Hating yourself

Marko Attila Hoare's review of Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of its Enemies

As an eighteen-year old Trotskyist and 'anti-imperialist' at the time of the 1991 Gulf War, I can testify to the empowering sense of self-righteousness I felt as I demonstrated against the US and its allies, in the course of which my views became increasingly extreme: I fervently believed that the US-led intervention was by far a greater evil than Saddam's occupation of Kuwait; that it would be a blessing for humanity if the US and its allies were defeated; that such a defeat would trigger revolutionary outbreaks across the Middle East and even in the West.

...It was only when my own mother's country, Yugoslavia, was torn apart by local fascists that I gradually came...to comprehend the political and moral bankruptcy of 'anti-imperialism'. It is very easy to be ideologically purist when it is someone else's country that is at stake; much more difficult when it is one's own, and one's own people are being slaughtered.

...Anti-imperialism is itself an expression of an imperialist mind-set. Anti-imperialists are fundamentally uninterested in the rights or wrongs of a conflict in a foreign country; their sole concern is their own geopolitical agenda. Thus, over Yugoslavia, they tended to support Milosevic's Serbia on an 'anti-imperialist' basis, sacrificing the rights of Milosevic's Croatian, Bosnian or Kosovar victims to the 'higher' anti-imperialist cause (in fact, the Western powers themselves aided and abetted Milosevic - but that's another story). Likewise, the anti-imperialists would be happy to consign Iraq to rule by Islamic fundamentalist mass-murderers - just so that the US can suffer a defeat. This is called subordinating the interests of non-Western peoples to Western political concerns, and is the direct counterpart of the readiness of Western Cold Warriors to support every brutal right-wing dictator - Somoza, Fahd, Marcos, Pinochet, Suharto - provided he was anti-Communist. For the Western imperialists of the left and of the right, non-Western countries are mere battlefields for the struggle against their own enemies - whether 'imperialist' or Communist. Anti-imperialists differ from right-wing imperialists in their choice of enemies, yet the two camps are mirror-images of each other, not opposites.

...Anti-imperialism slips effortlessly into opposition to Western values. It is perfectly possible to oppose the negative aspects of Western policy abroad - such as unfair trade rules or the bombing of civilians - while upholding the values of Western liberal democracy: parliamentary sovereignty, the rule of law, separation of powers, multi-party elections, equality of the sexes, gay rights, free trade unions, etc. Yet the anti-imperialists tend to see Western values themselves as a form of oppression. They prefer the regimes of China, Belarus, Zimbabwe or Cuba to those in the West, and oppose not merely the means by which the US seeks to introduce democracy in Iraq, but the goal itself. They rage against the 'colour-coded revolutions' that overthrew the neo-Communist regimes of Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan - not because they genuinely fear these countries will be 'enslaved by imperialism', but because they hate Western-style liberal democracy. The anti-imperialists object little, if at all, to genuinely imperialist crimes by non-Western states: China's colonialism in Tibet; Argentina's invasion of the Falklands; Iraq's occupation of Kuwait; Serbia's wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo; Russia's assault on Chechnya. Ultimately, anti-imperialism is not really about opposing imperialism, but about something else.

It is the last of these practical problems with anti-imperialism that indicates its ideological and psychological origins. As Buruma and Margalit show in Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of its Enemies (first published in 2004 by Atlantic Books as Occidentalism: A Short History of Anti-westernism), anti-imperialist ideas can form part of a larger phenomenon of 'Occidentalism': the ideology of violent opposition to Western political and moral values; not just democracy and political pluralism, but also individualism, the emancipation of women and sexual freedom. The authors discuss a wide range of regional case-studies under the umbrella of Occidentalism.... All these groups arose in opposition to a perceived Western enemy; in one way or another, they all sought to understand the reasons for Western success - both technological and organisational - and apply them to resist the Westernisation of their own societies. ...

Buruma and Margalit discuss the Occidentalists' hatred of the Western city, with its relaxed social mores and sexually liberated women, which they find deeply threatening. At the psychological level, therefore, Occidentalism is related to sexual insecurity and fear of the body. Discussing the Egyptian Islamist Sayyid Qutb and the stay in the US which shaped his subsequent ideology, the authors note: 'In his letters home, Qutb was particularly distressed by the 'seductive atmosphere', the shocking sensuality of daily life, and the immodest behaviour of American women' (p. 32); 'He found the spectacle of young women dancing to a current hit, "Baby, It's Cold Outside", horrifying.' (p. 118). This psychological dislike of the Western lifestyle is linked to a political dislike, as the Western cultural system involving individual choice, personal autonomy and the acceptance of difference and a degree of selfishness makes individuals immune to the fundamentalist or totalitarian temptation: 'The Occident, as defined by its enemies, is seen as a threat not because it offers an alternative system of values, let alone a different route to Utopia. It is a threat because its promises of material comfort, individual freedom, and the dignity of unexceptional lives deflate all utopian pretences.' (p. 72) Occidentalism therefore involves some political and psychological themes that are fundamental to the human condition.

[Buruma and Margalit] point out that 'Neither capitalism nor liberal democracy ever pretended to be a heroic creed' (p. 71); they contrast the Occidentalists' thirst for heroism, self-sacrifice and martyrdom with the liberals' acceptance of the ordinariness of everyday life for the majority of people: 'Liberals, in line with a Puritan tradition, have learned to accept this. More than that, as witnessed by seventeenth-century Dutch painting and English novels, they recognise that the unexceptional, everyday life has dignity too and should be nurtured, not scorned.' (p. 71). ..

The whole thing is worth reading. In a similar self-hating vein, from John Stossel:

Science-fiction author Robert A. Heinlein once wrote, "In declaring his love for a beaver dam (erected by beavers for beavers' purposes) and his hatred for dams erected by men (for the purposes of men) the 'Naturist' reveals his hatred for his own race -- i.e., his own self-hatred." The "Naturist" religion, which today we call "environmentalism," elevates every other form of life above human life. The Constitution was written to protect human beings' rights to life, liberty and property, but environmentalism says those rights must be subordinated to the protection of other species. And men and women who count on their land to support them must live at the mercy of the regulators.