The thesis
that Western civilization is in decline is one which has been increasingly
posited in recent times.
Centred on
the fortunes of the nations comprising North America and Western Europe, such
discourse has typically been framed under deconstructions based on alternate
predictive models of history such as prescribed by the German philosopher
Oswald Spengler or based on eschatological ideologies of religion.
Others have
sought explanation by exploring specific issues and their correlation to
certain symptoms of degeneration and dysfunction in regard to the institutions
and the social fabric of these countries or in relation to their relative
power, influence and vitality. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet writer and
dissident, asserted that the supplanting of religion by proof-based science
which has irresistibly continued to erode morality and traditions was an error
“at the very foundation of thought in modern times.”
For some,
references to the diminution of the racial stock of Caucasian populations
caused by falling birth rates and increased levels of immigration are central
while others cite the rise of the economies of nations such as China, Brazil
and India. In all cases evidence of such malaise is built around arguments
identifying progressive decline in economic power, cultural practices, the
codes of social morality operating within the countries as well as in the
unethical policies of Western-dominated international financial institutions
and the malign effects of the post-Cold War conflicts sponsored by the US-led
military alliance of NATO.
Much argument
has centered on the fortunes of the United States of America, a global
superpower beset by economic ails represented by a trillion-dollar national
debt as well as a marked diminution in its prestige and moral leadership owing
to its conduct in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and arguably prior to that;
in the policy of militarism adopted in the aftermath of collapse of the Soviet
bloc and the creation of a unipolar world.
Henry
Kissinger may have appropriated Spenglar’s model of analogizing the cycles of
human civilizations to the four seasons when in the 1970s he claimed that the
United States had “passed its historic high point like so many earlier
civilizations.” For Kissinger, the decline of the United States is an
historical inevitability: “Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately
collapsed. History is a tale of efforts that failed.”
The
intellectual context of such discourse encompasses a range of schools of
thought including those that subscribe to race-based explanations of the
process of history and civilization such as was given exposition by Lothrop
Stoddard in his 1920 work The Rising Tide
of Color Against White World-Supremacy and those who adhere to Marxist
thinking which posits the inevitable collapse of capitalist institutions and
the culture on which it is based.
While some
thinkers have constructed theoretical models they claim as offering a universal
explanation of the rise and fall of civilizations, others have focused on
developing critiques of the dominant civilizational power. It may also be
helpful to add that the fall of a powerful empire is not necessarily synonymous
with the fall of a civilization.
For instance,
the decline and end of empire for Britain was accompanied by the rise of the
United States of America, itself an Anglo-Saxon nation which had been created
as part of the idea of constructing a new society as a modern off-shoot of the
‘Old World’ of Western European civilization.
Old Europe
was of course the location of empires built up on the ideologies of racial
hierarchy and capitalism. These two issues formed the basis of the relationship
between the West and the non-white peoples who were colonized and arguably
continues to inform the relations between the West and the so-called developing
world in the post-colonial era.
The
establishment and maintenance of an ascendancy over non-Western people was
facilitated by the creation of appropriate institutions and the adoption of
policies and techniques through which political, economic and social control
could be exercised over colonial and later nominally independent post-colonial states.
The
institutions and their methods of operating ensured the economic exploitation
of colonies and former colonies as well as the instituting, when necessary, of
brutal measures aimed at maintaining the status quo.
But it came
at the cost of contradicting the values on which Western civilization was
predicated. And as time has progressed it can be observed that these techniques
of colonization and imperialism have been corrupting to the extent that they
have been directed inwardly and key elements have been applied to Western and
other European countries.
An argument
can be made that they have effectively served to undermine Western
civilizational values and provided at least part of the framework for its own
ruination.
A useful
starting point would be to refer to Aime Cesaire, the Martinique-born writer
whose work Discours sur le Colonialisme
(Discourse on Colonialism), a
critique of the relationship between coloniser and colonised, presented
rationales which drew from Marxist theory and the philosophy of Negritude.
Cesaire asserted that one of the major criticisms of Hitlerism by Europeans was
the harshness and the brutality of the implementation of race-based National
Socialist policies which they believed were akin to the methods devised by
European colonial powers in dealing with their colonial subjects.
The methods
adopted by Adolf Hitler in his quest to create a new order on the European
continent, namely of establishing a new basis for the relations between the
German people and other ethnic groups as well as in realising Lebensraum in the eastern part of the
continent owed a great deal to German state policy and practice during the
imperial era of the Kaiser. In other words, the policies associated with racial
hygiene, the Nuremberg system of racial laws, the merciless war against racial
enemies as executed by the Einsatzgruppen
and the infrastructure of racial extermination had a prelude under the
circumstances of colonial rule.
The
management of German-controlled territories on the African continent was
predicated on the idea of the racial supremacy of those of German lineage. Laws
were passed forbidding intermarriage between those of German stock and African
indigenes.
These laws,
the forerunner of the Nuremberg Laws which criminalised miscegenation between
Germans and those considered as ‘racial inferiors’ on the European continent
such as Jews and Romanis, had been influenced by the writings of Eugen Fisher,
an anthropologist and eugenicist.
In the early
part of the 20th century, Fisher had conducted field research and unethical
experiments on the Herero and Namaqua peoples of South West Africa. His
racially-motivated study of the bones and skulls of Africans pre-figured the
human experimentation conducted by Josef Mengele, to whom he served as mentor,
during the Third Reich.
German
policies of racial extermination as applied to Jews and Romani in death and
labour camps and the mobile death squads of the Einsatzgruppen had their basis in an earlier programme applied
against the Herero and Namaqua who were punished for the sin of resisting
colonisation via death marches, mass starvation and concentration camps. This
was the first genocide of the 20th century and preceded the Ottoman programme
against the Armenian people.
The methods
of resisting rebellion in European colonies have at various junctures also been
transplanted to Western countries. Officers among the British and French armies
who battled various anti-colonial insurrections devised and refined various
brands of counter-insurgency doctrines. These have involved the strategic use
of collective punishment, preventative detention, torture and death squads.
The French
experience in Indochina and Algeria produced ideas by the likes of David
Galula, Roger Trinquier and Jean Gardes. Trinquier advocated the use of terror
and torture in the war with the guerillas of the Front de Liberation Nationale
(FLN). Gardes, who fled to Argentinian exile after the failed rebellion of the
anti-de Gaulle Organisation de L’Armee Secrete (OAS), was one of a group of
former French officers who trained and advised members of the Argentinian
military in the ‘dirty war’ waged against Marxist guerillas in the 1970s and
1980s.
British
counter-insurgency doctrine was also shaped in the waning days of empire in
places such as Mandate-era Palestine, Malaya and Kenya. Again, the practice of
employing torture was integrated into operations aimed at putting down
insurrection. Although torture has been contrary to the English common law for
several centuries, it was part and parcel of the range of extraordinary
measures built into breaking the Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s.
British army
methods of what euphemistically came to be known as enhanced interrogation
techniques became a highly valued ingredient in another Latin American ‘dirty
war’, this time in Brazil. The military Junta which seized power in 1964 also
waged a war against Leftists using the panoply of state-sanctioned violence
including death squads and torture.
But the crude
methods of torture initially employed by the Brazilian military while efficient
in the homicidal elimination of state enemies was not as efficient in gathering
of intelligence data. British Army advisors, with newly acquired experience of
refined techniques of torture from a counter-insurgency in Northern Ireland,
were able to provide the necessary expertise in the use of psychological
torture which their Brazilian counterparts found to be more effective. Using
the ‘Five Techniques’, a strategy which combines the use of sensory deprivation
with high stress, information was obtained at a higher rate than was previously
the case with dissident prisoners.
The
Brazilians even began referring to the new interrogation methods as the
‘English System’.
The British
Army, which had been deployed in Northern Ireland to keep the peace between
Roman Catholic and Protestant communities soon became embroiled in an
insurgency conducted by the Irish Republican Army (IRA).
The
employment of a counterinsurgency strategy influenced by the army theoretician
Frank Kitson, a brigadier commanding an infantry brigade in the early part of
‘The Troubles’ in the early 1970s, is argued by many republicans to have
worsened a situation that had began as a peaceful civil rights protest movement
seeking to end anti-Catholic discrimination.
Fuelled by to
an extent by longstanding anti-Irish racism and ancient anti-Catholic sectarian
sentiments, Britain, the argument goes, had transferred intact the brutal
techniques of suppression fashioned in colonial destinations to a province of
the United Kingdom which diehard republicans ruefully refer to as “England’s
first colony and its last”.
Britain’s own
‘dirty war’ involved the use of the harshest measures and techniques as had
been employed in its recent colonies: Death squads were represented by special
military units such as the Military Reaction Force (MRF) and successor
creations of British Army intelligence. These units formed the fulcrum through
which a vicious war of attrition ensued with the use of loyalist paramilitary
proxies from the Protestant community.
Population
control techniques such as internment and the surveillance of working class
Roman Catholic communities were employed and a system of torture notably at
venues such as East Belfast’s Castlereagh interrogation centre was formalised.
The use of the ‘Five techniques’ was ruled to amount to torture by the European
Commission of Human Rights in 1976. Two years later, the European Court for
Human Rights held that that while they did not amount to torture, they still
breached the European Convention on Human Rights because they constituted
“inhuman and degrading” treatment.
The
resistance to introducing the use of plastic bullets to the British mainland
despite its decades-long use in Northern Ireland offers confirmation to those
Irish who perceive more than a whiff of the colonial master’s mentality in
British attitudes to the people its province. The methods utilised for
containing the serious breakdown of law and order in the early years of the
‘Troubles’ were not applied in the United Kingdom even though the military
theorist Frank Kitson did envisage that they likely would be.
However in
the United States where state and local police forces have become more
militarised, the increasingly brutish manner employed by officers in dealing
with members of the public can be attributed to the training they receive and
the doctrine being inculcated from a part of the world involved in an ongoing
colonial enterprise. This is the state of Israel.
Many police
departments receive training on crowd control, the use of force and
surveillance from Israel’s national police, military and intelligence services.
The training is not focused on community policing in conventional circumstances
but is given in the context of maintaining order in the Occupied Palestinian
Territories.
The United
States Department State has backed up the findings of international human
rights organisations such as Amnesty International who have cited extrajudicial
executions, the use of torture and excessive force against peaceful protesters
by Israeli security organisations.
For many
American police forces, the emphasis is not on community policing but acting as
an occupation force. It is a mindset which owes a great deal to being trained
within the framework of the tactics used to suppress Palestinians.
It is no
surprise therefore to discover what a US Department of Justice report published
in August of 2016 found to be “widespread constitutional violations,
discriminatory enforcement and culture of retaliation” in regard to the
policing of the American city of Baltimore. The quality of training led to the
use of excessive force against juveniles, homeless persons and those with
mental health issues.
This form of
policing is not restricted to the troubled inner cities of poor African
American and Latino communities. The statistics show that incidents involving
the shooting of unarmed citizens have shot up by over 500% since the Bush era.
The number of civil action claims and settlements have also increased.
The passage
of the National Defence Authorization Act and other draconian legislation in
the post-9/11 era provides the basis for future government actions that would
enable the colonial-like treatment of US citizens. The extensive powers granted
to law enforcement bodies tasked with surveillance as well as the potential
creation of camps under the auspices of the Federal Emergency Management Agency
(FEMA) provides ample scope for this.
The rise of
the United States as a power on a global scale has meant that it has acquired
the characteristics of an empire dictating and controlling other countries. The
acquisition of Spanish-speaking territories after the defeat of Spain in the
Spanish-American War meant that it inherited an empire including Cuba and the
Philippines.
But even
before this, the Monroe Doctrine which formalised a fundamental policy of
hemispherical domination meant it thought and acted less as a first nation
among equals than as an empire controlling a dominion of states. Numerous
interventions in Latin American states consolidated the reputation of the
United States as a purveyor of ‘Yanqui Imperialism’; a bully state concerned
only about economically exploiting its smaller neighbours. Many of the
interventions in South and Central America as well as in the Caribbean, were
done at the behest of corporations and banks.
General
Smedley Butler considered himself to be a racketeer and enforcer for the banks
and corporations on Wall Street. He had been he claimed a “gangster for
capitalism”.
This
continued after its official ascendency to the status of a global superpower in
the aftermath of the Second World War. The Cold War era with interventions in
Iran, Guatemala and Chile as well as waging a counter-insurgency effort in
Vietnam which regardless of its ideological rationale, bore the trappings of a
neo-colonial war in Vietnam.
The imperious
hand of the United States intervened in the affairs of a number of its Western
European allies in order to ensure that they did not fall under the influence
of the Soviet camp. The fear of communism meant that these countries were
effectively treated as vassal states and in a manner redolent of the methods
used by European colonial powers.
The attitude
is perhaps best encapsulated by a diatribe of US President Lyndon Johnson. A
complaint by Greece’s ambassador to the United States over American meddling in
the affairs of his country met with the following harangue from Johnson:
Listen to me,
Mr. ambassador. Fuck your parliament and your constitution. America is an
elephant. Cyprus is a flea. Greece is a flea. If those two fleas continue
itching the elephant, they may just get whacked by the elephant’s trunk.
Whacked good...We pay a lot of good American dollars to the Greeks, Mr.
Ambassador. If your prime minister gives me talk about democracy, parliaments
and constitutions, he, his parliament, and his constitution may not last long.
They were
sentiments echoed later on by the CIA station chief in Athens at the time of
the military coup staged with United States backing against the democratically
elected socialist government of Greece. When the US ambassador expressed
disapproval by stating that the coup represented a “rape of democracy”, the station
chief retorted: “How can you rape a whore?”
American
modes of intervention were not at all dissimilar to those still utilised by
Western European countries to keep their former colonies in line once they were
nominally independent. The post-colonial policy of Francafrique which sought to bind France politically, economically
and diplomatically with its former African colonies effectively maintained
French hegemony.
Jacques
Foccart, the chief adviser on African policy to the governments respectively of
Charles de Gaulle and Georges Pompidou, was for a long period of time, the
dominant force behind the management of this relationship. It was one which was
decidedly paternalistic in nature and which also undertook a sometimes sinister
form. In 1959 Foccart co-founded Service d’Action Civique (SAC), a Gaullist
militia that specialized in covert operations in Francophone Africa. Recruited
from the ranks of political toughs as well as from the underworld, SAC
undertook armed operations in the continent from a base in Gabon.
The
strategies employed by the United States in relation to the Western European
nations it had liberated from Nazi domination and formed the North Atlantic
Treaty Organisation (NATO), an anti-communist military alliance, were no less underhand.
It is worth reminding that the first successful operation undertaken by the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) after its establishment under the US National
Security Act of 1947 was to fix the Italian general elections held the
following year against the popular communist party.
The irony of
French insistence on continued hegemony over its previous African dominions may
have been lost on de Gaulle who came to view NATO’s presence on French soil as
an affront and a threat to French national sovereignty. When four of his
generals staged a coup in French Algeria in 1961 as a prelude to an attempt to
overthrow his government, de Gaulle was aware of CIA support for the
putschists. He also came to understand that US intelligence was supporting the
OAS which was attempting to assassinate him for what they considered to be his
betrayal over the issue of Algerian independence.
The OAS was
linked to the stay-behind secret armies controlled by NATO. While these cells
were ostensibly tasked with the role of preparing to serve as guerrillas
sabotaging occupying armies of the Warsaw Pact in the event of an invasion of
Western Europe, evidence points to their having morphed into something
sinister.
Today known
generically as Gladio, the name of the Italian branch, NATO’s secret armies are
claimed to have fomented military coups and facilitated acts of terrorism, both
with the aim of forestalling communist influence in the governments of Western
Europe. Thus the United States sanctioned the overthrow of governments in
Turkey and Greece, events helped by the input respectively of Counter-Guerrilla
and LOK, the Turkish and Greek versions of Gladio.
In Italy,
Germany and Belgium, terror attacks directed at the public and officially
blamed on Left-wing groups were in fact carried out by fascist and neo-Nazi
groups with the aid of the intelligence branches of state who were influenced
by the CIA and NATO intelligence. In Italy, the anni di piombo or ‘years of lead’, featured numerous bombings most
notably in Milan, Peteano and Bologna which were part of la strategia della tensione or strategy of tension designed to
influence a fearful public to seek protection from politically Right-wing
governments.
The
revelations of the former neo-fascist Vincenzio Vinciguerra and General Vito
Miceli point to American-led NATO involvement in acts of terror and coup
plotting. It was a less obvious form of involvement in the affairs of
purportedly sovereign nations but no less insidious than its lengthy experience
in shaping the political direction of many states through numerous American
interventions in Latin America.
There is
perhaps no better illustration of how the methods of neo-colonial behaviour in
the West has been appropriated and applied to certain European countries than
in the manner in which countries are put into spiralling debt before being
plundered of their national treasures and resources while effectively losing
national sovereignty.
The
techniques employed by the World Bank in creating indebtedness in nation states
through arrangements made with the leaders and the elites of such countries was
given detailed airing by John Perkins in his book Confessions of an Economic Hitman. According to Perkins who worked
as a strategic consultant advising institutions such as the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund, the role of professionals such as him was to:
...cheat
countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from
the World Bank, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and other
foreign “aid” organisations into the coffers of huge corporations and the
pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet’s natural resources.
Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs,
extortion, sex and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has
taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization.
The result of
indebtedness (i.e. when the country is unable to service the development loan)
is that the affected developing country would be obliged to enter into a
structural adjustment programme. The terms typically mandate that the country
consent to privatizing and deregulating its economy. It also entails lifting
trade barriers and imposing an economic regime of austerity. The implications
for national sovereignty are all too apparent. And where the level of debt is
particularly high, it creates the circumstances through which national assets
and resources can be taken over by foreign, inevitably Western corporations.
As the
economic plight of nations such as Greece and Portugal demonstrate, such
economic colonization appears to be applicable to certain European nations. For
it appears that the longstanding principle of re-adjusting terms when a debt
becomes unserviceable has been abrogated and substituted by one that is
insistent that social services and benefits must be slashed and national
resources sold.
Thus it has
been the case that successive governments in Greece have signed memorandum
agreements which have imposed a particularly stringent austerity regime that
forces Greece to sell off important public assets. The fact that European Union
(EU) and a troika consisting of the European Commission (EC), the European
Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have to approve
relevant legislation brought before the Greek Parliament is taken by many
Greeks as evidence of the forfeiture of their national sovereignty.
There is a
belief among some eastern European commentators that the absorption of former
Soviet Bloc nations into the European Union has merely created an opportunity
for the West to replace presently indebted southern European states such as
Greece with new markets to plunder. The fate of central and eastern European
members of the EU has, they argue, been one of indebtedness and general
economic malaise caused by the sale of national industries to foreign
corporations who engage in large-scale asset stripping.
Certainly the
experience of post-Soviet Russia at the hands of Western bankers and economists
hired to oversee the transition from a centralised, planned economy to one
operating according to laissez faire principles, was a hard one tinged with
scandal and tragedy. Incomes fell as did life expectancy as social services
became near to extinct. The nation’s industry and resources were permitted to
be bought up at rock-bottom prices enabling a few individuals to rise within a
short period of time to form an infamous group of oligarchs. Russia was
plundered.
Meditating
over the the causes of the presumed decline of a civilization is an inherently
weary endeavour. And any attempt at constructing a universally accepted paradigm
based on a range of criteria ranging from the scientific to the eschatological
will never achieve universal acceptance.
But the
evidence from trends which are retrogressive and trajectories that are harmful
are all too apparent. The path taken toward militarism, the importation of a
police state culture and evolving oligarchic capitalism all have dire
implications for social justice, economic fairness and democratic values.
It is also
clear to those with an understanding of history and the contemporary world that
the attitudes and the practices of the West towards the non-western world have
a bearing both on elevating its civilizational values as well as diminishing
such values. And it is with regard to the latter that a substantial part of any
discourse on the decline of the West should necessarily focus.
© Adeyinka
Makinde (2017)
Adeyinka
Makinde is a writer based in London, England
