The other Kyoto protocol
In July 1942, a group of Japanese intellectuals attended a conference in Kyoto. The group was made up of scholars, writers and philosophers and the topic of discussion was "How to overcome the modern". Democracy, capitalism, technology and science were identified as the enemies of Oriental culture. One of those present, the film critic Tsumura Hideo, savaged Hollywood and praised the documentaries of Leni Riefenstahl, while another attendee, Hayashi Fusao, a former Marxist turned nationalist, said that that the assault on Pearl Harbor had filled him with joy. When he heard the news, "it felt as though dark clouds had lifted to reveal a clear summer day."
When a clear September day in New York was suddenly filled with the dark clouds of dust from the felled World Trade Center, Osama bin Laden responded by saying: "The values of this Western civilization under the leadership of America have been destroyed. Those awesome symbolic towers that speak of liberty, human rights, and humanity have been destroyed. They have gone up in smoke."
All of the above comes from Occidentalism by Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, one of the most important books to appear in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Occidentalism, say the authors, is a revolt against rationalism, secularism and individualism. It is also a war against the West, which the jihadis see as something to be destroyed. But Occidentalism predates bin Laden and 20th century Japanese imperialism. Its roots are old European.
Reacting against the universalist claims of the French Revolution, German romantics of the late 18th and early 19th centuries such as Fichte and Herder invoked blood, soil and the spirit of the Volk. The Slavophiles of 19th-century Russia adopted this idea of national soul and used it to attack Russian advocates of liberal reforms. European fascists and National Socialists drew from this poisonous well in the 1930s when they sought to destroy "Americanism", Anglo-Saxon liberalism and "rootless cosmopolitanism" (Jews). Similarly, Stalin declared "rootless cosmopolitanism" and Western liberalism the sworn enemies of Communism. The founders of the Ba'ath Party in Syria were admirers of prewar German race theories and Jalal Al-e Ahmad, an influential Iranian intellectual in the 1960s, coined the phrase "Westoxification" to describe the noxious influence of Western civilization on other cultures. He was another admirer of the blood and soil school.
Seen through Occidentalist eyes, then, the West is a bourgeois, soulless society, hooked on comfort, lust and security and obsessed with money and science. It comprises cowards, who prefer life to death. Buruma and Margalit quote a Taliban fighter saying that the Americans would never win in Afghanistan, because they love Pepsi-Cola, whereas the holy warriors love death. As the authors point out, this was also the language of Nazi ideologues and Japanese kamikaze pilots. On 9/11, the pilots who smashed the two jumbo jets into the World Trade Center were acting in a historical context and it's only by understanding this context and studying its lessons that the Attas of tomorrow can be defeated. In their compact book, Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit provide us with an elegant and succinct account of our enemies.
