by Ian Buruma
In truth, however, European ideas about politics were inevitably transmitted to the colonial subjects, along with science, religion, economics, and literature. The transmission did not always work perfectly. Many distortions crept in, but from Cairo to Tokyo Western ideas about capitalism and democracy transformed the way societies were run. The few non-Western nations to have avoided Western rule, such as Japan and, to some extent, China, still had to borrow European ideas to keep the West at bay. The question is: Which European ideas? Too often they tended to be variations of either brutal universalism or its most lethal antidotes, ethnic nationalism and religious purity.
China is a good example of both. It was there, under Mao Zedong, that the war between City and Country was at its most murderous. Chinese imperial rule was justified by a cosmic order. China was in the center of the world, and the dragon throne occupied the spiritual and political center of the Chinese empire. The scientific challenge to this cosmic order, imported from the West, was a political challenge as well. And so, of course, were liberalism, individualism, and Christianity. The rejection of these Western influences, more often than not, was a defense of a monopoly on power, of the divine monarch and his courtiers. So the nineteenth-century Chinese establishment scholars found an ingenious formula: Western knowledge for practical matters, such as weaponry, and Chinese learning for spiritual and moral affairs. This formula was later adopted by the Japanese as well.
It was a hopeless undertaking. You cannot separate one kind of knowledge from another, cannot import what is merely utilitarian while keeping out the potentially subversive ideas that go with it. But the effort persists to this day: the Chinese government wants the benefits of information technology without the ideas it makes available to all. Misguided or not, the classification of Western knowledge as purely practical confirmed the notion of a cold and mechanical Occident. The other thing that has remained a constant factor in Chinese and many other non-European societies, ever since their confrontation with modern Western ideas, is the split between nativists and Westernizers. The former dream of going back to the purity of an imaginary past: Japan under the divine emperor, the Caliphate united under Islam, China as a community of peasants. The latter are iconoclasts, who see local tradition as an impediment to radical modernization.
The problem of radical modernizers was how to modernize without becoming a mere clone of the West. Was there a way to build a modern nation without letting in Christianity and other forms of “spiritual pollution”?b This problem was sharpest in the Muslim countries, where the modern successes of Christian empires were felt as an intolerable humiliation. Given these circumstances, the appeal of socialism, whether in an Arab or Chinese guise, is not at all surprising. Marxism is egalitarian, and indisputably modern. It came from the West, and like Christianity it has universal claims. But its promise to liberate mankind is “scientific,” not cultural or religious. State socialism was a way for non-Western countries to become part of the modern, industrial world without appearing to mimic the metropoles of capitalist imperialism. This alternative route to modernity was tried in Egypt, Iraq, North Korea, Ethiopia, Cuba, China, Vietnam, and many other places. And it failed. The most violent forms of Occidentalism, of nativist yearnings for purity and destructive loathing of the West, were born from this failure, or, as was the case in China, were part of it.
Of all Third World revolutions, Chairman Mao’s was the most inspiring model of Occidentalist dreams. Chairman Mao was at war with Western imperialism, of course, and a great wrecker of Chinese traditions. But what made him original, compared with Stalin, was his war against the City. Against the advice of Comintern agents and fellow Chinese Communists, who championed the urban proletariat, Mao decided to mobilize rural China and reverse the victory of town over country. Shanghai, in particular, was seen as the symbol of Western imperialism, capitalist corruption, degenerate urban luxury, cultural artificiality, and moral decadence. Shanghai, with its teeming slums, coffeehouses, French restaurants, Hollywood movies, Russian teahouses, and merchants and prostitutes of all races and creeds, was the most venal, most soulless, most Westernized urban whore of all. The fact that one of the most ferocious apostles of Maoism, Mao’s own wife Jiang Qing, was once a Shanghai movie starlet and good-time girl only goes to show that violent hatred and deep longing can be closely related.
The horizon of Mao’s rural revolution went far beyond Shanghai. His idea of a rural revolt was not limited to China. Mao saw himself as the champion of the entire Third World. And so did his sympathizers in the West. For all those who hated the bourgeois West, Maoism promised a way out of capitalist alienation, urban decadence, Western imperialism, selfish individualism, cold reason, and modern anomie. Under Mao, warm human bonds would be restored, life would have deep meaning once again, and people would have faith. The Country would finally strike back, just as God once had his revenge on Babylon, and as a new generation of holy warriors is attempting to do today.
Mao’s most immediate target was the “Westernized” city-dwelling bourgeoisie. In the autumn of 1951, he unleashed a succession of bloody campaigns against bourgeois capitalists and intellectuals. “Tiger-hunting teams” were sent out to gather likely suspects for public humiliation, torture, and, for several hundred thousand people, death. Intellectuals, Mao declared, had to be cleansed of bourgeois ideology, especially individualism and pro-Americanism. Small fry would be sent to hard labor camps, but the worst offenders were immediately shot. The assault on the urban middle class went on for more than a decade. A speech Mao gave to Party leaders in 1955 is couched in the brutal rhetoric of Marxism-Leninism, but it shares a common loathing with other revolutionaries who would bring the pillars of the City down:On this matter, we are quite heartless! On this matter, Marxism is indeed cruel and has little mercy, for it is determined to exterminate imperialism, feudalism, capitalism and small production to boot. . . . Some of our comrades are too kind, they are not tough enough, in other words, they are not so Marxist. It is a very good thing, and a significant one too, to exterminate the bourgeoisie and capitalism in China. . . . Our aim is to exterminate capitalism, obliterate it from the face of the earth and make it a thing of the past.15
For China, read Kabul, Phnom Penh, and all the other cities built by men that must be demolished or transformed into vast temples of sacrifice to ancient gods, or modern political messiahs. Mao’s revolution of Country over City would be taken to even greater extremes. Photographs of the ragtag Khmer Rouge army marching into Phnom Penh show village boys, stunted and wiry, staring in wild disbelief at the sights of the big city they are about to empty of its citizens. Phnom Penh had Western architecture, French restaurants, Chinese merchants, and a relatively modern urban economy. The Khmer Rouge soldiers came from the poorest areas of the country, remote places where modern life was unknown. Many of them were barely teenagers. Most could neither read nor write. And they had been told by their masters that educated city people, meaning anyone who had been to school, spoke French, or simply had soft hands and wore glasses, were enemies of the people. Vietnamese or Chinese, who had lived and traded in the cities for centuries, just as Jews had in Germany, had to be cut out of the new society like cancerous cells. Some of the Khmer Rouge leaders, including Pol Pot, had been students in Paris, where they picked up anti-Western, anticolonial, anti-imperialist ideas from such theorists as Frantz Fanon, who called cities the home of “traitors and knaves.”16
By the time the Khmer Rouge had done their work and left Phnom Penh a ghost town, its schools turned into torture chambers, more than two million people had been murdered or worked to death. This act of revenge took less than three years. Like the Al Qaeda raid on New York’s Twin Towers, it was an actual as well as a symbolic revenge. Phnom Penh, to the Khmer Rouge, was evil, inauthentic, capitalist, ethnically mixed, Westernized, degenerate, and compromised by colonialism. City people did not have to be treated with humanity, since they had already lost their souls. Through systematic mass murder, and b
y smashing the wicked city, the Khmer Rouge would restore purity and virtue to the ancient land.
The Taliban worked just as quickly in Kabul, and almost as ruthlessly. After a brutal civil war, during which Kabul was devastated by constant shelling from the surrounding hills, the Taliban suddenly took the city one September evening in 1996. Their leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, was the one-eyed son of a peasant. Like his followers, in their black turbans and flip-flops, he had never been to Kabul. But he had cloaked himself in the mantle of the prophet—quite literally; a garment deemed to have been Muhammad’s was removed from an Afghan shrine and shown off by Mullah Omar on his rare public appearances. The first act of symbolic—and horribly real—violence after the fall of Kabul was the torture of former leftist president Najibullah. The Taliban cut off his testicles and dragged his battered body behind a Jeep. Then they shot him and hanged his corpse from a street lamp. As a sign of his citified debauchery and corruption, the ex-president’s pockets were stuffed with money, and cigarettes were pressed between his broken fingers.
The aim of the Taliban’s assault on Kabul was to turn it into a City of God. All signs of Westernization, such as “British and American hairstyles,” had to be erased. Women were banned from work and hidden from public view. The religious police decreed that “women going outside with fashionable, ornamental, tight and charming clothes to show themselves . . . will be cursed by the Islamic Sharia and should never expect to go to Heaven.”17 Music was banned, and so were television, kite flying, chess, and soccer. Adultery would be punished by stoning, and drinking alcohol by whipping. The only law was Sharia, or religious law. And Kabul would be governed by a six-man Shura, not one of whom was from Kabul. Not one of them had ever even lived in a city before.
Such cases of extreme revolts by rural people against the modern city are, in fact, quite rare. Most revolutions, religious, political, or combinations of both, are born in cities, as the brainchildren of disaffected city dwellers. Nikola Koljevic, to mention but one typical case, was a Shakespeare scholar from Sarajevo. He spent time in London and the United States. His English was fluent. He was a citizen of the most cosmopolitan place in the Balkans, a secular city of Bosnians, Serbs, Jews, and Croats, a city famous for its libraries, universities, and cafés, a city of learning and trade. Yet there he was, in the mid-1990s, watching his city burn from the surrounding hills. The orders to shell Sarajevo, in the name of ethnic purity and the “resurrection of Serbdom,” had been signed by Nikola Koljevic, Shakespeare scholar.
SHELLING IS OF COURSE A CRUDE FORM OF DESTRUCTION. There are many other ways of attacking our modern Babylons that are just as deadly. Such attacks can take the form, for example, of building new cities, even bigger and grander than the old ones, cities that celebrate power instead of freedom, the power of tyrants, or gods. The city under attack, after all, is not just an urban cluster of buildings, but an idea of the city as a cosmopolitan metropolis.
Hitler hated Berlin, but instead of abandoning or sacking his capital, he made plans to transform it. Speed, industry, and technology would be the hallmarks of Nazi achievement. Everything had to be bigger and faster, but also totally controlled by the Nazi state. The unruly crowds would be regimented as one single mass of worshipers. And the city itself would become a giant metropolis, to be called Germania, whose domes would reach such heights that clouds would float inside them. Large areas, where people lived and worked, would be demolished to make way for huge avenues, suitable only for military parades and mass rallies. The idea was to build a cult city to rival the City of God. Germania would be a morbid simulacrum of a great capital, populated by a pure race, a city with all spontaneous life sucked out of it, a Babylon of death. Thus, all the attributes of the liberal West—civil liberties, free-market economics, democracy, artistic freedom, individualism—would be “overcome,” to make way for something utterly outlandish. Berlin, Hitler boasted, “as a world capital, can make one think only of ancient Egypt, it can be compared only to Babylon or Rome. In comparison to this capital, what will London stand for, or Paris?”18
Germania left few traces. A row of street lamps, and a couple of embassies—of Italy and Japan—are about all that remains of Hitler’s great master plan. But the aspiration to rival the Occidental capitals by creating controlled cities on a Babylonian scale did not die with him. Such cities have sprung up, not in Europe, but in North Korea, China, and Southeast Asia. Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, is what Germania might have looked like, a neoclassical necropolis of outsize marble and granite temples to totalitarian power. As a warning of dictatorial hubris there stands the empty tower of the Ryugyong Hotel, a gigantic pyramid of 105 stories, which has been a concrete shell ever since the money ran out and the building was considered too unsafe to complete. The giant skyscrapers in Pudong, a new industrial suburb of Shanghai, are tributes of another kind, to the raw economic might of an authoritarian state: command capitalism stripped of political liberty. There are plans to erect the highest building on earth there. The glass and steel towers in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur are softer versions of the same. These cities have all, in their different ways, overcome the West by creating brutal copies of the civilization they hope to surpass.
[HEROES AND MERCHANTS]
IN THE FIRST WEEK OF THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN, A British newspaper reporter spoke to a Taliban fighter on the Pakistani border. The young jihadi was full of confidence. The Americans, he said, would never win, for “they love Pepsi-Cola, but we love death.” This view of the West as soft, sickly, and sweet, a decadent civilization addicted to pleasure, reflected similar sentiments of warriors in other holy wars with the West. Japanese bombers, who tuned in to the jazz radio stations of Honolulu before smashing the U.S. fleet in Pearl Harbor, felt the same way. Three years later, when Japan was all but ruined, Japanese naval strategists thought the United States could still be defeated by a show of superior Japanese spirit: kamikaze attacks by young men who were asked to embrace death as a sacred sacrifice.
Wars with the West are also part of European history, and the cult of death is not an exclusive trait of crazed Asiatics. In November 1914, the German army launched a series of futile attacks on the British in Flanders. More than 145,000 men died in the fog and the mud, many of them young volunteers from patriotic youth organizations. Some, like the kamikaze pilots thirty years later, were the brightest students from the best universities. This exercise in mass slaughter became known as the Battle of Langemark. According to legend, promoted by German nationalists between the wars, the young men marched to their almost certain death singing the “Deutschlandlied.” The famous words of Karl Theodor Körner, written a hundred years before in the Liberation War against Napoleon, were often evoked in remembrance: “Happiness lies only in sacrificial death.”1
As is true of all propaganda, the rhetoric of heroic self-sacrifice had historical precedents. After the Seven Years’ War—fought by European powers mainly over colonial possessions—had laid waste to large parts of Germany in the mid-eighteenth century, Thomas Abbt, a mathematician, wrote a famous essay called Dying for the Fatherland. He extolled to his fellow Prussians the “pleasure of death . . . which calls our soul like a Queen from its prison . . . and finally gives the blood from our veins to the suffering fatherland, that it may drink and live again.”2 Far from being a Prussian martinet, however, Abbt was a gentle philosopher at the heart of the German Enlightenment, a liberal for his time, friendly with Jewish writers such as Moses Mendelssohn. His evocation of sacrifice and beautiful death was more poetic than bellicose.
Germany’s response to the superior might of Napoleon’s army and the universalistic claims of French civilization was to see itself as the nation of Dichter und Denker, poets and philosophers. French writers, artists, and jurists might think they had the right to set common European standards. French republican values, French law, French literature, French Enlightenment, might, in French eyes, be the model of rational universal civilization, but German poets and
thinkers begged to differ. They stood up for Kultur, roots, and the kind of heroic Romantic idealism already discussed. Abbt and Herder were interested in culture and a national spirit. But by the latter half of the nineteenth century, German idealism had taken a military turn. With the Prussian victory over France, the founding of the German Reich, and the crowning of Kaiser Wilhelm I in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, all in 1871, Germany began its long march to Langemark and finally, in 1945, to almost total destruction. German liberals, in parliament, the press, the arts, and even in industry, did try, sometimes heroically, to deflect their country from this course and build a more liberal society, but their attempts ended in failure. From the late nineteenth century, generals, courtiers, and a large variety of official promoters of the warrior state insisted that German Kultur stood for martial discipline, self-sacrifice, and heroism.
In fact, the distinctions between Germany, the land of heroes, and its neighbors were in many respects more imaginary than real: France and Britain, too, had their propagandists of sacrifice and valor. German businessmen were no less eager for profit than their British rivals. France and Britain had their share of Romantic and Counter-Enlightenment thinkers. And Abbt, in any case, did not see himself as an enemy of the West. But later nationalists did see themselves this way, and that is what made German heroic propaganda different from its counterparts in western Europe, the idea that Germany was different, the Reich in the middle, culturally distinct from the West, beyond the civilizing borders of the old Roman Empire. This is what made Konrad Adenauer, the conservative but unromantic German politician from the western Rhineland, mutter “Asia” every time his train crossed the Elbe into Prussia.
