Which Cecil does somewhat agree with the question, though just like a good politician does leave himself an out, and smooths the rough edges.
I seems like if so much of the world was NOT backwards and ignorant we would be in a far different world with a lot less freedom. If, God forbid, the Arab countries became the superpowers where would we be now? They have shown their tendencies towards conquering and converting nations and (another generalization) horribly oppress their own people (with some exceptions) all to the betterment of the ruling class. Yes the Christian countries did that too but mainly outgrew that before entering the ‘modern age’.
Perhaps I am mischaracterize the Arab countries. I am influenced by the propaganda given out by the US Gov’t mainly the Clinton and G. W. Bush presidencies. I am lead to believe that women are basically treated somewhere between property, children, sex toys, and slaves in much of the Arab Countries. The general populous is not allowed to see movies and other ‘westernized’ entertanments while the ruling classes has their own private movie theaters inside their palaces. Iraq under S.H. was a little more fair to women - he treated all people equally as bad. Perhaps this is all made up to make the Arab nations look bad?
So whatever the cause it looks like something to be thankful for, or perhaps I’m totally off base.
Well, I would think that being “less backward” would imply a changing view on the status of women, et al, and a reduction of warlike tendancies. I wouldn’t necessarily say that the Christian countries outgrew their horrors before the “modern age” - the two most violent and bloody ideologies in history were Nazisim and Communism - between the two of them, there are (conservatively) over 40 million untimely deaths. Those two ideologies were a direct result of secular utopianism: the idea that humans could remake the world in an image of our choosing.
Personally, I think that “enlightened self-interest” is a reasonable goal, and if more people generally had that as their motivator, there’d be fewer atrocities in the world. This doesn’t mean pacifism, or anything like that - it just means taking a long view.
Yes, and that was when they ceased being backward and ignorant. The question isn’t why many Muslim countries are oppressive et al, but why they’re still oppressive when so many other countries have stopped.
Stopping being backward and ignorant includes stopping being oppressive, hostile to women, and so on. All in all, we should not be thankful for the backward and ignorant parts of the world but instead work for them losing that status.
I’ll be brief, as I think C K Dexter Haven would frown on turning this into another Great Debate ( which, by the way, there are many to choose from on this topic in the GD archives, if you do a search ).
Likely the Arab countries would look and act rather different than they do today. Because an Arab superpower presupposes a nation that either did not go in to precipitous decline with the Ottoman empire or reversed itself and replaced it no later than the 19th century ( it propably would had to do it earlier, like the 17th, which is when the Ottoman state really began to fall behind ).
The current state of th Arab countries is the end result of a few centuries of modern history, but especially the post- WW I era, which reshaped the Middle East. Repression is not necessarily an inherent feature of the culture or religion. Though it has become an inculculated feature of much of modern Arab political culture, that is situational as much as anything.
Conquest ( outside of attempts to terminate Israel, which is sort of a unique case ), when it has occurred ( or been attempted ) have mostly been driven by post-colonial territorial disputes, deriving from historically artificial borders. The Spanish Sahara, Kuwait, and the Shatt al-Arab dispute between Iran and Iraq ( the latter two driven by SH’s megalomania as well as long-standing territorial grievances ), all fall into this category.
Pre-Saudi Arabia’s conquest of the Hijaz is a bit different and falls under the heading of pure old-fashioned empire-building.
Conversion? Not much of that. Repression, yes - But not a lot of converting going on.
Oppression in the name of the ruling class? Absolutely. Of that, there is little dispute ( the nature and severity of the oppression varies substantially from country to country ).
You mischaracterize. You seem to be describing Saudi Arabia by and large, a very atypical outlier. Not to say the Arab world is an exemplar of women’s rights - Far from it. Like most of the third world, women are very frequently oppressed to one degree or another. However for the most part women are not treated with the total opprobrium you describe and Iraq is hardly the only country with a sizeable educated class of women.
And although the repressive governments ( and many are indeed pretty nasty, though some are only “mildly” authoritarian ) of some of those countries have been known to ban “scandalous” ( read: lewd or politically sensitive ) films from time to time, I can’t think of any country ( SA possibly excepted ) where watching films are verboten for the common folk.
I think it’s a bit misleading to list these as the top 2, just based on numbers – there was a much larger world population at the time, so of course the numbers are higher. I’d think a more realistic ranking would be to base it on the percentage of the ‘target’ population.
On that basis, the ‘winner’ seems to be the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia, which ended up killing off nearly 1/3 of their male population! See Cecil’s column here for more details.
P.S. About your comment that these were the “direct result of secular utopianism”: I’d suggest that religion in general is probably the ideology that has caused the most human slaughter down thru the ages.
And Christianity in particular, given its prevalance, is probably tops in number of humans killed, if you add them all up. From Constantine’s killings, thru the Crusades, the inter-denominational battles (slaughter of the Hugenots in France, British religious wars: Bloody Mary/Evil Elizabeth, etc.) even up to the current day troubles in Northern Ireland, the grand total would have to be enormous.
And the Muslim religion would probably not be too far behind. Can we count several thousand people in the World Trade Center as victims of this religious war?
Judaism seems to be far behind here, except for a few ancient stories (Samson putting entire tribes to the sword, etc.). Maybe that’s because they seem to come out on the short end in most religious persecutions.
In general, it seems the ‘recipe’ for mass slaughter/genocide is:
We know the “one true way”.
We must convert everyone to our beliefs.
So a general stance of skepticism might be a good way to prevent genocide!
Very well, to amplify on what Tamerlane has noted:
First, your view seems to be based on something of a charicature of Saudi Arabia, among the most extreme cases.
On the status of women, while not fabulous the view that women are treated like property is also not supportable. Of course this varies from country to country and region to region, but in general Sharia’ law gives women a separate legal personality from their husband and in legal theory they are quite far from being property. Now, as many an Islamic feminist – there are such – will point out, men have a way of fixating on the restrictions on women in the law and rather forgetting about those that apply equally or to men. Old fashioned male chauvinism.
On the general populaces not seeing Western movies etc., this is pure hokum. I can report from a decade of on the ground experience that access to ‘Western’ movies – in general Hollywood tripe – is pretty damned plentiful and largely 100 percent legal. Even were it not, the proliferation of satellite dishes (with pirated receivers available dirt cheap such that you see satellite dishes sprouting up from slums) throughout the region and access to Euro TV would make the restrictions nonsensical. Depending on the country censorship is usually focused on a few sensitive political points and on sex scenes, although the censor’s scissors are often wildly inconsistent and lax. Further while videos released in region are censored (well usually only those with Arabic subtitles) by the distributors in a very light way, DVDs seem not to be.
As to the issue of Sadaam, well that’s rather different. Iraqi society was indeed heavily secularized in a superficial fashion, but there was also a clear glass ceiling in most of society for women. Similar to the FSU in some ways in my opinion, ostentatious equality on some levels hiding a fundamental male chauvinism at others. It may be added that the Sadaam regime did not treat everyone equally badly, some groups were clearly favored, Xian Arabs, Assyrians and Sunni Muslim Arabs were among the favored, in general Shiites among the disfavored although I have seen analyses that suggested that for the secular in fact Sadaam’s regime did a better job at promoting Shiites than any past regime had. Kurds, on the other hand really got a serious short end of the stick.
Combined with the rapid population growth seen in the region from 1950 to 1990s (with significant drop offs in North Africa in the past ten years to European levels), you have a recipe for socio-economic stagnation, for resentment – some of it well placed and justified, some not – of the “West” and a rejection of the secularized model, upon which most states were based. Further to that, insofar as most states have engaged in repression without delivering growth, political opposition has moved to the safe space available, the mosque, where social and political support are available with less interference from the State.
Of the entire region I can only point to Tunisia as a fairly decent model of socio-economic development, but under a relatively mild dictatorship. Hopefully Ben Ali will allow for some liberalization and house cleaning in the next ten years to fend off discontent will continuing stable economic policies.
As mentioned earlier, if they weren’t ‘backward and ignorant’ - forgiving the nuances of the truth for a moment - they’d be more free. I’d be wary of this attitude, as it kind of assumes an arrogant sense of privilege: it’s fine for them to suffer because it advantages us.
Becoming a superpower involves eradicating this ignorance with increased secularism, stronger science and industry, more literacy (that is, reading books other than The Holy One), more independence for women and girls, etc. Thus, for them to become superpowers, they will have to become less “backward and ignorant.” Having some military power - which a few of them do - isn’t enough to make one’s nation a superpower. Economic strength is needed, and again, I don’t think you can have much of that without the stuff I mention.
That comment may be a bit tongue-in-cheek. I have no idea if the Ba’ath government was as repressing as some of the others. Doesn’t quite count as a point in their favor, but it’s a point of interest I guess.
That comment may be a bit tongue-in-cheek. I have no idea if the Ba’ath government was as repressive toward women as some of the others. Doesn’t quite count as a point in their favor, but it’s a point of interest I guess.
t-bonham, let’s not hijack this thread into yet another debate over the merits vs. the failings of religions.
I take the line about “secular utopianism” in stride. NAZI Germany was driven by fascism, which was not religiously motivated. However, the undercurrent was a strong sense of racism. Most secularists do not approve of racism. Communist USSR suffered from the problem of being a poorly implemented communism and a greatly abused system for the gain of the ones in power. I would say it wasn’t so much a failure of secularism but a failure of utopianism. But that’s just my cursory evaluation, and it really doesn’t have a lot of bearing on the topic of this thread - Islam and Islamic countries and their relative status to western countries.
Could you cite an example of any other kind of communism? That is, a well-implemented communism in which “the ones in power” do not “abuse the system” and thus gain no more than those they have power over?
It is my observation that other attempts to squelch and violate human nature also tend to fail with similar predictability.
I don’t claim that there’s any other version that’s been tried, but my impression is that the totalitarian state implemented under Lenin and further developed by Stalin bore little resemblance to what Marx actually had in mind. You may be correct that it is unrealistic and anti-human nature, so inherently flawed.
I wouldn’t like to hijack this discussion on communism, but
Maybe if the world was full of Muslim superpowers, it’d be much like it is now. It’s not like there haven’t been people over-obsessed with the bible making thw world as hellish as possible, but now Xianity is mostly relatively tolerant.
I couldn’t promise this, but I wouldn’t be too surprised.
Administrative Aside: It’s really a stretch to say that this is a “Comment on Cecil’s Column”, but it’s gone on for a while already, so I’m going to leave it here. If I’d seen it the first day it was started, I would have moved it to Great Debates.
I’m just throwing this comment in, so that if another Moderator sees it, he/she will know that I decided not to move it.
Actually, communism (albeit on a VERY small scale) was (and in a few places - see below - still is) successfully implemented on the Israeli “Kibbutzim”.
Two noteworthy points:
The LARGEST kibbutz has a population of something like 5000 people. More of a greek Polis than a modern state. So, this provides no proof that communism scales well.
In the past 20 years or so most kibbutzim have gradually moved to a rather pinkish shade of socialism (in fact, rather close in time to the fall of communism in the old USSR), so the claim that this philosophy is anti-human-nature and therefore doomed may actually be truer than it seems (i.e., true even in a system where communism was implemented on small, tight-knit groups of people, with relatively little corruption at the top).
That’s like being happy that someone else lives a poorer life than you.
Most of the problems of the developing world exist (here too unfortunately) BECAUSE people are so backward and ignorant, they are not made less severe because of this fact.
We have camparatively far less ignorance in this country overall (unless you happen to live in a few counties in some Bible Belt states) ;), so our problems are a lot less severe than in the less developed countries of the world.
America only gained its superpower status because it emphasized education. This led to advances in technology, economic planning, decades of continuous infrastructure development. This raised the standard of living of the average American which led to more increases in education and further social advancement - such as public education for all which didn’t come about until the 20th century. Of course, all of this was helped by America’s continual access to cheap immigrant labor & abundant resources. But, it was really education, good planning (by gov’t & community leaders), continuous virtually uninterupted development. If you look around the world, you will see that these three elements are always essential to all successful nations. Many other nations have abundant resources & access to cheap labor - e.g. Brazil, Australia, China, South Africa - but they have not developed as quickly nor as far as the USA.
The poorest nations of the world are invariably the least educated & have the least infrastructural development. Economic development goes hand in hand with social development. Africa is by far the poorest region of the world - that is mostly because continual national strife and/or warfare erupting every few years in a country causes infrastructure development to continually grind to a halt. Same thing for the poor nations of Southeast Asia - e.g. Burma, Cambodia, N.Korea, etc.
Decade of poverty and warfare ultimately leads to authoritarian regimes - especially when the country has great natural resources and wide gap between rich and poor. In Nigeria, for example, greater wealth due to the development of its abundant oil resources has led to fewer freedom because the wealth has not been widely shared. Increasing the gap between rich and poor turns up the heat on social strife until it boils over and then come crack downs when that source of wealth is threatened. Desperate people turn to any extremist gov’t or group who claims to be able to re-establish order. Often such desperation is born of continual warfare too - e.g. see Afghanistan & Cambodia. Devoting national energy to warfare & social strife/crackdowns leads to neglect of national economic development (except for the wealthy classes) which just fuels the fire more.
You can’t make long-term plans for a modern diversified economy during a continual state of national emergency. (It’s hard enough to do in this country - GWB please take note - in an under-developed country its next to impossible.) You also can’t make such plans - while neglecting the education of the population. To authoritarian regimes, spreading wealth and levels of education, is threat to continual hold on power.
Look also at the example of China. Now that their economy is growing so rapidly - roughly 8% per year for over a decade - people are slowly gaining more freedoms. China now has more millionaires than the UK and now the Communist Party allows free elections of local officials (The on-going transformation of Chinese society deserves to be better reported). All of this was a result of the Chinese governments decision to stop remaining isolated from the rest of the world and invest in development of its economy & its people. Chinese gov’t ha simproved the lot of the rural poor & also pays for thousand of talented people each year to attend American universities.
** Back to the topic at hand.**
Lack of education and lack of exposure to the rest of the world leads to lack of human rights & greater poverty for all, if allowed to continue. Fortunately in this country - Americans rejected early on their brief flirtation with theocracy as a form of government. The people of Salem, Mass in the 1600s were very backward with little access to the outside world. They knew only of the religious scriptures of their own cloistered extremist sect. The results were predicatably disastrous for the community. In their ignorance they created a brutal theocractic regime that burn witches & imprisoned people for blasphemy & even hanged Quakers and member other rival Christian sects who dared to challenge their authority. If America had continued down this path, today we would not be a super-power, but instead at a similar level of economic social development as many poor Afrian nation, or maybe China, or Iran.
Fortunately, other early immigrants to this country had the experience of the British Parliamentary & Court systems to draw upon & also lofty new ideas of social liberty coming from Europe at that time. The American experiment worked because we set a governement that worked and planned for the future. Education was also important. By the 1770s the American colonies had higher rates of literacy than back in England overall.
In short, education leads to social advancement and freer societies. So if Muslim nations had higher levels of education (i.e. were less backward, as you put it) then they would not only be more wealthy, but would not likely be threatening to us either - just as China has become less of a threat to us (and its people) as it has opened to the world, raised education and living standards, and invested in long-term development.
It is interesting to note that many (if not all) of the 9-11 hijackers were NOT poor or illiterate. Most came from relatively well-to-do families in Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Some studied engineering in school. But, in their societies there is no real means of social advancement. No chance of overthrowing nor reforming the Saudi royal family and no access to such wealth usually unless born into it. They have no political voice - no way to contribute to changing their countries for the better. And, few jobs to match their ambitions. The wealth of the royals & the outside world is dangled in front of them, but they can’t participate. Some leave the country and move to the West, others become completely disillusioned and seek radical back-to-basics movements to transform their societies. Fundamentalist groups are often in such countries the only dissenting groups legally allowed to exist (because the royals can’t crack down on the clerics.)
The point here is that individual education & lack of extreme poverty is not enough. Education is useless if you have no opportunity to apply it or hope to escape the ills of your society once you get it.
But, it should also be noted that the Muslim world of the 1300s led the world in math & science. This era, the rule of the Caliphate, is often mythologized as the Muslim world’s golden age, even by fundamentalists, but in fact, in many ways, it was an era of much greater freedom there than today. Muslim universities in Baghdad admitted Jewish & Christian scientists and these people for the most part were allowed freedom of worship - unheard of in Many Muslim countries today. The difference was the emphasis by their gov’t on education. That led to greater wealth & freedom & social advancement. Closing off to the world leads to backwardness.
America as the richest most powerful country is threatened by all the backwardness in the world. It is NOT something to be ‘thankful’ for. We have a choice - to act like the kings of their countries & promote backwardness as a means to holding onto our position in the world. Or, invest in education & development in those contries which leads to social advancement - which WILL ultimately remove what causes that threat & feeds it. Education & broader economic opportunity for all must come first, democratic gov’ts cannot survive without these things.
So, how do we, as average Americans, export knowledge and education to those aras of the world that are in dire need of it? Seems like a country must WANT to change, as your example of China illustrates, and they need to change from within.
Clearly, the US will have difficulty establishing a “beach head for Democracy” in the middle east with our current campaign unless the underlying sources of hatred for the US are addressed.
Giordano Bruno was burned to death by the Church in 1597. Galileo was jailed by in 1632. Jamestown founded 1608. Pilgrims landed at Plymouth in 1623. Salem witch trials were 1692. Spanish Inquistion lasted from the 1400s through the end of the 1700s. These are all concurrent events. The origins of this country came at a time of great religious horror, repreesion, and bloodshed. Wars were raging all during this time between Protestants and Catholics raged throughout Europe - from the early 1500s through the late 1700s.
The spread of Islam though out the Middle East, North Africa, and parts of South Asia (from 660s through 1500s) also killed countless many.
In the Americas, millions of Indian peoples were slaughtered from 1492 through the late 1800s. Much of this slaughter (at least in the early years) was in the name of God. (Later it was often simply a pure land grab.) Colonialism killed countless many in Africa and Asia as well often also religious justified by colonial powers.
So, first, I see no reason to single out “secular” utopian movements. Much of the slaughter, imprisonment, executions, and genocide throughout the centuries have been to convert the heretics or to remake the world in God’s image.
As a percentage of world population at the time, I would bet that the Crusades, the Reformation, the colonization of North & South America, etc. EACH of these caused as many or more deaths than Naziism or Communism.
Though I do not have any reliable figures on population & death counts to offer for any of these. ANYONE???
Also there were many other secular battles aand movements throughout history between rival monarchies - e.g. The Hundred Year War between England and France (from 1337 - 1453). These events too should be compared with your figures on Naziism & Communism on a percentage basis. How many were killed as a result of the Slave Trade?
You, like most people, are simply more familiar with the the attrocities attributed to Naziism & Communism , because they are more recent. But, it is an error to say that they were worst, simply because the population was much larger - that’s like saying that the Stock market crash following 9-11 was worse than 1929 - perhaps in raw numbers it is, but on a percentage basis!
At the start of the 20th century - global population was about 2 billion, I think, at the end about 6 billion. For most of world history the global population was well below 1 billion.