With his background in acting, he was especially adept at extolling the virtues of American democracy, often with deprecating narratives about communist Soviet Union. One of his jokes to this end wasn’t just funny, it also illustrates the exaggerated perception of political differences.

4  Many faces of cultural chauvinism As Reagan narrated it during one of his speeches: An American and a Russian were arguing about their two countries. The American said to the Russian, “In my country I can walk into the Oval Office. I can pound the president’s desk and say Mr. President, I don’t like the way you are running our country.” The Russian said, “I can do that.” The American asked, “You can?” The Russian said: “Of course. I can go to the Kremlin and to the General Secretary’s office and pound his desk and say, Mr. General Secretary, I don’t like the way President Reagan is running his country.” Reagan’s audience roared in laughter. The joke was on the Soviet Union. Yet, it was premised on a false claim about American democracy. Very few people have the privilege to enter the Oval Office. And anyone who enters and dares to pound the president’s desk would be quickly wrestled to the floor and whisked away by secret agents. But then the joke wouldn’t be so stinging if this reality is factored in. It illustrates the essence of cultural chauvinism: the amplification—or even manufacture—of differences. This book then is another take on identity discourse. Among the notable recent releases in this regard are Francis Fukuyama’s Identity2 and Kwame Anthony Appiah’s The Lies That Bind.3 Fukuyama’s thesis is summarized in the book’s subtitle, The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment. He draws from this theme to analyze various political challenges around the world. Among them are the ferment in U.S. politics, the Ukrainian civil war, the challenges of creating the European Union, and even Nelson Mandela’s use of an all-white rugby team to seek to unify South Africans. Appiah goes further to question the validity of identity claims, persuasively discrediting “religion, nation, race, class, and culture as sources of identify.”4 He draws inspiration from his own hybrid identity. Not only is he bi-racial (British Ghanaian), but he was imbued with the disparate values of London middle class and Asante aristocracy. To complicate matters, both cultures practice opposite family lineage. The Asante are matrilineal and the English patrilineal. That means, Appiah jokes, that he could tell those who ask that he has “no family at all.”5 In Lies That Bind, Appiah makes the case that such hybridity is commonplace in all pivots of identity claims. “I aim to persuade you that much of our contemporary thinking about identity is shaped by pictures that are in various ways unhelpful or just plain wrong,”6 he writes.

Many faces of cultural chauvinism   5 The goal of this book is to demonstrate how the “pictures” are perpetuated regardless of their validity and consequences. What it offers uniquely is an exposition on the culturally chauvinistic dimensions of identity claims. It covers such claims—in their explicit and implicit dimensions—by everyday people, academics, diplomats, statesmen, and especially journalists in their coverage of world affairs. Overtly offensive expressions of cultural chauvinism, such as the Chinese detergent commercial, stir outrage from time to time. This book goes beyond that to show the various and routine ways that cultural chauvinism is expressed without so much as eliciting raised eyebrows. The book shows too that even when such expressions don’t offend, they underlie consequential behaviors and policies.

Special case of Western values Another important feature of this book is that it uses the notion of Western values as the pivot. Its centrality in global politics and contestations makes it the most consequential expression of cultural chauvinism. Appiah writes in this regard of “the multiple mistakes we make about our broader cultural identities, not the least the very idea of the West” and of “the temptation to imagine that people’s origins make them either inheritors of, or outsiders to, Western civilization.”7 The corollary to Appiah’s concern is that other cultures tend to express their cultural chauvinism in relation to “Western values.” Either they are a part of it or they are the antithesis. As with the claim to Western exceptionalism, the counter-claims also manifest ambivalence and contradictions. For a quick illustration, here is a press contestation that encapsulates the complexity. On April 10, 2013, the Singaporean daily The Straits Times published a letter to the editor in which one Dr. George Wong Seow Choon lamented the debasing effects of “Western values.” He was commenting on a story in an earlier issue of the paper about a rising incidence of abuse of healthcare workers. “Part of the reason is that many of our children are now brought up by maids, and they lack the strong cultural milieu to cultivate codes of good conduct,” he wrote. He reminisced about his own upbringing during which he was imbued with Confucian values and good character, and blamed the West for the erosion of those values. “Now, some affluent, Westernised Singaporeans throw litter, abuse nurses and are road bullies,” he wrote. “Fortunately, they are a minority, but nevertheless, the trend cannot be ignored.”

6  Many faces of cultural chauvinism In a rebuttal letter two days later, another reader, Dr. Wong Jock Onn, took exception to the message that “seemed to be that ‘East is good, West is bad.’” Jock Onn wrote: “It puzzles me how some Singaporeans continue to blame the West for supposedly bringing decadent values here.” While in Australia and England, he wrote, he found those places spotless and his Western friends not at all abusive. He then compared Chinese values unfavorably with those of the West. “Western values like democracy, egalitarianism, minority rights and environmental friendliness are values largely alien to traditional Chinese culture,” Jock Onn wrote. “Singaporeans who do treat people such as maids and nurses as equals probably learnt from these values. Contrary to what Dr. Wong implies, there is a great deal we can learn from the West.” The contestation between two Singaporean Wongs encapsulates the phenomenon of cultural chauvinism. One extoled Confucian values over Western values, and the other turned the table on him. Beyond that, the contestation also demonstrates how convoluted is the meaning of “Western values.” It is a phrase that is used often and with presumed specificity of meaning. Yet, it is a rhetorical paradox with grave implications.

Clash of cultures The phrase Western values is frequently used in academic, press, and diplomatic discourses to describe a wide array of political and civic values, social tendencies, and personality traits. It is central to the thesis of a “clash of cultures” in explaining various global conflicts, especially Islamist extremisms. The phrase was made popular by Samuel Huntington, the late Harvard University political scientist. According to Huntington, the West is headed toward an epochal clash with other cultures because they reject Western values. And, indeed, many non-Western peoples aver rejection of the said Western values. What often goes unquestioned is whether both sides are referring to the same realities. What this book demonstrates is that “Western values” means different things to different people. And that spells trouble for world affairs. A search of the Lexis-Nexis database found that Western statesmen, academics, and especially journalists use the phrase Western values to refer to a wide range of characteristics. Among them are the readily identifiable values of freedom, liberty, democracy, rule of law, egalitarianism, individuality, gender equality, tolerance, and protection

Many faces of cultural chauvinism   7 of civil rights. Not as commonly identified as “Western values” but are so characterized in Western press reports are charisma, pizzazz, humor, sarcasm, populism, charity, civility, reason, reciprocity, considerateness, public relations, self-reliance, and, yes, five course meals. In addition, there are characteristics that are reported to be distinctly American, among them grit and the can-do attitude. On the other hand, nefarious political and civic behaviors are reported as characteristic of countries that lack, or are in transition to, Western values. Among such are nationalism and civic transgressions such as corruption, inefficiency, mismanagement, and ethnocentrism. Because the basis of the various chauvinisms is reductive, there is much bifurcation and ambivalence. To the Westerner, for example, “Western values” are desirable values. But to Islamists, they connote decadence and to Chinese communist leaders they are harbingers of political disorder and even anarchy. Remarkably, these cultural chauvinisms have their domestic equivalents within countries around the world. In the United States, for example, it is manifested in the growing toxicity of partisanship or what Fukuyama calls “the politics of resentment.” After Donald Trump won the presidential election in 2016, most analysts pointed to economic anxiety among the white working class as the major factor. However, a study conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and The Atlantic in 2017 found that anxiety over America’s cultural identity was the decisive factor. Nearly two-thirds of the white working class say American culture has gotten worse since the 1950s. Sixty-eight percent say the U.S. is in danger of losing its identity, and 62 percent say America’s growing number of immigrants threaten the country’s culture, Anna Green writes in The Atlantic (May 9, 2017) in summarizing the findings. Another study conducted by PRRI and The Atlantic in 2019 found that a significant percentage of Americans (20–25 percent) live in a cultural bubble. That is, they rarely interact with people of other races, religions, and political affiliations. This is intensifying the political divide, the study concludes. And yet, the choices Americans make every day—about where to live or go to church or send a kid to school, about whose book club to join or whom to invite over for dinner—influence the way they see the world, and especially how they see politics,

8  Many faces of cultural chauvinism Green writes in a summation in The Atlantic of February 1, 2019. “When people largely surround themselves with sameness, they may find themselves left shouting across perceived divides, unable to see their reflection in anyone who stands on the other side.” The inability to see one’s reflection in others is, of course, the operative issue here. The problem is multiplied tenfold in the context of international relations and contestations. American identity is, of course, a subset of Western values. Yet, as will be discussed in subsequent chapters, there is much contradictions and equivocation on what these constitute. It is in this thicket of communicational confusion that world affairs are conducted. It is a world in which—to excerpt from W.B. Yeats’ “The Second Coming”—“the falcon cannot hear the falconer” and so “things fall apart.” The objective in this book again is to expound on this obstacle to improved global harmony. The next chapter elaborates on the notion of “Western values” from the perspective of the West. The three chapters (3–5) that follow discuss how this notion manifests in Western press coverage of global affairs. These are followed by two chapters (6 and 7) that turn the table and examine Western values from the perspective of non-Westerners. It is, in effect, a look at non-Westerners’ cultural chauvinism. Chapters 8 and 9 are about contestations over democratic ethos, with Chinese communist leaders rejecting it outright while other countries lay claim to it and rebuke the West for asserting ownership. Chapter 10 sketches the history of cultural chauvinism, dating back to the early years of intercultural interface. It was then that the major races were formally placed in a hierarchy of superiority, with the black race being placed at the bottom. And Chapter 11 is a counter-point by African and Africanist scholars. The last two chapters (12 and 13) discuss commonalities and the forces of political and cultural convergence. They lead to the conclusion that Francis Fukuyama’s declaration of “the end of history”8 may have been premature but it is certainly foreseeable. The book ends with a short postscript in which the author recounts a personal encounter that well illustrates the muddied nature of identity claims. ******************

Many faces of cultural chauvinism   9

Notes 1 Examples: Brown, Ashley, “‘Least Desirable’? How Racial Discrimination Plays Out In Online Dating,” NPR, Morning Edition, January 9, 2018. https://www.npr.org/2018/01/09/575352051/least-desirable-how- racialdiscrimination-plays-out-in-online-dating; Belinda Robnett and Cynthia Feliciano, “Patterns of Racial-Ethnic Exclusion by Internet Daters,” Social Forces, 89, 3 (March 2011): 807–828, doi:10.1093/sf/89.3.807. 2 Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment (New York: Picador, 2019). 3 Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity (New York: Liveright, 2019). 4 Appiah, The Lies That Bind, 31. 5 Appiah, The Lies That Bind, xii. 6 Appiah, The Lies That Bind, xiii. 7 Appiah, The Lies That Bind, xv. 8 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).

2

Democracy is Western

President Donald Trump warred with every institution of A merica’s democracy: the mass media, the judiciary, and the Congress. He called the press enemies of the people and purveyors of fake news. He threatened retribution against entertainers who spoofed him. His disparagement of the judiciary became so routine and vitriolic that Chief Justice John Roberts reprimanded him for undermining the guardian of the Constitution. And in his feud with Congress, he declared an emergency just so he could get around legislative constraint. In contrast, Trump repeatedly expressed fondness for autocratic leaders such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. It is all summed up in a headline for an op-ed piece in the New York Times of June 3, 2018: “Trump thinks he is a king.” It would seem then that he is an unlikely articulator of Western values. Yet, like his predecessors, Trump extolled it exuberantly. In one of his first major speeches after the inaugural, he told an audience in Warsaw, Poland, that Western values were under threat from inside and out and from the south and the east. Under Western values, he said: [W]e debate everything. We challenge everything. We seek to know everything, so that we can better know ourselves. And above all, we value the dignity of every human life, protect the rights of every person and share the hope of every soul to live in freedom. That is who we are. Those are the priceless ties that bind us together as nations, as allies and as a civilization.1 In thus suggesting that these values are the West’s—and the West’s alone—Trump spoke in the tradition of other Western leaders and analysts. As Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former Prime Minister of Denmark, prepared to step down as the Secretary General of NATO

Democracy is Western   11 in 2014, he was equally unequivocal in contrasting Western values with those of others. In a farewell address at Carnegie Europe, Rasmussen evoked those values in making the case for continued strengthening of NATO: “We are confronted by forces that reject our liberal democracy and our liberal, rules-based order,” he said. Their agendas and ideologies are different. But they are virulent, violent, and viciously anti-Western. They will grasp every opportunity to undermine our values of individual liberty, freedom, democracy, respect for the rule of law, and human rights. And to impose their backward-looking vision on others.2 By “they” Rasmussen was referring to Russia to the east and the “so called Islamic State” to the south. Even then, he left no doubt that the political and civic ethos he listed are all uniquely Western. Steve Emerson and Pete Hoekstra, of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, also cast Islamist terrorism as a mortal threat to Western values. Even as they note the incidence of Islamist terrorism in the non-Western continents of Africa and Asia, they issued a dire but more narrowly focused warning. “Western leaders must take measure of the defeat confronting them and understand that radical Islam directly jeopardizes Judeo-Christian civilization,” they wrote for Foxnews.com on April 1, 2016. In effect, though Islamists are a menace around the world, they are a threat to just one civilization. Walter E. Williams, a distinguished professor of economics at George Mason University and a syndicated columnist, is pointedly effusive. “Western values are superior to all others,” he writes in a column carried by the Augusta (Georgia) Chronicle on August 29, 2013. “Why? The greatest achievement of the West was the concept of individual rights…. It’s no accident that Western values of reason and individual rights have produced unprecedented health, life expectancy, wealth and comfort for the ordinary person.” Williams made these assertions in the context of explaining his opposition to multiculturalism and equal opportunity programs. Traversing the worlds of politics and scholarship, Patrick J. Buchanan, the political columnist and former White House aide, was apocalyptic in his book Suicide of a superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?3 Despite the title, the book actually pursues the broader theme of the demise of Western civilization resulting from liberal domestic and international policies.

12  Democracy is Western

Diplomatic dilemma This notion of a dichotomy in values between the West and the rest is posing considerable diplomatic dilemma and raising a lot of questions. When Western governments formed a coalition with Arab and Muslim countries to combat the Islamic State, they had to explain what political values the Muslim countries were being called upon to fight for. Were they being asked to fight for Western and Judeo- Christian values and against Islamic values? When Iranian youths demonstrate for a more liberalized polity, are they demonstrating for Western values? When Indian women demonstrate for greater gender equality are they aspiring to be Western? When activists there campaign against discrimination against people of the “lower castes,” are they being Western? When Nigerian journalists crusade against corruption, are they on a quest to institute Western values? Or in all these instances are the non-Westerners in pursuit of causes that have a universal impetus? Might they be responding to the same human impulses that gave rise to the Enlightenment? From all indications, the protesters and crusaders for reform remain anchored in their respective core national values and might even hold some disdainful views of the West. Most of the Iranian protesters, for example, are probably devout Muslims and the protesting Indian women are proudly imbued with their country’s fundamental cultural values. It would seem, therefore, that their advocacy for change is driven by reasons other than the quest for “Western values.”

Western values as boogeyman And then there is the matter of “Western values” as a boogeyman. In an essay in The Globe and Mail (Toronto) on August 23, 2014, Canadian journalist Doug Saunders notes that it has become a double-edged sword. It becomes dangerous when applied in the negative: When autocrats on the other side of the world want to deny their people basic rights and freedoms, they can then use our chauvinism to spread the notion that these universal human assets are merely ‘Western’ imports or incursions. There is thus a circular logic to the notion of Western values. First, the West lays claim to a set of civic and political values. Then despots and Islamists label those values alien and invoke the said alien-ness to cultivate

Democracy is Western   13 ideological, nationalist, and religious sentiments against reform. Then that exploitation ostensibly validates the thesis of a clash of cultures. Significantly, the global war on terrorism has been fought not just with weapons but also with narratives. In the years after the “September 11,” the United States began implementing a war of information to supplement invasions and other military actions. In fact, then Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld told the press that the war against terrorism had to be waged primarily as a war of ideas. However, U.S. implementation of this parallel war has been schizophrenic in its narrative. On the one hand, “September 11” is said to be an attack on “America’s values” or “Western values;” on the other hand, it is as an attack on “universal principles.” While the West is thus mired in rhetorical confusion, the Islamists formulated and propagated a simple message: the West is out to destroy Islam and the Islamic way of life. It is a coherent message that resonates even among Muslims who otherwise crave a democratic society. [P]eople want to know that as they move in the direction of greater individual liberty, secular democratic institutions, freedom of conscience, and the rule of law, they are also moving in the direction of cultural, historical, and religious authenticity—not away from it, write John Gallagher and Eric D. Patterson in the introductory chapter to their book Debating the War of Ideas.4 Because of its narrative confusion, the West could not provide an affirmative answer to the implied question. In contrast, Islamists foster the view that liberal democracy is incompatible with Islam. So, while the West is winning the war on the battlefields, the Islamists are successfully appealing to potential recruits. And their success in the narrative front has checkmated the West’s progress on the battlefield. There is no stronger evidence of this problematic than that groups such as ISIS have had remarkable success in recruiting Muslim youth in Western countries, despite the latter’s relatively comfortable life in secular and democratic societies.

The torture dilemma On occasion, the notion of Western values presents a definitional dilemma in policy debates. That was the case in December 2014, when the U.S. Senate released a detailed report on the CIA’s harsh interrogation techniques in the aftermath of al-Qaeda’s “September 11” attacks. The domestic reaction revealed considerable chasm.

14  Democracy is Western Liberals labeled the interrogation techniques torture and said “it does not represent our values.” Conservatives, on the other hand, wouldn’t label the CIA techniques torture. Rather, they defended them as necessary to protect the United States and “Western values.” By that logic, what is necessary to protect the West is inherently within the parameters of Western values. In effect, while both ideological camps assert the moral superiority of Western values, conservatives concede its pragmatic elasticity.

From dilemma to ambivalence Faced with these dilemmas, many Western leaders have now become circumspect in their invocation of Western values: whether democratic ethos are Western or universal values now depend on the rhetorical occasion. If the primary audience is domestic or other Western countries, the democratic ethos are Western values or “our values.” If the audience is non-Western or global, then democratic ethos are universal. President George W. Bush most starkly exemplified the ambivalence. In a press conference in January 2005, Bush talked about his efforts to promote Western values around the world, specifically human rights, freedom, and an end to tyranny. He said he had pressed the case with the Chinese leaders and would do the same with Russia’s Vladimir Putin when they met the following month. “I will remind him that if he intends to continue to look West, we in the West believe in Western values,” Bush said at the press conference (Associated Press, January 26, 2005). Similarly, while addressing Russian politics in December 2007, Bush said: My hope, of course, is that Russia is a country which understands there needs to be checks and balances, and free and fair elections, and a vibrant press; that they understand Western values based upon human rights and human dignity are values that will lead to a better country. That’s my hope. (Associated Press, December 20, 2007) About one year later, Bush reversed course on whether democratic ethos are Western values. In an address in Egypt during a tour of the Middle East in May 2008, Bush first took a broad swipe at governments in the region. Too often in the Middle East, politics has consisted of one leader in power and the opposition in jail. The time has come for nations

Democracy is Western   15 across the Middle East to abandon these practices, and treat their people with the dignity and respect they deserve. (Associated Press, May 18, 2008) Then, as the AP summed it up: Bush rebutted what he said are the many arguments from ‘skeptics about democracy in this part of the world,’ without specifying who they are. He said democracy is not ‘a Western value that America seeks to impose on unwilling citizens’ nor is it incompatible with the religion of Islam. Then British Prime Minister Tony Bair was similarly contradictory or ambivalent at best. At a Labour Party conference in 2002, he explained why Britain closely worked with the United States to reform the political order in Afghanistan. “Our values are not western values,” Blair said. “They are human values, and anywhere, anytime people are given the chance, they embrace them.” Blair restated the same view in June 2004 during a joint press conference with Bush to address efforts to install a democratic order in Iraq after the invasion. “[U]ltimately, our best guarantee of security lies in the values that are not values that are American or British or Western values, but the values of humanity,” Blair said (The Associated Press, June 28, 2004). Yet, in 2011—amid continuing turmoil in Afghanistan and Iraq— Blair seemed to revert to the notion of democratic values as Western values. In a speech at the Oral Roberts University in October that year, Blair urged the West to remain steadfast in its values. “We have to rely on a belief in our own system—on those values of freedom, democracy, the rule of law, of treating people equally” (The Journal Record, November 1, 2011). President Obama may have been the most conflicted in his rhetoric, switching seamlessly from the West-centric to the universalistic conception of democratic ethos. During his widely acclaimed speech in Cairo in 2009, which was directed especially at the Arab and Muslim world, he was painstaking in delineating the province of cultural and religious differences and those of human rights: I do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn’t steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose. Those are not

16  Democracy is Western just American ideas, they are human rights, and that is why we will support them everywhere.5 Still, Obama does not hesitate to invoke American exceptionalism when seeking to appeal to the domestic audience. When in 2013 evidence surfaced that President Bashar al-Assad’s forces were using chemical weapons in the Syrian civil war, the Obama administration decided that Assad’s chemical weapon stockpile had to be destroyed. First, though, Obama had to justify such an action to a war-weary American people. He did so in a speech on September 10, 2013, by invoking the American spirit of compassion. First, he quoted President Franklin D. Roosevelt: “Our national determination to keep free of foreign wars and foreign entanglements cannot prevent us from feeling deep concern when ideals and principles that we have cherished are challenged.”6  Then he added: [W]hen, with modest effort and risk, we can stop children from being gassed to death, and thereby make our own children safer over the long run, I believe we should act.  That’s what makes America different. That’s what makes us exceptional. Here, Obama asserts a distinctly American dimension of Western values, thus separating America from the rest of the West. For the most part though, Obama preferred the ambiguous phrase “our values,” which allows much interpretive latitude. In many instances, however, the intended reference is evident, and often it is the United States or the West.

The Trump doctrine Along with the usual attributes of Western values, Trump added faith. His speech in Warsaw in 2017 generated this variety of headlines: Trump Just Redefined Western Values Around Faith, Not Democracy (Bloomberg News, July 6, 2017) The Racial and Religious Paranoia of Trump’s Warsaw Speech (The Atlantic, July 6, 2017) Trump’s Warsaw speech pits western world against barbarians at the gates (The Guardian (UK), 6 July 2017)

Democracy is Western   17 The Guardian’s headline very much reflects the usual dichotomy between the West and everyone else. But the element of faith that The Atlantic and Bloomberg News stress is a radical deviation. That he was speaking in Poland—a staunchly Catholic nation that set off the ultimate demise of communism in Eastern Europe—probably explains why Trump chose that venue to state this doctrine of Western values. Pope John Paul II’s visit there in June 1979 was a watershed in ridding Poland of communism. When Poles turned out en masse to partake in the Pope’s mass, it was partly for the religious rite and partly a political statement, a rebuff of atheist communism. To Trump, that assertion of faith was an expression of Western values. “A million Polish people did not ask for wealth. They did not ask for privilege. Instead, 1 million Poles saying three simple words: ‘We want God,’” Trump said. In those words, the Polish people recalled the promise of a better future.… Their message is as true today as ever. The people of Poland, the people of America and the people of Europe still cry out, ‘We want God.’ This emphasis on religion in public life is at odds with the secular orientation of liberal democracy. It certainly contradicts the core element of the Enlightenment, the philosophical basis of liberal democracy. In so defining Western values, Trump positions it much closer to the theocratic order of countries such as Iran and Saudi Arabia. Indeed, he suggests as much during his visit to Saudi Arabia in May the same year. In a speech in Riyadh, Trump declared this common bond of faith and values: I stand before you as a representative of the American People, to deliver a message of friendship and hope. That is why I chose to make my first foreign visit a trip to the heart of the Muslim world, to the nation that serves as custodian of the two holiest sites in the Islamic Faith. We are not here to lecture—we are not here to tell other people how to live, what to do, who to be, or how to worship. Instead, we are here to offer partnership—based on shared interests and values—to pursue a better future for us all.7 Trump avoided the phrase Western values, opting instead for the more inclusive “our shared values.” Though he did not specify what those are, the emphasis on faith provides a clue.

18  Democracy is Western The pattern was repeated two days later, when Trump delivered another major speech, this time at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Again, the recurrent phrase was “our shared values.” In countries as disparate in political culture as Poland, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, the one common factor is the pre-eminence of religion in public life. It would seem then that the Trumpian doctrine of Western values has faith as the core tenet. But then Trump’s ban of people from seven largely Muslim countries from entering the United States muddles the doctrine. But then that is the norm with all things Trumpian.

Western press’s reconsideration For the most part, the U.S. press isn’t overly enamored by the nuanced distinction between “Western values” and “our values.” Even when a speaker uses the latter phrase, journalists still report it as Western values, especially in the headlines. In Tony Blair’s speech on “our values,” for example, he did not use the phrase Western values. Yet, that’s the phrase used in the coverage. Even then some Western journalists are becoming critical of the usage. When in 2014, British Prime Minister David Cameron invoked the clash-of-culture thesis in asking for more security powers, a columnist for The Observer (London) sharply took him to task. “[I]t is not Cameron’s proposals that I fear, it is his rhetoric,” writes Paddy Ashdown in the paper’s August 31, 2014, issue. “He recently told us that this fight was about defending ‘western values.’ I cannot think of any phrase, short of those used by George Bush during the Iraq war, which more damages our ability to win this battle.” Ashdown argued that the phrase alienates the vast majority of Muslims, who also deplore Islamists’ ideology and violence. “The truth,” Ashdown continues, “is that this increasingly brutal and dangerous battle will not be won for our ‘western values’ but for the universal values which underpin and unite all the world’s great religions and philosophies—including, perhaps especially at this moment, Islam.” A Canadian journalist expressed the same concern. “If you want to identify the most harmful idea in the world, it would be hard to avoid the phrase ‘Western values,’” Doug Saunders wrote in The Globe and Mail (Toronto) on August 23, 2013. From over here, it doesn’t sound so bad. In North A merica and Europe, the expression is simply a commonplace bit of chauvinism, a historically naive way to suggest that various good things—equal rights, multiparty democracy, the rule of law,

Democracy is Western   19 open economies, freedom of speech—were the product of, or are uniquely held by, European-origin cultures. However historically and geographically inaccurate, we don’t mind the phrase because it represents a set of hard-won qualities we’re rightfully eager to possess and defend. In the column in which Walter Williams asserted the superiority of “Western values,” he also added this caveat: “ONE NEED NOT be a Westerner to hold Western values. A person can be Chinese, Japanese, Jewish, African or Arab and hold Western values” (capital letters his). That raises the question, if non-Westerners can hold “Western values” just like Westerners, why is it called “Western values”? Is it a value that is inherent in Westerners but may be acquired as a secondary attribute by others? Not by the logic of Williams’ subsequent sketch of the evolution of “Western values.” “The Western transition from barbarism to civility didn’t happen overnight,” Williams writes. “It emerged feebly—mainly in England, starting with the Magna Carta of 1215—and took centuries to get where it is today.” If then “Western values” took so long and so much effort to implant in the West it couldn’t have been Western to begin with. It is more logical to see the West as the “bridgehead,” as Francis Fukuyama describes it. (This is elaborated upon in Chapters 11 and 12.) As to the West’s “transition from barbarism to civility,” contemporary events such as neo-Nazism, xenophobia, and mass killings would suggest that it remains a work in progress. And that further makes the phrase “bridgehead” the more logical way to think of the Western genesis and realities of liberal democracy. ******************

Notes 1 Remarks by President Trump to the People of Poland, Krasiński Square, Warsaw, July 6, 2017. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/ remarks-president-trump-people-poland/. 2 “A Force for Freedom,” Speech by NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen at Carnegie Europe, September 16, 2014. https://www.nato.int/ cps/en/natolive/113063.htm?selectedLocale=en. 3 Patrick J. Buchanan, Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2011). 4 John Gallagher and Eric D. Patterson, Debating the War of Ideas (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009).

20  Democracy is Western 5 “A New Beginning,” Speech delivered by President Barack Obama in Cairo, June 4, 2009. https://nypost.com/2009/06/04/full-text-of-obamasnew-beginnings-speech/. 6 “Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation on Syria,” by President Barack Obama, September 10, 2013. 7 “Transcript: Donald Trump’s Foreign Policy Speech,” Riyadh, April 27, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/28/us/politics/transcript-trumpforeign-policy.html.

3

All things modern are Western

Africa has historically been the antithesis of modernity. Yet, in a sense and for a while, that mantle seemed to have been turned over to Eastern Europe. It was at the turn of the millennium, and the region was transiting from communist rule. From Belarus to Bulgaria, there were feverish transitions from controlled economies to free enterprise and from totalitarianism to democracy. In the U.S. press, these transitions were reported as transitions to Western values. And the dominant storyline was that in so changing, the region was closing its distance from modernity, albeit fitfully. It is only fitting. The very idea of Western culture in its contemporary usage is said to have evolved during the years after World War II. It was the beginning of the Cold War between the communist “East” and the democratic “West”. This is discussed more fully in Chapter 12. Suffice to state here that the notion of Western values gained currency at this time as an armor in the war. “In the chill of battle, [the West] forged a grand Plato-to-NATO narrative about Athenian democracy, the Magna Carta, the Copernican Revolution, and so on.”1 In due course, the West won the war and Eastern Europe began to return to democracy and free enterprise. Predictably, the Western press covered the transition as Westernization. Correspondingly, the end of the Cold War also marked a change in the dominant division in national politics. Hitherto, the fault line was class struggle; after the Cold War, it was identity contestations. As “the class-based leftwing parties that were so prominent in the politics of the twentieth century”2 faded away, ethnic and religious identities came to the fore in the 21st. This change is manifested in the cultural chauvinism in the coverage of Eastern Europe’s transition from communism. The 20th anniversary of Romania’s anti-communist revolution in 1989 provided an archetypical context for such coverage. In a dispatch on December 16, 2009, the Associated Press (AP) contrasted Romania’s past and present, leaving little doubt as to which represented

22  All things modern are Western Western standards and values. Before the revolution, “Romania … seemed like a relic of the 19th century;” now it is “a nation with many of the trappings of modernity,” the AP correspondent writes. Referring to Timisoara, a city that played a prominent role in the revolution, the correspondent painted this picture of modernity: [T]his westward looking city of ornate fin-de-siecle buildings, exclusive boutiques, huge shopping malls and fine restaurants was awash in bright Christmas lights and streets were flooded with well-dressed shoppers, some jumping to avoid the spray of slush thrown up by late-model Western cars speeding by. Moreover, “Today, Romania is a member of both the EU and NATO, both of them clubs associated with Western values and prosperity and on the surface seems to have overcome the past.” The story states, however, that the glitz belied continued difficulties. The Romanians had not quite overcome their non-Western past. Today, Romania is drowning in debt with foreign obligations of almost 78 billion euros ($113 billion). Although it joined the EU in 2007, the nation remains deeply troubled, plagued by corruption, mired in recession, and paralyzed by political infighting most recently by a hotly contested presidential election marred by allegation of wholesale fraud. In effect, by being allowed into the European Union, Romanians were given ample opportunity to catch up with Western values. But persistence of the listed problems was evidence that they were having difficulty measuring up. Similar storylines were used in the coverage of Poland, Ukraine, Bulgaria, and a number of the former Soviet republics. One is left with the impression that those civic and political problems are absent in Western democracies, that they are evidence of lagging modernity. The storyline roughly corresponds with the policy basis for admission of countries into the EU. Originally, it was supposed to encompass countries in “Central Europe,” a construct that is more ideological than geographic. Today, however, the point of the construct is not so much … to repudiate any connexion with Russian experience during the Cold War, it now serves to demarcate superior from inferior—i.e., Romanian, Bulgarian, Albanian, etc.—candidates for entry into the EU.3

All things modern are Western  23

Africa: the ultimate in non-Western That Africa is the antithesis of modernity has been a perennial storyline.4 Henry Morton Stanley, the 19th-century Welsh-born journalist and explorer, was especially influential in setting the theme. Following his voyage down the Congo and other central African rivers in the late 1870s, he wrote volumes of narratives on what he called “the dark continent.” His theme that Africa is the antithesis of modernity still guides reporting on the continent. A New York Times (March 16, 2014) article on Gambia as a tourist destination is an example. In it, Judith Dobrzynski, a freelance writer and former reporter for the Times, narrated her tourist experience in the West African country. The essence of the narrative was that Gambia is a place where Westerners may experience “the real Africa” without giving up the comforts of modern (that is, Western) life. “White-sand beaches on its Atlantic coastline are a favorite of Northern European vacationers,” Dobrzynski writes. “After each excursion, we were met by … crewmen offering cold towels and glasses of iced tea…. And each night, we enjoyed the creature comforts of the West, including five-course dinners.” The reader is left to fill in the blank regarding the rest of the “creature comforts of the West.” In any case, the white sandy beaches of the Atlantic coast and the creature comforts are not African, Dobrzynski suggests. “[T]o get close to the real Africa, the Gambian people and their way of life,” the tourist has to travel upriver, where there is “such a light tourism infrastructure.” The idea that the modern is Western (and not African) is also the storyline of a New York Times (January 5, 2016) story on malls in Nigeria. The story was pegged on the opening of a new mall in the Midwestern city of Warri. “Delta Mall opened here last spring, bringing to about a dozen the number of Western-style shopping malls catering to 180 million people in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation,” the Times reports. In the paragraph that follows, the Times indirectly conceded that malls are not so much Western as they are the product of economic forces.5 “The emergence of malls—and mall culture—in Nigeria reflects broad trends on the continent, including a growing middle class with spending power and the rapid expansion of cities like Warri that are little known outside the region,” the Times reported. If this is the case, then the earlier reference to malls as Western could only have resulted from immersion in the cultural ideology that equates the modern with the Western.

24  All things modern are Western Such claims of ownership are not limited to advancements in infrastructure and amenities. Even rationality has been described as an attribute of the West and not Africa. Ordinarily, shortfalls in journalism are blamed on financial imperatives, political bias, or inadequacies in training and experience. In the case of Africa, at least one U.S. scholar has attributed such deficiencies to Africa’s oral tradition and “pre- empirical” thought processes. “Although the press in Black Africa appears in printed form, it has inherited little of the reasoned discourse associated with the printed tradition of post-Reformation Europe,” writes Louise M. Bourgault, a media scholar and consultant. “Rather, the press in Africa displays preempirical stylistics typical of the oral discourse.” In contrast, Bourgault continues, news and features from Western wire services “inevitably display the marks of the more literate traditions of their originators.”6 By 1995 when Bourgault’s analysis was published, the sub-Saharan African press was at least 136 years old7, many of its journalists held associate or bachelor’s degrees, and some even had doctorates.

Science/technology are Western Beyond Africa, the claim to exceptionalism extends to epistemological processes. Science is ordinarily thought of as a procedure of inquiry that is culture- and value-neutral. Yet it too is reported as a Western value, along with modern technology. A story in the New York Times of October 12, 2013, carries the headline “A bridge between western science and eastern faith.” The story is about Tibetan monks from India visiting Emory University in a meeting that sought to reconcile faith with science. The first two paragraphs of the story read: Quantum theory tells us that the world is a product of an infinite number of random events. Buddhism teaches us that nothing happens without a cause, trapping the universe in an unending karmic cycle. / Reconciling the two might seem as challenging as trying to explain the Higgs boson to a kindergarten class. The paper goes on to report on the reciprocal impact of Eastern faith on “Western science.” Given that the story was about a meeting between Tibetan monks and American scientists, the theme of East and West was, of course, compelling. Yet, faith and mysticism are also very Western and

All things modern are Western  25 science Eastern. About 66 percent of Americans believe in God and the efficacy of prayers, for example.8 And non-Western cultures have contributed immensely to the advancement of science. An AP story (September 22, 2009) on a new Saudi university is circumspect on the storyline that science and technology are Western. The story written by one Tarek el-Tablawy is about the establishment of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia. The story points out some unique features of the university, especially its exemption from restrictions on women. Unlike the strict practice enforced in Saudi Arabia, women affiliated with KAUST may drive, mingle with men, and not have to wear veils. “In many ways, the campus is similar to other Western-style compounds in Saudi where residents are often allowed more flexibility in embracing liberal Western values shunned outside the confines of their community in the kingdom,” the story states. In effect, such mingling of the sexes is an exclusive attribute of Western culture, the story suggests. In a departure from the common practice, el-Tablawy appended a passage that contradicts the claim that KAUST is Western-inspired. But the university also could be seen as a return to Islam’s golden age, an era centuries ago when Muslim scholars took up the mantle of the Greeks and were pioneers in the fields of medicine, mathematics, chemistry, astronomy, among others, el-Tablawy writes. “This tolerant and inquiring period was snuffed out under pressure from invasions by Crusaders, Mongols and nomadic desert hordes in the Middle Ages and was replaced by an age where faith superseded reason amid unstable times.” The reporter may have been echoing a speech delivered about three months earlier by President Barack Obama. “As a student of history, I also know civilization’s debt to Islam,” Obama said in June 2009 in a speech in Cairo. It was Islam—at places like Al-Azhar University—that carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment. It was innovation in Muslim communities that developed the order of algebra; our magnetic compass and tools of navigation; our mastery of pens and printing; our understanding of how disease spreads and how it can be healed.

26  All things modern are Western The identification of technology as Western has led some analysts to declare Islamist terrorists as hypocritical. Groups such as the Islamic State and Boko Haram say they are waging a war against Western values. Yet, they use modern weapons and communication technologies to pursue their cause. Critics such as Lt. Col. Rudy Atallah—who headed the Pentagon’s counterterrorism operations in Africa—finds this incongruous. “They have declared war on anybody that doesn’t believe what they do and consider these people un-Islamic,” Atallah said regarding the Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram. This includes fellow Muslims in the North that attend western schools and follow western principles. Boko Haram believes this education is corrupting their mindset. However, they do use the western media to their advantage, and they use western science to fabricate bombs and carry out advanced attacks. Though Atallah’s argument seems sound, it is actually a double-edged sword. To begin with, it concurs with Islamists that non-Islamic education is, indeed, Western. Moreover, its premise is that “Western values” means the same thing to Islamists as it does to Westerners. Specifically, it assumes that Islamists see modern technologies as Western.

Humor, glitz are Western too The belief that science and technology are Western is, of course, understandable. In the past two centuries or so, the West has been in the vanguard of technological innovations. What most people might not readily consider Western are personality attributes such as humor, glitz, and grit? Yet, Western press coverage of other peoples also claims these as uniquely Western. Coverage of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, is readily illustrative. In a feature story on the opening ceremony, the New York Times (February 7) pointedly applied the yardstick of “Western values,” assigning passing and failing marks accordingly. The opening ceremony was majestic and grandiose, the correspondent wrote, but it was humorless, much like Russian President Vladimir Putin. Like the Summer Olympics in London in 2012, the Sochi event “had much of the artful theatricality but none of the self-deprecating touches that distinguished the London Olympics.”

All things modern are Western  27 The correspondent then sums it all up thus: It was a little bit Alice in Putinland, but also ‘Fantasia’ on the Black Sea and an indication of how much Russia has adapted to Western values since it shook off Soviet rule. Putin may be hoping to use the Games to project Slavic power and Russian exceptionalism, but Friday’s immersion course in Mother Russia had an unmistakable glint of Hollywood make-believe and show business pizazz. In effect, in seeking to be entertaining, the Russians were aspiring to Western values but just couldn’t quite get beyond themselves. The Times (February 8, 2014) furthered the idea that humor is Western in its coverage of Thais’ use of humor to cope with their convoluted politics. The story headlined “Taking On Thailand’s Crisis With a Bit of Western Bite” zeroed in on a popular and satirical video production, the “Shallow News in Depth.” Founded by two Thai-Americans, ‘Shallow News in Depth’ is a low-budget weekly program posted to YouTube that employs a type of Western humor not common in Thailand—acid-laced sarcasm—and draws on the deep well of paradoxes, absurdities and mangled logic of Thailand’s otherwise deadly serious political crisis. Grit and perseverance too are reported to be Western values, specifically in the mode of American exceptionalism. At least, so wrote an AP correspondent covering the women’s World Cup Soccer in Frankfurt, Germany, in July 2011. Japan had upset the United States in the championship game in a penalty shootout after the U.S. team had twice come from behind to even the scores. The AP correspondent lauded the U.S. players for earlier victories that brought them to the championship, including in a dramatic game against Brazil that also ended in a penalty shootout. The performance garnered considerable interest back in the United States. As summed up by the AP correspondent, “Hollywood celebrities, pro athletes, even folks who don’t know a bicycle kick from a Schwinn were captivated by the U.S. women and charmed by their grit and can-do attitude that is uniquely—proudly—American.” It is a claim to exceptionalism that seems to rob the Japanese champions of what is more plausibly theirs. They could have attributed their victory to a uniquely Japanese “grit and can-do attitude.”

28  All things modern are Western

Are they really? Back to the matter of humor, sarcasm, and theatricality, anthropologists hold that they all find expression in every culture. They are the products of reflections on life’s paradoxes and absurdities. They are means of grappling with life’s challenges and drudgery, or finding diversions from its tedium. Humor in particular is universally derived from the incongruities of life.9 And subtleties and sarcasm have also been age-old rhetorical devices used by kings’ men and court jesters in various cultures to make a point they dared not state directly. Similarly, the characterization of science as a Western value contradicts its essence and history. As an objective process of understanding nature, science is a part of every culture over the ages. And some of its discoveries have collided with traditions and theology everywhere. That includes the West, as Galileo Galilei would testify. His demonstration that the Sun, not the Earth, is at the center of the universe contradicted theology and so affronted the Church. It almost cost him his life. The Inquisition found him guilty of heresy and could have sentenced him to death. His friendship with the pope and renunciation of his discovery spared him that fate. Even then, he spent the rest of his life in house imprisonment. Much has changed since then—in the West more so than some other places. Even then, in Europe and especially the United States, science continues to collide with theology. In Tennessee in 1927, a science teacher, John T. Scopes, was tried and convicted for teaching the theory of evolution, which was against state law. The state supreme court subsequently overturned the conviction but only on the narrow ground that the jury, not the judge, should have levied the fine. It wasn’t until 1967 that Tennessee repealed the law under which Scopes was convicted. The U.S. Supreme Court followed suit and vacated all such laws the following year. Even then, resistance to the theory of evolution continues in various school systems. Teachers are no longer prosecuted for teaching the theory, but faith-based groups are suing to have creationism taught in tandem. In any case, the most compelling evidence against the notion of science as Western is to be found in the behavior of babies. In every culture, they seek to understand the world they are born into with their eyes, fingers, and tongues. Sometimes, it is to the horror of parents. Invariably, it is in the spirit of science. ******************

All things modern are Western  29

Notes 1 Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity (New York: Liveright, 2019), 201. 2 Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment (New York: Picador, 2019), 74. 3 Perry Anderson, The New Old World (London: Verso, 2009), 40. 4 Minabere Ibelema, “‘Tribal Fixation’ and Africa’s Otherness: Changes and Resilience in News Coverage,” Journalism & Communication Monographs, 16, 3 (2014): 159–217. 5 W. W. Rostow’s The Stages of Economic Growth (London: Cambridge University Press, 1962) is a seminal treatise that would explain the rise of malls in economic terms. 6 Louise M. Bourgault, Mass Media in Sub-Saharan Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 181. 7 The Nigerian press is said to have dated to 1859, when the Yoruba-language newspaper Iwe Irohin began publishing. 8 “Americans’ Religious Values,” Pew Research Center, Religion & Public Life, June 7, 2012. http://www.pewforum.org/2012/06/07/americansreligious-values/, Retrieved March 9, 2015. 9 This is illustrated quite well in Arnold Kruger, “The Nature of Humor in Human Nature: Cross-Cultural Commonalities,” Counselling Psychology Quarterly, 9, 3 (1996): 235–241.

4

All things nefarious are non-Western

In September 2014, President Barack Obama delivered a speech at the United Nations General Assembly in which he chastised warring nations for failing to make peace. He reserved his harshest words for terrorist groups, especially the Islamic State, which he lambasted for their bloodletting. Toward the end of the speech he acknowledged that the United States is not perfect: I realize that America’s critics will be quick to point out that at times we too have failed to live up to our ideals; that America has plenty of problems within its own borders…. So, yes, we have our own racial and ethnic tensions. Obama noted, however, that U.S. history is a history of working on such problems, overcoming differences, and becoming a better society. And he urged turbulent nations and violent groups to strive for the same. The speech incensed American conservatives. In comments on Fox News afterward, former Vice President Dick Cheney accused Obama for suggesting that incidents of police killing of black people were the moral equivalent of ISIS’s brutality. “I was stunned,” Cheney said. “I mean, to compare the two as if there’s some kind of moral equivalence there is, I think, outrageous.” Obama never said such a thing, of course. He was merely pre-empting the counterpoint to his chastisement, a classic strategy in argumentation. Some conservatives similarly criticized Obama for his speech in Cairo in June 2009 that he used to articulate his vision of world affairs. He pressed on the Arab and Muslim world in particular to embrace peace and political reforms. He extended an olive branch to U.S. adversaries, especially Iran. Obama also acknowledged U.S. diplomatic missteps of the past and deviations from its ideals, including unlawful

All things nefarious are non-Western  31 detentions and use of torture as an interrogation technique. And above all, he vowed “a new beginning.” As with the U.N. speech, some conservatives lashed out at Obama, describing his state visits in the Middle East as the “apology tour.” Nearly ten years later, the speech still riled those conservatives. When Mike Pompeo—the second secretary of state in President Donald Trump’s administration—visited Cairo in January 2019, he used Obama’s speech as the departing point of his. It was here, here in this city that another American stood before you. He told you that radical Islamist terrorism does not stem from an ideology. He told you that 9/11 led my country to abandon its ideals, particularly in the Middle East, Pompeo said to the audience at the American University in Cairo. “The good news is this. The age of self-inflicted American shame is over, and so are the policies that produced so much needless suffering. Now comes the real new beginning.”1 Conservative critics have been especially riled by Obama’s preference for the phrase “violent extremism” to describe acts of terrorism by Islamists. To them, that is political correctness. That is, Obama was avoiding pinning terrorism on Islam as the phrase Islamist terrorism might connote. Yet, Obama’s preferred phrase allows for the neutral labeling of acts of terrorism. It also precludes the befuddling law enforcement practice of investing resources to determine whether a given premeditated act of mass killing is terrorism or not. Indeed, to Obama’s critics, the phrase “violent extremism” is objectionable because it doesn’t demarcate between the West and others. To them differences are not a matter of a continuum of values; they are a dichotomy, and as such do not permit of relative comparisons.

Practices alien to the West To a considerable extent, press coverage of the affairs of non-Western countries reflects this iron-clad demarcation in values. On December 11, 2003, about nine months after the United States invaded Iraq, the Associated Press (AP) distributed a story assessing the prospects for peace and democratic governance. The story included this summation of the obstacles: “Shiites, notably the politician Ahmad Chalabi, are among the best educated and sophisticated people in Iraq. However, the Shiite community is also strongly influenced by religious clerics, whose views and style of leadership are often alien to Western values.”

32  All things nefarious are non-Western Webster’s New World Dictionary’s first two definitions of the word “alien” are “1. belonging to another country or people; foreign 2. strange; not natural.” The phrase “alien to Western values” is used or implied routinely in the coverage of non-Western countries. It is used to characterize a myriad of civic and political policies, as well as social practices and cultural beliefs. Whether it is the upheavals in the Middle East at the turn of the millennium, the post-communist transitions in Eastern Europe in the 1990s, or civic cynicism in Africa, the contrast to “Western values” is the ready reportorial device. According to the news stories, it is alien to Western values to engage in nationalistic politics, extremism, corruption, and nepotism. It is so also to believe in mystical powers, entertain religion in public policy, curtail civil liberties, or violate constitutional provisions. In effect, everything nefarious or dubious is alien to Western values. In the case above of Iraqi Shiites, nothing is specified regarding the views that are “alien to Western values.” The reader is left to infer the reference from the passages that follow. The first sentence states: “Shiites are divided between those favoring a prominent political role for the clergy and those who believe clerics should simply provide moral guidance.” But this division can’t possibly be “alien” to Western countries, where evangelical Christians assert that laws and policies should abide by biblical principles. And, as will be discussed in Chapter 12, they lobby and vote accordingly. And then there is this: As a measure of Shiite clerical power, the now abandoned U.S. plan to draft a constitution before transferring power collapsed when a leading cleric, Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, insisted the charter be written only by elected delegates—a process that the Americans feared would take too long. The AP reporter apparently did not see the irony here that a Shiite cleric was advocating a more democratic process of drafting a constitution.

Corruption is non-Western Of the civic vices most commonly reported as “alien to Western values,” corruption stands out. The reporting on Bulgaria’s, Romania’s, and Ukraine’s transitions to democracy very well illustrates this. When in 2002 NATO invited Bulgaria and Romania to join the alliance, the AP (November 18) distributed a story that questioned these countries’ fit as members. The story pointed out their considerable

All things nefarious are non-Western  33 poverty, the inferiority of their military, and especially their corruption. A pertinent paragraph reads: “Corruption is rampant in this region, Western values are not universally held, and the economies are struggling. Ordinarily, such grave troubles would delay a nation’s entry into NATO for years.” The corollary is that an anti-corruption stance is an attribute of Western values—or transformation toward it. Though not always specified, it is manifest in the overall narrative. It was especially evident in the coverage of Ukraine in the years before and after the Russia-allied government of President Viktor Yanukovych was forced out by massive violent protests in February 2014. One AP story (originally distributed on December 4, 2013) chronicled the rise of heavyweight boxing champion Vitali Klitschko as a leading candidate for the presidency. “Thanks to his sports-hero status and reputation as a pro-Western politician untainted by Ukraine’s frequent corruption scandals, the 6-foot 7-inch Klitschko has surpassed jailed former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko in opinion polls,” the AP reported in the second paragraph. Klitschko was quoted as saying that Ukrainian politicians were “simply plundering the country” and had no interest in transforming the system. “He embraced Western values while training in Germany and the United States for matches, he says, and wants to bring that mindset home to Ukraine.” To avoid splitting the reformist votes, Klitschko had decided to back Poroshenko for the presidency and was elected mayor of Kiev instead. In an interview with the U.K. Guardian about four years later, Klitschko expressed frustration at the difficulty of rooting out corruption. “The Soviet system is how everything here works,” he told the Guardian in a story published on May 29, 2018. “It’s very difficult to break the system. The system is big and inflexible, uneffective and also corrupt. And that is our main goal, to change the system, to break the system, to make it modern.” In a second-anniversary story on the revolution, the Washington Times blamed holdovers from the earlier regime for the difficulty of transforming the system. “Activists said the problem is clear: Oligarchs like Mr. Poroshenko who ran Ukraine before the revolution remain in control despite the change of regime,” the Times surmised in a story on December 20, 2015. The paper quotes a critic of the slow reform as saying, “The people who came to power are the people from the old system, who worked with Yanukovych.” It just happens that Poroshenko was one of the oligarchs who sponsored and fanned the massive protests that brought down Yanukovych’s government.

34  All things nefarious are non-Western That corruption is alien to Western values also comes through in reporting on another Ukrainian oligarch charged with the offense amid the unrest that toppled Yanukovych. In March 2014, Dmytro Firtash, an influential pro-Russian businessman, was arrested in Vienna in connection with a U.S.-issued warrant. In its dispatch on March 13, the AP quoted one Tim Ash, “an emerging markets analyst with Standard Bank in London,” as describing the arrest as a “seismic development.” And then there is this detail: In an email, he said Firtash’s detention sends a strong message to oligarchs in Russia and other former Soviet republics ‘that no one is above the law and… that if they are to do business in (or) with the West, they need to comply with some basic Western values.’ Although the story does not specify that corruption is “alien to Western values,” that point is obvious.

Corruption paradox Sometimes the storyline of corruption as a non-Western value gets muddled. In fact, a case that plunged Poland into a political crisis in June 2014 turned the storyline on its head. The interior minister and the head of the central bank were surreptitiously recorded discussing how the bank would help the governing party get re-elected in 2015. The story, which was first published by the weekly magazine Wprost, set off a political storm. As an independent body, the central bank was not supposed to engage in partisan politics. Using its clout to aid a candidate or political party, therefore, constituted a serious violation. The AP’s coverage on June 19 stressed not the apparent political corruption, but the motives behind the surreptitious recording. The lead paragraph reads: “Interference from ‘abroad’ could be behind the eavesdropping of the compromising conversation between two Polish top leaders, some claim, as a political scandal grows and threatens to topple the government in the Eastern European country.” The story pinpointed Russia as the probable foreign hand, noting growing tension with Poland over Russia’s intervention in Ukraine. “Poland is staunchly pro-West and has reacted to the violence in Ukraine by pledging to increase its defense budget and calling for a permanent NATO presence on its soil,” the AP reported. “For years it has taken the lead in the EU in trying to encourage democratic and

All things nefarious are non-Western  35 Western values in Ukraine.” The AP also quoted an American author, Edward Lucas, as saying that “The Russians are experts at bugging and at information warfare.” There was nothing in the story to suggest that the collusion of the central bank with the pro-West ruling party was a serious breach of democratic principles. Rather, the story made clear that the mechanism of the exposé was a greater problem than the collusion. The AP quoted five sources on the story—Lucas, the prime minister, an opposition politician, a retired director of the military intelligence, and the head of the Polish Institute of International Affairs—and all concurred on this theme, directly and indirectly. The Prime Minister, Donald Tusk, was quoted as saying, “I will not resign in response to actions that, we all know, had criminal character, and, maybe were…. aimed at the government’s resignation or fall.” The leader of the opposition party Law and Justice, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, was also quoted as expressing solidarity with the government. “There’s a difficult international situation,” Kaczynski is quoted as saying. “We don’t know where this information came from. It could be an intervention from abroad. We have to protect this government.” This all points to the theme that nefarious behaviors are non-Western, but they are understandable if committed in the service of Western values. The notion that corruption is alien to Western values, of course, flies in the face realities. The U.S. state of Alabama, for example, may have set a record in this regard. Within a span of one year between 2016 and 2017, the heads of the three branches of government—the governor, Speaker of the House, and the Chief Justice—were all forced out of office for corruption or subversion of the law. The previous governor was already serving a prison term. And so was the former mayor of the state’s largest city, Birmingham, who had also served as chairman of a County Commission. It is improbable that any EU country can match that record, but none can claim that corruption is alien to it. In The New Old World—a history of the EU—for example, Anderson Perry cites corruption as one of the challenges facing the Union. Regarding France in 2004, Anderson writes, “The political system, riddled with corruption, is held in increasing public contempt.”2 France happens to be one of the three pillars of the EU, the others being Germany and Italy. In Transparency International’s Index of Perception of Corruption, Germany (9th) is the only one of the three countries to rank in the Top 10. With a score of 69 out of 100, France tied with the United States at 23rd. That is behind the non-Western

36  All things nefarious are non-Western countries of the United Arab Emirates and Uruguay. Italy has a score of 53 and ranking of 51st, tied with Grenada, Malaysia, Rwanda, and Saudi Arabia. Among the non-Western countries scoring higher are Barbados, Botswana, and Cape Verde.

Nationalism is non-Western In a story on November 18, 2002, the AP applied the nationalism yardstick in contrasting Romania and Bulgaria in their advancement on “Western values.” “Like neighboring Bulgaria, Romania is struggling to build a viable democratic society,” the narrative goes. “While Bulgaria has found a measure of stability under the premiership of its former king, Simeon Saxcoburggotski, Romanian voters have set off alarm bells by giving considerable support to Corneliu Vadim Tudor, a rabble-rousing nationalist.” And there is this case from the Balkans. In December 2010, Croatia’s former Prime Minister Ivo Sanader was arrested in Austria where he had fled following allegations of abuse of office. An AP news story on corruption in the Balkans (January 7, 2011) included coverage of Sanader’s fall. “Sanader was considered a symbol of Western values who broke with the kind of Croatian nationalism that contributed to the violent breakup of Yugoslavia,” the AP reported. In effect, Sanader became a symbol of Western values by parting with nationalism and he lost that status when he became tainted by corruption. The coverage of Japanese politics similarly illustrates the nationalism storyline. Japan has, of course, been a democracy since World War II. And its ruggedly capitalist economy and close relationship with the West has long accorded its inclusion in the circles of Western values— at least in political matters. Even then, there is nationalist elements in Japan’s politics, and that is reported to be inimical to Western values. The AP pursued that storyline in a story on Japan’s rising nationalism distributed on April 28, 2001. Among the evidence cited were “the government’s approval of a revisionist history textbook” and the popularity of “a wave of cartoons and movies glorifying Japan’s imperialist past.” The AP offered this summation: “Right-wingers say nationalism is a way to reclaim a bit of Japan’s heritage from the Western values it embraced after World War II.” However, the quote that follows this summation makes no reference to Western values. It was apparently the reporter’s spin on the development. What Tadae Takubo, the author of the textbook, was reported as saying was, “We want to provoke a rebirth of patriotism in a nation where there’s too little of it.”

All things nefarious are non-Western  37 The closest thing to the mention of Western values by the nationalists came in the AP’s report that two of the popular comic books “present Japan’s conquest of Asia as ‘liberation from Western colonialism.’” The AP also reports that though regulatory authorities made the author remove incendiary passages from the textbook, the following excerpt left little doubt as to its objective: “Nationalism is our last fortress to resist the high-speed information age.” To the AP reporter then, the right-wing nationalists were kicking against Western values. Their advocacy of a rebirth of patriotism was particularly indicting. It does not seem to matter that nationalist advocacy has been a driving force in European and American politics. It only gained steam during the Trumpian era. In the United States, the pressure for patriotic textbooks is mounted not by people deemed “nationalists” or “extremists,” but by mainstream conservatives.3 ******************

Notes 1 “Pompeo uses Obama as foil in sweeping Middle East speech,” Washington Post, January 10, 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/ national-security/pompeo-uses-obama-as-foil-in-sweeping-middleeast-speech/2019/01/10/9f5b314e-b532-4171-973d-a36dc8548ec2_story. html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.3b9de744a49e 2 Perry Anderson, The New Old World (London: Verso, 2009), 145. 3 Michael S. Merry, “Patriotism, History and the Legitimate Aims of American Education,” Educational Philosophy and Theory, 41, 4 (2009): 378–398.

5

The hell of war is non-Western

It was the U.S. civil war hero General William T. Sherman who wrote in 1862 that “War is hell.” Yet, Western press coverage of conflicts around the world leaves the overall impression that this applies only to wars prosecuted by people who lack Western values. There is no better illustration than the contrast in the coverage of Aleppo in Syria and Mosul in Iraq. It just happens that both cities have much in common besides experiencing major bombardment in the respective countries’ civil wars. As the second most important cities in the respective countries, Aleppo is to Syria what Mosul is to Iraq. Moreover, both are ancient cities that played major roles in world history and human civilization. And they continued to be custodians of notable artifacts from long-gone eras. Then there are the parallel circumstances that led to their respective bombardments. Aleppo was taken over by a rebel movement in Syria, and Mosul was seized by an Islamist group in Iraq. And their retaking by government forces took place back to back. Therefore, how the two campaigns were covered says much about how comparable experiences are interpreted as the “hell of war” or the absence of “Western values.” When in 2012, anti-government protests and repression escalated into a civil war in Syria, the government of President Bashar al-Assad found itself in a tenuous situation. The rebels occupied Aleppo, the country’s second largest city, and retaking it became a preoccupation. Assad’s allies Russia, Iran, and Lebanon’s Hezbollah joined in the effort. Jointly, they pummeled Aleppo by artillery and aerial attack. By December 2016, they had taken over much of the city, after much damage and casualty. The reporting and commentary conveyed the sense of horror, leaving little doubt that Assad’s forces and their allies were the villain. “Aleppo, one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world, has been all but

The hell of war is non-Western  39 obliterated by barrel bombs, bullets, chemical attacks and air strikes in the war,” states a story by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in an online post on December 16, 2016. “While Syrians fight for their lives to escape the city once known as the cradle of civilisation, many photographers have stayed to ensure the world [bears] witness to the razing of Aleppo.” The story draws considerably from dispatches by the French News Agency (AFP) and was illustrated with dramatic photos, including those showing severely injured children. In a blog for Vox.com on December 12, 2016, Zack Beauchamp was even more evocative. He acknowledged that “there are not, and never were, easy answers to the Syrian civil war,” then added this: But that has no bearing on the suffering of people in Aleppo. Men, women, and children are being slaughtered and forced from their homes by a regime that has demonstrated zero compassion for its own citizens. Iran and Russia are aiding in this atrocity. And everyone responsible appears to be getting away with it. The blog included a video insert that provided even more visceral support for the written words. It showed several bloody scenes, including of severely injured children. The video also included heart-wrenching accounts by civilians caught up in the war. At another front in October 2016, Iraqi government forces, backed by the United States and other allies, began the forbidding task of liberating Mosul from the Islamic State. ISIS had seized Mosul in June 2014 as part of its blitzing campaign to establish a caliphate that would stretch from eastern Syria to much of northern and western Iraq. By October 2016, the group had lost much of the territory, but retained its most prized possession, its proclaimed capital city of Mosul. So, they resorted to every technique to fortify and defend it. Still, the recapture of the eastern half of Mosul was relatively easy. Progress got bogged down when ISIS fighters amassed at the already dense Western side of the city across the Tigris. There, they dug tunnels and booby-trapped homes and vehicles along the routes of Iraqi forces’ advancement. The battle became very difficult and protracted. It involved bombardment by artillery, drones, and jetfighters. By the time the U.S.-backed forces fully recaptured the city in July 2017, there was much casualty and destruction. At least, 2,463 were killed, half of whom were civilians, according to United Nations estimates. An additional 1,661 were seriously injured. And more than 800,000 fled their homes, according to the BBC, citing the International Organization for Migration. Meanwhile, all five of

40  The hell of war is non-Western the bridges connecting eastern and western Mosul across the Tigris river were rendered unusable by U.S. airstrikes. The Western press had little access to Mosul in the course of the battle because journalists would risk being snatched by ISIS and probably beheaded. So, much of the reporting on the destruction was behind the frontline. Even then the videos were of apocalyptic scenes of destroyed buildings, wreckages, and desolate places. In one of the rare frontline reports, CNN interviewed an Iraqi commander and stray civilians. The commander talked of the dangers faced by his soldiers in pressing the war against a hardened and determined ISIS soldiers. His troops had sustained considerable casualty already, and he expected a lot more by the time they took over the center of Mosul. He pointed to some of the wrecked buildings and said they were booby-trapped by ISIS and served as hideouts for their snipers. The stray civilians who were interviewed stressed the hardship of life under ISIS and expressed relief that they had been liberated. The scope of the casualty and damage became evident after the Mosul was fully liberated. Even one year later, there were still corpses all over. “The bodies of both civilians and Islamic State militants can be found throughout Mosul, once Iraq’s second-largest city, abandoned in bombed-out buildings, tossed in roadside rubbish heaps or discarded in and around the Tigris River,” states the second paragraph in a story in USA Today on May 2, 2018. Though the story is quite evocative, there is no suggestion of atrocity. Quite the contrary, the story indirectly places the blame on ISIS. “The sight and smell of these corpses is a constant reminder of our darkest days,” the story quotes a young pharmacist who was helping to clean the debris as saying. “A large number of bodies are scattered in the houses, gardens, squares and even in some of our mosques.” In April 2019, the BBC provided this update: It has been almost two years since the jihadist group Islamic State was defeated in Iraq’s second city of Mosul following a battle that left thousands of civilians dead. Large parts of the city [have] yet to be rebuilt and residents are growing increasingly frustrated. Unlike the stories about the battle itself, there is an implicit blame here on the lack of Western values. While acknowledging the magnitude of the task of rebuilding Mosul, the writer blames corruption, ineptitude, and religious rivalry for the continued difficulties. Then she ended the article on this summation: “Poverty, corruption, unemployment and an increasingly angry population with sectarian divisions bubbling

The hell of war is non-Western  41 underneath the surface all contributed to the IS takeover of Mosul five years ago. And unless those root causes are tackled, IS will remain a threat.”

Biafra and the African Europeans Coverage of the Nigerian civil war (1967–1970) provides another stark example of the storyline that war is hell only in the absence of Western values. The war took place roughly a century after the U.S. civil war (1861–1865). And the circumstances were remarkably similar. Not long after Nigeria’s independence from Britain in 1960, regional differences and rivalry deteriorated into political bloodshed. A civil war ensued after the Eastern Region—which bore the brunt of the bloodshed— seceded and declared itself the Republic of Biafra. As with all civil wars—America’s included—it was an existential war that saw both sides fighting ferociously. Accordingly, there was much casualty on both sides. However, because the war was fought mostly within the secessionist territory, people of the Eastern Region sustained the most casualty. It also happened that a majority of the federal side of the war were Muslim, while the Eastern Region was almost entirely Christian, especially Catholic. Not surprisingly, public opinion in the Western world weighed heavily in favor of the secession. And the Western press largely covered the war through that prism. The federal side of the conflict was portrayed as feudal, brutish, and incompetent. And the secessionist side was cast as aspirants to Western values. Time magazine was especially effusive in its praise of the Igbo, the dominant ethnic group in Eastern Nigeria and leaders of the secession. According to the magazine, the Igbo became successful because they were receptive to “Western values and education.” They were at once the “Jews of Africa” because of their capabilities and industry and the “Irish of Africa” because they are “ready-witted, strong-willed … with a burning sense of patriotism for their own.” In contrast, Nigeria’s other ethnic groups—especially, the Hausa/ Fulani and the Yoruba, who anchored the federal side of the conflict— embodied African values. Time described the Hausa/Fulani as haughty Muslims, who lived in mud houses, were resistant to progress, and were led by reactionary emirs. The Yoruba were “a tribe known for its profusion of gods … and joie de vivre” and given to “endless draughts of pungent palm-wine.”1 Coverage of the war reflected the evident cultural affinity. Early in the war, secessionist troops took over the Midwestern Region in

42  The hell of war is non-Western a lightning operation that caught everyone by surprise. Their success was attributed to Sandhurst, the British military school where several Nigerian officers were educated. When federal forces retook the Midwest and began to advance into the Eastern Region, their success was attributed largely to African brutishness. It didn’t matter that several of their officers were also trained at Sandhurst. Massive shelling before infantry advance is a common practice in war. Yet when the federal side engaged in it, Time (August 23, 1968) claimed that “such tactics, or the attitude behind them, are not confined to Nigeria’s federal troops; they are commonplace with most African armies.” This claim derives from a broader theme. In summarizing the political violence that precipitated a military coup and led to the civil war, Time (January 28, 1966) declared: “To the African mind, a political group is either for the government or against it, and if the latter, it has no business existing.” By the 1990s, such a stark contrast between Europhilic civility and African barbarism had eased somewhat. Even the Hutu-led pogrom against the Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994 was covered with less emphasis on primordial tendency and more on political rivalry. The shift became more pronounced in the coverage of Kenya’s post-election bloodshed in 2008, the Darfur crisis, and the protracted civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. But the storyline of Africans’ uniquely savage behaviors in wars remains quite entrenched. For people lacking “Western values,” the hell of war is rarely inherent in the wars but in themselves. ******************

Note 1 The excerpts are all from Minabere Ibelema’s “Tribes and Prejudice: Coverage of the Nigerian Civil War,” in Beverly Hawk (ed.), Africa’s Media Image (New York: Praeger, 1992), 77–93.

6

All things decadent are Western

In April 2019, Brunei—the predominantly Muslim country in Southeast Asia—adopted one of the most draconian penal codes in the world. The new law called for the death penalty for offenses such as robbery, adultery, sodomy, rape, and insulting Prophet Mohammad. It also prescribed amputation for theft and public flogging for abortion. About the same time, several U.S. states were enacting draconian laws to restrict or, in effect, ban abortion. By May 2019, eight states had adopted such laws: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, and Utah. And several more states were in the process of legislating such laws. The Alabama law was the most draconian of all. It stipulated up to 99 years of imprisonment for any physician who performed abortion for any reason other than to save the expectant mother’s life or to remove a non-viable embryo. The rationale was that an embryo becomes a human being as soon as its heartbeat can be detected. Technically, that’s about six weeks after conception, just when women begin to sense that they may have conceived. The draconian laws in countries as politically and culturally disparate as Brunei and the United States are only a sample of the universal contestations over values. In the United States, the laws spurred massive protests and opponents set their eyes on the courts to reverse them. Such laws were ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in its Roe vs. Wade decision in 1973. But the court had turned markedly conservative by 2019, especially with President Donald Trump’s appointment of two conservation justices: Neil Gorsuch and  Brett Kavanaugh. So, anti-abortion legislators in various states aimed to give the court an opportunity to overturn itself. It didn’t. Meanwhile, in Brunei—a country that has been under the authoritarian rule of Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah since 1968—objections to the newly announced draconian codes could only be muted. Open challenges would be swiftly repressed. Even then, it may well be that the

44  All things decadent are Western Sultan announced the new code in response to quiet protests over the trajectory of the country’s values. The Sultan and some members of his royal family had been notorious for indulgent lifestyles. The new penal code may have been intended for image repair. CNN’s Rebecca Wright recounts this lifestyle in an article posted on CNN.com in April 2019. Among her sources was Bridget Welsh, an associate professor of political science at John Cabot University and a specialist on Asia. “The sultan of Brunei and his brother Prince Jefri were known for their harems, their excesses in terms of purchasing of cars, their sexual exploits,” Wright quotes Welsh as saying. “All of these women were coming into Brunei in the 1980s, so the image of them being the playboys was very prevalent.”1 In splurging, nothing perhaps could top the sultan’s two-week 50th birthday extravaganza in 1996 that was estimated to have cost $25 million. Among the performers was the hip-thrusting and crotchgrabbing Michael Jackson. Though not nearly at the same level of lavishness, such indulgent lifestyles are commonplace in the Arab/Muslim world. Yet to their conservative critics, decadence is a Western value. It covers the gamut of vices and presumed vices: loose sexual mores, female immodesty, civic unruliness, and disrespect for the natural order.

Western values as decadence The view of the West as quintessentially decadent is encapsulated in a satirical article that ran in the South Wales Echo in December 2011 with the headline, “‘Civilised’ by our Western values.” It was part of the debate in the United States and Europe on when to withdraw forces from Afghanistan following the post-9/11 invasion in September 2001. The writer, Derek Hanlin, suggested as benchmarks the following transformations of the Afghan society: The elders are put into old people’s homes and left in urine-soaked sheets for days. Women are free to roam the streets in the early hours of the morning drunk, shouting obscenities and having sex in shop doorways. Families are broken up…. The Catholic Church, the Church of England and the Welsh Baptists all invade the country with their missionaries and the mosques are turned into bingo halls. Hanlin was obviously being satirical in the mold of Jonathan Swift. Yet his benchmarks approximate the conception of “Western values”

All things decadent are Western  45 by its critics. It is the non-Western dimension of cultural chauvinism. Just as the West appropriates political and civic virtues to itself, non-Westerners claim social and cultural superiority. The negative conception of Western values paradoxically co-exists with an envious and even covetous attitude toward the West. Western countries are among the most developed and industrialized countries, they have the most advanced economies and stable political systems, and they are the trailblazers in technological innovations. Accordingly, they are magnets for the youth in developing countries and people seeking safe havens from wars, civil unrest, and poverty. But to critics, what the West offers comes with the baggage of decadence and cultural decay. Not surprisingly, the harshest critics of “Western values” in both the political and cultural dimensions are despots and clerics. But they are not alone. Civic groups, social critics, and intellectuals also routinely express their discontents. They question whether “Western values” are good values and whether they are appropriate for their respective societies. Critics are particularly concerned that the West is pressuring non-Western countries to accept social practices that the West itself only recently began to accept. And most of such practices still engender unease and opposition, sometimes by a substantial majority of the citizens of the Western countries. Generally speaking, it is rarely a compliment in the non-Western world to be labeled Westernized. It connotes a range of uncomplimentary characteristics such as being aloof, brash, arrogant, rude, uncultured, and disrespectful of social norms. In China, people deemed Westernized are called bananas, meaning they are yellow outside and white inside. The term is derogatory in much the same way as the word “Oreo” as used by African-Americans to describe people who are “black outside but white inside.”

The Muslim invective Not surprisingly, the most disparaging characterization of Western culture has been from Islamic clerics and scholars. Jaafar Sheikh Idris, a renowned Islamist scholar, is one of the harshest critics. Idris holds a Ph.D. in philosophy that was jointly awarded by the University of Khartoum and the University of London. In publications and presentations, the Sudanese-born academic has attributed Western values to four influences: Greek polytheism, the Enlightenment, Roman civilization, and Judaism/Christianity.2 And to him the influences were all negative in different ways.

46  All things decadent are Western Greek polytheism gave rise to “obscenity,” a term that Idris uses to cover the gamut of social practices such as immodest dressing, nudity, prostitution, homosexuality, pornography, and obscenity in its legal conception. These are all offshoots of ancient Greeks’ lax sexual morality, as evidenced by the proliferation of status of naked people, Idris argues. The Enlightenment engendered liberal democracy, which provides the environment for “obscenity.” Roman civilization begot Western imperialism, and Judaism/Christianity spurred the sense of superiority, from the Biblical notion of a chosen people. Correspondingly, the most apocalyptic view of Western values is from the Islamic Republic of Iran, with which the United States has been in conflict since 1979.3 In a speech in September 2014, the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamene’I, asserted that the West and its influence are in decline and attributed the decline to cultural decadence. “The increasing moral and spiritual crisis in the West is one of the reasons that have undermined the moral dominance of the West,” Khamene’I said in a broadcast transcribed and translated from Farsi by the BBC (September 5, 2014). The feeling of emptiness, feeling absurd and mental insecurity, especially among the young and every person, in the West is its clear sign. Also collapse of families, the basis of family in the West is collapsed seriously, so that it leaves such results. Khamene’I added that Westerners are having second thoughts about aspects of Western values such as feminism and the secular society. People are increasingly yearning for spirituality, he said. Still, he identified other values that are certain to bring down the West. “For example, homosexuality in the West becomes a value, and being against homosexuality becomes an anti-value,” Khamene’I said. The moral atmosphere of the West has gone in this direction. Of course, it would not be stopped. It will go forward and it will end to somewhere very bad and indecent.… When a moral system goes downhill, it cannot be prevented and it has no other destiny except collapse. Unstated, of course, is that Khamene’I sees Islamic values as superior and ascendant. As Fawas A. Gerges, an international relations scholar, put it, “Some Islamists regularly denounce the spiritual corruption of the West and proudly affirm the vitality and unchanging nature of Islam.”4 Gerges wrote this before al-Qaeda’s “September

All things decadent are Western  47 11” attack in 2001, that is before Islamist radicalism took a decidedly sinister turn. Had he written it afterward, he might have dropped the qualifier “some.”

Africans say no Of all the cultural values most negatively associated with the West, none evokes more visceral rejection than the growing acceptance of homosexuality and related sexual lifestyles. And that goes beyond the Muslim world, as President Barack Obama found out when he visited Africa in 2013. By happenstance, Obama was on his way to the continent when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was unconstitutional. The law forbade federal agencies from recognizing same-sex marriages for purposes of benefits. Obama’s first destination was Senegal, a 95 percent Muslim country. During a joint press conference with Senegalese President Macky Sall the following day, a reporter asked Obama what he thought of Senegal’s criminalization of homosexuality. As is characteristic of Obama, he began his response by expressing respect for diversity in cultural values. “I want the African people just to hear what I believe, and that is that every country, every group of people, every religion (has) different customs, different traditions,” he began. “And when it comes to people’s personal views and their religious faith, etc., I think we have to respect the diversity of views that are there.” Then he made a beeline to his central point: “But when it comes to how the state treats people, how the law treats people, I  believe that everybody has to be treated equally. I don’t believe in discrimination of any sort.” Obama’s Senegalese host politely but sharply disagreed. “Senegal, as far as it is concerned, is a very tolerant country which does not discriminate in terms of inalienable rights of the human being. But we are still not ready to decriminalize homosexuality,” Sall responded. Then the Senegalese president added what is in part a contradiction and in part an acknowledgement that things may change in the future: “I’ve already said it in the past…while we have respect for the rights of homosexuals—but for the time being, we are still not ready to change the law.” Sall turned Obama’s own preamble against him: These issues are all societal issues basically, and we cannot have a standard model which is applicable to all nations, all

48  All things decadent are Western countries—you said it, we all have different cultures. We have different religions. We have different traditions. And even in countries where this has been decriminalized and homosexual marriage is allowed, people don’t share the same views. These words resonated with a vast majority of the Senegalese people. In fact, Sall was hailed in much of Africa and the non-Western world. Newspaper headlines declared him a hero, as did chatter on the streets. When Obama made a second round of visits to Africa about two years later in July 2015, it was again in the shadow of another landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court regarding same-sex relations. In June that year the court furthered its DOMA decision by declaring same-sex marriage a constitutional right. The decision caused considerable anxiety in Africa and elsewhere. The fear was that this new order would be pressed upon African countries in the manner of Obama’s comment in Senegal in 2013. To pre-empt this, Obama’s host countries issued warnings against such advocacy in advance of his arrival. Such broad-based attitude toward lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) lifestyles is not unique to African and Islamic countries. It holds true also in much of Asia, South America, the Caribbean, and even Eastern Europe.

Pressure and backlash The West sees the resistance as a challenge. Some Western countries— especially the United States under Obama and the United Kingdom under British Prime Minister David Cameron—elevated LBGT rights to prominence as a foreign policy issue. As the Associated Press put it in a June 28, 2014, story, “President Barack Obama has taken the U.S. gay rights revolution global, using American embassies across the world to promote a cause that still divides his own country.” Before then, at a meeting of the Commonwealth heads of government in 2011, Cameron threatened that the U.K. would withhold aid from countries that did not liberalize their policy towards homosexuality. The diplomatic offensive furthered the perception that the LGBT lifestyle is a Western cultural phenomenon. So, the offensive largely backfired and provoked a backlash. Critics compare it with the “gunboat diplomacy” of the colonial era. Then, non-Western countries were forced to accept terms of trade and other relations under threat of invasion. Rather than the intended effect, the pressure produced widespread defiance and denunciation by African political leaders and

All things decadent are Western  49 commentators. Then Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe was especially caustic. During a lavish ceremony to observe his 88th birthday in 2012, he took pains to urge the youth to shun Western values, especially same-sex marriage. “We reject that outright and say to hell with you,” Mugabe said in a nationally televised address, referring to Western diplomats. “You are free as a man to marry a woman and that is what we follow. That’s what produced you and me. This kind of insanity is now part of [European and American] culture” (Associated Press, February 25, 2012). In another even more caustic comment, Mugabe mockingly invited Obama to come to visit Zimbabwe so that he could marry him. Some countries responded to the strong-arm diplomatic pressures by stiffening or instituting criminal laws against homosexuality. The Nigerian Senate, for example, hastily introduced a bill that called for 14 years of imprisonment for any public display of homosexuality, such as intimate kissing by persons of the same sex. The bill was signed into law in 2014. In Uganda, the law stipulates a life sentence for homosexuality, and that was a watering down from the death penalty. Elsewhere, some countries are a lot more circumspect in their laws. In Russia, for example, the law does not prohibit homosexuality per se, but forbids activities that “promote” homosexuality to children. Notable among such activities are LGBT rallies. But the law has been interpreted much more broadly. Before releasing Elton John’s biopic “Rocketman” in Russia in May 2019, for example, the distributors edited out all sex and kissing scenes between men. Though the movie about the gay pop star is rated for viewers 18 and older, Paramount and its Russian distributor explained that the scenes were cut to comply with Russian law. The pressure and pushback are creating an odd alignment against Western crusaders for LGBT rights. Because of the adverse impact, some spokespeople for the LGBT communities in these countries have criticized the strong-arm tactic. “It is a colonial approach,” Rauda Morcos, “a prominent Palestinian lesbian activist” is quoted by the AP (June 28, 2014) as saying. “In cases where it was tried, it didn’t help local communities and maybe made things even worse.” Morcos argued that it would be much more effective to let local gay communities assert themselves in their cultural contexts.

Of pornography, prostitution, and miniskirts Along with homosexuality, other practices commonly attributed to Western values are pornography, prostitution, and immodest attires.

50  All things decadent are Western Pornography is especially of concern because it is associated with masturbation and infidelity. However, its consumption is deemed a form of deviancy by itself. Its distribution is a legal offense in most non-Western countries. And people are willing to tolerate considerable censorship if necessary to minimize access to pornographic material. According to a survey in China in 2008, four out of five people support Web censorship because of concern for pornography.5 As to prostitution, it too is said to be a Western value and is a crime in most non-Western countries. In some Islamic countries, it is punishable by death—death by stoning in some countries. Most other countries impose long prison sentences. Under domestic and diplomatic pressure, many countries began to lessen the penalties. But that has usually provoked controversies. Before 2012, for example, Vietnam had a rigid law against prostitution that imposed long prison sentences. Pressures for change resulted in a new law in 2012 that imposed fines rather than prison terms. The law was passed over stiff opposition by critics who saw it as capitulation to Western values. A news story distributed by the German wire service Deutsche Presse-Agentur concurred. The story stated that despite the opposition, the relaxation of the law reflected growing public acceptance of prostitution and other moral taboos such as sex outside of marriage. The writer credited this trend, at least in part, to Western influence. “Twenty years ago, Western values were seen as opposite to Eastern values, and there was no connection, but now the economy has opened,” the news agency quotes a civil right activist, Khuat Thi Oanh, as saying. “People have become more connected to Western values. In the same way, these values have become more desirable.” But to most Vietnamese, they are still very alien to their values. When Westerners tout Western values, these are usually not the characteristics they have in mind. ******************

Notes 1 Rebecca Wright, “Is the Sultan of Brunei Imposing Sharia Law to Clean Up His Family’s Image?” CNN, April 9, 2019. https://www.cnn. com/2019/04/09/asia/brunei-sultan-intl/index.html. 2 Jaafar Sheikh Idris, “Polytheism, Arrogance, and Obscenity: Elements in the Western Values,” paper presented at an Islamic conference in Kuwait, January 22–24, 2007. www.saaid.net.

All things decadent are Western  51 3 That was the year Iranian students led a grassroots Islamist revolution that toppled Shah Pahlavi, a close ally of the U.S. The students also held 52 U.S. embassy personnel hostage for 444 days. The Shah’s secular government was subsequently replaced by Islamist theocracy, with a hitherto exiled Ayatollah Khomeini as the “Supreme Leader.” 4 Fawaz A. Gerges, America and Political Islam: Clash of Cultures or Clash of Interests (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 4. 5 Cited in Kris Kristoff, “China Much Freer,” New York Times, August 24, 2008.

7

Immodest dressers and desecraters

One of the social practices most dubiously attributed to the West is immodest female dressing. It has provoked legislative action, assault on women, and intense debates in the African press. The prevailing view that it is Western is countered by traditional African practices. Yet, the debate goes on. In Nigeria, there has been a number of attempts at the state and federal levels to legislate a code of dressing. The two most notable attempts in the national legislature to curb “indecent dressing” were bills introduced in 2004 and 2008. Ironically, both bills were introduced by legislators from the more “Westernized” South, rather than the more conservative Muslim North. And the 2008 bill was introduced by a female legislator. Both bills were vigorously debated before being rejected. It was not for a lack of concern about immodest dressing by Nigeria’s young women, but because it was too complicated a matter to legislate on by a secular government. A major criticism of the bills was that they were intended to control women. “That the machinery of governance can be put into use in such ultimately flimsy and unimportant issues is a further indication of a systemic backing for sexual harassment, misogyny and the whole gamut,” Jibril Sado, an independent blogger, wrote in a letter to the editor (Punch, December 2, 2014). “Otherwise, pray, tell how to adjudge a man’s dress as decent or indecent?” Instead of banning provocative dresses, Sado would rather that the Muslim hijab and burqa be banned for security reasons. Nothing more widely sparked a debate on the matter of immodest dressing than the roughing up of a Kenyan woman in downtown Nairobi in November 2014. It sparked a debate not just in Kenyan papers, but in the broader African press. A columnist in Kenya’s leading newspaper, the Daily Nation, on November 12 condemned the act and warned the perpetrators not to impose their morality on others.

Immodest dressers and desecraters  53 The article generated 186 posts, the vast majority of which expressed similar outrage. However, there were also some posts that put the blame on the molested women and blamed their fashion style on Western values. One post read: “While no one has the right [to] strip a person in the streets, this incident speaks volumes about the levels of indecency among our young women who copy Western dress culture. Let our women mind their dressing period.” Two writers pointed to the irony of blaming skimpy clothing on Western values. “So my mother in 1960 when she was wearing a mini dress, block shoes and an afro she was indecent?” one posted. “So when my grannie was wearing only loincloth she was being immoral? … give us a break.” Excerpting from a preceding post, another reader added: “‘It’s the norm of Africans to dress decently.’ REALLY? So Rendille and Samburu gals don’t dress decently because they walk around bare-chested in their ‘hoods?” The reference is to two tradition-bound ethnic groups in two northern Kenyan villages. The debate in Kenya was joined by other Africans. The popular Nigerian daily The Punch, for example, ran three articles on the topic in a span of 27 days in November and December 2014. The first was a column on November 27 titled “How to treat a naked woman.” In it, columnist Abimbola Adelakun chided the Kenyan harassers and other like-minded people for misguided notions of African values and a lack of self-control. “It never fails to amuse how some folk paralyse themselves with nostalgia of an Africa that probably never existed,” Adelakun writes. “If a woman showed ‘skin’ in her self-presentation, a rabble of pontificates scream it is unAfrican forgetting that once upon a time, their African ancestors lived in unashamed Garden of Eden nakedness.” Adelakun argued that like Adam and Eve in the Biblical narrative, earlier Africans did not feel shame for being naked because they had not been so socially conditioned. Echoing the Kenyans, she wrote that modesty in dressing is a Victorian value that was introduced to Africa as one of the colonial instruments of conditioning the colonized. Adelakun then took the argument from the ethno-cultural to the feminist sphere. “There is something about realising that you can be imprisoned by the power of the passion between your own legs that could turn you into a bully,” she writes. For, if someone’s sexual expression does not have power over you, you would not fight to repress it. Those Kenyan men who did not hesitate to strip a woman naked did so because her dress choices activated their loins; and took over their senses.

54  Immodest dressers and desecraters Five days later, Jibril Sado wrote what was titled “a rejoinder,” though it was actually a concurrence. It stressed the broader issue of the status of women. “The problem with issues like the harassment of the Kenyan woman is that many social systems, especially in Africa and the Arab world, create an enabling environment for such acts to thrive,” Sado writes. “Increasingly, in these societies, the hypocritical patriarchy and other puritans seem to be trying to convince everyone that somehow there is something wrong with being a woman; that to be a woman is to be sub-human in some instances.” About three weeks later, on December 23, The Punch carried yet another rejoinder and this time it was decidedly a rejoinder. Without condoning the undressing of women for wearing skimpy dresses, Bunmi Aroyewun questioned the appropriateness of such attires and the wisdom in wearing them. She argued that as a matter of selfrespect, a woman should not advertise herself as a sexual object or encourage such objectification. “For crying out loud, why are women usually the object often depicted as representing seduction and sexual themes?” Aroyewun writes. Why do we allow ourselves to be subjugated by the society by dressing and dancing dishonourably on TV when the men dress corporately even at beaches? Why do we use ourselves as sexual appeal for men who eventually go away with all the benefits and the profits of the promos? For answers, Aroyewun points to “Western values”: “We seem to always want to emulate everything from the West without a reason to look back and sieve the grains from the chaff, the reverberation of which is ripping the society apart.” Were there scientific polls in Africa on the matter, it would probably show that public opinion is overwhelmingly on Aroyewun’s side. But that has not dissuaded young African women. Immodest attires remain commonplace from Nairobi to Lagos to Johannesburg.

Abusers of heritage, people, and nature In May 2019, American celebrity Kim Kardashian launched a line of body-slimming women’s wear called Kimono. Kimono happens to be the name of a loosely fitting traditional Japanese attire that is a fixture in the culture. Its appropriation by an American celebrity set off a social media storm of criticism. The Japanese in particular felt that their culture was being violated. “This is blasphemy against

Immodest dressers and desecraters  55 Japanese culture,” a Japanese journalist tweeted. “Can’t someone from kimono-related organizations protest? This is terrible.” Mayor Daisaku Kadokawa of Kyoto joined in the protest, though in more temperate terms. He released a letter he had sent to Kardashian imploring her to reconsider the choice of name. “Kimono is a traditional ethnic dress fostered in our rich nature and history with our predecessors’ tireless endeavors and studies, and it is a culture that has been cherished and passed down with care in our living,” Kadokawa writes. He was especially concerned that Kardashian had filed for copyrights to the name. Initially Kardashian was defiant. She would not change the name, she told the New York Times. She relented soon after, when the matter went viral on social media and the criticism intensified. In place of Kimono, she renamed the brand Skims Solutionwear. By then though, the appropriation had gone down as another example of the West’s disrespect for other cultures. In Kenya, at the turn of the 21st century, a group known as the African Millennium Renaissance expressed a similar concern regarding Western tourists. Among other things, they complained about the “desecration” of Mount Kenya. Initially, the group consisted of traditional healers and herbalists. But early in January 2000, they were joined by an ecumenical group of mainstream Catholics, Anglicans, Methodists, and Pentecostalists to hold week-long prayers and to proclaim Mount Kenya a national shrine. As reported by The Nation (Nairobi) of January 5, 2000, the coalition declared that “the mountain is sacred and should be set aside as a holy place for prayers…. The worshippers … also called for an end to littering and pollution of the mountain by tourists.” The coalition didn’t limit its campaign to the sanctity of Mount Kenya. It pursued a broader campaign against “Western values.” As The Nation reported, “Both the Christians and the traditionalists condemned use of contraceptives which they termed a western culture.” They asserted that Kenya and Africa would never progress without a purge of Western values. As The Nation paraphrased it: The worshippers noted that most of the evils and the poverty that has bedeviled Kenya and Africa started at the advent of colonialism. They called on all the African people to reject the western values saying unless they reverted to their past, they were doomed to remain poor. There is nothing in the story to explain how Western values impoverished Africa, but the question of whether colonialism helped or hurt Africa is one that scholars have long debated.

56  Immodest dressers and desecraters Across the ocean in the UK, two readers of the South Wales Echo similarly engaged in a related debate. It was sparked by Hanlin’s letter to the editor that satirically proposed saturation of Afghanistan with decadent “Western values.” A rebuttal by another reader, one Bryan D. Prescott, followed nine days later. Prescott argued that the social dysfunctions Hanlin listed as characterizing Western values are actually not Western values. “The growing problem of drink, drugs and promiscuity reflects the secularisation of society and the decline in Christian values and practices, as does the increase in abortion and divorce,” Prescott writes. I would suggest that criteria for success in Afghanistan might include: boys and girls attending school; honour killing of wives and daughters outlawed; women enjoying the same rights as men; stoning to death [of] adulterers banned; freedom of worship enshrined in law; and the government rules by consent of the people. In blaming secularization for the ills that are said to characterize the West, Prescott appears to share President Trump’s view that faith is integral to Western values. But then secularization is at the heart of liberal democracy, which the West claims as its own. It is so complicated!!! ******************

8

Contention not Confucian

A lot of people ask me what do we know about democracy, we live in a communist totalitarianism. We didn’t know much, but we did know democracy through a lack of democracy, lack of freedom. —Wu’er Kaixi, a leader of the pro-democracy movement that occupied Tiananmen Square in Beijing in May/June 1989 and was put down with armored tanks.

In July 2013, a Chinese government policy statement titled Document 9 began circulating among the general public. It was a point-by-point rejection of democratic practices, which it says are Western and at odds with Chinese values and interests. Accordingly, Document 9 prohibits the following “seven ills”: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

“Promoting Western Constitutional Democracy.” “Promoting ‘universal values’” “Promoting civil society.” “Promoting Neoliberalism.” “Promoting the West’s idea of journalism.” “Promoting historical nihilism.” “Questioning Reform.”

With one exception, these are reiterations of classical communist ideology. The exception, Prohibition #7, is a concession to advocates of reform. More pointedly, it is a warning to arch-conservatives who complained that the reforms were against the spirit of Mao Zedong’s Communist Revolution in 1949. The rest of the prohibitions are an affirmation of the revolution. The first rejects multi-party democracy and the system of checks and balances. Advocacy of these, it states, is an attempt to undermine

58  Contention not Confucian China’s socialist order. The second rejects the argument that democratic values, such as individual liberty and the right to free expression, are universal principles. It sees such a position as an attempt to weaken the theoretical foundation of Chinese communism. Correspondingly, the third prohibition is on the grounds that the activities of civil society are an attempt to make individual rights paramount and, therefore, superior to the authority of the state. Despite the economic liberalization that was underway in China at the time, the document still rejects promotion of “neoliberalism.” Thus, the fourth prohibition depicts it as an attempt to introduce unfettered capitalism, that is, complete privatization and marketization. In Prohibition #5, the document returns to matters of freedom of expression, specifically journalism. It characterizes the practice of press freedom and independence as “the West’s idea of journalism.” The ideal press system, it suggests, is one that is subject to “Party discipline.” All advocacies to the contrary are an offense. The prohibition of “historical nihilism” (Prohibition #6) is a final declaration of continued fidelity to Mao Zedong, the Communist Party’s founding chairman. Document 9 defines “historical nihilism” as any suggestion that Chinese communism was based on anything but sound scientific principles. In effect, any questioning of Chinese communist system was an offense. Document 9 was apparently intended as a reiteration of ideological tenets for the benefit of top party and government officials. But somehow it was obtained by dissidents and circulated. This infuriated the authorities. Probably because of his activism, dissident journalist Gao Yu immediately became a suspect. He was arrested, “tried,” and sentenced to seven years imprisonment for leaking “state secret.” That a policy statement that revealed nothing new about communist rule in China was a matter of secrecy is quite revealing. It says much about the collective psychology of the Communist Party. It apparently considered the document too stridently anti-democratic for public consumption. Like other autocratic governments, it wanted to have its cake and eat it. On the one hand, it was bent on enforcing communist doctrines. On the other hand, it wanted to allow itself the latitude to pay lip-service to freedom and liberty. China’s recent history at the time also provides insight into the necessity for Document #9 and the caginess with which it was handled. To begin with, President Xi Jinping was just elected General Secretary of the Communist Party and President of China, respectively, the preceding months. Document #9 was his formal declaration of his leadership commitments.

Contention not Confucian  59 Moreover, the specter of the Tiananmen Square uprising in June 1989 and its violent suppression still haunted the Chinese leadership. The student-led mass protests that called for political liberalization was the most potent internal threat the communist government had faced since it came to power in a violent revolution in 1949. The conservative elements of the party/government were so fearful of losing power that they deployed hundreds of armored tanks and thousands of soldiers to crush the protests. Though government officials put the death toll at less than 300, independent estimates put it at no fewer than 10,000.1 Chinese authorities have since seen to it that every evidence of the massacre was scrapped from the square and erased from official Chinese history. Today, Tiananmen Square is a tourist attraction that glistens with flowers. In a 30th anniversary story in June 2019, a CBS correspondent Elizabeth Palmer showed photos of the bloody images to a random selection of young Chinese visitors. None knew about the incident. Some even asked in what country it took placed. But while the government has so successfully “erased” the history of the massacres, government officials are still haunted by the specter. They are still frightened by the prospects of a similar uprising. And just as he was becoming China’s supreme leader, events in some provinces reminded Xi that the possibility of a repeat of the Tiananmen uprising was not farfetched. Just weeks before Document #9 was issued, a government censor had sparked protests at a weekly newspaper in the southern city of Guangzhou. The censor had watered down an article in the Southern Weekend that called for constitutionalism in government. The paper was also part of a campaign calling on officials to disclose the sources of their wealth. These were all a part of continuing internal pressure for political liberalization and transparency. When the protests spilled into the streets of Guangzhou, Xi, and his fellow hardliners were alarmed. The issuing of Document #9 was partly necessitated by that and similar protests. Among other things, the document was apparently Xi’s way of letting fellow communist leaders know that he had no inclination toward political reform. But then, he didn’t want to spell that out too bluntly to internal and external crusaders for democratization. There was probably the fear of a pushback that could result in another Tiananmen Square-type of uprising. As with that uprising, the Chinese officials blamed the United States for the Guangzhou protests. “Western anti-China forces led by the United States have joined in one after the other, and colluded with

60  Contention not Confucian dissidents within the country to make slanderous attacks on us in the name of so-called press freedom and constitutional democracy,” the New York Times (August 19, 2013) quotes Zhang Guangdong, a government propagandist, as saying. “They are trying to break through our political system, and this was a classic example.” Accordingly, issuance of the document was accompanied by a crackdown on dissent. Reform activists were detained, and access to domestic news on the web was constrained. Meanwhile, most state-owned media began a campaign against constitutionalism and “American influence.” In May 2019, about six years after Document 9 was released, China was again faced with a mass demonstration for democracy. This time, it was in the semi-autonomous city-state of Hong Kong. Until July 1997, Hong Kong was under British sovereignty. That year the British bowed to Chinese pressure and relinquished the sovereignty. The transfer agreement stipulated, however, that Hong Kong would be “a special administrative unit of China” and retain its democratic character for at least 50 years. But even with 28 years before the expiration of the agreement, Hong Kong residents were concerned that the Chinese government was already—and increasingly—encroaching on their liberties. In effect, they wanted everything that Document 9 forbids. But that was not to be. In June 2020, the Chinese parliament passed a sweeping law that criminalized pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong and gave Chinese law enforcement direct police power to quail the protests. The law was quickly implemented early in July, and the crackdown began. Again, Chinese officials blamed the West for instigating and encouraging the protesters. Usually, China singled out the United States, but this time it was Britain. Ironically, the Western press’s characterization of democracy as Western lends credence to China’s finger-pointing. Western press coverage of the Hong Kong and similar protests invariably state explicitly or implicitly that the protesters are pushing for Western values. Even coverage of Document 9 and the related repression says as much. For example, a New York Times story on August 19, 2013, carries the headline, “China Takes Aim at Western Ideas.” In the story, the paper refers to the reformists as advocates of “Western-style economic changes” and “Western-inspired notions of media independence and civic participation.” It all harkens back to Doug Sanders’ point that the notion of Western values is a double-edged sword. As he wrote in Toronto’s Globe and Mail of August 23, 2014, “If you want to identify the most harmful idea

Contention not Confucian  61 in the world, it would be hard to avoid the phrase ‘Western values.’” Sanders noted that democracy is not anymore Western than is communism. After all, he argued, communism is based on the political ideology propounded by two German philosophers, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Wu’er Kaixi, one of the leaders of the Tiananmen Square rebellion, concurs with Saunders. In an interview during the 30th anniversary of the rebellion, he suggested that the democratic impulse is innate in everyone. “A lot of people ask me what do we know about democracy, we live in a communist totalitarianism,” said Kaixi, who was still in exile in Taiwan. “We didn’t know much, but we did know democracy through a lack of democracy, lack of freedom.” That may well be the reason that even Xi’s government wanted to keep Document 9 secret. It certainly explains why monarchies such as Jordan and theocracies such as Iran claim to be democratic, but in their own way. And they bristle when their democratic credentials are questioned by the West. Sometimes they complain that the West wants to impose its own coloration of democracy on them. Other times they fault the West for its own deficiencies and accuse Westerners of hypocrisy.

The Kagame doctrine Rwandan President Paul Kagame is especially strident in rejecting Western claims to democratic ethos. As political leaders go, Kagame has to have one of the most checkered resumes. Before his presidency, Rwanda had experienced recurrent ethnic clashes between the majority Hutu and the politically dominant minority Tutsi. Himself a Tutsi, he came to power through an insurgency that killed the Hutu President, Juvenal Habyarimana, and sacked his government. Yet, he has managed to bring tenuous peace and progress to the formerly moribund country. But how Kagame attained this feat has been an issue. To begin with, he came to power in 1994 in the wake of one of the worst pogroms in the modern era. Though his insurgent soldiers didn’t carry out the pogrom, they played a role in triggering it. With political tensions simmering, his soldiers apparently shot down President Habyarimana’s plane as it approached to land in Kigali, the capital city. This triggered the bloodletting by the Hutu against the Tutsi. By the time Kagame’s rebels fought their way into Kigali, an estimated 800,000 Tutsi had been killed. In a politically astute gesture, Kagame installed a Hutu associate, Pasteur Bizimungu, president while he took the title of vice president.

62  Contention not Confucian In reality though, it was Kagame who wielded the power. About six years later, Bizimungu resigned to protest the stacking of the cabinet with the Tutsi. Kagame formally ascended to the post he had held all along for practical purposes. Two years later Bizimungu was arrested, tried, and imprisoned supposedly for plotting to overthrow the government. He was subsequently pardoned and released after seeking Kagame’s clemency. Such has been the fate of Kagame’s opponents and critics. “Since he took the reins of this small east African country after the Rwandan genocide in 1994, he has become increasingly authoritarian, cracking down on freedom of expression and making it impossible for political opponents to organize,” the New York Times editorialized on January 11, 2016. And that’s the more benign forms of repression. Kagame’s government hunted down even dissidents who went on self-exile. In February 2010, Kayumba Nyamwasa, the former chief of staff of the army and a founding member of the opposition Rwanda National Congress, fled to South Africa. Barely four months later, he was shot and seriously wounded in an assassination attempt. Then in March 2014 armed men invaded his residence in Johannesburg. He was not at home— purposefully or fortuitously. Kagame’s former intelligence officer Patrick Karegeya wasn’t so lucky. Karegeya fled to South Africa in 2006, after falling out with Kagame. On New Year’s Day in 2014, he was found strangled in a hotel room in Johannesburg where he had gone to meet a Rwandan businessman. Following the second attempt on Nyamwasa’s life, the South African government expelled three Rwandan diplomats and a Burundian envoy, whom the government said it had linked to the attacks. The government also issued a public warning to Rwanda to cease the assassination campaign. According to a BBC.com report on March 7, 2014, the assassination campaign was worldwide. “Rwandan dissidents in several Western countries, including the UK and US, say local security agents have warned them of plots to kill them,” the BBC reports. While denying specific cases of assassination and attempts, Kagame and his aides vowed in public statements that dissidents were traitors and would be dealt with as such. What raised the most concern about Kagame’s human rights record was the fate of Rwandans who fled the country as Kagame’s insurgents took power. According to a United Nations report in October 2010,

Contention not Confucian  63 the government’s soldiers massacred tens of thousands of Hutu refugees in neighboring Congo and buried them in shallow graves. In Rwanda itself, there is a parallel, though more benign, ruthlessness in handling offenders. As the New York Times sums it up in an article in its May 1, 2010, issue: Nearly 900 beggars, homeless people and suspected petty thieves, including dozens of children, have recently been rounded up from the nation’s neatly swept streets and sent — without trial or a court appearance — to [Iwawa Island a] little-known outpost. They will spend up to three years here being ‘rehabilitated,’ learning skills like bricklaying, hairdressing and motorcycle maintenance. Such spartan and peremptory discipline has had its benefits, as The Times also summed up in the report: Under President Paul Kagame, this country, which exploded in ethnic bloodshed [in 1994], is now one of the safest, cleanest and least corrupt nations on the continent. The capital, Kigali, is not ringed by sprawling slums, and carjackings — a deadly problem in many African cities — are virtually unheard of here. The roads are smoothly paved; there is national health insurance; neighborhoods hold monthly cleanups; the computer network is among the best in the region; and the public fountains are full of water, not weeds. All of this has been accomplished in one of the world’s poorest countries. To many Rwandans then, Kagame is a hero. A referendum was held in December 2015 on whether to change the constitution to allow him to run for a third term, after 17 years in office. According to the Rwandan electoral commission, 98 percent of voters voted in favor. In the presidential election that followed about two years later, in August 2017, 99 percent of the voters voted for Kagame. But much of that is actually window dressing. With the violent suppression and marginalization of the opposition, it is hard to tell how many Rwandans truly wanted to keep Kagame in power. Carina Tertsakian, Human Rights Watch, told Bloomberg news in April 2015, that is, before the referendum: “It’s actually very, very difficult for opposition parties to function in a meaningful way. In reality, the situation in Rwanda cannot be described as democracy in the true sense of the term.” In effect, Kagame has ruled Rwanda very much by the principles of China’s Document 9, sans the communist ideology.

64  Contention not Confucian

Kagame turns the table So, along with Rwanda’s material progress under Kagame, his human rights record has characterized his leadership. Yet, he bristles when confronted with it—usually by Western critics. Accordingly, when a reporter for the French TV network France24 questioned him in June 2019 about that record, he seized the opportunity to turn the tables on the West. To begin with, he said, criticism of his human rights record is “rubbish” and “ridiculous.” He accused the West of arrogance and having a “superiority complex.” Alluding to Africans’ fight for independence from European colonialists, Kagame said: You think you are the only ones who respect human rights, and all others are about violating human rights. No, we’ve fought for human rights and freedoms for our people much better than you people who keep talking about this nonsense. Referring to ongoing developments in Europe and the United States, Kagame said Western countries are abusing the human rights of refugees and immigrants. “Europe is violating people’s rights with this problem of people being bundled and sent back to sink in the Mediterranean and so many people being mistreated in your own country,” Kagame said. Kagame also could have compared his leadership of post-genocide Rwanda with America’s war against terrorism. In a span of seven years, both countries suffered national traumas that substantially affected civil liberties in both countries. Kagame’s case has already been recounted above. There are some parallels with America’s. The September 11 (2001) attack by al-Qaeda was readily the most traumatic incident in American life since the Japanese attack of Pearl Harbor in 1941. In the campaign to track down and eliminate al- Qaeda and Islamic State terrorists, the United States has spared no rod. A Senate study publicized in December 2014 documented the various forms of torture used to seek to extract confessions from suspects. The Washington Post’s (December 9, 2014) lead on the report says it describes “levels of brutality, dishonesty and seemingly arbitrary violence that at times brought even agency employees to moments of anguish.” The torture included sleep deprivation, water-boarding, the thrusting of brooms into suspects’ anus, and the euphemistically termed extra-ordinary rendition. Under “rendition,” suspects were abducted and flown to remote territories of the world and held

Contention not Confucian  65 incommunicado. Some were ultimately handed over to regimes that would “neutralize” them. And some never made it out alive. When the number of suspects in the dragnet surged, the United States established a special prison for them in Guantanamo Bay. There, they were in a legal vacuum: neither prisoners of war nor regular prisoners. Neither the Geneva Conventions nor U.S. laws applied to them. So, the innocent suffered the same fate as the liable. And given that the threshold for being a terrorist suspect was so low, a large number of the detainees were probably people who were presumed guilty for being at the wrong place. Anthony D. Romero of the American Civil Liberties Union and journalist Dina Temple-Raston recount some specific ordeals in this regard in their book In Defense of Our America. One case is that of Khaled El-Masri, a German citizen and Lebanese by birth. He was heading for vacation in Macedonia, when, at the request of the CIA, he was abducted and turned over to the agency. He was blindfolded and ear-padded and flown to a secret prison in Afghanistan where he spent the next five months. During that period, he was subjected to extensive interrogation and torture, including being “locked in a small, dirty, cold concrete cell.”2 In the end, the CIA determined that he was innocent. It was a case of mistaken identity. But if El-Masri thought that his ordeal was over, he was mistaken. Rather than being released to his family, he was “blindfolded, handcuffed, chained to the seat of a plane, flown to Albania, and—without explanation—abandoned on a hillside at night.”3 The torture program was apparently abandoned after its disclosure stirred much controversy. Meanwhile, the United States has sustained a drone attack campaign that has regularly decimated terrorist networks in the Middle East and parts of Africa. From various accounts, the drones are regularly on the watch or can be deployed in a moment’s notice. And they are lethal. The problem has been that even with the greatest care, their casualties have included innocent family members, including children. Sometimes, the wrong intelligence—or its misapplication—has resulted in the exclusive loss of innocent lives. In any case, President George W. Bush had asserted that he did not feel bound by any law. And his Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, had authored a memo in which he described the Geneva Convention as “quaint” and “obsolete.” These are the realities that Kagame alludes to when he reacts with indignation to questions about his human rights records. They are some of the reasons he accuses the West of a “superiority complex.”

66  Contention not Confucian And he is not alone. The view that the West over-estimates its own libertarianism is widely held by non-Westerners ranging from bloggers to academics. Ali A. Mazrui, then director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies at the State University of New York at Binghamton, wrote extensively in rejection of the notion of Western exceptionalism in human rights.4 He argued that infringements for which the West now criticizes other countries were the norm in the West until recently. Among other things, he cited the examples of women’s and LGBT rights. He noted that it wasn’t until the 1920s that American women were granted the right to vote. And LGBT lifestyles were not accorded legal legitimacy until the 21st century. And then there is the view that the West’s campaigns for human rights are highly selective and self-serving. Critics note that governments that are in adversarial relationship with the West tend to be regularly chastised for civil rights infringements and the friendly ones get away with the same. The Abu Dhabi daily Al Khaleej ran a frontpage editorial to this effect on December 14, 2014. The editorial titled “On American values” (in Arabic) says that the U.S. government advertises itself as the world’s protector of human rights, but in reality, it is on a quest for hegemony.5 Earlier on in May, a blog in Islamway.net with no byline made much the same point. “America is a country driven by its own interests, not values and ideals,” the blogger wrote. “There is no place for American values when it comes to diplomatic practice. … The policy is opportunistic and pragmatic to serve their interests.”6 It is improbable that Kagame, Mazrui, and the Muslim bloggers truly believe that their countries are at par with the United States in the practice of human rights. The target of their argument is the notion of exceptionalism. Between the First Amendment and Document #9, there is much political gradation. And despite their seeming absoluteness, the principles they embody are quite elastic in practice. ******************

Notes 1 “Tiananmen Square Protest Death Toll ‘was 10,000,’” BBC, December 23, 2017. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-42465516 2 Anthony D. Romero and Dina Temple-Raston, In Defense of Our America: The Fight for Civil Liberties in the Age of Terror (New York: William Morrow, 2007), 69. 3 Romero and Temple-Raston, In Defense of Our America.

Contention not Confucian  67 4 A summary of his arguments may be found in Ali A. Mazrui, “Islamic and Western Values,” Foreign Affairs, 76, 5 (1997), 118–132. 5 Information courtesy of Muhammad Alqhtani, a Saudi graduate student in communication studies at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. 6 Information from Alqhtani.

9

As democracies turn

In a letter to a friend in January 1787 on the essence of democracy, America’s third President, Thomas Jefferson, paid the ultimate compliment to the press: The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.1 Much as President Abraham Lincoln didn’t think his Gettysburg address would be long remembered, Jefferson probably never thought these words would become public, let alone continue to resonate more than 230 years later. Yet, they couldn’t be more pertinent in the America—and the world—of 2020. From 2016 to 2020, the United States had a president who took the diametrically opposite stance. President Donald Trump repeatedly declared the press “an enemy of the people.” And he sought to propagate that view by repeating it, as though a matter of habit, in tweets and remarks. He termed every news that was not to his liking “fake news,” extending the label even to the most respected news operation in the United States, the New York Times. Trump even sent an ominous “cease and desist” letter to CNN demanding that the network withdraw and apologize for a news story on an opinion poll. The offense was that the poll had him substantially trailing rival Joseph Biden in voter preference in the presidential election of 2020. So, Jefferson and Trump couldn’t differ more in their view of the press. In choosing the press over government, Jefferson wasn’t expressing disdain for the latter. After all, he was active in political leadership

As democracies turn  69 through much of his adult life. He was only extolling the free press as the pulse of democracy. It is in that spirit that this chapter examines press freedom around the world as a comparative measure of commitment to democracy. Over the years, various organizations have developed indices for comparing countries in this regard. Most notable are Freedom House and Reporters Without Borders (or RSF, the French acronym). Of the two, RSF’s index is the more ideologically neutral as it is determined primarily on the basis of infractions against the press. Though limited as a measure of the robustness of press systems, it provides much insight into how countries fluctuate in their democratic ethos with changing situations. And that’s without regard for regions. In general, Northern European countries dominate RSF’s top rankings; South and East Asian and Middle Eastern countries cluster at the bottom; and African, Central, and South American countries occupy the middle range. But countries don’t necessarily conform to regional patterns, nor do they always approximate a giving ranking. When the RSF index was first released in October 2002, the United States was ranked 17 among the 139 countries measured. By 2005, however, it had plummeted to 44th out of 167 countries. And in 2019 it was further down at 48th out of 180 countries. In the 2005 index, 12 non-Western countries, including 6 in Africa, ranked higher than Italy (42nd) and the United States. Of the African countries, Benin and Namibia (tied at 25th) were also ranked higher than France (30) and Australia (31). And they were very much at par with Portugal (23) and the UK (24). The 2019 index shows a similar pattern of regional dispersion. The United States maintained approximately the same ranking (48th) and was surpassed by 14 non-Western countries, including 6 in Africa. Two of the non-Western countries—Jamaica (8th) and Costa Rica (10th)—also outranked most Western European and North American countries, including Portugal, Germany, Ireland, France, the UK, and Canada. And three of the African countries (Namibia, Cape Verde, and Ghana) outranked Spain, France, the UK, and Italy. China consistently ranked at the bottom of the indexes, along with other repressive governments such as Eritrea, North Korea, and Turkmenistan. And despite Kagame’s protestations, Rwanda too has consistently ranked low. After starting at 108th in 2002, it sank to 122nd in 2005 and to 155th in 2019. These rankings are not surprising by any means. What might surprise is the relatively low ranking of the United States, the world’s trailblazer in modern democracy. It speaks to the impact of violence

70  As democracies turn or threats to the political order. The 2002 index was issued just months after al-Qaeda’s September 11 attack. “The poor ranking of the United States (17th) is mainly because of the number of journalists arrested or imprisoned there,” RSF explains in the report. “Arrests are often because they refuse to reveal their sources in court. Also, since the 11 September attacks, several journalists have been arrested for crossing security lines at some official buildings.”2 The infractions intensified after the United States invaded Iraq 2003 in connection with the al-Qaeda attack. By 2005, the rationale for the invasion had unraveled and the occupation had become highly controversial. Press coverage became correspondingly contentious, as did infractions against the press. That is reflected in America’s low ranking of 44th in the 2005 index. In the first several years after the invasion, the United States largely administered Iraq. RSF called the area under U.S. control the “United States of America (in Iraq)” and ranked it 137th, placing it close to the bottom. Iraq itself got a separate and even lower ranking at 157th. “The situation in Iraq … deteriorated further during the year as the safety of journalists became more precarious,” RSF states. At least 24 journalists and media assistants have been killed so far this year, making it the mostly deadly conflict for the media since World War II. A total of 72 media workers have been killed since the fighting began in March 2003.3 The United States itself fell further in the 2019 index because of President Trump’s intensely combative stance toward the press. “Press freedom has continued to decline in the second year of President Donald Trump’s presidency,” RSF writes in its summation. Rhetorical attacks from the government and private individuals alike grew increasingly hostile, and in June they became physical when a gunman entered the Capital Gazette newsroom in Maryland, killing four journalists and one other staffer in a targeted attack on the local newspaper. Since then, President Trump has continued to declare the press as the ‘enemy of the American people’ and ‘fake news’ in an apparent attempt to discredit critical reporting.4 Italy’s low rankings also resulted from its compromised press system. For extended periods, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was also a dominant media tycoon. That was in a country that also had

As democracies turn  71 substantial government-run media. It was the equivalent of President Trump also being the owner of the major news media in the United States. There would be no “fake news,” just compromised news and opinions. Back to the United States, the pressure on the press in the context of the war against terrorism is merely a shadow of the experience during its only civil war. Though that was in the mid-19th century, the context is comparable to that of many developing countries in the 21st. The civil war press on both sides was heavily censored. Actually, on the side of the Confederacy, there wasn’t much reason to censor. The press was generally conformist. Most Southern newspapers supported the war, and those who didn’t knew better than to dissent. It was on the Union side that overt censorship was more pronounced. Though the official regulation of the press was mild, the generals evoked military codes to censor the press. General William Tecumseh Sherman, whose war campaign brought the war to an end, reputedly said that an army cannot win a war with a free press. Accordingly, as many as 43 newspapers were ransacked by mobs, often with the active participation of soldiers.5 Even the loyalist newspapers were not spared when their contents were deemed too adversarial or otherwise unhelpful. Given these realities of press freedom in the West, democratic governments elsewhere don’t feel apologetic when they employ harsh measures against the press. They see them as necessary within their political colorations. Nigeria and India—two countries that take pride in having robust press systems—are good examples.

Nigeria’s press is free, except when it isn’t Nigeria prides itself as having one of the freest press systems in Africa, but one cannot tell from its low rankings in the World Press Freedom Index. In 2002, it was ranked 49 out of 139 countries. The relatively lofty ranking reflected the transition to democracy after about 16 years of military rule. By 2005, however, Nigeria had tumbled to 123 out of 167, tied with Bahrain. It fell further down by 2010, when it was tied with Columbia at 145 out of 178 countries. By this time, the euphoria of democracy had been supplanted by the reality of turbulent—sometimes violent— politics. The ranking improved notably to 115 out of 179 in 2013 and 111 out of 180 in 2015. This probably reflected the easier-going presidency of a former biology lecturer, Goodluck Jonathan. However, by 2019—about five years into the presidency of former military ruler

72  As democracies turn Muhammadu Buhari—the ranking had fallen again to 120 out of 180 countries. The 2019 ranking reflects a number of incidents of harassment of journalists. They range from the roughing up of reporters by security men to expulsion from coverage of the presidency, from detention of journalists to the suspension of privately held broadcast licenses. The harsher measures are typically blamed on media content that is “capable of endangering national securing” or “disturbing the peace.” That was the case early in December 2019, when agents of the Department of State Services (DSS) swooped into an Abuja courtroom to re-arrest Omoyele Sowore, a political activist and journalist. As the publisher of Sahara Reporters, a U.S.-based online outfit that specializes in investigating malfeasance and corruption in Nigeria, Sowore has been a gadfly to the Nigerian government. But what made him of particular interest to Nigeria’s security apparatus was his attempt to stir popular revolt. Following a general election in February 2019 that was won by incumbent President Muhammadu Buhari, Sowore started a movement hashtagged RevolutionNow. “Simple elections can no longer save Nigeria or improve Nigeria’s democracy,” he said in a TV interview in July. “We deserve or must have a revolution in this country.” The movement attracted enough attention to unsettle the government. Early in August, DSS arrested Sowore and charged him with sedition. Despite two court rulings ordering his release, DSS kept him in jail. The storming of the court in early December followed another decision by a judge to free him on bail. It was indicative of the government’s confused policy that the DSS first denied, then justified, and finally apologized for invading the court. And then, even after the apology, Sowore was kept in jail for 18 more days. Meanwhile, the president’s Special Adviser on Media and Publicity, Femi Adesina, declared that the Nigerian people didn’t care about the breach of a democratic norm. In an interview on a local TV program, Adesina said: It is a country of 198 million people. When just 100,000 are making (a) noise in the social and traditional media, you would think the whole country is in an uproar. There are millions and millions of people who are not bothered. The comment provides the context for some absurdities in the rationalization of arrests. In September 2019, for example, Chido Onumah, another political activist and author, was arrested and briefly detained

As democracies turn  73 for wearing a t-shirt bearing the inscription “We Are All Biafrans.” That happens to be the title of his widely noted book on Nigerian politics. The content of the book itself was not at issue. After all, the foreword was written by Atiku Abubakar, the two-term vice president and runner-up in the 2019 presidential election. But ‘Biafra’ happens to be the name adopted by Eastern Nigeria when the region seceded in May 1967. The resulting civil war of unification lasted for about 30 months, ending in January 1970. Yet the name Biafra remains touchy for some officials. Even then, the title of the book didn’t incur the wrath of DSS. It was the same title on a T-shirt that did. “I was arrested for wearing the T-shirt because the SSS said it is capable of causing disaffection in the country,” Onumah told the press. A similar explanation was given earlier in the year for the shutdown of an independent radio and TV operation. In June 2019, the Nigeria Broadcasting Commission (NBC) suspended the licenses of Daar Communications, which owns two popular stations: African Independent Television (AIT) and Raypower FM. NBC’s major justifications were that Daar was delinquent in paying license fees and its stations broadcast “inciting content.” Some of such content he cited are statements such as: “Nigeria is cursed,” “We declare independent state of Niger Delta,” “Nigeria irritates me,” “This country is gradually Islamising.” Kawu conceded, however, that the precipitating “offense” was a documentary on legal challenges to the presidential election of February 2019. The electoral commission had declared incumbent Buhari the winner, but the opposition party’s candidate, Atiku Abubakar, rejected the election figures as rigged. While his petition for review was pending, AIT broadcast a detailed report on the data the petitioners had marshalled as evidence. This to the commission was partisan, and so it issued a warning to AIT. To alert the public to the regulatory pressures, Daar posted the warning letter on its website. That, Kawu said, was the last straw. So, it was not the “offending” broadcasts that caused the suspension of the licenses, nor was it the non-payment of license fees. It was that the commissioners felt affronted by the public display of its warning letter. Raymond Dokpesi, the owner of Daar Communications, counterattacked in his own press statement. “The NBC and the government in power are not comfortable with the broadcast industry because of its courageous and dogged stance in informing Nigerians on happenings in the country,” Dokpesi told the press.

74  As democracies turn We are in a democracy and must all rise to defend Nigeria from anti-democratic forces. We invite all Nigerians and the international community to note this obvious act of brigandage against freedom of speech and association as clearly expressed in our constitution. Together, let’s Rescue Nigeria. The Nigerian public and civil society agreed with Dokpesi. They greeted the suspension with outrage and demanded that the licenses be restored. Within three weeks, NBC bowed to the pressure and reached a court-approved agreement with Daar to restore the licenses. The quick turnaround would not have happened during Nigeria’s prolonged military dictatorship from 1984 to 1999. The regimes paid little heed to public opinion. In one case of repression, three publishing houses that accounted for up to 50 percent of the country’s newspaper and magazine circulations were simultaneously shut down for six months. As with most other countries, Nigeria continues to grapple with the problem of mass circulation of hoaxes via social media. Nigeria just happens to be one of the countries where the dangers are tenfold, given its readily inflammable ethnic tensions. Expectedly, the government has been raging against social media hoaxes. In October 2018, the Minister of Information, Lai Mohammed, launched what he called the “National Campaign Against Fake News” through which he sought to stem the problem through moral suasion. However, as reported by The Punch newspaper, by October 2019, the minister had concluded that that approach had failed. “While the national campaign has succeeded in putting the issue of fake news and hate speech on the front burner of national discourse, the menace has yet to go away,” Mohammed conceded during a meeting with on-line publishers. Let me be clear: we didn’t think the issue will suddenly disappear, but we also didn’t think it will get worse, which is what it is now. In fact, it remains a clear and imminent danger to the polity. It is in this light that we are once again asking you to join us in pushing this campaign. The minister’s next step was to raise the fine for broadcasting hate speech or inciting material from N500,000 (about $1,400 at the time) to N5 million. In a country where independent broadcasters struggle to pay salaries, that is a crippling penalty. Expectedly, the increase met with fierce opposition by politicians, civil society, and the press.

As democracies turn  75 Yet, the minister vowed to stay the course. “[W]e will not rest until our media space has been rid of fake news and hate speech,” he said. That is, of course, a tall order, especially given the failure he admitted to. What it all means is that Nigeria’s press system, like its politics, will continue to be turbulent for quite some time.

India: press freedom at ‘Internet shutdown capital’ Like Nigeria, India has a vibrant press. In fact, it boasts that it is the most populous democracy in the world. Yet, in December 2019, LiveMint, the online service of India’s financial daily Mint, declared India “the Internet shutdown capital of the world.” According to the news service, India accounted for 67 percent of all documented Internet shutdowns in the world in 2018. With 134 instances, India far outdistanced the next closest countries: Pakistan (12), Iraq and Yemen (7 each), and Ethiopia (6). In RSF’s index of press freedom, India’s ranking has ranged from average to very low. In 2002, India was ranked 60th out of 139 countries. In 2005, it plummeted to 106th out of 167. And in 2019 it fell even steeper to 140th out of 180 countries. It is not that India’s press system has dramatically changed over the years. It is that infractions against the press have varied in number and scope. In December 2019, the Indian parliament passed a law that made illegal immigrants from neighboring countries, except for Muslims, eligible for citizenship. This triggered massive protests in parts of the country, but most intensely in the state of Assam, which borders Bangladesh. Some protested against the exclusion of Muslims and others against the plan to grant citizenship. Following failed attempts to quell the demonstrations, the state government shut down the Internet. Just months earlier, the Indian federal government took even more draconian measures in the quasi-autonomous state of Kashmir. It is a state over which India and Pakistan have been at loggerheads. In August 2019, the Indian parliament declared a state of emergency there without warning, stripped the state of its special status, and began the process of federalizing it. The declaration was followed immediately with a crackdown on political activities and communication. Thousands of political leaders and activists were arrested and detained indefinitely without charges. Movement of people was restricted, and Internet and telephone services—both landline and mobile—were suspended indefinitely. The government claimed that these drastic measures were a prelude to pursuing greater economic development in the region. But they came

76  As democracies turn in the shadow of recent escalation in the protracted feud between India and Pakistan, which also claims the region as its own. In any case, the repression in Kashmir is not without precedent in India itself. Since it became independent from Britain in 1947, there have been three such declarations of national emergency. The first two were in 1962 and 1971, and both were related to wars: a Chinese invasion and war with Pakistan, respectively. The third emergency, 1975–1977, was the only one declared in response to domestic politics. It was also the one that most directly affected the press and generated the most outcry. India was in economic and political distress. Inflation was on the rise, and transportation workers were on strike. There were also mass street protests accusing the government of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi of gross corruption. Even the very legitimacy of the government was in question. Allegations of irregularities in its election were under judicial review, and a court’s ruling was pending. It was in this charged political environment that Gandhi declared a state of emergency in June 1975. For nearly two years thereafter, the government clamped down on civil liberties, including press freedom. Critics said her primary motive was to pre-empt the court’s decision, as the declaration did indeed. But Gandhi alleged that the unrest was a campaign to bring down her government and that the CIA was behind it. Invoking the pertinent clause in the constitution, she said that that justified the declaration of emergency. Gandhi’s allegation against the CIA was not at all implausible. The crisis came at the height of the Cold War between the Western bloc (lead by the United States) and the Eastern bloc (led by the Soviet Union). And India had a warm relationship with the Soviets and a frosty one with the United States. In that scenario, it was quite consistent with the CIA’s pattern of operations to seek to bring down Gandhi’s government.6 In any case, the emergency declaration damaged Gandhi politically. The formerly popular daughter of independent India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, became very unpopular. Not surprisingly, her ruling Congress Party lost the parliamentary election of March 1977, the first time since India’s independence. And with that, Gandhi was out of office. But she reclaimed the office about three years later following a landslide victory in the general election of January 1980. So, though her defeat in 1977 served as a warning that Indians would not tolerate any form of dictatorship, her return to office within three years was proof that such could readily be forgiven. Still, the lesson has remained. There has not been any such sweeping declaration of

As democracies turn  77 emergency powers since then. Even the declaration of such in Kashmir pales in comparison. For the most part, India’s press system reflects its political peculiarities. Most notable is the press’s own self-policing regarding the reporting of religious/ethnic clashes. The traditional rule of thumb among the established press is to exercise caution so as not to widen the clashes. Beyond that, the press assertively guards its independence and for the most part the government respects it. That’s notwithstanding the continuous pressures and periodic jolts. This is the general pattern in democracies around the world. Unlike China, much of the non-Western world does not cede democratic ethos to the West. There is a general commitment to political rights, including freedom of expression. But, of course, the devil is often in the details. ******************

Notes 1 Extract from Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, Paris January 16, 1787. http://tjrs.monticello.org/letter/1289. 2 “Reporters Without Borders Publishes the First Worldwide Press Freedom Index.” https://rsf.org/en/reporters-without-borders-publishes-firstworldwide-press-freedom-index-october-2002. 3 https://rsf.org/en/worldwide-press-freedom-index-2005. 4 https://rsf.org/en/ranking_table. 5 John Nerone, Violence Against the Press: Policing the Public Sphere in U.S. History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 118–119. 6 A good source of information on this subject is John Stockwell’s expose In Search of Enemies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974). Stockwell, a major in the U.S. Marines, was a paramilitary intelligence officer with the CIA.

10 Dark history of distinctions

The myth of Magna Carta lies at the whole origin of our perception of who we are as an English-speaking people, freedom-loving people who’ve lived with a degree of liberty and under a rule of law for 800 years. It’s a load of tripe, of course. But it’s a very useful myth. —Nicholas Vincent, professor of medieval history, University of East Anglia, and author of Magna Carta: A Very Short Introduction.1

It was early in the 15th century or so that European explorers began seafaring journeys to other lands. Some were looking for new trade routes, some were on the quest for bountiful discoveries, and others were seeking to fulfill curiosities. Whatever the impetus, they invariably found people who were physically and culturally different from themselves. “In most cases, the first encounter with a hitherto unknown society was but a fleeting kaleidoscope of curiosity, sometimes horrified fascination, and often romantic excitement,” writes Brian M. Fagan in his book The Clash of Cultures.2 For better and for worse—usually for worse—the explorers fitted what they saw into the pigeonholes of their own culture. When Marco Polo saw rhinoceros during his voyage to China, for example, he was sure he had found the mythical unicorn at last. Never mind that other than their single horns, the rotund rhinos looked nothing like the depictions of unicorns.3 When explorers and natives came into contact for the first time, it was always a moment of apprehension for both sides. To the natives, who were invariably darker skinned, the white complexion of Europeans looked like apparitions. And to the explorers, the natives were even more exotic, perhaps not fully human. So, explorers approached natives with caution. The most pressing needs were how to

Dark history of distinctions  79 communicate and especially express good intentions. They relied on hand gestures, friendly facial expressions, and the offer of gifts. Sometimes these worked; other times they were misunderstood, provoking hostile reactions. In the latter case, the explorers often resorted to a lethal response not available to the natives: guns. It was the first phase of the “clash of cultures.” Fagan characterizes it as “the progressive confrontation between an expanding, sophisticated civilization with radically alien beliefs and dozens of societies that lived in careful balance with the natural resources of their environment.”4 Whether the initial encounter was amicable or hostile, the native peoples were invariably deemed primitive, with Europe being the yardstick of civilization. The unfamiliar languages were typically likened to animal grunts, and some of the peoples were deemed to be close to the same level of evolution. This was especially the case with the Tasmanians of Australia. They were deemed the most primitive people on earth, a link between animals and humans. The Tasmanians’ rebuff of attempts to re-acculturate them was interpreted as evidence of their animalistic status. The Khoikhoi of the southern tip of Africa did not fare much better. They too “became the epitome of savagery in European minds.”5 It was a characterization that was to extend to all of sub-Saharan Africans. These early encounters and interpretations, in effect, established the dichotomy of primitive and civilized. Actually, it was more than a dichotomy. European philosophers—led by Joseph-Arthur Comte de Gobineau of France and Thomas Carlyle of Scotland—furiously competed to establish a hierarchy of the races. By the mid-19th century, Gobineau’s three-rung hierarchy had gained wide acceptance. Anglo-Saxon Europeans (the white race) were superior to all others, followed at some distance by Asians (the yellow race), then Negroes (the black race) at a much distant bottom rung. “Superior to the black and the yellow, the white race is characterized by energetic intelligence, perseverance, physical strength, an instinct for order, and a pronounced taste for liberty….,” wrote cultural critic and academic David Spurr in summarizing Gobineau’s theory.6 There were some divergences and nuances, however, in explorers’ views of the natives they met. For example, while some explorers labeled Native Americans barbaric and brutal, others noted admirable attributes. To this latter group, American Indians—as they were erroneously identified—were “noble savages” or “savage beauties.” They were primitive people who nonetheless manifested noble qualities such as valor, honor, kindness, piety, and beauty.

80  Dark history of distinctions They were complimented also for living in harmony with nature, unaffected by modern technologies. This may well be patronizing “in the sense that a group of ten-year-old children might set up an innocent and happy society among themselves.”7

Colonization as civilizing mission There’s hardly any controversy today about the motivation for Europe’s colonization of other nations that it was driven by commercial interests and geopolitical rivalry.8 But at the time, it was rationalized as a civilizing mission to make it palatable to those who might otherwise object. In any case, the combination of the two national interests and their camouflage made European explorers national heroes in their respective home countries. That was especially the case of the French explorer Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza. A pervasively glowing account of his exploits in Africa “recast the often sordid, inhumane, and unsuccessful history of French imperialism into the heart-warming story of a gentle explorer who persuaded Africans to devote themselves and their lands to a generous France.”9 More than anyone else though, it was the accounts of Henry Morton Stanley, the 19th-century Welsh-American journalist and explorer, that created the most enduring image of Africa and the colonial mission. Stanley is widely known for “finding” Dr. Livingston in Africa and greeting him, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.” Not as widely known is that he was also the one who coined the pejorative phrase “the dark continent” in reference to Africa. Stanley was by no means the first explorer to portray Africans pejoratively, but he was a talented journalist, and that gave his dispatches and books much appeal and exposure. In effect, there was symbiosis between the colonial enterprise and journalistic pursuits in Africa. The economic motivation for colonization is readily traceable to the industrial revolution, which gave rise to mass production. That in turn created immense need for raw materials as well as the market for exports. Colonialism provided an expeditious fulfillment of both needs. In fact, so valuable were the colonies that European countries nearly fought wars over Africa. It took a conference—the Berlin Conference in 1885—to avert that spectacle. Beyond commercial interests, colonial occupation was also a status symbol, much as slave ownership was subsequently to become in the United States. France, for example, needed to boost its self-image and global stature after the carnage of its revolution and the debilitating

Dark history of distinctions  81 aftermath. And some established countries sought to preserve their status. “By the 1880s, competition from France, Germany, and Russia forced Britain to aggressively defend its once unshakable standing in the world.”10 And then there was the factor of press history. Until the early 1800s, the press in the United States and Europe were political or mercantile in orientation. Either they catered to the political interests of their owners or they focused on news that facilitated industry and business operations. Then came an occupational revolution, a transition to press independence, and a focus on mass circulation. That entailed a shift in emphasis to news that appealed to the general public, which meant a good dose of the scintillating. It was in this context that Stanley chronicled Africa for British and American newspapers, especially the New York Herald. He also wrote a number of widely read books, including Through the Dark Continent.11 In neither media was Stanley’s contempt for Africans subtle. In one book, he likened the natives’ manner of speech to that of the great apes. Listening to the apes from a distance, he wrote, he “could not distinguish any great difference between the noise they created and that which a number of villagers might make while quarrelling.”12 And in the same work, he described as “barbarous and exhilarating chorus”13 the singing by natives paddling him down a river. And then there is the tragic irony that Stanley had no qualms narrating his brutality to the natives. In a dispatch on how he found Dr. Livingston, for example, Stanley wrote this of his treatment of exhausted escorts: The virtue of a good whip was well tested by me … and I was compelled to observe that when mud and wet sapped the physical energy of the lazily-inclined, a dog-whip became their backs, restoring them to a sound—and sometimes to an extravagant activity.14 Such brutality was actually the norm of the colonial enterprise. Natives who resisted colonial incursion were massacred, and when captured their leaders were often executed or exiled. And coercion was often implicit in the gunboats offshore. Given that the colonial enterprise was ostensibly a civilizing mission, it would seem that force and brutality were the normal means of civilizing the uncivilized. Such practice was commonplace among all the colonial powers. Even then, Belgium’s rule of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo stood out. That has been attributed to the fact that Congo

82  Dark history of distinctions was administered as a personal possession of King Leopold II.15 The autocratic and brutal colonial rule is also blamed in part for Congo’s post-independence despotism and perennial civil war. In June 2020, the current holder of the office, King Philippe, acknowledged the uncommon brutality of Belgium colonial rule of Congo and expressed regrets. Philippe expressed the regrets in a letter to the Congolese President Félix Tshisekedi on the occasion of Congo’s 60th independence anniversary. It was also in the context of the Black Lives Matter protests that spread from the United States to Europe, including Belgium. “At the time of the Congo Free State, acts of violence and cruelty were committed that still weigh on our collective memory,” the letter reads in part. The colonial period that followed also caused suffering and humiliation. I would like to express my deepest regrets for these injuries of the past, the pain of which is now given new life by the discrimination still too present in our societies. The Washington Post reported on June 30 that Philippe stopped short of an apology because that would have required an act of Parliament. Even then, the expression of regret contrasted sharply with what the then reigning Belgian monarch said on the occasion of Congo’s independence in 1960. Rather than condemn the violence and brutality, King Baudouin praised his predecessor for ruling Congo with “tenacious courage” and “not as a conqueror but as a civilizer” (Washington Post, June 30, 2020).

Slave trade, slavery, and Darwin Colonialism aside, the most consequential outcome of the notion of a hierarchy of the races has to be the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the slavery it begot. In combination, they evidenced some of the most horrific treatments of humans in history. The very idea of selling and buying human beings speaks for itself. And on that score, both the “Black slavers” and “White Predators” are complicit, to borrow Chinweizu’s phrase.16 Where culpability shifts decisively is what happened to the slaves once they left their homelands. Because Africans were deemed sub-human, the slaves were stacked like cargo in the ships that sometimes took up to six months to complete the journey from West Africa to the Americas. They lived in such deprivation that about 15 percent routinely died en route. Those

Dark history of distinctions  83 who survived became slaves at plantations, where they toiled and got whipped like animals. In fact, in 1904 the Bronx Zoo formalized the notion of Africans as animals when it exhibited Ota Benga, a kidnapped Congolese teenager, in the same compartment as monkeys. The brutalization of slaves notwithstanding, slavery too was deemed a civilizing undertaking much like colonialism. In due course, the theory of a hierarchy of the races was discredited— at least among the learned. In fact, there soon arose contestations over the very notion of race, whether there is, indeed, such a thing.17 Even then the notion of race superiority still had strident advocates. It was in the context of the debate that Darwin published his theory of evolution. It was supposed to be a purely scientific theory that explains the origins of the species. Yet it energized the debate about race superiority. People who argue for the sameness of biology found confirmation in Darwin’s finding of continuity in the human species. Those who still believed in a hierarchy also found support in the theory. Some races are higher evolved than others, they argued. Darwin himself became a subject of controversy regarding his stance on the race matter. The prevalent view was that his writings and political activism both pointed to a non-racialist belief. But others argue that he slyly implanted racist views in his writings. It would be too much of a detour to delve into this controversy. Suffice to state that justifications for the view that Darwin was a racist are a stretch. But that matters little to those who make the case.

Academia and the primitive Even after intellectuals abandoned the idea of a hierarchy of races, it continued to manifest in academia in benign forms. The distinction between the disciplines of sociology and anthropology is an example. Sociology is essentially the study of Western societies, and anthropology is the study of non-Western people. That is, the study of the customs, lifestyles, values, and relational issues in Western societies is sociology. The study of the same topics in non-Western societies is anthropology. Accordingly, sociologists study Europe, North America, and a few other societies with comparable levels of advancement. Anthropologists study Africa, Central and South America, the Middle East, much of Asia, and even Native American reservations in the United States. When applied to Africa in particular, the distinction is very much that of the study of the civilized and the primitive. The distinction is increasingly being abandoned. Ironically, it was anthropologists—at least the liberal ones—who ultimately discredited

84  Dark history of distinctions the notion of the primitive, and with that, the sociology/anthropology distinction. Physical anthropologists now look for fossils everywhere, and sociologists and cultural anthropologist study values and lifestyles in London, New York, and Uppsala the same as they do in Lagos, Lima, and Delhi. But if the terminological distinction has been discredited, the idea it represented endures. Recall the case of the American tourist in Gambia who wrote in March 2014 that to see the real Africa tourists have to travel upriver to where life is untouched by modernity. Certain notions die hard.

Race hierarchy in contemporary times Indeed, discredited or not, the notion of a race hierarchy was official policy in places up to the late 20th century. The two most consequential were readily Nazism in Germany and apartheid in South Africa. In the early 20th century, Adolph Hitler rose to power by extolling the notion that Germans were a superior people over all others. In effect, they were a superior subset of the superior race. It was the notion that underpinned Nazi politics and atrocities in Germany before and during World War II. Hitler and his followers’ belief in German superiority went beyond the intellectual. They were also staunch believers in Gobenau’s yardstick for Aryan superiority: “energetic … perseverance (and) physical strength.” So, when the African-American sprinter Jesse Owens won multiple gold medals at the Summer Olympics in Berlin in 1936, it was an assault on Hitler’s essence. He couldn’t bear to shake his hands, as was the custom. So, he stormed out of the stadium. But the worst was yet to come. Apparently, Jews in Germany were disproving other aspects of the Nazi superiority complex. They were excelling in the professions, in academia, in commerce, and so forth. That was too much for Nazis to bear. And so came another of the worst atrocities in human history: the holocaust. During World War II, Jews in Germany and adjourning countries were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. There, they were treated even worse than the slaves in the trans-Atlantic voyage. By the end of the war, an estimated six million had been put to death in gas chambers. Even as the world grappled with the scope of that horror, a government in another part of the world was instituting a regime of race hierarchy. The locale this time was South Africa, and the implementers were Dutch settlers, specifically the Afrikaner Nationalist Party. The discriminatory structure predated the party’s ascendance to power in 1948. Their legacy was that they formalized the system. First,

Dark history of distinctions  85 they christened it apartheid and then they enacted laws that gave it statutory standing. Foremost among the laws was the euphemistically titled “Population Registration Act” of 1950. Among other things, it classified the races by a hierarchy of superiority and with corresponding civil rights. Whites were the superior race; so, they had all the rights and privileges and they exercised dominion over other races. Coloreds (Asians and people of mixed race) were second in the hierarchy and had limited rights. Blacks, who constituted (and still constitute) the vast majority, were at the bottom rung. They had minimal rights, not even the right to vote or choose where to live. The system lasted until 1994, when Nelson Mandela was released from a 27-year imprisonment for fighting it. He was subsequently elected president that year. And that brought an end to the last political system formally based on a hierarchy of racial superiority. Yet, the idea endures, albeit with different hues. Nationalist politics is on the rise in Europe, spurred by opposition to a surge of nonEuropean immigrants. Anti-immigrant political parties are surging in the polls and gaining in parliaments. Even those that used to be in the political margins are suddenly making inroads in parliamentary elections by flailing against immigrants. UK’s Brexit decision (52-48) in 2016 was largely driven by a similar sentiment. A large percentage of pro-Brexit voters were primarily motivated by the fear of being overwhelmed by “alien” cultures. That was not so much a reference to Africans, Asians, and Muslims, as it was to people from Eastern Europe. Thus, the fear stems from cultural chauvinism, rather than racism as such. But the thinking is along the same line. Even the world of academia is not exempt from racialist views that Gobineau would applaud. For example, Amy Wax, a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania, has openly advocated racial preference in the acceptance of immigrants. “Embracing cultural distance, cultural distance nationalism means in effect taking the position that our country will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites,” Wax said at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D.C. in July 2019. “Well, that is the result, anyway.”18 As though to elaborate on her notion of “cultural distance,” Wax said also that non-white immigrants tend to trash their surroundings. “I think we are going to sink back significantly into third-worldism,” she said at a panel discussion at the conference. We are going to go Venezuela. You can just see it happening. One of my pet peeves, one of my obsessions, is litter. If you go up to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, or Yankee territory, versus other

86  Dark history of distinctions places that are quote-unquote more diverse, you are going to see an enormous difference, I’m sorry to report. Generalizations are not very pleasant. But little things like that aren’t little. They really affect our environment.

Otherness and a war This history and contemporary realities shine a light on the notion of “Western values.” It is not nearly as odious as Gobineau’s race classifications or the philosophies of Nazism and apartheid. It is only an echo of these, but a very powerful one. Its use is ubiquitous because it is a handy and seemingly innocuous distinction. But it isn’t. For one thing, it sometimes leads to avoidably grave misjudgments. The rhetoric that presaged the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 is an example. Just before and months after the invasion, various polls (Gallop, CNN/USA Today) showed that nearly 80 percent of Americans supported the invasion. That was testimony to the power of casting others as sinister and untrustworthy. And as Frank Rich of the New York Times narrates in The Greatest Story Ever Sold,19 the most tenuous evidence is all that was necessary. According to the pre-invasion rhetoric and related press coverage, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was a monster. He was Saddam the madman. And this madman had developed weapons of mass destruction that he wouldn’t hesitate to use against his people, Iraq’s neighbors, and subsequently the world. In any case, brutality and violence are integral to the Arab culture. So, the only language Saddam would understand was force. Thus justified, the invasion followed. As it turned out, Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction. He hardly had any weapons at all, as most of them were destroyed during the Kuwait war. And he had no link to the “September 11” attacks. The invasion turned Iraq from a country under despotic rule to one in violent upheaval. A Sunni insurgency wreaked havoc on Iraqis and U.S. troops alike. In due course, the insurgency morphed into the Islamic State, readily the most blood-thirsty of the terrorist groups. In a sense, the narrative of otherness thus became self-fulling. It is such realities that lead Appiah to declare that “we are living with the legacies of ways of thinking that took their modern shape in nineteenth century, and that it is high time to subject them to the best thinking of the twenty-first.”20 ******************

Dark history of distinctions  87

Notes 1 Vincent was quoted by the New York Times (June 14, 2015) in a story commemorating the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta. http:// www.nytimes.com/2015/06/15/world/europe/magna-carta-still-posing-achallenge-at-800.html?_r=0. 2 Brian M. Fagan, Clash of Cultures (New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1984), 2. 3 Umberto Eco, Serendipities: Language and Lunacy, trans. William Weaver (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace, 1998), 55. 4 Fagan, Clash of Cultures, 5. 5 Fagan, Clash of Culture, 5. 6 David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 65. 7 Fagan, Clash of Cultures, 89. 8 Chinweizu, The West and the Rest of Us: White Predators, Black Slavers, and the African Elite (New York: Vintage Books, 1975); Edward Berenson, Heroes of Empire: Five Charismatic Men and Their Conquest of Africa (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011). 9 Berenson, Heroes of Empire, 171. 10 Berenson, Heroes of Empire, 125. 11 Henry M. Stanley, Through the Dark Continent, Vols. 1 & 2 (New York: Dover Publications, 1988). 12 Henry M. Stanley, Through the Dark Continent, Vol. 2 (New York: Dover Publications, 1988), 33. 13 Stanley, Through the Dark Continent, Vol. 2, 202. 14 Berenson, Heroes of Empire, 37. 15 Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998). 16 Chinweizu, The West and the Rest of Us. 17 See, for example, Appiah, The Lies That Bind. 18 Quoted by Rosie Gray in an article on “An Intellectual Strain of Trumpism,” in Buzzfeed, July 19, 2019. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ rosiegray/national-conservatism-trump. 19 Rich, Frank, The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth in Bush’s America (New York: Penguin Press, 2006). 20 Appiah, Lies That Bind, xiv.

11 Who civilized the Greeks that civilized the West?

In the Lies that Bind, Kwame Anthony Appiah recounts an experiment in 1953 in which two camping groups were brought together in a remote area.1 Before their interface, neither group saw it necessary to declare an identity through such means as adopting a nickname and distinguishing group characteristic. That changed once they started sports competition. One group soon claimed an exceptional identity, and the other group reciprocally countered with theirs. In world affairs, the West’s claim of exceptionalism has triggered much similar counterpoints. The case of sub-Saharan Africans, the ultimate obverse of Western exceptionalism, is especially illustrative of the response. On the one hand is a counter-assertion of African exceptionalism; on the other hand is a claim to the very basis of Western identity. That entails the paradox of claiming exceptionalism from the realities one claims to have engendered. The paradox and the counter-claims are the subjects of this chapter. First, some additional context. British historian William Miller MacMillan’s intriguing take on colonialism and civilization provides a helpful takeoff. “In the nineteenth century civilization was thought of as a higher synthesis of the best experience of all the human race,” MacMillan writes in his book Emergent Africa. “No leader in those days questioned the theoretical right of Africans to equality and our duty to help their ‘progress.’”2 MacMillan further argued that that orientation to colonialism changed only after the events of World War I tarnished in Africans’ mind the image of Europeans as a civilized people. MacMillan was a liberal intellectual and colonial administrator, and his lofty views had to be an over-projection. As has already been recounted, the brutality and condescension of colonialists long preceded World War I. What could be said is that MacMillan’s lofty views co-existed with the conception of Africans as inferior beings.

Who civilized the Greeks that civilized the West?  89 The same was true of the Christian missions which set out to proselytize to and educate Africans. Not only did they co-exist with colonial brutality, they facilitated the colonial objectives. In any case, Christian missions generally didn’t see much in African culture that could be a part of the synthesis of civilization. Rather, they proselytized by the assumption that Christianity inhered in European culture and “what was Christian could, therefore, not abide with what was African.”3 For this reason, converts were expected to abjure all traditional practices. Some missions even required Africans to take European first names to be baptized.4 Even in the 21st century, an important measure of faith to many African evangelicals is the extent of distancing from African traditions. Such affronts to African culture have been resisted in practice and theory. The strongest evidence of the resistance is the mere fact that African traditions have endured.5 Occasionally, this has required statutory intervention. The fate of the iria tradition among the Ibani (Bonny) people of the Niger Delta provides an example. Since there is no equivalent in Western culture, Iria is best described as an initiation into womanhood. It entails an elaborate process that begins with a period of pampering to get the woman to look her best. The highlight of the ceremony is a festivity, during which the iria, as the initiate is also called, dances to special traditional music and drums, along with her escorts and scores of partakers. Because the iria ceremony is the one occasion in every Ibani woman’s life that she is guaranteed to be treated like royalty, hardly any woman opts out of it. In fact, it is an occasion to look forward to. Even those who live abroad make every effort to go home to undergo the ceremony. However, as Pentecostalism began to displace traditional Christianity, believers began to replace the traditional iria music with evangelical choruses. In due course, the practice was deemed an unacceptable adulteration of the tradition. So, the traditional ruler and his chiefs in council banned it. Now, women have the option of either doing the ceremony in accordance with the tradition or not at all. Because of the ceremony’s popularity, the ban has had the effect of restoring the traditional practice.

Negritude as Africans’ exceptionalism The intellectual/philosophical response to Western exceptionalism has been much more complicated. Its earliest and most comprehensive articulation is the philosophical movement called Negritude.

90  Who civilized the Greeks that civilized the West? It is a philosophy that, in essence, accepts that Europeans and Africans are fundamentally different and articulates that difference from an African perspective. And for the most part, it turns the tables on the West. Its articulation formally dates to 1947, with the establishment of Presence Africaine, the French-language intellectual magazine that subsequently established an English-language edition.6 The first comprehensive articulation of the philosophy is to be found in The Cultural Unity of Black Africa,7 a seminal treatise by the Senegalese scholar and philosopher Cheikh Anta Diop. Also foremost in the development of Negritude was Leopold Senghor, Senegal’s first post-independence president. That Negritude was spearheaded by Senegalese intellectuals and philosophers is quite significant. Senegal was colonized by France, which practiced the colonial policy of assimilation. It is a policy that encouraged locals to shed their traditions and seek to assimilate into French culture as a condition for being granted real or honorary French citizenship. In contrast, the British practiced indirect rule, a colonial policy that mostly let traditional structures remain thus indirectly preserving traditions. It was logical that the overt denigration of African culture under French rule would more strongly trigger a counter-narrative. The essence of Negritude and the related concept of Afrocentricity is that black Africans are oriented toward community rather than the individual, holistic rather than atomistic thinking, a sense of continuity with rather than separation from others and the environment, and the acknowledgement of non-sensory means of knowing. From these groundings are said to emanate more specific characteristics, such as charity, kindness, a hospitable spirit, and commitment to restorative justice. The Western world, on the other hand, is said to be individualistic, materialistic, xenophobic, war-prone, patriarchal, and misogynistic. For the most part, it is an inversion of Western exceptionalism. Africanists also contrast Western objectivism with Africans’ non-empirical or non-sensory means of knowing. Among them are scholars such as Diop and Charles S. Finch III, who argue that there are means of knowledge beyond what is observable and measurable. And they cite the uncertainty principles of quantum mechanics as supporting evidence. Finch, a physician, even asserts that “parapsychology could justifiably be considered a branch of modern physics.”8

Who civilized the Greeks that civilized the West?  91

Africa as cradle of civilization The second thrust of Africanists’ response to Western exceptionalism is a reversion of the claim that Africans have not contributed to civilization. The counter-claim is that civilization and modern science are rooted in Africa. Here again, it is the Senegalese scholar Cheikh Anta Diop who led the way. He began researching, writing, and presenting on the subject during the mid-1940s. It was a period of rising agitation for decolonization, and Diop’s works provided the intellectual heft. It was also in the shadows of World War II, with all its carnage and savagery in Europe. Diop didn’t rely exclusively on reanalysis or reinterpretation of existing materials. He did original research in a radio-carbon lab that he established in Senegal. He was thus in the vanguard in research on antiquity. His writings were originally published in French. They became most familiar to the English-speaking world in the mid-1970s to late 1970s, when a collection of chapters from his books were published as The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality9 and The Cultural Unity of Black Africa. While Diop made this case writing from Senegal, George G. M. James, a Guyanese-American scholar, was making much similar argument in the United States. James’ book Stolen Legacy: Greek Philosophy Is Stolen Egyptian Philosophy was first published in 195410 and then reissued by another publisher in 1992.11 It was the immense popularity of this reissue that contributed to an intellectual ferment over Afrocentricity that has hardly abated. James himself didn’t live long enough to participate in this ferment. He died in 1956, about two years after the publication of Stolen Legacy. Meanwhile, between the late 1980s and early 1990s, Martin Bernal, a British history professor at Cornell University, penned three volumes supporting the Afrocentric thesis. In 1987, Bernal published Black Athena: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785–1985. He followed that up with a second and third volumes in 1992 and 2006, respectively. Diop, James, and Bernal, respectively, relied on the accounts of early historians and travelers, artifacts, inferences, and conjectures to reach the same conclusions: One, that Egyptians were black Africans. Two, that there was much interface between ancient Egypt and Greece. Three, that Greek scholars and philosophers who visited Egypt took back traditions, artifacts, and ideas that subsequently became pivotal to the Greek civilization. Four, that the indebtedness was acknowledged by early Greek historians and philosophers. Given that

92  Who civilized the Greeks that civilized the West? ancient Greece is the widely acclaimed origin of Western civilization, they concluded that the credit for that civilization rightfully belongs to Africa. This recasting of conventional history became prominent in African-American studies and was increasingly being discussed in history and social studies by liberal white professors. The trend dismayed conservative history and classics professors. Most notable among them was Mary Lefkowitz, who was both a professor at and alumna of Wellesley College. Lefkowitz became the most noted critic of Afrocentric historiography by authoring the much-publicized book Not Out of Africa: How “Afrocentrism” Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History.12 The main title is a play on Sydney Pollack’s 1985 romance/adventure film “Out of Africa,” starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford. But what set the tone for the subsequent eruption of criticism is the subtitle. Lefkowitz states that the book was inspired by an invitation in 1991 to write a review essay on Bernal’s Black Athena “and its relation to the Afrocentrist movement.”13 In the process, Lefkowitz writes, she realized that she “had been completely unaware … [that] there was in existence a whole literature that denied that the ancient Greeks were the inventors of democracy, philosophy, and science.”14 And so Lefkowitz became a fierce critic of the contention that Western civilization has its origin in Africa. Lefkowitz’s use of the term “inventors” to refer to imprecise concepts such as democracy, philosophy, and science says much about her approach to the debate. It is as though these concepts are of comparable exactitude as gunpowder, Arabic numerals, moveable type, Facebook, and the like. Even these technologies are not beyond contention as to origin. In any case, Lefkowitz’s dismissal of the Afrocentric perspective is not as ironclad as the subtitle of her book suggests. Her primary case against it is that it is based on wrong interpretations and inferences. She concedes that ancient Egypt had a negroid population but counters that other races were there as well. Therefore, what originated from ancient Egypt cannot be presumed to be of black African origin. Lefkowitz concedes also that Egypt was a major influence on Greek arts and architecture, but she asserts that it is not much more. To her, the greater flow of influence was from the Greeks to the Egyptians. To the extent that the Greeks were influenced by Egyptians the influence was not extensive and it was a case of borrowing rather than stealing. This is evidently a case of semantic quibble. Lefkowitz’s book expectedly triggered fierce criticisms from Afrocentric scholars and writers. Foremost among them was Molefi Kete Asante,

Who civilized the Greeks that civilized the West?  93 the professor and chair of Temple University’s African-American Studies Department. In comments and reviews, Asante essentially called Lefkowitz’s book a re-assertion of Eurocentric hegemony. Asante was critical not just of Lefkowitz, but of writers such as George Will and Roger Kimball who wrote rave reviews of Not Out of Africa. “It is a racial argument clearly fast backpedaling,” Asante wrote in a review. What it indicates is that we have gone full circle from the Hegelian ‘Let us forget Africa’ to a late 20th-century attack on African scholarship by declaring that major influences on Greece were not out of Africa. And as such, it will simply confirm the inability of some scholars to get beyond the imposition of their particularism of Europe.15 Asante himself is the most prolific Afrocentric scholar. Among his most popular works is Afrocentricity,16 a book whose major contribution is demonstration of the practical implications of the Afrocentric perspective to black people. It digests the thoughts of African-Americans such as Marcus Garvey, W. E. B. DuBois, Malcolm X, and Elijah Muhammed, and African authors such as Diop, Wole Soyinka, and Chinua Achebe to establish a philosophy of connectedness and empowerment. However, the most substantive rejoinders to Lefkowitz’s Not Out of Africa came in the form of three books that were published soon after: Richard Poe’s Black Spark, White Fire: Did African Explorers Civilize Ancient Europe?17 (1997); Charles S. Finch’s The Star of Deep Beginnings: The Genesis of African Science and Technology (1998); and Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Origins of Classical Civilization, Vol. III: The Linguistic Evidence. Poe’s background and motivation for writing Black Spark, White Fire is quite pertinent. His father’s parents were Russian Jews and his mother the daughter of Mexican immigrants. Still, he was raised to eschew ethnic identification. In contrast, his wife is a Greek-American, who immersed herself in that identity. “We live in a Greek neighborhood, celebrate Greek holidays, eat traditional Greek food, and every few weeks, it seems, attend some Greek family get-together.”18 Moreover, his father was an enthusiast of classical antiquity. This all makes Poe’s foray into Afrocentric scholarship—with the active support of his wife—all the more intriguing. Poe writes that he was motivated in part because Bernal’s Stolen Legacy did not adequately credit Greek civilization to Black Africa.

94  Who civilized the Greeks that civilized the West? Moreover, the more he explored the subject, the more he realized the vast evidence yet to be uncovered and articulated. In the painstaking analysis, Poe did not hesitate to take a second look at works that were vilified at the time they were published. And he also made extensive use of records and interviews. Unlike some Afrocentric writers, Poe was meticulous in differentiating between inferences and conjectures. Poe writes especially on the probability of trans-Atlantic seafaring by Negroid Africans at a time when most historians thought such was impossible. Some of the seafarers apparently settled in the Americas before Christopher Columbus got there, Poe writes. And some may have returned to Africa. As with much of the book, Poe supports his inferences and conjectures with miniscule but cumulatively compelling evidence. For example, in a chapter titled “The Cocaine Mummies,”19 he examines the probability that cocaine may have been brought to ancient Egypt by Egyptian seafarers. He cites genetic tests of hair and tissues from Egyptian mummies that showed evidence of cocaine use. Given that cocaine was available only in North America, Poe posits the probability that it was taken to Egypt by Egyptian seafarers. Poe also took specific aim at Lefkowitz’s rebuttal to Stolen Legacy. He writes, for example, that Plato attributes the innovation of numbers, arithmetic, and geometry to the Egyptian god Thoth. And that ultimately inspired the Greek mathematician Pythagoras. “When Plato founded his famous Academy in 387 B.C., he hung a sign over the door saying, ‘Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here,’” Poe writes. “Plato also urged the Greeks to adopt Egyptian styles of art and music, which he found superior to those of Greece.”20 In Volume 3 of Stolen Legacy, Bernal similarly rebutted Lefkowitz’s Not Out of Africa. He criticized Lefkowitz for engaging in the same selective scholarship and simplistic interpretations that she accused Afrocentric scholars of engaging in. Unlike other Afrocentric scholars, Bernal does not say that Egypt is the pivotal source of Greek culture and civilization. He asserts rather that that source of cultural and intellectual influence has not been given its due. Nor has the Semitic/ Phoenician influence, he argues. That was not always the case, however, Bernal states. Like other Afrocentric scholars, Bernal notes that ancient Greek leaders of thought such as Plato, Herodotus, and Aeschylus acknowledged their intellectual debt to Egypt. Those acknowledgments were excised from Greek history by 18th- and 19th-century historians, Bernal states. It is no coincidence that that was the era of colonial explorations, colonialism, and the attendant racism. In fact, Appiah writes that the very notion of the West as a cultural entity didn’t “emerge until the 1880s

Who civilized the Greeks that civilized the West?  95 and 1890s, during a heated era of imperialism, and [it gained] broader currency only in the twentieth century.”21 Finch’s Star of Deep Beginnings refocuses the scholarship on the black African influence. “We are being forced to radically readjust our optic on ancient history because more and more we are stumbling upon evidence that shows that Africa is the true crucible of modern human culture,”22 Finch writes. Alluding to the seminal work of the science historian Thomas Kuhn, Finch asserts that there is enough evidence in this regard to warrant a “paradigm shift.”23 Finch mostly explores what career counsellors in high schools and universities refer to by the acronym STEM, that is, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Like other Afrocentric scholars, Finch sees ancient Egypt as a black civilization. However, he transcends arguments to the contrary by tracing early developments in civilization to locales in sub-Saharan Africa. In the case of mathematics, for example, Finch reiterated what others have written regarding ancient Greece’s indebtedness to Egypt. “The Greeks were unanimous in attributing the origin of mathematics to ancient Egypt, particularly geometry, which the Greeks called the ‘queen of sciences,’”24 Finch writes. However, though the Egyptians may have refined mathematics, Finch traces its origin further South to what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. “The earliest arithmetic system of which we have any record is revealed in the Ishango bone,”25 Finch writes. He was referring to a bone discovered in the Ishango territory of northeastern Congo. On it were carved horizontal lines that were grouped in such a pattern that they could only have represented mathematical computations. Subsequent findings show that “all the numerical patterns seen in the Ishango bone show up in later African mathematical systems,” 26 Finch writes. As to science, technology, and engineering, Finch points to a number of landmarks and archeological discoveries that demonstrate the extent of competences that existed in ancient Africa. One of the landmarks, of course, is the Sphinx. “There is simply no arguing that it is the most stupendous structure ever raised by human hands,” Finch writes. “It has never failed to strike observers with an overpowering awe and it has embroiled the imaginations of better than 150 human generations.”27 The Sphinx aside, Finch also cites evidence of advanced science and technology in excavated mines and buildings that defy the traditional categorization of human history in terms of paleolithic, Neolithic, and prehistory. In any case, much of Africa remains unexcavated, Finch notes. And that means that there is much more to uncover that would force the paradigm shift.

96  Who civilized the Greeks that civilized the West?

Summation Putting aside ethnic and occupational sensitivities, it could be said that the debate over the origins of Greek civilization is not that different from debates about other origins. Ideas and inventions are typically associated with those who first brought them to light. But it is rare that there are no contentions as to influences and who else should appropriately lay claim to them. One reviewer of the manuscript for this book, for example, questioned the reference to the Magna Carta as the seminal document in modern democracy. “[M]any historians would disagree with Ibelema, that England led the way toward the democratization of Europe,” the reviewer writes. “They might point to the arguments of the French Enlightenment as crucial toward teaching people to use their critical capacities rather than follow the guidance of clergymen, princes and kings.” The reference to the Magna Carta has been kept not because the reviewer’s point is necessarily mistaken, but because the Enlightenment is also given its due. Rather than being in competition, the two historical developments actually played distinct roles at distinct points in the history of democracy. Accordingly, the Magna Carta is described in Chapter 12 as the ignition and the Enlightenment as the fuel. In any case, there is a fundamental problem with according credit for historical and intellectual developments. Though the Magna Carta is widely credited as the origin of democracy in Anglo-American history, it cannot rationally be said to be the first instance in world history that devolution of power was compelled by a monarch’s political rivals. It just happens to be the first documented case that could be directly linked to modern democratization. A similar argument would be true of the Enlightenment. Given the diversity of human thoughts and characters in all societies, it is certain that some people somewhere else have expressed the same thoughts that came to define the Enlightenment. It may have been individuals in African villages or obscure sages in Asia. In all likelihood, they were regarded as cultural outliers or misfits. And just like the pioneers of the Enlightenment in Europe, they were probably harassed and persecuted. The difference is that the latter group coalesced and over time began to gain converts and ultimately triumphed. Back to the Eurocentric/Afrocentric debate, one only needs to note that it might never have become so contentious had MacMillan’s conception of civilization stood that it is “a higher synthesis of the best experience of all the human race.” There is a joke that God cannot

Who civilized the Greeks that civilized the West?  97 change history, but historians do. It could be said that the Eurocentric/Afrocentric contestation is over restoration of the history that was changed in the 18th/19th centuries. ******************

Notes 1 Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity (New York: Liveright, 2019), 29–30. 2 William Miller MacMillan, Emergent Africa (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1949), 9. 3 J. P. Kirby, “Cultural Change & Religious Conversions in West Africa,” in Thomas D. Blakely, Walter E. A. van Beek, and Dennis L. Thomson (eds.), Religion in Africa (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1994), 57–71. 4 For a narrative example, see Minabere Ibelema, “Tradition and Modernity: The Triumph of African Culture,” in Ebere Onwudiwe and Minabere Ibelema (eds.), Afro-Optimism: Perspectives on Africa’s Advances (Wesport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 20–38. 5 See, for example, Ibelema, “Tradition and Modernity.” 6 V. Y. Mudimbe, The Surreptitious Speech: Presence Africaine and the Politics of Otherness, 1947–1987 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 7 Cheikh Anta Diop, Cultural Unity of Black Africa (Chicago, IL: Third World Press, 1978). 8 Charles S. Finch III, The Star of Deep Beginnings: The Genesis of African Science and Technology (Decatur, GA: Khenti, 1998), 264. 9 Cheikh Anta Diop, African Origins of Civilization: Myth or Reality? Translated from French by Mercer Cook (Chicago, IL: Lawrence Hill, 1974). 10 George G. M. James, Stolen Legacy: Greek Philosophy Is Stolen Egyptian Philosophy (New York: Philosophical Library, 1954). 11 George G. M. James, Stolen Legacy: Greek Philosophy Is Stolen Egyptian Philosophy (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1992). 12 Mary Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa: How “Afrocentrism” Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History (New York: Basic Books, 2006). 13 Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa, xi. Given the year of the assigned review, one has to assume that it was of Stolen Legacy II. 14 Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa, xi. 15 Molefi Kete Asante, “Reading Race in Antiquity: The Many Fallacies of Mary Lefkowitz,” Diverse Education, June 17, 2007. https:// diverseeducation.com/article/7495/. 16 Molefi Kete Asante, Afrocentricity (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1988). 17 Richard Poe, Black Spark, White Fire: Did African Explorers Civilize Ancient Europe? (Rocklin, CA: Prima Publishing, 1997). 18 Poe, Black Spark, White Fire, xx. 19 Poe, Black Spark, 256–260. 20 Poe, Black Spark, White Fire, 110.

98  Who civilized the Greeks that civilized the West? 21 Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity (New York: Liveright, 2019), 200. 22 Finch, Star of Deep Beginnings, 1. 23 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1970). 24 Finch, Star of Deep Beginnings, 57. 25 Finch, Star of Deep Beginnings, 55. 26 Finch, Star of Deep Beginnings, 56. 27 Finch, Star of Deep Beginnings, 110.

12 Political convergence

The apparent differences between the people of the West and the Muslim World are exceeded by the beliefs they have in common about humanity, respect, opportunity, peace, and cooperation. Yet, in the execution of policy and politics, much seems to get lost in translation.1 —Dr. Doug Stone, retired major general in the U.S. Marine Corps, who commanded a task force in Iraq from 2007 to 2008.

From the end of World War II until 1990, the most pronounced global divide was not between the West and the rest. It was between the democratic/capitalist bloc and its totalitarian/communist rival. Though the capitalist bloc was known as the West and the communist bloc the East, the “Cold War” between them was essentially another case of the West divided. Yet, it spurred or compounded shooting wars in much of the rest of the world. The Cold War ended in 1991 following the disintegration of the Soviet Union. For a “war” that lasted for about 46 years, its ending couldn’t have been more sudden. It all began with the successive deaths of three Soviet premiers in a span of about 30 months. They were all in their 70s. First, there was Premier Leonid Brezhnev who died in November 1982, after 18 years in office. He was succeeded by Yuri Andropov, who died about 16 months later. Andropov was succeeded by 73-year-old Konstantin Chernenko, whose tenure was even shorter. He died just 11 months in office. Concerned and embarrassed, the Soviet Communist Party decided to get away from the hard-core communist old guards. They reached further down and picked a charismatic 54-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev. It was a momentous decision for the Soviet Union and the rest of the world. Though a committed communist, the relatively young Gorbachev was open to policy innovations. And it was his foray

100  Political convergence in this regard that pried open what Winston Churchill—the World War II-era British Prime Minister—had called the iron curtain. Gorbachev’s innovations were two-pronged. First, he introduced glasnost or openness, a policy that encouraged more freedom of speech than had ever been tolerated in the Soviet Union. For a complementary policy, he introduced perestroika or the opening of the economy to free enterprise. In so doing, he melted the glue that had kept the patchwork country together. Nationalists in the various republics suddenly found their voices, and invariably it was a call to bolt from the union. In the past, the Soviet government would have wielded the big stick and squelched any such ambition. It had invaded communist Hungary and Czechoslovakia in 1956 and 1968, respectively, to stop anti- communist reforms. But by 1991, the genie was out of the box and Gorbachev couldn’t put it back in there, even if he had wanted to. The Soviet Union disintegrated. And that freed up Eastern European countries, which had hitherto been welded to it by the Warsaw Pact. It was an epochal moment of triumph of democracy over communist rule in Europe. And with that, the ascendance of free enterprise over controlled economy. These developments reverberated elsewhere in the developing world. It inspired reformists in various countries in Africa, Asia, South and Central America, and the Caribbean. And almost overnight, there was a wave of democratization and economic reform. Socialist governments suddenly found themselves without their ideological bulwark. And many other despotic regimes quickly realized that they could not hold back the tide. This was the third wave of global democratization in the 20th century. The first resulted from the defeat of Nazism and Fascism in Europe and Japan, and the second came with decolonization in the late 1950s through early 1960s. It was this third wave of democratization that inspired the political scientist Francis Fukuyama to declare that we were at “the end of history.” That is, history as epochal transformation of societies. “At the end of history, there are no serious ideological competitors left to liberal democracy,”2 Fukuyama postulated. “[That means] that there would be no further progress in the development of underlying principles and institutions, because all of the really big questions had been settled.”3 Fukuyama, whom one critic describes as “Endowed with a bright, widely informed, well-read, spirited mind,”4 engendered considerable scholarly ferment with his thesis. Some critics faulted him for an ethnocentric take on world history and political ideology and some for undue optimism about world affairs. Some critics go further in

Political convergence  101 abstraction to make the epistemological argument that humans are incapable of determining “the end of history,” even as Fukuyama conceptualizes it.5 These criticisms and Fukuyama’s response to them will be further discussed later. Suffice to state here that hardly any of Fukuyama’s critics deny the remarkable convergence in the direction of liberal democracy, notwithstanding Islamist insurgencies and other ideological frictions.

Alienation and recognition Drawing from the philosophies of Socrates, Nietzsche, Hegel, and Hobbes, Fukuyama argues that liberal democracy is ascendant because it resolves a fundamental conflict in human nature. On the one hand, everyone seeks domination, and on the other hand, everyone wants recognition. Prior to liberal democracy, political systems almost universally entrenched the conflict through hierarchical relations and rigidity of power. This has proven untenable in the long run because of individuals’ desire to be seen as worthy and every society’s quest to affirm its identity. Liberal democracy reconciles the contradictions through its ethos of equality, justice, egalitarianism, and liberty. Fukuyama writes in this regard that “the understanding of history as a ‘struggle for recognition’ is actually a very useful and illuminating way of seeing the contemporary world.”6

Tumultuous origins Yet, the road to liberal democracy has never been easy. As Fukuyama notes, democracy didn’t take its current semblance until the United States declared independence from Britain in 1776. And even then, it went through considerable convulsion and evolution to where it is today. The establishment of constitutional democracy by the United States was the culmination of a political movement that began in England about five and a half centuries earlier in 1215. The movement began as a resolution of a feud between wealthy English barons and a weak and unpopular King John. Concerned about a breakdown in civic order, the Archbishop of Canterbury intervened with a compromise proposal. The document became the nucleus of a set of reforms the barons presented to the king and pressured him into signing on June 15, 1215. This was the Magna Carta. It specified certain rights for the barons,

102  Political convergence among them due process and the reduction of levies. It also called for the independence of churches to practice their religion. Though highly limited in application, the Magna Carta has long been hailed as the beginning of liberal democracy. However, it has been a long journey. Its maturation took several bloody civil wars and revolutions in Europe and North America. And the process continues. An anniversary story in the New York Times on May 15, 2015, carried the headline, “Magna Carta, Still Posing a Challenge at 800.” The same headline would probably hold true centuries from now. And the challenges would most likely be of the same variety: the nature of governance, individual sovereignty vs. government authority, individual rights vs. communal interests, limits of political and artistic expressions, and freedom of and from religion. One of the provisions of the Magna Carta was the establishment of an advisory council for the King. The council ultimately evolved into a bicameral parliament which increasingly began to assert its primacy. The ensuing power struggle led to a protracted civil war in the 1600s between monarchists and parliamentarians. Ultimately, the latter won and the reigning monarch, King Charles I, was beheaded. “The first middle-class revolution in history thus asserted itself successfully with decisive and unheard of audacity.”7 Even then true democracy still took several more centuries to evolve in the UK. It took many more contestations to whittle down monarchical powers. It wasn’t until the early 20th century that the House of Commons became the effective government and the monarchy essentially ceremonial. The establishment of democracy in the United States similarly took a protracted war of independence that the colonies ultimately won. Europe’s democratization took many more wars. Among them was the bloody and very influential French revolution that lasted from 1789 to 1799. Like the English civil war of 1649, it culminated in the beheading of the country’s monarch, King Louis XVI. Yet, despite its motto of “Liberté, égalité, fraternité,” France remained a country under dictatorial caprice for several more years. Indeed, despite advancements in democratic governance, the struggle between despotism and liberty was still playing out in Europe about 140 years later. It took World War II—“the war to end all wars”—to consolidate democracy in Western Europe. And that was because the Allies won. Had the war ended differently, Europe might have regressed into despotism, possibly feudalism. Rather the triumph of Americanled Allies over the German-led Axis not only consolidated democracy in much of Western Europe but led to its expansion elsewhere.

Political convergence  103

The Enlightenment as fuel If the Magna Carta was the ignition for liberal democracy, the Enlightenment was the fuel that has powered it through the journey. Where the Magna Carta was politically driven and therefore narrow in its inception, the Enlightenment was an intellectual movement that totally and radically redefined the relationship of the individual to the state, the church, and other institutions of authority. It advocated science over religion, reason over faith, individuality over communal fiat, and questioning over subservience. These were radical views in the late 18th- to early 19th-century Europe where these ideas were first formally propounded. It was a society that was still steeped in mysticism, religious dogma, and autocratic rule—much like the rest of the world. Not surprisingly, the Enlightenment—especially its radical expression—had a rough beginning. It was despised and rejected not just by governments and the church, but also by universities, academics, and even the press.8 Its advocates—largely fringe intellectuals— were fiercely persecuted and driven underground for what were deemed subversive ideas. Jonathan Israel summed it up thus: Vast energy was invested by governments, churches, universities, erudite journals, lawyers, and scientific academies, not to mention the Inquisition and guardians of press censorship, in seeking to prevent, or at least curb, the growing seepage of radical ideas into the public sphere—and eventually the popular consciousness.9 But ultimately the suppression failed. The Enlightenment gradually took hold in the minds of the broader intelligentsia and ultimately the masses. Its logic was compelling. Well, at least in principle, though not always in practice. The gap between principles and practice explains enduring contradictions, such as the disenfranchisement of minorities and women. And so, the Enlightenment continues to generate contestations. Its boundaries remain under contention. What is the place of religion in public life? What are the limits of individual rights? What lifestyles must society formally accord its blessings? In effect, the ethos of the Enlightenment is still evolving and being challenged everywhere. Yet, its trajectory is certain. And that’s what inspired Fukuyama to foresee global convergence in political philosophy and hence “the end of history.”

104  Political convergence

Europe as bridgehead The inexorable implication of this history is that the challenges of governance currently facing non-Western countries are best understood as the inherent challenges of democratization. Those countries are battling the same forces that made democratization of Europe and North America such a bloody affair. It would be mischaracterization to label the drive to liberalize as a quest for “Western values.” Rather, the history supports Fukuyama’s characterization of the West as “the bridgehead” from which the philosophy spread. Just as impressive as the growth in the number of democracies is the fact that democratic government has broken out of its original beachhead in Western Europe and North America, and has made significant inroads in other parts of the world that do not share the political, religious, and cultural traditions of those areas.10 In military parlance, a beachhead is a territory that is captured and secured for purposes of pursuing a broader campaign. Thus, liberal democracy is a political ideology that first overcame competing ideologies in specific locales in Europe, spread to other parts of Europe and North America, and then to the non-Western world. It gradually displaced traditional Western values, just as it is currently challenging traditional practices elsewhere. Libertarian philosophers such as John Locke and John Stuart Mill wrote in the backdrop of opposite philosophies such as Nietzsche’s authoritarianism and Plato’s moralism. In the 20th century, democratic governance in the West had to contend with other “Western” philosophies, notably Nazism and Marxism (espoused by Germans Carl Marx and Frederick Engel). Even at present—in the 21st century—some of the contrary philosophies have surged in several western European and North American countries. Meanwhile, some non-Western countries have had uninterrupted democratic governance longer than some Western European countries. For example, notwithstanding a few periods of national emergency, India has been a democracy since independence from Britain in 1947. So too have Jamaica since 1962 and Botswana since1966. In contrast, Spain didn’t become a democracy until 1977 following the death of General Francisco Franco about two years earlier. And Greece was under military rule from 1967 to 1974 and Portugal from 1974 until 1976.

Political convergence  105

Skepticism on convergence The overall trajectory notwithstanding, skeptics and critics still reject the convergence thesis. There remain too many deficiencies in and challenges to liberal democracy to warrant the pronouncement of “the end of history,” they say. First, the quality of the global democratization has been checkered at best. Second, even contemporary champions of the Enlightenment, such as German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, are having second thoughts. They now argue that the Enlightenment’s wholly secular logic has left an existentialist vacuum in humanity.11 And third, liberal democracy has spurred the social equivalent of the runaway train, the absence of “moral moorings,” as Newsweek columnist George Will once put it. And then there are criticisms from the perspective of cultural relativism. British journalist Jenni Russell encapsulated this view in her sharp critique of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s assertion that democratic values are universal. “These sentences betrayed a total ignorance of the range of customs, convictions and prejudices that govern human behaviour in a multitude of different societies,” Russell wrote in The Guardian (London) on July 27, 2007. Blair talked as if he thought that people around the world were essentially blank sheets, who would adopt all western values wholesale as soon as they encountered a can of Coke, a job in a clothing factory and a gender rights worker. From this logic, Russell offered this explanation of the otherwise inexplicable horror of Islamist violence: People are driven by metaphysical beliefs about society to commit heinous crimes, even against their better judgments. That is because people’s sense of self and identity are determined by what obtains around them and a threat to that identity is thus a threat to the self. “The mistake here is that the modern liberal belief—all men are equal—has been transmuted into the false idea that all people think the same,” Russell argued. Fukuyama’s response to these criticisms is essentially that he never intended “the end of history” to suggest the end of political problems or ideological conflicts. Rather, it is that liberal democracy represents the most promising platform from which they may be—and are being—resolved.12 The argument is much like Winston Churchill’s quip about democracy that it is the worst kind of government excerpt for everything else that has been tried.

106  Political convergence Since Fukuyama’s exuberant declaration, there have, indeed, been several challenges to the thesis of convergence. Most notable is the rise of anti-Western Islamist rhetoric and related violence. To Islamists, democratic values are “alien values” that the West seeks to use to undermine Islamic values and perhaps destroy Islam. Then, there is the rising nationalism in Europe that also undercuts some of the assumptions of liberal democracy. These developments have tended to support the late Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington’s claim that the post-Cold War era would be characterized by a “clash of civilizations.”13 Yet, Fukuyama—who was Huntington’s student at Harvard—has not wavered in his conviction that we are at the “end of history.” He subsequently took a dimmer view of global convergence, however, but has not abandoned the thesis.14 “[T]he aspiration to live in a free society is pretty widely shared,” he has said. “But the actual ability to create a democracy is actually quite difficult because you need institutions and those are hard to create,” Fukuyama said in an interview on National Public Radio on September 27, 2014. “I think that as societies become more middle-class, better educated, wealthier, there is a universal human desire to participate in politics. And that’s happened in one country after another.” The challenge, as in Europe up to the mid-20th century, is to establish enduring democratic structures. “I think the problem is that actually getting to democracy is a pretty hard thing because you really need institutions,” Fukuyama said in the interview. “And that’s where we’ve been falling down over the last few years. But in the long sweep of history, I do think there’s a certain reason to expect that.” One may add in this regard that Russell’s loss-of-identity case against convergence applies to all challenges to the traditional order. It applied to the Reformation, and it was the major case against the Enlightenment. It becomes a more potent issue in the context of Muslim countries only because democratic ideals have been extolled as Western values. ******************

Notes 1 Doug Stone, “Foreword,” in Eric D. Patterson and John Gallagher (eds.), Debating the War of Ideas (New York: Palgrave Macmillan: 2009), viii. 2 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992), 211. 3 Fukuyama, End of History, xii.

Political convergence  107 4 Theodore H. Von Laue, “From Fukuyama to Reality: A Critical Essay,” in Timothy Burns (ed.), After History? Francis Fukuyama and His Critics (Lanham, MD: Littlefield Adams Quality Paperbacks, 1994), 23–37. 5 Among other sources, these views are to be found in After History? Francis Fukuyama and His Critics, ed. Timothy Burns (Lanham, MD: Littlefield Adams Quality Paperbacks, 1994) and Robert Kagan, The Return of History and the End of Dreams (New York: Knopf, 2008). 6 Fukuyama, End of History, 145. 7 William Ebenstein, Great Political Thinkers: Plato to Present (New York: Rinehart & Company, 1960), 358. 8 Jonathan I. Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 9 Israel, Enlightenment Contested, 12. 10 Fukuyama, End of History, 50. 11 Habermas’s second thoughts in this regard are summarized by Stanley Fish in a blog for the New York Times, April 12, 2011, “Does Reason Know What It Is Missing?” http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/12/ does-reason-know-what-it-is-missing/. 12 Francis Fukuyama, “Reflections on the End of History, Five Years Later,” History and Theory. Theme Issue 34: World Historians and Their Critics, 34, 2 (1995): 27–43. 13 Huntington originally published the view in an essay, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs, 72, (Summer 1993), 22–49; then followed it up with a book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). 14 Fukuyama, “Reflections on the End of History.”

13 Onward from the bridgehead

Evidence of Francis Fukuyama’s optimism is to be found all over the world. People in non-Western countries frequently put their lives and livelihood at risk to crusade for democracy and human rights. Despite civil wars, political upheavals, and Islamist insurgencies, surveys still show that non-Western people are strongly in favor of the democratic order—including fair elections, civil liberties, and press freedom.1 When such commitments to democratic ethos are labeled a quest for Western values, it feeds the reactionary rhetoric of Islamists, communists, and leaders invested in other forms of despotism. In 2013, for example, Iranian students took to the streets demanding political reforms, a change from the Islamic theocracy. An editorial by the Kansas City Star (November 14, 2013) approvingly cast this as a quest for Western values. “Although the Iranian people generally have shown themselves to be hungry for peace and in harmony with many Western values, the governments of Iran have promoted opposite positions in recent decades,” the editorial states. That pervasive interpretation of the non-Western world has been discredited by scholars such as Edward Said, Ali A. Mazrui, Fawaz A. Gerges, and David Cannadine. In his book Culture and Imperialism, for example, Said writes that we have never been as aware as we now are of how oddly hybrid historical and cultural experiences are, of how they partake of many often contradictory experiences and domains, cross national boundaries, defy the police action of simple dogma and loud patriotism.2 Said followed up on that argument with an essay titled “The clash of ignorance.”3 Similarly, in an essay in Foreign Affairs titled “Islamic and Western Values,” Mazrui painstakingly rebuts the notion of Western

Onward from the bridgehead  109 4

exceptionalism. At the time of the essay in 1997, the Ugandan-born Muslim was the director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies at the State University of New York at Binghamton. Among other things, he notes that most of what the West sees today as characteristics of Islamic culture were all features of Western societies up to the 20th century. Among them are the disenfranchisement of women, criminalization of homosexuality, societal abhorrence of sex out of wedlock, stigmatization of single motherhood, and even censorship of the press. “Westerners tend to think of Islamic societies as backward-looking, oppressed by religion, and inhumanely governed, comparing them to their own enlightened, secular democracies,” Mazrui writes. “But measurement of the cultural distance between the West and Islam is a complex undertaking, and that distance is narrower than they assume.”5 About six years before Appiah’s The Lies that Bind, Cannadine made very much the same points in his book The Undivided Past. From the perspective of history rather than sociology, Cannadine examined the six major dimensions of identity politics—religion, nation, class, gender, race, and civilization—and concluded that none of them is compellingly homogenizing or distinguishing.6 In other words, they don’t uniquely brand any group or distinguish them from others. Muslims are much more like Christians than identity politics would suggest and Westerners are much more like non-Westerners than is typically claimed, he argued. Journalists too are increasingly echoing this argument. An essay in the Kashmir Monitor of India (October 21, 2011) took issues with the argument that Islam is incompatible with “Western values” such as tolerance, fairness, and religious freedom. The essay, which had no byline and was reprinted in the Hindustan Times, argued that the ethos was long manifested by the Muslim-run Ottoman Empire. “The Ottomans were history’s longest-lasting major dynasty; their durability must have had some relation to their ability to rule a multi-faith empire at a time when Europe was busily hanging, drawing and quartering different varieties of Christian believer,” the writer argued. The essay characterized the notion of Western values as the “chauvinism apparent among some westerners.” It is “typically triggered by Islamic extremism,” the essay continued, extremism that is disliked by mainstream Islam no less than the West does.

West’s ‘civil wars’ over values Even in the present, Western societies continue to struggle with contending visions of society, quite often driven by domestic identity

110  Onward from the bridgehead politics. When at the Republican National Convention in Houston in 1992, Patrick Buchannan spoke of a “culture war” raging in the United States, he wasn’t talking of “alien” values. He was referring to intense divisions in domestic social values. It was a war between those who saw the United States as a Christian nation that should be governed by Biblical principles and progressives who embrace multiculturalism and secular values. In a broader sense, it was a war between those who want to preserve traditions and those who want to break down their constraints. By 2020, the fourth year of the Trump presidency, the “culture war” had reached a breaking point. Actually, the war reached a climactic point in June 2015, when the Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry. While the decision was hailed by the liberal end of American political ideology, it upended the metaphysical world of the rest. Most of those who were unsettled by the decision accepted it as fait accompli. The highest court in the land had spoken. Yet, there have been pushbacks and consequences. The most consequential fallout has to be the improbable election of Donald Trump in 2016. Among his major supporters were white evangelical Christians. Exit polls show that about 81percent of them voted for Trump, and the reason is existentialist. Though Trump rates low in Christian pedigree—with his penchant for coarse language, pugnacious rhetoric, and sexual proclivities—evangelicals saw him as the candidate who would most boldly protect their beliefs from an encroaching liberal trend. That pattern of political choice was set in the 1980s, when Rev. Jerry Falwell formed a group he tellingly called the Moral Majority. It was an able brigade in the “culture war” that Buchanan subsequently and formally proclaimed. Under Falwell’s leadership, the group wielded considerable political influence in much of the 1980s. It contributed to the rehabilitation of the Republican Party after the Watergate scandal and the resulting resignation of President Richard Nixon. And it played a pivotal role in the election of Ronald Reagan as president. But the fortunes of the Moral Majority took a downward trend by the end of the decade. First, there was the election of the liberal Bill Clinton for two terms beginning in 1988. Then came Barack Obama, after George W. Bush’s tenure. To evangelical Christians, Bush’s middle-of-the-road conservatism did not sufficiently advance Christian values. But he was much preferred to Clinton. In Obama, they saw a regression beyond Clinton.

Onward from the bridgehead  111 Though a Christian, some evangelical Christians considered Obama the anti-Christ. To them, his social policies, especially regarding sexual lifestyles, were an attempt to gut Christian values. Like Reagan in the 1980s, Trump appealed to the evangelicals not because he exemplified Christian values, but because he most demonstrated the political pugnacity to stem the liberal tide. Like the election of Reagan in 1980 then, the election of Trump demonstrated the multifaceted nature and intricacies of the “culture war.” Reagan was a once-divorced Hollywood-actor-turned politician. Jimmy Carter, the man he beat by a landslide, was (is) a never- divorced pious Baptist. Yet evangelical Christians preferred Reagan. The choice may well be explained by the doctrinal shift from Martin Luther’s emphasis on character to the prosperity gospel, or what Francis Fukuyama describes as the “therapeutic message.”7 Evangelical Christians’ choice of Trump in 2016 was similarly motivated, though Trump’s Christian pedigree would seem to be even much less than Reagan’s. “The virtues that one associates with great leadership—basic honesty, reliability, sound judgment, devotion to public interest, and an underlying moral compass—were totally missing,”8 Fukuyama writes. Even then evangelicals saw Trump as the candidate most likely to protect their Christian values. And nothing stoked their apprehension more than the legalization of same-sex marriage the year before. “As I’ve written before, white evangelicals’ bargain with Trump is better understood as a desperate deal born of anxiety in the face of a changing nation than as a fulfillment of their aspirations,” states Robert P. Jones of the polling agency Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), in an essay in The Atlantic magazine (April 20, 2018). “White evangelicals were the last soldiers still manning the barricades opposing same-sex marriage, and their resounding legal and cultural defeat on that issue put an end to any lingering serious talk of being ‘the moral majority’ in the country.” In in-depth articles for the Washington Post, Julie Zauzmer and Elizabeth Bruenig have conveyed much the same sentiments after interviewing evangelical Christian leaders around the country. “For many, the eight years of the Obama administration felt like a nightmare,” Zauzmer writes for the Post on September 13, 2018. “The indelible image for the Rev. Chris Gillott was the night the Supreme Court ruled gay marriage legal across the land and Obama flooded the White House in rainbow lights.” Gillott, the youth pastor at Christian Life Center in Bensalem, PA, was speaking for quite a few. Joey Rogers, a Tampa-based evangelical

112  Onward from the bridgehead Christian activist, similarly sees the election of Trump as a check on the erosion of Christian values. American laws are based on the Ten Commandments, yet government policies have moved away from that foundation, Rogers told Zauzmer. He cited among other things, the ending of prayers in public schools and removal of Bible verses from federal court houses. “I think that’s why the country is losing the values that we once had,” he told Zauzmer. He pinned the blame on Democrats, whom he said thinks Christians are “wacky.” In the past few decades then, evangelical Christians have gone from feeling that they are the moral majority to fearing that they are an endangered species. Not only are they losing ground in their quest to have the country governed by Biblical precepts, they now fear being forced to abandon those precepts themselves. They cite laws and lawsuits that compel or seek to compel their businesses to provide services that contravene their beliefs. Among them are the Obama-era law that requires businesses to include birth control in their medical insurance policies and the loss of lawsuits by service providers who would rather not cater for same-sex weddings. The prevailing sense is that they would continue to lose ground. Rather than the ultimate answer, they see Trump as their best bet to stem the liberal trend for a while. Trump’s approval rating among white evangelicals dipped a little because of his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests from spring 2020 onward. Still, by July, 82 percent said they planned to vote for him in November 2020.9 That’s a 1 percent increase from the 2016 election. Now, the evangelicals are in a political limbo. The polls are strongly indicating a likely victory by the liberal Joseph Biden. So, the next opportunity to elect a conservative president would be in 2024. Some evangelicals are already looking ahead to that election. For some, there is an overriding sense of resignation. There is nothing more to do than to hold forth until the prophesied Second Coming. Robert Jeffress—pastor of the First Baptist Church in Downtown Dallas who described himself as Trump’s foremost evangelical supporter—articulates this ecclesiastical view. “As a Christian, I believe that regardless of what happens in Washington, D.C., that the general trajectory of evangelicalism is going to be downward until Christ returns,” he told Elizabeth Bruenig (Washington Post, August 14, 2019). I think most Christians I know see the election of Donald Trump as maybe a respite, a pause in that. Perhaps to give Christians the ability and freedom more to share the gospel of Christ with people before the ultimate end occurs and the Lord returns.

Onward from the bridgehead  113

Canada’s West coast Christian accord The values war is also playing out in Canada. There, the introduction in 2018 of a pro-LGBT curriculum in a school district was the trigger. As part of its sex education, the province of British Columbia implemented a Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity curriculum for Grades 1–3. As explained by Morgane Oger, a transgender woman and candidate for the school board: The idea is to teach kids that there are gay kids. There are trans kids. There are trans parents and gay parents, in our society, and everyone is wanted and desired. It is the role of the schools to teach the following of our laws.10 But SOGI 1 2 3, as the curriculum is called, ignited fierce opposition. A group of clergy men and women bandied to issue what they called the West Coast Christian Accord. It consists of 14 declarations on why SOGI shouldn’t have been implemented, in effect, their equivalent of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses. The essence was that SOGI was an affront to Christian values, that it would corrupt the minds of impressionable children, and that it would confuse them regarding the normalcy of gender distinction. As of September 27, 2018, when the group streamed the announcement of the accord on Facebook, more than 200 pastors and 1,100 church leaders had signed it. And several of those present took turns to read the respective declarations and offer individual accounts of what SOGI had meant and will mean. Some of them turned the tables on the LGBT regarding marginalization and persecution. Giulio Lorefice Gabeli, the pastor of Westwood Community Church, seemed especially aggrieved. For far too long, many of us in the evangelical churches throughout Canada have been dismissed, intimidated, bullied, and even threatened because of our biblical worldview regarding human sexuality, a worldview that is not only based on the time-honoured truths of the Bible, but is a view protected by Canadian law, Gabeli said during his turn. And there were accounts of overzealousness in the implementation of SOGI. Pastor Rene´ McIntyre, of the Trumpet of Truth Christian Ministries, narrated the case of an 8-year-old pupil who felt pressured to accept the view that gender is an option.

114  Onward from the bridgehead “That teacher failed to respect that little girl’s diversity of thought and belief. Rather she imposed and dictated the fear-based sex activist agenda,” McIntyre said. Clearly these activists are seeking to change and subvert the culture by indoctrinating young and malleable minds. There are numerous other stories of children that are similarly traumatized. As ministers of the gospel of Jesus Christ, we are here today to say that we are opposed to students being taught lifestyles that the Bible calls sin. Laura-Lynn Tyler Thompson, another signatory and a broadcaster, pressed the issue along the same line. “We will not permit misinformation about biological reality and identity to undermine the teachings of the Christian faith,” Thompson said. “We will not remain silent as children are brainwashed to reject heterosexuality and embrace gender fluidity, homosexuality, polyamory, pan-sexuality, bisexuality and other forms of sexual behaviors.” When Muslims complain that the West is out to destroy their values, they seem oblivious of these parallel battles within the West. In using anti-Western rhetoric as bait for recruits, Islamists do not acknowledge these points of convergence. They do not discuss the values of Peoria, Illinois or Arab, Alabama. They do not incite followers against family values, democracy, and justice. Rather, they incite them with invectives against the same lifestyle issues that are in contention in the West, especially regarding the normalization of anomalies.

Muslims critical of Islam Meanwhile, even as Islamist extremism has become the face of Islam, many young Muslims are rebelling against the orthodoxy. Whether it is student protests on the streets of Tehran, feminist activism even in Saudi Arabia, or outspokenness on social media and the web, Muslims are increasingly rejecting the draconian tenets ascribed to their faith. Among other things, they are increasingly speaking out for civil liberties, against the subservient status of women, and in denunciation of the draconian penal code known as sharia. Understandably, the news is filled with accounts of Muslim youth in Western countries journeying to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria to fight with the Islamic State. What is not as commonly reported is that the ideology and horrors of the Islamic State disquiet a vast majority of Muslims in the Arab world and elsewhere.

Onward from the bridgehead  115 Thomas L. Friedman elaborates on this in a column in the New York Times (December 7, 2014) titled “How ISIS Drives Muslims From Islam.” The article notes a rising voice among Muslims on the Web and social media against the so-called Islamic values. These values are inconsistent with the needs of the modern Muslim state, they argue. To illustrate the strength of this voice, Friedman points to the popularity of a Twitter hashtag which translates from Arabic as “why we reject implementing Shariah.” The hashtag was used 5,000 times in 24 hours, Friedman wrote. There are also websites for Muslims who reject the religion entirely and even profess atheism. Significantly, Friedman did not discuss this trend as reflecting adoption of Western values, as is the conventional practice. The dissenting Muslims most likely do not see it as such. It is a continuation of the triumph of the Enlightenment over rival political ideologies. ******************

Notes 1 The case of Africa has been chronicled by Afrobarometer since 1999. (See Afrobarometer.org.) 2 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 15. 3 Edward M. Said, “The Clash of Ignorance,” in Jason Dittmer and Jo Sharp (eds.), Geopolitics: An Introductory Reader (New York: Routledge, 2014), 191–194. 4 Ali A. Mazrui, “Islamic and Western Values,” Foreign Affairs, 76, 5 (1997), 118–132. 5 Mazrui, “Islamic and Western Values,” 118. 6 David Cannadine, The Undivided Past: History Beyond Our Differences (London: Allen Lane, 2013). 7 Fukuyama, Identity, 100 8 Fukuyama, Identity, x. 9 Pew Research Center, July 1, 2020. https://www.pewresearch.org/facttank/2020/07/01/white-evangelical-approval-of-trump-slips-but-eight-inten-say-they-would-vote-for-him/ft_20-07-01-2020_religioustrumpapproval3/. 10 Scott Douglas Jacobsen, “West Coast Christian Accord,” Canadian Atheists.com, October 21, 2018. https://www.canadianatheist.com/2018/10/ west-jacobsen/.

14 Cultural humility

On May 25, 2020, a white Minneapolis policeman planted his knee on the neck of a black detainee, as three colleagues watched. The detainee, George Floyd, repeatedly pleaded, “I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe” to no avail. Apparently realizing he was at the point of death, the 46-yearold man called out to his late mother, “Mama, mama.” Unfazed, the policeman kept his knee planted on Floyd’s neck for more than two additional minutes. By the time he lifted it, Floyd was dead. This horrifying sequence would never have been known were it not captured by a 17-year-old woman who had her cellphone camera trained on the scene. With the recording, the whole world got to see one of the most surreal murders by a law enforcement officer in contemporary history. It was cause for global outrage. In Minneapolis, other U.S. cities, and around the world, thousands thronged the streets to protest police brutality and racism. As often happens during protests, some participants broke away from the crowd to vandalize property and loot stores. And that resulted in confrontations with the police. About one week after Floyd’s death, the protests reached the front lawns of the White House, and an unnerved Secret Service quickly whisked President Donald Trump down to the security bunker. But apparently embarrassed at thus showing weakness, the image- conscious president re-emerged soon after. Then he did two things that widely drew both criticism and derision. First, he ordered the forcible ejection of the protesters from the White House lawn. Then, flanked by top government officials—including America’s top military officer, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—Trump strode across the lawn to a nearby church, retrieved a Bible, held it up, and posed for photos. Beyond the ostensible show of resolve, the photo-op was apparently intended to appeal especially to fundamentalists and evangelicals. Yet, it was widely decried as an anomaly in a secular society.

Cultural humility  117 Outside the United States, the action that caught the greater attention was the forceful ejection of the peaceful protesters. The United States routinely chastises other governments for abusing their citizens’ human rights. Officially and unofficially, some of those countries seized the opportunity to turn the tables. Among them were Russia, China, Iran, and India. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government took the most ironic approach, wording its comments to mirror U.S. admonishments of other governments. Maria Zakharova, the spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, implored the United States to “start respecting peoples’ rights and observing democratic standards at home” (Associated Press, June 4, 2020). To drive home the actual concern, she added that “it’s time for the U.S. to drop the mentor’s tone and look in the mirror.” The Chinese too didn’t hold back. As reported by the BBC on June 5, the state media covered the U.S. protests extensively, playing up the isolated cases of use of force to contain protesters. The state news agency, Xinhua, referred to the protests as “Pelosi’s beautiful landscape.” Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, had in summer 2019 referred to the massive anti-Beijing protests in Hong Kong as “a beautiful sight to behold.” The massive U.S. protests presented too good an opportunity for China’s retort. On social media, Chinese activists also proclaimed the United States “the double-standard nation.” These sentiments are chorused by officials, the press, and commentators in places as politically disparate as India and Iran. India, which boasts of being the world’s largest democracy, has come under U.S. criticism for its treatment of Muslims. The George Floyd demonstrations provided an opportunity for a counter-accusation. Much as Russian and Chinese commentators, an Indian broadcast segment circulated on social media caustically accused the United States of blatant hypocrisy. Not surprisingly, the most official and dramatic reaction came from the Islamic Republic of Iran. As reported by the BBC on June 8, an Iranian legislator asked his colleagues to stand and chant “to show respect for the movement of the oppressed in the U.S.” And for about 15 seconds, members of the parliament stood and chanted a familiar refrain, “Death to America.” To be sure, except for polemical purposes, it would be a stretch to equate U.S. observance of human rights—even under the Trump administration—to that of Russia, China, Iran, and even India. In the first three countries in particular, dissent is barely tolerated. In Russia,

118  Cultural humility opponents and critics of Putin are often imprisoned or killed. There is certainly no equivalent anywhere in contemporary history of China’s Tiananmen Square massacre in June 1989. It was an incident in which the government—more accurately the Communist Party—deployed armored tanks and thousands of soldiers to put down massive prodemocracy protests by students, leaving an estimate of at least 10,000 people dead.1 In summer 2009, Iran comparably squashed massive protests against election results that the protesters deemed rigged in favor of conservative candidates. Much like China’s Communist Party, Iran’s theocratic leaders took a hardline. They didn’t resort to China’s wartheater style of operation, but they detained thousands and killed an estimate of more than 70 people. In contrast, despite massive turnouts in virtually every major American city to protest George Floyd’s murder, hardly any protesters were killed by the direct action of law enforcement and few were detained. But then that is not to say that the worst couldn’t have happened. In articulating the government’s strategy for containing the protests, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said it was to “dominate the battle space.” It is a phrase that President Trump repeated a number of times, especially in urging state governors and city mayors to clamp down on protesters. The most observable indication of the Trump administration’s seriousness was that he had the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff accompany him to the Bible-display photo-op. Beyond that, there were actual preparations to deploy the military. What many Americans did not see was that behind the scenes, active-duty units from the 82nd Airborne Division and elsewhere— soldiers who are prepared to confront external enemies at a moment’s notice—had been deployed to staging areas on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., apparently part of Trump’s plan to ‘dominate the battle space.’ So wrote Rachel E. VanLandingham and Geoffrey S. Corn, two U.S. law professors and retired military officers,2 in USA Today on June 10. The troops never engaged protesters. However, federal agents were deployed a few weeks later against protesters in Portland and other cities—against the wishes of state and municipal leaders. Regarding Portland, National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition reported on July 19 that the “federal agents dressed in camouflage and tactical gear took to the streets unleashing tear gas, beating protesters bloody and pulling people into unmarked vans.”

Cultural humility  119 The Trump administration’s rationale for the heavy-handed intervention was that the protesters were a threat to federal government property. That raises this question: What if those who protested in front of the White House on June 1 had breached the building and sought to eject the occupants? What level of force would have been used to stop them? These questions are especially pertinent because the United States applauded when protesters did those things in Ukraine and Hong Kong. In February 2014, Ukrainian protesters besieged the office of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych and forced him to sneak out to Russia. Then in July 2019, protesters in Hong Kong surrounded the parliamentary building for hours before breaking the glass wall and storming the building. As reported by the BBC on July 1, “Extensive damage was done to the building, with portraits of political leaders torn from the walls and furniture smashed.” The protesters also spray-painted emblems on the walls of the central legislative chambers. In both cases, the U.S. government warned the respective governments not to use force against the protesters. But would the primedfor-action soldiers of the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division have stood aside while such happened to the White House? Who knows? In any case, with just months to go before the presidential election in November 2020, there was palpable fear that Trump might refuse to hand over if he lost re-election. The concern was that he would scuttle the election or dispute its outcome as a pretext. This widely speculated scenario created the sort of pre-election unease that is associated with the emerging democracies of Africa, Asia, and Latin and South America. Trump lost the election and did exactly as feared. What this all demonstrates is that democracy is ever a fluid form of government and the practice of human rights is a continuum rather than a dichotomy. In fact, Trump’s entire tenure is a lesson in that regard. His authoritarian tendencies, his disdain for the institutions of democracy, and his disregard for decorum all point to the fragility of democracy even in a country that has practiced it for centuries.

The last history Now, to the exceptionalism that is posing the greatest challenge to convergence in political culture: Islam. Late in July 2020, a video circulating on social media showed five Nigerian men kneeling while blindfolded with a red cloth. Behind them, off video, someone could be heard telling them the basis for their pending execution. The claim against them was that they were seeking to convert Muslims

120  Cultural humility in neighboring villages to Christianity. In reality, as confirmed by Nigerian and international aid organizations, the five men were aid workers who were distributing COVID-19 relief to the remote areas in northeastern Nigeria. That notwithstanding, the Islamists executed the men. While jihadists consider it a capital offense to attempt to convert Muslims to other religions, they themselves are on a mission to make Islam the world’s sole religion. The resulting campaign for Islamization may be deemed the last serious challenge to convergence in global political culture. Some may point to communism as another challenge. But the few surviving communist countries—China, North Korea, and Cuba—are striving to hold on to the ideology rather than seeking to spread it. That leaves Islamization as the last real challenge to “the end of history.” Its agenda, rationale, and process are most succinctly, yet comprehensively, articulated in a paper by the Islamic scholar Jaafar Sheikh Idris. His paper titled “The Process of Islamization” encapsulates the agenda of Islamization with this opening statement: The aim of the Islamic movement is to bring about somewhere in the world a new society wholeheartedly committed to the teachings of Islam in their totality…. Our organized and gradual effort which shall culminate in the realization of that society is the process of Islamization.3 The word somewhere suggests that this theologically pure Islamic state is to be established in one locale, as with ISIS’s caliphate. However, further down in the 15-page essay, Idris contradicts this. He argues that in the eye of true Islam, all societies are corrupt, a term he uses apparently to refer to every activity that is inconsistent with strict Islam. Furthermore, he argues, only adherence to strict Islamic faith can rid societies of “corruption.” It is, therefore, the duty of every true Muslim to “warn” non-believers of the imperatives of converting to Islam. “This attitude of sincere and convincing warning should be our attitude towards all communities and nations whether they belong to Islam or not,” Idris writes. Our aim and duty is not to destroy Western civilization and build on its debris but to attempt to save and guide it to the correct path. If it refuses to heed our warning, or listen to our advise its downfall is inevitable and we shall not be responsible for it.

Cultural humility  121 Idris suggests that the inevitability is a matter of scripture, rather than military compulsion. However, Islamist insurgencies are to be found everywhere from the Middle East to sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe. It seems evident, therefore, that the goal of Islamization is not merely to establish a holy Islamic state somewhere, but to make fundamentalist Islam the world’s religion by all means. Idris does not provide any empirical or even conjectural evidence of why societies are better off with Islam. He bases his entire argument on passages from the Quran. Islamization is thus an advocacy of the very practice the Enlightenment stands against. Idris also does not address contradictions between his claims and the realities. Why have no Muslim country met the standards of Islamic purity that he articulates? If, indeed, Islamization is to be pursued through persuasion and ominously enough “warnings,” why are there so many Islamist insurgencies around the world? A booklet issued by the Saudis in 2008 answers some of these questions. The booklet titled Clear Your Doubts About Islam: 50 Answers to Common Questions blames the press for equating Islamist violence with Islam. In reality, it states: Extremism is something blameworthy in Islam, as it means deviation from the moderation of Islamic teachings or from the correct method of applying them. Although the extremist might present his arguments from an Islamic point of view or be motivated by religious feelings, it remains an unacceptable position according to the Qur’an and guidance of Prophet Muhammad. Consequently, it has been condemned by all reliable Muslim scholars.4 But then that begs the question of why so many Muslims have embraced violence and bloodshed. The Islamic State, for example, was established ostensibly to actualize the ideal society that Idris describes. Yet, during its brief tenure, it was readily the most violent “government” in the world. Regarding material well-being, the pamphlet concedes that relative to the West, “the Muslim world has been in decline for several centuries.”5 It blames the decline on indulgence during its period of prosperity. “But affluence, excessive concern with worldly life, and the spread of corruption eventually weakened religious consciousness,” the pamphlet states. The inevitable result of these human failures was an ebb in conversions to Islam and territorial expansion, losses sustained in East

122  Cultural humility Asia and Europe, the ascension of Western power and influence, and a change from an ascendant to a defensive posture.6 But even if one concedes the explanation, there is still the fact that that was centuries ago. What are the realities today? Outside of the oil-rich Gulf states, why are Islamic societies so impoverished and wracked with violence? In Nigeria, for example, the virtually all-Muslim Northern states are lagging considerably behind the predominantly Christian South. When both regions were merged in 1914 by the British colonial administrator Lord Lugard, they were of approximate parity in economic development. In fact, the North may have had the advantage, with its expansive Sultanates and Emirates. Then Northerners—mostly Moslems—led Nigeria for about 40 of the 60 years since independence in 1960. Yet, the South has distanced the North in prosperity and educational attainment. By 2020, a number of Northern state governments had begun to dismantle the Almajirai boarding schools that were established to educate Muslim children as an alternative to secular schools. It was a concession that their Quran-focused curriculum had proven disastrous for purposes of preparing the estimated 10 million to 12 million children for life in the modern world. But then, the states did not make adequate alternative plans for the children. One of the options exercised was both inhumane and surreptitious. When hordes of children were found abandoned in various communities in the South, locals feared a terrorist scheme. Though that was never fully discounted, they soon realized that the young ones were Almajirai children surreptitiously dumped in those communities under cover of darkness. The practice created tension when some Southern states threatened to truck the children back to their states of origin—to the extent that that could be determined. Even the Northern state governments feuded among themselves over responsibility for the children. What about parental responsibility in this scenario? The simple answer is that the children’s parents couldn’t afford to take care of them. In the Muslim tradition, men may marry as many wives as they wish and may leave them simply by repeating thrice, “I divorce you.” So, impoverished men routinely married multiple wives—usually young girls—and fathered several children with them. Those children typically ended up on the streets as beggars or are taken to the Almajirai schools. It was the closing of those schools that led to the desperate measures to find where to leave them.

Cultural humility  123 During his six-year tenure as the Emir of Kano—one of the highest positions in Nigeria’s Muslim world—Sanusi Lamido Sanusi implored his fellow Muslims to eschew this and other similarly impoverishing practices7. “We have to be honest with ourselves,” he said in one of the speeches. If you look at the poverty indices in the world today, you find that in South-West Nigeria, the incidence of poverty is 20 percent. In the North West, it is 80 percent. The North-East, it is 80 percent. Why is it that the poorest parts of this country are the Muslim parts? Sanusi, who had served as the governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, answered his own question with another question: “What part of Islamic law, what verse in the Koran, what ideals of the Prophet allows a father…. to leave the child to go and fend for himself?” Such outspokenness may have cost Sanusi the emirship, as he was soon dethroned and exiled to another state in March 2020. Yet, the questions he raised are among those that confront Islamist exceptionalism. If Islam has engendered neither peace nor prosperity, wherein lies its challenge to the secular ethos of the Enlightenment? The Saudi pamphlet seems to concede that it is not. The pamphlet’s response to the question of “Islam’s attitude toward Western civilization today” suggests as much. “Undoubtedly, Western culture is the dominant influence in the modern world today,” the pamphlet states. “Hence, it is inevitable that others interact with it and assimilate its positive values and achievements, but without adopting its negative ones.”8 It goes further to add that, “What Muslims and many other peoples of the world today reject is the presumed centrality and universalism of the West and its self-centered attitude.”9 One does not have to read these excerpts too closely to discern that resentment toward Western exceptionalism is a factor in current Islamic revivalism. Islam and Christianity have, of course, vied with each other over the centuries. But as the excerpts indicate, the West’s “self-centered attitude” is a hindrance to current prospects for convergence. As discussed in Chapter 12, the Enlightenment is also being revisited to address its limitations. Its contemporary champions, such as Jürgen Habermas, have conceded its deficiencies. To begin with, it gave rise to behavioral excesses. Among them were the hedonism of the 1960s that spurred a culture of irreverence and illicit drug use, and the radical feminism that contributed to the deterioration of the nuclear family,

124  Cultural humility the bedrock of society. Moreover, the Enlightenment’s exclusive focus on rationality and science discounts human spirituality and the search for meaning. This is the province of all religions, regardless of their specific theology. It could be said then that global convergence is progressing from mutually complementary directions. Societies that are steeped in the ethos of the Enlightenment are modifying it to meet the human needs it doesn’t fulfill. Meanwhile, societies that are lagging in its ethos are incorporating it at various rates, while guarding against losing aspects of their culture that fulfill what the Enlightenment does not. Without cultural chauvinism, both sides might move more speedily closer. And “the end of history” would come at some point in the process.

Summation In any discussion of cultural commonalities and political convergence, it is easy to seem to overreach. The impression can readily be created that cultures are—or can be—like factory outputs in their uniformity. That is, of course, neither possible nor desirable. A people’s environment and history always shape the way they live and see the world. What this book and others like it say is simply that the rhetorics of exceptionalism are themselves an overreach, when not outright false. The most powerful engine of convergence today is globalization. Some of its most comprehensive analyses are to be found in the book Identity, Culture and Globalization, a collection of essays by some of the world’s most authoritative scholars.10 The thrust of the analyses is that globalization has had the effect of eroding national identities, but it has not been an invincible force. Craig Calhoun, then professor of sociology at New York University and one of the contributors to the volume, summed it up succinctly. “Modernity is an era shaped by contradictions,” Calhoun writes. “Pursuing uniformity and producing difference in unprecedented ways, defined equally by the slave trade and the post-Reformation ideal of tolerance, modernity has been an epoch of crossed purposes from its outset.”11 Over the years, the world has become “smaller” and more familiar as advancements in transportation and communication technologies have brought people closer together. In The Lies That Bind, Appiah writes that even the much-heralded “Western civilization” emerged from a “cultural goulash.”12 And globalization has ensured that the same is true of all cultures, excerpt if there are still any out there that have not interfaced with the rest of humanity. Moreover, “the tendency

Cultural humility  125 of modern literature and science has been to locate the savage within us [the colonial cultures], in our historical origins and in our psychic structure.”13 That cultural chauvinism has endured up to the 21st century is testimony to its resilience. That’s largely because “identities can be held together with narratives … without essence.”14 As has been demonstrated in this book, those identities are not just held but flaunted as superior. It would seem then that there is something Nietzschean about cultural chauvinism. As interpreted by Fukuyama, Nietzsche’s ideal society is one in which people are driven by megalothymia, “that is, the desire to be recognized as better than others.”15 This inclination most likely explains the West’s exclusive—and reductive—claim to the ethos of the Enlightenment. It underlies Islamist radicalism and violence. And it is the engine behind most claims to distinction that get in the way of empathetic and reflexive thought. The point here is that world affairs would change for the better when these impulses begin to weaken. ******************

Notes 1 “Tiananmen Square Protest Death Toll ‘was 10,000,’” BBC, December 23, 2017. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-42465516. 2 Rachel E. VanLandingham is a professor of law at Southwestern Law School and a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel. Geoffrey S. Corn is the Vinson & Elkins Professor of Law at South Texas College of Law in Houston and a retired Army lieutenant colonel. 3 Jaafar Sheikh Idris, “The Process of Islamization,” http://www.call-to monotheism.com/the_process_of_islamization__by_dr__jaafar_sheikh_ idris,_Retrieved March 11, 2015. 4 Saheeh International, Clear Your Doubts About Islam: 50 Answers to Common Questions (Jeddah: Dar Abul-Qasim, 2008), 79. 5 Saheeh International, Clear Your Doubts About Islam, 54. 6 Saheeh International, Clear Your Doubts About Islam, 54. 7 One of such speeches was “Nigeria between the Past and the Future: Culture, Governance and Development,” Keynote Lecture of the SOAS Africa Conference, University of London on 20 July 2017. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=ciV5Vi-3Adw. 8 Saheeh International, Clear Your Doubts About Islam, 52 9 Saheeh International, Clear Your Doubts About Islam, 53. 10 Eliezer Ben-Rafael and Yitzhak Sternberg (eds.), Identity, Culture and Globalization (Leiden: Brill, 2001). 11 Craig Calhoun, “Nationalism, Modernism, and Their Multiplicities,” in Eliezer Ben-Rafael and Yitzhak Sternberg (eds.), Identity, Culture and Globalization (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 445.

126  Cultural humility 12 Appiah, Lies That Bind, 197. 13 David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 7. 14 Appiah, Lies That Bind, 199. 15 Fukuyama, End of History, 305.

Postscript An Oreo and Mozart

This book is written in the grammatical third person to maintain some analytical distance between the author and the subject. But all along I have thought that some personal perspective might be useful to round out the point. That’s what I provide here in the form of a postscript. One afternoon in summer 1998, my then 13-year-old daughter, Boma, and I went to a movie rental store in Birmingham (USA) to rent the film “Amadeus.” I had always wanted to watch it since it was released in 1984, with critical acclaim and box office success. That I didn’t probably had something to do with the fact that it was the same year that I completed my doctoral studies and made the transition to a career in academia. For reasons I don’t readily recall—probably something from a conversation with my daughter about her class discussions—I decided to rent and watch “Amadeus” that summer, 14 years after its release. To prevent theft by customers, the store stacked disks behind the desk, leaving only empty casings in the browsing area. So, to rent a DVD, customers had to take the empty case to the desk, where the disk is retrieved and inserted before checkout. Behind the checkout counter—a little farther back—were two black teenagers, one male and one female, both busy sorting and restacking returned DVDs. When my daughter and I got to the desk, the young man immediately approached us to take our order. I placed the empty case in front of him and said, “May we have this, please?” “Amadeus,” he called out to his colleague, who was still farther away. “What?” she asked, apparently not comprehending the order. He stepped back a little from the desk and repeated a little more emphatically, “Amadeus.” She got it that time and mumbled something I couldn’t discern. In response, he muttered “Oreos” and they both chuckled.

128  Postscript: an Oreo and Mozart He seemed like a very polite young man, and when he said “Oreo” he did so matter-of-factly and with an affable demeanor. There was no appearance of judgment or offense whatsoever. Yet, though he muttered the word, it was in such proximity that he had to know that I heard him. That apparently didn’t matter, for, to him, an Oreo couldn’t possibly know the meaning of Oreo. Were it necessary to respond to him, I would have conceded that if liking classical music makes a black person an Oreo, then I was one. I especially savor Mozart’s piano and horn concertos. Indeed, I never get tired of listening to his Piano Concerto No. 27, as well as Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5. But I would also have informed the teenagers that while my vinyl and cassette collection had a smattering of classical music, it was (and still is) dominated by reggae, R & B, funk, and soul. Along with Mozart, Beethoven, and the like, I have no less a passion for the music of Junior Walker, Otis Redding, Clarence Carter, Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight, the Commodores, Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff, Peter Tosh, Toots and the Maytals, Rex Lawson, Osita Osadebe, and so on. For that matter, my heart still revs at the sound of the traditional music of the Ijaw people of the eastern Niger Delta, where I grew up. I am talking of the Eremina Ogbo and masquerade songs and drum rhythms. I actually still manage to dance to and drum away some of the basic steps and rhythms. That is with due concession to talent deficiency and rust from decades of not being regularly immersed in the traditions. As to movies, I would have added that I had watched, rented, or owned black-themed movies such as “A Soldier’s Story,” “Sparkle,” “Malcolm X,” “The Greatest,” “Jungle Fever,” “Do the Right Thing,” “School Daze,” among many others. Quite a few Caucasians most probably watched those movies as well. But then they may well have been Wannabes, the reverse of Oreos. Given the youth of the checkout clerks, most of the names and titles I have mentioned probably wouldn’t have rung a bell. Still, they might have been persuaded to append an asterisk to their Oreo label. They definitely would have been surprised to find out—as I was— that watching “Amadeus” made me realize how proximate the culture it depicts was to the one I grew up in. I was especially struck by the similarity in the masquerade traditions and supernatural beliefs. The masquerade festivities were the same unbridled affair as the ones I grew up cherishing. And the mysticism and superstition that permeated the film were just as familiar. Sure, what was depicted in “Amadeus” was

Postscript: an Oreo and Mozart  129 the cultural practices of late 18th-century Vienna. But it was Europe nonetheless, and I couldn’t but feel the cultural commonality. In retrospect, I had reason to outright reject the Oreo label. Were it not for the narrative of racial superiority, the counter-narrative that gave rise to the notion of Oreo might never have arisen. It all ties in with Kwame Anthony Appiah’s point that “much of our contemporary thinking about identity is shaped by pictures that are in various ways unhelpful or just plain wrong.”1 ******************

Note 1 Appiah, Lies That Bind, xiii.

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Index

Abortion (issues, laws) 43, 56 Abubakar, Atiku 73 academia (racialist views) 83–85, 127 Achebe, Chinua 93 Adelakun, Abimbola 53 Aeschylus 94 Afghanistan 15, 44, 56, 65, 114 Africa: barbarism 42; Christians 55; cradle of civilization 91; evangelicals 89; exceptionalism 88, 89; press freedom 69 Africa Independent Television/AIT 73 African Europeans 41 African Millennium Renaissance 55 Afro centricity 90–97 Al-Azhar University 25 al-Qaeda 13, 46, 64, 70 Alabama 35, 43, 114 alienation 101 ambivalence (in diplomatic rhetoric) 5, 7, 14 America first (policy) xi American Civil Liberties Union 65 American democracy 3, 4 American exceptionalism 16, 27 Andropov, Yuri 99 apartheid 84–86 Appiah, Kwame Anthony xiii, 4, 5, 86, 88, 94, 109, 124, 129 Archbishop of Canterbury 101 Aroyewun, Bunmi 54 Asante (lineage) 4 Asante, Molefi Kete 92, 93 Ash, Tim 34 Ashdown, Paddy 18 Assad, President Bashar 16, 38

Associated Press 1, 14, 15, 21, 31, 48, 49, 117 Atallah, Lt. Col. Rudy 26 Australia: Australian Broadcasting Corporation 39; Tasmanians 79 Ayatollah Khamene'I 46 Balkans 36 Barbados 36 BBC 39, 40, 46, 62, 117, 119 Beauchamp, Zack 39 Belarus 21 Belgium 82 Benga, Ota 83 Bernal, Martin 91 Biafra 41, 73 Biden, Joseph 68, 112 Bizimungu, Pasteur 61, 62 Blair, Prime Minister Tony 15, 18, 105 Boko Haram 26 boogeyman (political) 12 Botswana 36, 104 Brazza, Pierre Savorgnan de 80 Brexit 85 Brezhnev, Leonid 99 bridgehead (for liberal democracy) 19, 104, 108 Bronx Zoo 83 Brunei: draconian penal codes 43; see also Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah Buchanan, Patrick J. 11, 110 Buddhism 24 Buhari, Muhammadu 72, 73 Bulgaria 21, 32, 36 Bush, President George W. 14, 15, 18, 65, 110

136 Index Cameron, (British) Prime Minister David 18, 48 Canada: Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity curriculum (SOGI) 113; West Coast Christian Accord 113 Cape Verde 36, 69 Caprio, Frank (Judge) 3 Carlyle, Thomas 79 Carter, President Jimmy 111 Caught in Providence 3 Central and South American countries (press freedom) 69 Central Europe 22 Chernenko, Konstantin 99 China/Chinese: banana (racial slur) 45; Black Lives Matter protests 117; Confucian values 5, 6; COVID-19 ix; detergent commercial 3; diplomatic fracas (with US) x, xi; Document 9 (rejection of democratic practices) 57–61, 63, 77; Guangzhou (protests) 59; press freedom ranking 69; Tiananmen Square (uprising) 57, 59, 61, 118; Web censorship (support for) 50 Christians 2, 55, 109; evangelicals 32, 110–112 Churchill, Winston 100, 105 CIA 13, 14, 65, 76 civilizing mission 80, 81 clash of cultures/civilizations 6, 13, 78, 79, 106; see also culture war class struggle 21 CNN 40, 44, 68, 86 Cold War 3, 21, 22, 76, 99, 106 colonization/decolonization 80, 91, 100 commonwealth (British) 48 Communist Revolution (China) 57 Congo Free State 82 Congo, Democratic Republic of 42, 63, 82, 95; River 23 convergence (political, cultural) 8, 101, 103, 105, 106, 114, 119, 120, 123, 124 Corn, Geoffrey S. 118 corruption 1, 2, 7, 12, 22, 32–36, 40, 46, 72, 76, 120, 121 COVID-19/SARS-CoV-2 ix, xi, 120

Croatia 36 crusaders 25 Cuba x, 120 cultural distance 85, 109 culture war 110, 111 CureVac x Czechoslovakia 100 Daar Communications 73 Daily Nation (Kenya) 52 dark continent 23, 80 Darwin 82, 83 dating preferences 3 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) 47, 48, 108 Department of State Services/DSS (Nigeria) 72, 73 Diop, Cheikh Anta 90, 91, 93 diplomatic dilemma 12 Dobrzynski, Judith 23 Dokpesi, Raymond 73, 74 DuBois, W. E. B. 93 Eastern Europe 1, 17, 21, 32, 34, 48, 85, 100, 121 Egypt/Cairo 14, 15, 25, 30, 91, 92, 94, 95 El-Masri, Khaled 65 elections 14, 108; Europe 85; India 76, 77; Kenya 42; Nigeria 72; Romania 22; Rwanda 63; US xi, 1, 7, 68 Emerson, Steve 11 end of history 8, 100, 101, 103, 105, 106, 120, 124 Engels, Friedrich 61 Enlightenment 12, 17, 25, 45, 46, 96, 103, 105, 106, 115, 121, 123–125 Esper, Mark 118 European Union/EU x, xi, 4, 22, 35 Europhilic civility 42 Fagan, Brian M. 78, 79 faith 2, 16–18, 24, 25, 28, 47, 56, 89, 103, 109, 114, 120 Falwell, Rev. Jerry 110 Finch, Charles S. 90, 93, 95 Firtash, Dmytro 34 Floyd, George 116–118 France ix, x, 35, 64, 69, 79–8, 90, 102 Franco, General Francisco 104

Index  137 Freedom House 69 French News Agency (AFP) 39 Friedman, Thomas L. 114, 115 Fukuyama, Francis xiii, 4, 7, 8, 19, 100, 101, 103–106, 108, 111, 125 Gabeli, Giulio Lorefice 113 Gallagher, John 13 Gambia 23, 84 Gandhi, Indira 76 Gao Yu 58 Garvey, Marcus 93 Geneva Convention 65 Germany x, 27, 33, 35, 69, 81, 84 Gillott, Rev. Chris 111 glasnost 100 Gobineau, Joseph-Arthur Comte de 79, 85, 86 Gonzales, Alberto 65 Gorbachev, Mikhail 99 Greek civilization 91, 93, 96 Greek polytheism 45, 46 Grenada 36 Guantanamo Bay 65 Habermas, Jürgen 105, 123 Habyarimana, Juvenal 61 Hanlin, Derek 44, 56 Hausa/Fulani 41 Hegel 101 Herodotus 94 hierarchy (race) 8, 79, 82–85 hijab/burqa 52 HIV 1 Hobbes 101 Hoekstra, Pete 11 homosexuality 46–49, 109, 114; see also LGBT honour killing 56 human rights 11, 14–16, 62–66, 108, 117, 119 Hungary 100 Huntington, Samuel 6, 106 Hussein, Saddam 86 Hutu 2, 42, 61, 63 hybridity (identity) 4 identity (ethnic, religious contestations) 4, 5, 7, 8, 21, 29, 65, 88, 101, 105, 106, 109, 113, 114, 124, 129

Idris, Jaafar Sheikh 45, 46, 120, 121 Igbo (African Europeans, Jews of Africa, Irish of Africa) 41 illegal immigrants 1, 75 immodest dressing/attires 2, 46, 49, 52, 54 immodesty 44 Index of Perception of Corruption 35 India 12, 24, 71; press freedom/ crackdown on political activities 75–77 Infidels 2 international conflicts 2 International Organization for Migration 39 Internet shutdown 75; see also Web censorship Investigative Project on Terrorism 11 Iran/Iranians 2, 12, 17, 30, 38, 39, 46, 61, 108, 117, 118 Iraq/Mosul 15, 18, 31, 32, 38–41, 70, 75, 86, 99, 114 iria tradition (Niger Delta) 89 Ishango bone 95 Islamic State/ISIS 11, 12, 13, 26, 30, 39, 40, 64, 86, 114, 115, 120, 121 Islamists 2, 7, 11–13, 18, 26, 31, 46, 106, 108, 114, 120; see also Muslims Israel 18 Israel, Jonathan I. 103 Italy ix, x, 35, 36, 69, 70 James, George G. M. 91 Japan (politics, culture) 19, 27, 36, 37, 54, 55, 64, 100 Jefferson, Thomas 68 John, Elton/“Rocketman” 49 Jonathan, Goodluck 71 Jones, Robert P. 111 Judaism/Christianity 45, 46 Kaczynski, Jaroslaw 35 Kadokawa, Daisaku 55 Kagame, Paul/Kagame doctrine 61–66, 69 Kaixi, Wu’er 57, 61 Kalenjin 2 Kansas City Star 108 Kardashian, Kim 54, 55 Karegeya, Patrick 62

138 Index karmic cycle 24 Kenya 2, 52–54; Mount Kenya (desecration) 55; post-election violence 42 Khoikhoi 79 Kikuyu 2 Kim Jong-un xi, 10 Kimball, Roger 93 Kimono 54, 55 King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) 25 King Baudouin 82 King John 101 King Leopold II 82 King Louis XVI 102 King Philippe 82 Klitschko, Vitali 33 Kuhn, Thomas 95 Lebanon/Hezbollah 38 Lefkowitz, Mary 92–94 LGBT 48, 49, 66, 113; see also homosexuality liberal democracy 11, 13, 17, 19, 46, 56, 100–106 Lincoln, Abraham 68 Livingston, Dr. 80, 81 Locke, John 104 Luther, Martin 111, 113 McIntyre, Rene´ 113, 114 MacMillan, William Miller 88, 96 Magna Carta 19, 21, 78, 96, 101–103 Malaysia 36 Malcolm X 93 Mandela, Nelson 4, 85 Mao Zedong 57, 58 Marx, Karl 61, 104 Mazrui, Ali A. 66, 108, 109 Mexico xi, 1 Middle East 14, 15, 31, 32, 65, 69, 83, 121 Middle Eastern countries (press freedom) 69 Mill, John Stuart 104 modernity 21–23 Mohammed, Lai 74 Mongols 25 Moral Majority 110, 112 Mugabe, Robert 49

Muhammed, Elijah 93 Muslims 2, 12, 13, 18, 26, 41, 75, 85, 109, 114, 115, 117, 119–121, 123; see also Islamists mysticism 24, 103, 128 Native Americans/American Indians 79 NATO xi, 10, 11, 21, 22, 32–34 Nazism/neo-Nazism 19, 84, 86, 100, 104 Negritude 89, 90 New York Times 10, 23, 24, 26, 55, 60, 62, 63, 68, 86, 102, 115 neo-Nazism 19 Nietzsche 101 Nigeria 3, 12, 23, 26; civil rights/ press freedom 71–75; civil war 41, 42, 49; dress code 52, 53; election 72; Islamist violence 119; North’s economic lag 120, 122, 123 Nigeria Broadcasting Commission/ NBC 73, 74 Nixon, President Richard 110 non-sensory means of knowing 90 Northern Europe 23, 69 Nyamwasa, Kayumba 62 Oanh, KhuatThi 50 Obama, President Barack 15, 16, 25, 30, 31, 47–49, 110–112; anti-Christ 111 obscenity 46 Oger, Morgane 113 Olympics: summer (1936) 84; summer (2012) 26; winter (2014) 26 Onumah, Chido 72, 73 otherness (as factor of invasion of Iraq) 86 Ottoman Empire 109 Paramount (studio) 49 patriotism 36, 37, 41, 108 Patterson, Eric D. 13 Pearl Harbor 64 Pelosi, Nancy 117 Pentecostalism 89 perestroika 100 Plato 21, 94, 104 Poe, Richard 93, 94

Index  139 Poland/Warsaw 10, 16–18, 22, 34, 100 pornography 46, 49, 50 Prescott, Bryan D. 56 prosperity gospel 111 prostitution 46, 49, 50 Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) 7, 111 Punch (Nigeria) 52–54, 74 Putin, Vladimir xi, 10, 14, 26, 27, 117, 118 Rasmussen, Anders Fogh 10, 11 rationality 24, 124 Reagan, Ronald 3, 4, 110, 111 recognition 101 Renaissance 25, 55 Reporters Without Borders/RSF (index of press freedom) 69, 70, 75 Roberts, Chief Justice John 10, 15 Roe vs. Wade 57 Rogers, Joey 111, 112 Rohingyas 2 Roman civilization 45, 46 Romania 22, 32, 36 Romero, Anthony D. 65 Roosevelt, President Franklin D. 16 Russell, Jenni 105, 106 Russia xi, 4, 10, 11, 14, 22, 26, 27, 33–35, 38, 39, 49, 81, 93, 117, 119 Rwanda (Hutu, Tutsi) 2, 36, 42, 61–64, 69 Sado, Jibril 52, 54 Sall, Macky 47, 48 same-sex marriage/wedding 47–49, 111, 112 Sanader, Ivo 36 Sandhurst 42 Saudi Arabia 17, 18, 25, 36, 114 Saunders, Doug 12, 18, 61 Saxcoburggotski, Simeon 36 schizophrenic (political narrative) 13 science 24–26, 28, 91–93, 95, 103, 124, 125 Senegal 47, 48, 90, 91 Senghor, Leopold 90 September 11 13, 64, 70, 86 sharia 114, 115 Sherman, General William T. 38, 71 skepticism on convergence 105

Skims Solutionwear 55 slave trade (trans-Atlantic) 82, 124 slavery 82, 83 Socrates 101 South Africa ix, 4, 62, 84 South Wales Echo 44, 56 South/East Asian (press freedom) 69 Southern Weekend (China) 59 Sowore, Omoyele 72 Soyinka, Wole 93 Spain ix, x, 69, 104 Sphinx 95 Stanley, Henry Morton 23, 80, 81 Stone, Major General (rtd) Doug 99 Straits Times, The (Singapore) 5 Suicide of a superpower 11 Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah: opulence/ indulgence 44; see also Brunei Syria/civil war 16, 38, 39, 114; 16, 39 Takubo, Tadae 36 Tasmanians 79 Temple-Raston, Dina 65 Tertsakian, Carina 63 Thailand/Thais 27 therapeutic message (theology) 111 Thompson, Laura-Lynn Tyler 114 Tibetan monks 24 Tigris river 40 Timisoara (Romania) 22 torture/torture dilemma 13, 14, 31, 64, 65 totalitarianism 21, 57, 61 transitions (to market economy, democracy), 7, 19, 21, 32, 71, 81, 127 Transparency International 35; see also Index on Perception of Corruption Trump, President Donald ix–xi, 1, 7, 10; Trump doctrine 16–18 Tshisekedi, President Félix 82 Tudor, Corneliu Vadim 36 Tusk, Prime Minister Donald 35 Tymoshenko, Yulia 33 U.S.: civil war 38, 41; press freedom 69–71; Senate report on torture 13; Supreme Court 28, 43, 47, 48 Ukraine/Kiev 22, 32–35, 119 United Arab Emirates 36

140 Index United Nations (UN) 30, 39, 62 Uruguay 36 USA Today 40, 86, 118 vaccine nationalism x, xi VanLandingham, Rachel E. 118 Vienna 34, 129 Vietnamese 50 Vincent, Nicholas 78 War of Ideas 13 Warri (Nigeria) 23 Wax, Amy 85 weapons of mass destruction 86 Web censorship 50; see also Internet shutdown Welsh, Bridget 44 Western Europe 69, 102, 104 Western exceptionalism 5, 66, 88–91, 123 Western/Judeo-Christian civilization 5, 11, 92, 120, 123, 124

Will, George 93 Williams, Walter E. 11, 19 World Cup Soccer (women’s, 2011) 27 World War II xi, 2, 36, 84, 91, 99, 100, 102 Wprost 34 Wright, Rebecca 44 Wuhan (China) ix, x xenophobia 19 Xi Jinping, President 58, 59, 61 Xinhua 117 Yanukovych, President Viktor 33, 34, 119 Yoruba 41 Yugoslavia 36 Zakharova, Maria 117 Zauzmer, Julie 111, 112 Zhang Guangdong 60