The vast majority of the time, I heartily agree with Dr. Victor Davis Hanson's excellent writings. He demonstrates excellent instincts when it comes to collaborators, for Bruce Thornton is also a joy and an education to read.
Thus, it is with disappointment that I have to express my disappointment at Dr. Hanson's latest writing: "The Global Shift:The world will soon better appreciate the United States"
He starts off with an unassailable discussion of how cultural and economic hegonomy has passed from one culture to another. Although there is no dispute that the United States is the current hegemon, he discusses the validity of the usual canards that this possession will be more fleeting than usual. I start quoting half-way through.
If we have avoided the state socialism of Europe that stymies growth, we have also already passed through all the contradictions of a breakneck capitalist transition — the dislocation of rural people, industrial pollution, unionization, suburban blues, ubiquitous graft, and petty bribery — that will increasingly plague both India and China as they leave the 18th century and enter the 21st.But the real question is how both China and India, nuclear and arming, will translate their newfound economic clout and cash into a geopolitical role. If internal politics and protocols are any barometer of foreign policy, it should be an interesting show. We mostly welcome the new India — nuclear, law-abiding, and English-speaking — onto the world stage. It deserves a permanent seat on the Security Council and a close alliance with the United States.
Damn Straight. No argument there.
China, however, is a very different story — a soon-to-be grasping Soviet Union-like superpower without any pretense of Marxist egalitarianism. Despite massive cash reserves and ongoing trade surpluses, it violates almost every international commercial protocol from copyright law to patents. It won’t discuss Tibet, and it uses staged domestic unrest to send warnings to Taiwan and Japan that their regional options will increasingly be limited by Beijing.China could rein in Kim Jong Il tomorrow. But it derives psychological satisfaction from watching Pyongyang’s nuclear roguery stymie Japan and the United States. China’s foreign policy in the Middle East, Central and South America, and Southeast Asia is governed by realpolitik of the 19th-century American stripe, without much concern for the type of government or the very means necessary to supply its insatiable hunger for resources. The government that killed 50 million of its own has not really been repudiated and its present successor follows the same old practice of jailing dissidents and stamping out freedom. When and how its hyper-capitalist economy will mandate the end of a Communist directorate is not known.
The world has been recently flooded with media accounts that U.S. soldiers may have dropped or at least gotten wet a few Korans. Abu Ghraib, we are told, is like the Soviet gulag — the death camp of millions. Americans are routinely pilloried abroad because they liberated Iraq, poured billions into the reconstruction, and jumpstarted democracy there — but were unable to do so without force and the loss of civilian life.
This hysteria that the world’s hyper-power must be perfect or it is no good is in dire contrast to the treatment given to China.
It's called hypocrisy, but I'm interjecting.
Yet Pavlovian anti-Americanism may soon begin to die down as the Chinese increasingly flex their muscles on the global stage and the world learns better their methods of operation.
Here's where the good Doctor starts departing from reality (in my opinion).
So far they have been given a pass on three grounds: the old Third World romance accorded to Mao’s Marxist legacy; the Chinese role as a counterweight to the envied power of the United States; and the silent admission that the Chinese, unlike the Americans, are a little crazy and thus unpredictable in their response to moral lecturing. Americans apologize and scurry about when an EU or U.N. official remonstrates; in contrast, a Chinese functionary is apt to talk about sending off a missile or two if they don’t shut up.The Patriot Act to a European is proof of American illiberality in a way that China’s swallowing Tibet or jailing and executing dissidents is not. America’s support for Saudi Arabia is proof of our hypocrisy in not severing ties with an undemocratic government, while few care that a country with leaders who traverse the globe in Mao suits cuts any deal possible with fascists and autocrats for oil, iron ore, and food.
Gotta hand it to Dr. Hanson: He's terrific at pointing out the obvious, even while he's driving the tour bus off the mountain road.
Yes, we are witnessing one of the great transfers of power and influence that have traditionally changed civilization itself, as money, influence, and military power are gradually inching away from Europe. And this time the shake-up is not regional but global. While scholars and economists concentrate on its economic and political dimensions, few have noticed how a new China and an increasingly vulnerable Europe will markedly change the image of the United States.
The sound you hear are the guardrails giving way. Such magnificence in the face of imminent disaster arouses the deepest facination, bordering on the morbid.
As nations come to know the Chinese, and as a ripe Europe increasingly cannot or will not defend itself, the old maligned United States will begin to look pretty good again. More important, America will not be the world’s easily caricatured sole power, but more likely the sole democratic superpower that factors in morality in addition to national interest in its treatment of others.China is strong without morality; Europe is impotent in its ethical smugness. The buffer United States, in contrast, believes morality is not mere good intentions but the willingness and ability to translate easy idealism into hard and messy practice.
Most critics will find such sentiments laughable or naïve; but just watch China in the years to come. Those who now malign the imperfections of the United States may well in shock whimper back, asking for our friendship. Then the boutique practice of anti-Americanism among the global elite will come to an end.
I fear that what is laughable or naïve is Dr. Hanson's touching belief in the capability of post-modern man to repent. I suppose we should cut him some slack: he is, after all, STILL a Democrat.
You see, he is utterly right about Europe, India, China, and the United States. This is a terrific screed. It outlines the hypocrisy going on in simple language and in such a way that the message cannot possibly be missed. I will be using it as a reference. It's magnificent.
In fact, the hypocrisy is so blatant, so obvious, so palpable, that the Leftist/Socialist/Democratic/Liberal refusal to acknowledge it has made me realize that SOMETHING ELSE IS GOING ON. I'm working my way through the logic and, God willing, I will have something to say on it soon.
What I'm driving at is that Dr. Hanson, while being (as usual) stunningly and eloquently right about the current geo-political situation, is naively and tragically wrong about the capability of the botique elite to reverse their expressions of anti-american sentiment.
Firstly, Dr. Hanson has overlooked a fourth reason for the botique elite giving the Chinese a pass: They are resolutely socialist and communist, and thus will forever be aligned with those nations whose structures reflect their politics. The American political structure, in their eyes, commits two grave faults: it is diametrically opposite to their politics, AND it is popular. Past is prologue: They overlooked Stalin's slaugher and Mao's slaugher. They overlook the Cuban and North Korean Gulags. They did this, and will continue to do this, because they AGREE with the stated reason: All this blood is NECESSARY to bring about the desired political end result.
Secondly, the Red Chinese are smarter than Dr. Hanson credits them. America is the Biggest Obstacle in their path to world power, and antiamericanism is a valuable weapon against her. The botique elites will not be given a reason to reconsider it and ask for America's friendship until America itself is reduced to a state where its friendship would be of no value whatsoever. Hell, if the Islamists are able to play the Liberal Elite Main Stream Media like a violin, how can one think that the Chinese are not doing it with much more skill and experience?
Thirdly, the botique elite will never admit that they were wrong about the United States because that implies that Truth is an important value to them, and they feel the obligation to obey it. The fact is, Truth is not their supreme value, nor an important value: Power is their supreme value, and the only obligation Power lays on its admirers is that they obtain it and wield it.
I will probably write more about this in a separate post, but I will attempt to explain briefly: The problem of regarding Power as a value is that it must necessarily destroy all other values within the value system and leave it unopposed. You see, a value is a value because it intrinsically motivates a person to act to gain or to keep it. When a person acts in response to a threatened value, or when circumstances arise that the person must oppose or support because of the dictates of that value, THAT VALUE HAS POWER. It has power because it made someone DO something specific. Power, as a value, is a JEALOUS value, in that it WANTS that power. To leave a value with influence is to leave a value with power that Power does not have. Since the only obligation Power lays upon its admirers is to obtain power and wield it, the value possessing the power that the admirers does not have must be either subjugated, perverted, or destroyed as a value, so that the admirers either manipulate it as a proxy, or it is destroyed so that the power they currently have is unopposed.
This explains a lot of leftist behavior: It is NOT hypocrisy for feminists to cry discrimination and fight it tooth and nail in the United States, AND say not a word about clitorectomy and female subjugation under Islam and Talibanism, IF their supreme value is Power, not the Female sex. If they truly valued the female sex, they would have applauded the fall of the Taliban and cheered when the rapist son of Saddam was shot full of holes. Feminism, and the regard for females in the United States, is a value that people respect and which makes them act in certain ways. THAT IS POWER, and they are feminists because they want the POWER, not the true uplift of women.
This is the MAIN reason why the botique elite will not abandon their anti-americanism: it motivates people to act against the United States, AND it motivates people within the United States to act to appease the anti-americanism inspired people. Motivating people IS POWER, and those whose supreme value is Power will ACQUIRE that power, WIELD it, and act to KEEP it.
As long as there are people who will riot when hearing a lie about Americans, and there are Americans that worry about what foreigners think of them, Anti-Americanism will be a tool of power that will be used.
They will still curse America for not stopping the boot that descends to erase their faces.
Posted by ptah at June 11, 2005 03:28 PM