by Ian Buruma
A key document of Germany’s war against the West was written in the second year of World War I, by the eminent social scientist Werner Sombart. It is entitled Händler und Helden, (Merchants and Heroes). Sombart begins his book by describing the war as an existential battle, not just between nations, but between cultures and worldviews, or Weltanschauungen. England, the land of shopkeepers and merchants, and republican France represent “West European civilization,” “the ideas of 1789,” “commercial values”; Germany is the nation of heroes, prepared to sacrifice themselves for higher ideals. Merchants and Heroes is worth looking at in some detail, because it is in every respect a prime example of Occidentalism.
Sombart, like all people who shared his views, was quite emphatic about the nature of this deadly Kulturkampf. He wrote: “German thinking and German feeling are expressed in the first place by a total rejection of everything which even approaches English or indeed West European thinking and feeling.” 3 But what is this Occidental thinking and feeling? The “ideas of 1789” speak for themselves. Or do they? The French Revolution and the merchant mentality might strike one as inimical, even incompatible. In Sombart’s view, however, “ ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ are true merchant ideals, which have no other aim but to give particular advantages to individuals.” 4 It is about the “merchant Weltanschauung” that Sombart waxes most eloquent. The typical merchant, he says, is interested only in “what life can offer him” in terms of material goods and physical comfort. Sombart uses the term “Komfortismus” for the bourgeois mentality.
Comfort is a largely passive experience. There is something dull about comfort. Pleasure tends to be more active, more exciting, and possibly more spiritual. The author Ernst Jünger, who fought in the Battle of Langemark and celebrated military heroism in his books, declared: “All pleasure lives through the mind, and every adventure through the closeness of death that hovers around it.”5 Death provides the rush, the spiritual edge that separates pleasure from Komfortismus. Jünger, like some other German intellectuals of the early twentieth century, had a profound influence in Muslim circles. His book Über die Linie was translated by Al-e Ahmed, a prominent Iranian intellectual, in the 1960s. Al-e Ahmed coined the term “Westoxification” for the pernicious influence of Western ideas.
He was a great admirer of Jünger. His friend Mahmud Human, who helped with the translation, said that after working on Jünger he “had seen one issue but with two eyes; had said one thing but with two languages.”6
To be comfortable, the traders and shopkeepers of the West need to make money. Indeed, according to Sombart, they are “crazy for money.” They also need security and peace. War is bad for business. In Sombart’s view, Komfortismus and personal gratification infect everything the merchant peoples do. English sports, for example, unlike the German cultivation of martial arts and drill, are typical of people who seek only physical well-being and spurious individual competition without higher aims. But it is the cowardly bourgeois habit of clinging to life, of not wishing to die for great ideals, of shying away from violent conflict and denying the tragic side of life, that seems most contemptible to Sombart, Oswald Spengler, Jünger, and other German thinkers of the period. Indeed, the merchant has no ideals. He is in every sense superficial. Merchants, whether they are petit bourgeois or busy men of the world, are interested in nothing but the satisfaction of individual desires, which “undermines the very basis of a higher moral sense of the world and the belief in ideals.”7
Liberal democracy is the political system most suited to merchant peoples. It is a competitive system in which different parties contend, and in which conflicts of interest can be solved only through negotiation and compromise. It is by definition unheroic, and thus, in the eyes of its detractors, despicably wishy-washy, mediocre, and corrupt. Even Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote so admiringly about American democracy, saw the system’s limitations. He wrote:If you think it profitable to turn man’s intellectual and moral activity toward the necessities of physical life and use them to produce well-being, if you think that reason is more use to men than genius, if your object is not to create heroic virtues but rather tranquil habits . . . if in your view the main object of government is not to achieve the greatest strength or glory for the nation as a whole but to provide for every individual therein the utmost well-being . . . then it is good to make conditions equal and to establish a democratic government.8
Tocqueville did not deplore these limitations. He was indeed a convinced liberal. But he did, nonetheless, miss the grandeur of aristocracy and felt the tug of higher ideals. He noted, on his visit to America in the mid-nineteenth century, “the rarity, in a land where all are actively ambitious, of any lofty ambition.”
Such lamentations can be heard on both poles of the political spectrum. One reason so many Western intellectuals supported Stalin and Mao, or indeed, to a somewhat lesser degree, Hitler and Mussolini, was their disgust with democratic mediocrity. A prominent supporter of Third World revolutionary causes, Arab terrorists, and other enemies of liberal democracy is the French lawyer Jacques Vergès. He has defended Algerian militants in court, as well as Klaus Barbie, the former SS police chief. Vergès might have personal motives for his hostility to the West. He was born in Réunion, an old French penal colony in the Indian Ocean, and his mother was Vietnamese, a circumstance that blocked his father’s ambition to be a French diplomat. But the reason for bringing up this notorious but marginal figure is his eloquent argument against the banality of democracy. Vergès loathes “cosmopolitanism.” He rates honor higher than morality and has a taste for violent action. As he put it in a long interview about his involvement in wars and revolutions, “One is thirsty for heroism, thirsty for sacrifice. . . .”9
Vergès continued, “Since I was a child, I was attracted by grandeur. I approve of what that young right-wing German naval officer, who assassinated Walter Rathenau, the foreign minister after the German defeat in 1918, once said: ‘I fight to give the people a destiny but not to give them happiness.’ Destiny is what fascinates me, which is not the same as happiness, especially since happiness in Europe has become an idea polluted by social democracy.”10
Happiness, in the sense Vergès uses it, is of course Komfortismus. He thinks of himself as a man of the left, but as the quotation above shows, Vergès is intelligent and honest enough to recognize his affinities with the extreme right. What is lacking in the democratic Occident is sacrifice and heroism. Unlike Mao, Hitler, or Stalin, democratic politicians lack “the will to grandeur.” Tocqueville called military glory the greatest “scourge for democratic republics.” But only an Occidentalist, such as Werner Sombart or Jacques Vergès, would hold a people in contempt for not seeing heroic death as the highest human aspiration.
In fact, of course, democratic nations have been rather successful in wars. In recent history, democracies have prevailed against dictatorships. But Tocqueville was right once again. He noted that democratic citizens (i.e., Sombart’s merchants) are not easily persuaded to risk their lives in combat. In Democracy in America, he writes: “When the principle of equality spreads, as in Europe now, not only within one nation, but at the same time among several neighboring peoples, the inhabitants of these various countries, despite different languages, customs, and laws, always resemble each other in an equal fear of war and love of peace. In vain do ambitious or angry princes arm for war; in spite of themselves they are calmed down by some sort of general apathy and goodwill which makes the sword fall from their hands. Wars become rarer.”11
Enemies of democracy, or of the West, as defined by early-twentieth-century German chauvinists, would agree, but they see this general apathy and goodwill as decadence. That is what the jihadi meant when he spoke of Americans’ love of Pepsi-Cola. Some German intellectuals ascribed their country’s defeat in World War I to the corrosive effect of “Westernization.” For example, Ernst Jünger’s brother, the writer Friedrich Georg Jünger, wrote in an essay, aptly entitled Krieg und Krieger
(War and Warriors), that Germany had lost the Great War because it had become too much “part of the West” by taking on such Western values as “civilization, freedom and peace.”12
In this line of argument, civilization, freedom, and peace undermine the potential grandeur of a people, nation, or religion. They lead to Komfortismus. The social organism grows weak, tired, and rotten. War is needed as a forge for a younger, purer, more vigorous community. Rebirth can come only from destruction and human sacrifice. The young must shed “blood from [their] veins to the suffering fatherland, so that it may drink and live again.” Thomas Abbt, when he wrote these words, did not have a particular idea of the West in mind. But it is very clear from the writing of German nationalists in the 1920s and 1930s that their view of the West was of an old world, effete, money-grubbing, selfish, and shallow. The danger, in their eyes, was that the seductions of this old world were corrupting and enervating the young Germans who should be fighting for a more glorious future. Only their sacrifice in a storm of steel would save them from being ruined by the banality of the West.
Some of the rhetoric now coming from the United States, specifically in neoconservative circles, comes close to this vision, a curious development for the nation of competitive conformists, without “lofty ambitions,” admired by Tocqueville.
IT IS NOT SUPRISING THAT OF ALL MODERN EUROPEAN ideas, German-style ethnic nationalism—including pan-Germanism, which inspired the pan-Arabist ambitions of the early Ba’ath Party—held such appeal for non-Western intellectuals rebelling against the universalistic claims of Western imperialism. The sometimes lethal combination of reinterpreted native traditions and reactionary European ideas produced, among other things, variations of the death cult. This was particularly true in Japan, in many ways the most “Westernized” nation in Asia.
The most chilling, and certainly best known, symbol of human sacrifice in twentieth-century warfare is the kamikaze pilot, hurtling himself to his death at almost 600 mph onto the deck of an enemy vessel. Many missed their target and exploded or crashed into the sea. An alternative form of violent death for the kamikazes, or Tokkotai (Special Attack Forces), as Japanese more usually call them, was to be stuffed into a steel, cigar-shaped coffin and launched from a submarine as a human torpedo. This is how one such torpedo described his last moments on earth, clutching a cherry blossom branch:
We were bubbling with eagerness. Shinkai and I swore to each other we would sink the largest ships we could find. I thought of my age, nineteen, and of the saying: “To die while people still lament your death; to die while you are pure and fresh; this is truly Bushido.” Yes, I was following the way of the samurai. . . . I remembered with pleasure Ensign Anzai Nobuo’s quoting from a poem and telling me I would “fall as purely as the cherry blossom” I now held. More banzai cheers sent us on our way. My mind was full of what Lieutenant Fujimura Sadao . . . had said so many times to me: “Never shirk facing death. If in doubt whether to live or die, it is always better to die.”13
Like this nineteen-year-old boy, many people still assume that Tokkotai operations were a harsh but integral part of Japanese culture, a reflection of ancient warrior codes, an aesthetic idea of voluntary death that is peculiarly Japanese. It is, in fact, hard to know to what extent the emotions expressed above were made to conform to an expected formula. There are too many clichés in such statements for them to be entirely believable. Private letters from kamikaze pilots to family or friends were often more reflective and anguished, and much less inclined to accept such ready-made concepts as falling like cherry blossoms or following samurai ways.
Most Tokkotai volunteers (under various degrees of pressure) were students from the humanities departments of top universities. Science students were considered to be less expendable. Letters reveal that all had read widely, often in at least three languages. Their most favored writers in German philosophy were Nietzsche, Hegel, Fichte, and Kant. In French literature: Gide, Romain Rolland, Balzac, Maupassant. In German: Thomas Mann, Schiller, Goethe, Hesse. Many reflected on the suicide of Socrates and on Kierkegaard’s writings about despair. A few were practicing Christians, and a surprising number took a Marxist view of politics and economics. 14
These young men were patriotic, highly idealistic, and often wary of militaristic propaganda. Western capitalism and imperialism were seen as the enemy, to be sure, but their ultimate sacrifice (and idealism) was often justified and articulated through Western ideas. They had turned the West against the West, as it were, and in this they were typical children of modern Japanese history, for that is what Japan had been doing since the mid-nineteenth century.
The images are ancient: ritual samurai suicide, the beautiful evanescence of cherry blossoms, the divine emperor, dying on the battlefield like a “shattering crystal ball.” The words of the melancholy song rendered by kamikaze pilots before leaving on their fatal missions are from an eighth-century poem:In the sea, water-logged corpses,
In the mountains those corpses with grasses growing on them
But my desire to die next to our emperor unflinching.
I shall not look back.15
And yet the death cult responsible for the suicidal tactics in the last two years of World War II was not at all ancient, but part of a modern militarized political ideology that owed as much to sometimes misunderstood European ideas as to Japanese traditions. Like all non-Western nations in the nineteenth century, Japan was confronted with superior European power, and the Japanese tried to learn as much about its sources as possible. Forging cannon and catching up on scientific discoveries were just the beginning. One of the few Asian countries not to be colonized by a European empire, Japan went further than any other to protect itself from Western power by mimicry. Japan’s behavior at the end of its war with the West shows that suicide bombing is not necessarily a product of poverty, backwardness, or foreign oppression. In Japan, as in Germany, death cults thrived amid the highest degree of technological, cultural, and industrial sophistication.
The Japanese transformation from a nation of feudal fiefdoms, presided over by a samurai dynasty, to a modern Western-style nation-state was always going to be a patchwork job. The constitution was largely Prussian, the navy was fashioned after the British Royal Navy, and so on. But the biggest problem for Meiji-period intellectuals and politicians was to find the most suitable model for a modern state. Some looked to Britain and the United States, attracted by the same bourgeois institutions that Tocqueville had analyzed so sympathetically. Others saw greater merit in the German model of ethnic nationalism: the Volk of heroic patriots ruled by a militarized monarchy. The latter prevailed and they proceeded to establish an authoritarian state along Germanic lines, dressed up in half-invented and frequently distorted Japanese traditions. The cult of young men dying for the emperor like cherry blossoms or shattering crystal was part of that new dressing.
The modern emperor cult was based partly on a misunderstanding of religion in the West. Trying to analyze the source of European power, nineteenth-century Japanese scholars concluded that Christianity, as a state religion, was the glue that held European nations together as disciplined communities. Used to Confucian codes of obedience to authority, they assumed that Christianity had the same effect in Europe. There were some Japanese in the early Meiji period who actually believed that all Japanese should become Christians as part of their quest for civilization and enlightenment, but they were in a minority. The more common view was that Japan needed its own state religion, and this was to be State Shinto, a politicized version of ancient rites, mostly to do with nature and fertility. The alternative to the Christian God was to be Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess; and the emperor, hitherto a remote and politically powerless figure in the old capital of Kyoto, was moved to Tokyo as a combination of kaiser, generalissimo, Shinto pope, and the highest living deity.
The most important document, the text that steered Japan into its ultimately disastrous course, was the Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors, pr
omulgated in 1882 at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. One of its key passages, which every Japanese soldier knew by heart, went: “Do not be beguiled by popular opinions, do not get involved in political activities, but singularly devote yourself to your most important obligation of loyalty to the emperor, and realize that the obligation is heavier than the mountains but death is lighter than a feather.”
Traditionally, Japanese emperors had divine attributes, as did thousands of other things, such as mountains, rivers, and rocks, as well as a huge family of deities. The idea that the emperor should be worshiped as a living god was new. His role as the supreme commander of soldiers and sailors was certainly new. That it should be considered a young man’s highest duty to die for him would have struck Japanese in earlier times as extremely eccentric. The ancient poem sung by kamikaze pilots before takeoff might suggest otherwise, but “the desire to die next to our emperor” referred specifically to guards who protected the western frontiers in the eighth century, when Chinese imperial customs were copied, only to be discarded later.
Self-sacrifice, in the form of ritual suicide, existed, but this was permitted only to the warrior caste. In any case, the samurai suicide was never an act of war, but more an expression of atonement for some form of dishonor: a transgression of some kind, or a humiliating defeat. Suicide was the samurai’s way to restore lost face in the living world by opting for death. In this sense, perhaps, those young idealists in 1945 who thought they were following the way of the warrior were not completely wrong. Some did see their sacrificial act as a restoration of honor to a nation that had clearly been defeated. But this was a sign more of romantic nationalism than of emperor worship, and thus the product quite as much of modern European history as of ancient Japanese customs.
