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| Europe |
| Lileks: Will there always be an England? |
| 2005-07-09 |
| Go read it all. I'm posting just an excerpt here. You really need to read it all. . . . Countries have national memories, national traits, but they’ve always been based in a certain amount of ethnic homogeneity. (To put it mildly. For Europe, nationalism was tribalism.) If you've moved beyond this, then what sort of core identity emerges after a great shock? What do you rise to defend? It is possible that a multiethnic society can unify along the lines of national identity; America proves that. But our foundational concepts are different. We’re the only true transnational country, inasmuch as our ideas are infinitely applicable. Our ethnic complexity began with refugees from all points of Europe, which is different from basing your national identity on beef-eating tars from Wales, Scotland, and assorted shires. Our ideals surpass ethnic identity, which is why a recent immigrant can get a lump in his throat when he hears the national anthem. Does someone who came to London last year from the West Indies respond on an elemental level to Holst like a fellow whose mum told him stories of the Blitz? I don’t know, but I doubt it. At some point the old legacy culture is unbellyfeel to the newcomer. This puts Great Britain in an unusual position – its cultural heritage is more specifically ethnic, which makes it difficult to apply to other cultures, and its new self-definition as a melting pot means it has fewer means to unite the culture to face a specific threat. . . . In the beginning, America was [the] next England; in the end, England ends up as the next America. And gets bombed for it. Some believe that England was already America, inasmuch as both were ruled by fiendish quazi-nazis who tossed their nations into a war for grins and giggles. Some believe that the bombings in London, like the ones in Madrid, can be blamed on Bush and Blair for the Iraq campaign. It’s always interesting to see how people who pride themselves on sophisticated analyses and exquisitely tuned cultural sensibilities cannot see the plain home truths. The foe sneers: you are infidels; you die now. The moderns pull a face, steeple their fingers, and wonder what they really mean. Surely this is a result of invading Iraq and forcing them to have elections. Surely one of the bombers was an ordinary Iraqi who lived a peaceable life – well, aside from the time that Qusay’s men came by, took his daughter, returned her the next day as a broken heap who died from a vaginal hemorrage, and aside from the time when his brother was thrown off a roof because someone said he had turned his portrait of Saddam to the wall - surely it was the invasion that made this ordinary man take the understandable step of moving to London to kill commuters. I know the 90s don’t matter at all; I know that nothing we believed in the 90s has any relevance, but you might want to heed a fellow named Osama who declared war on the West, and cited the sanctions against Iraq as one of his causus belli. Let us assume then that the Iraq campaign had never taken place. By now either the sanctions that so inflamed Osama’s sensibilities would still be in place, or they would have been removed due to international pressure. Saddam would still be in power, free to spend the Oil-for-Food money as he pleased, lavishing stipends on Palestinian suicide bombers, building up his own weapons programs without fear of international interference, having weekly meetings with Zarkawi. (Who would have been something other than a terrorist, of course. A chiropractor, perhaps. Or a botanist.) The situation in Lebanon would be unchanged; Libya would be happily pursuing its own agenda. And we would be safer? Yes! Because the Arab world would not be enraged by our removal of Saddam and imposition of representational government, and we could get back to the real work of combating terrorism by addressing the root causes. You know, tyranny and lack of representational government. But this assumes that Newsweek et al wouldn’t have run with the Gitmo detainee stories. This assumes that Osama would be mollified by the lifting of the sanctions, an assumption so naive it makes the statue in the Lincoln Memorial weep on your behalf. This assumes that the London bombers’ mention of Afghanistan was just a rhetorical device, and they really have no fellow-feeling for the Taliban and their recent troubles. This assumes that all that stuff about the tragedy of Andalusia was just boilerplate, and they really aren’t animated by the loss of Muslim Spain. One of the curious facts about the enemy: they may time their bombings down to the second, but their clocks count off the centuries. . . . Go read it all. |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #2 an assumption so naive it makes the statue in the Lincoln Memorial weep on your behalf... ROTFLMAO |
| Posted by: Matt 2005-07-09 13:53 |
| #1 Lileks and Steyn, always a must-read. Check it our, tsotsi. |
| Posted by: Brett 2005-07-09 09:10 |