Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (6 page)

I
N 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.

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:

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.