Summer
1991
MISUNDERSTANDING
ASIA
U.S. Secretary of
State James Baker has been misled. Worse still, he continues to be misled. His
error is that of most newcomers to the State Department: to follow respectfully
its well-rooted misinterpretation of Asia, a tradition shared by many
chancelleries, academic institutions, editorial offices of the media and
generally by many intellectuals throughout the West (not by the Soviets,
asianized since Lenin). Western
misunderstanding of Asia and misinterpreting its political moves have
proved remarkably resistant to modern communications, travel and “first hand”
reporting by professional diplomats, cultural and military attaches and many
media reporters. Asia in this context means all of that vast and varied continent
- from the Pacific to the Mediterranean, from the Soviet Union to South
Vietnam. The misunderstanding of Asia by the West, deeply rooted and pervasive,
had Rudyard Kipling exclaim “Oh East is East and West is West and never the
twain shall meet.” He was at home
in both civilizations and an intuitive observer of their mutual
incomprehension.
Examples of such
misunderstanding of foreign countries are numerous. The few chosen from this
century alone are (or should be) fairly well remembered because of their grave
and tragic consequences. Some time in 1940 and with growing urgency in 1941,
warnings reached Stalin, a native Asian, that the Germans were preparing an
invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of that year. The reports came from
the U.S.A., from Stalin’s own intelligence services and, as the records show, even from the accredited German
ambassador to Moscow himself. He regarded it a patriotic duty to his own
country to oppose Hitler’s madness and to warn the intended victim. Stalin dismissed
the warnings as “disinformatzia” (deliberately misleading enemies by slanted
information, a technique on which the sly Asian was himself an expert). He was
in the grip of a solid conviction that the Germans - as he judged them - would
honour the recent non-aggression treaty signed by foreign ministers Molotov and
Ribbentrop. When the invasion, Operation Barbarossa” began on June 22, 1941, Stalin suffered a nervous shock that
immobilized him for several days.
What made
Stalin misread the signals whose meaning was obvious to many people around him?
The psychology (and quite often psychopathology) of misinterpreting reality in
general and politics in particular is a complex subject beyond the scope of
this comment. Most of us have at some time in our life been disappointed and
painfully surprised as a result of wrong judgment suddenly revealed to us when
reality turned out to be very different from how we had seen it until then.
Misunderstandings are a common human trait, either arising from wishful
expectation, or of morbid suspicion (as in Othello), in politics most often
from “projective” thinking. We
attribute to others traits and qualities that have their origin in our own mind
and concepts. Projective thinking
- and the errors of judgment which result from them - occur between parents and
children, husbands and wives, lovers, partners in business,
neighbours,colleagues and even old friends. The discovery of having erred can come slowly or suddenly.
Surprise, pain, shock and loss, or a mix of these, are part of the price to
pay.
Another
misunderstanding of political reality with disastrous results between
neighbouring nations shaped the foreign policy of successive governments of
Britain and France in the twenties and thirties. Stanley Baldwin and later
Neville Chamberlain, their cabinets, diplomats - “patricians to a man”, as
Churchill biographer William Manchester observed - were convinced that the
Germans, even under Hitler, were basically a friendly, decent, peace-loving
people with whom one could live and treat on a rational basis, once their
grievances dating back to World War One were met. Churchill, one of the few who
read the facts correctly, denounced appeasement of Germany as the highway to
war (“the most avoidable of all wars”). He was denied power and influence at
the time, vilified by the British establishment and the press as a “warmonger,
extremist, eccentric”. The
clinical details of this blindness which brought the free world to the brink of
perdition, have been eloquently recorded by the “eccentric” himself. But he too
had no plausible psychological explanation of what exactly caused such a costly
error of his predecessors’ judgment. Manchester offers one: the Conservative
British establishment, recruited almost entirely from the upper classes, was by
its ethics, values and blind
ethnocentricity incapacitated for understanding the spirit of aggression, moral
degradation and vulgarity of their neighbours across the North Sea. Chamberlain
himself commented on his misjudgment in an ante-mortem reflexion. Lying on his
deathbed he said ruefully: “Everything would have been alright if only Hitler
had kept his word.” He and his cabinet colleagues had expected a vulgar German
to live up to his own honourable standard. The British people paid the
incalculable cost of their error.
A third example of
misunderstanding - in this case of Asia – is that of President Franklin
Roosevelt and his State Department advisers. While the U.S. and a high-level
Japanese delegation were negotiating in Washington in 1941 on “limiting naval
armaments in the Pacific Ocean”, another department of the Japanese government
was secretly preparing war against the U.S. The bubble of American self-deception in Washington burst on
the day of the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7. The Americans discovered
too late that their assumption that their Japanese partners were negotating in
good faith, was unfounded. “The day of infamy”, exclaimed Roosevelt the next
day. We suggest he should have called it “the day of awakening from our error.”
What lessons, if any,
has the State Department learnt from the post mortem examination of that costly error with its
incalculable results, among them the advent of the nuclear age ? Every
confidence trickster is by instinct familiar with the human habit of wishful
and projective thinking and takes advantage of it. In the domain of politics
the Asians have long been skilled at it, as were Hitler and his helpers. Lenin,
a sly Asian,was an outstanding practitioner. When the chief of his secret
services Felix Dzershinsky asked him by what tactics he could thwart Western
anti-Soviet schemes, Lenin answered: “Tell them what they want to hear.” The results of his words were most effective. Soviet agents,sent
to the West and posing there as anti-Communist refugees, spread the rumours
that Anglo-French intervention was unifying the Russian people against it and
weakening domestic opposition against Communism. France and Britain cancelled
the military intervention plans against the Bolsheviks, a decision that allowed
Lenin and Trotzki to consolidate the Communist regime without further outside
interference.
Today it is the turn of Secretary of
State James Baker to be misled by his advisers, themselves victims of the old
Western tradition of wrongly interpreting Asia in general and the Middle East
in particular, and to mislead President George Bush on the subject of Saddam
Hussein and Iraq. It needs to be borne in mind that reason and rational,
pragmatic thinking is a young, tender and perishable plant that even in the
West began to sprout only some 500 years ago. In the political domain it is
barely sprouting. But it cannot
growing at all on the arid sands of Eastern irrationality. What today sounds
sensible, rational, self-evident to a Western mind sounds strange and alien, at
best interesting to Oriental ears. The man in the East understands the Western
message and makes astute and devious use of his understanding. But he has a quite different
existential experience of its underlying meanings and implications.
Cause-and-effect relationships, the concept and experience of time which are
part of Western rationality and dynamism, are alien to the Eastern perspective.
No wonder all countries in which traditional Islam is the dominant religion are
backward industrially and technologically, despite the enormous wealth of some
of them.
On the evidence of
its own dogmas Islam remains exclusive, immovable, uncompromising. Its basic,
central profession of faith is “There is no God but Allah. And Muhammad is his
Messenger”. Allah is not the universal god common to all monotheistic creeds,
but of Islam alone . Mohammed
divided non-Moslems into pagans and “People of the Book” - Jews and Christians
who at least believed in the one God of the Bible. They were offered the choice
of choice of conversion or tolerance at a price (a head tax), the pagans could
live by conversion or die by the sword. Before his death he called upon his
followers to convert the peoples of the earth to Islam - and they went at it
with vigour and impressive success - in large parts of Asia, most of North
Africa and Spain until they reached the heart of France (where for the first
time they were chased back). As late as the 17th century they stood
at the gates of Vienna. Last century Moslems in India tried to convert the
unwilling Sikhs by force, but were wiped out in the attempt (which was not
repeated). The vigour of Islamization by the sword has vanished, but the dogma
is intact and the missionary effort is still successful.
Secretary of State
Baker has been wrongly briefed to think that the central issue of the
Arab-Israeli conflict is the presence of Israel in the mainly Arab populated areas west of the Jordan
river since 1967. But the conflict began long before a State of Israel arose
(1948) and will soon be eighty years old. Even the present “Green Line” border
is nothing but a 1967 cease-fire line after a war which the Arabs began and
lost. Arab terrorism against the Jewish minority has been endemic in Palestine
and erupted time and again since the twenties. The conviction at the State
Department appears to be that Israel can and should trade “territory for peace”
with its Arab neighbours, retreat to the so-called Green Line, and both sides should
negotiate for mutual benefit. Such a conflict-solving formula whose main
ingredients are mutual concessions, sweet reasonableness, some gain for both
sides and honour upheld, is a typical product of Western rationalism. It is
alien to the Oriental mind. Transplanted from West to East it must wither, like
the succession of “armistices” signed by the civil war factions in Beirut in
the morning and broken in the afternoon. Maybe not as fast. But wither it will,
like the treaty between Iraq and Iran on their conflicting interests in the
Persian Gulf (Shatt El Arab) in the early seventies. When turmoil in Iran
followed the overthrow of the Shah, the Iraqi dictator Haddam Hussein tore up
the treaty and waged war for nine years.
A truce, a treaty, an agreement of any kind, no matter how solemnly
signed, sealed and sworn to, are instruments for resting arms or making peace
in the West. In the East they last
only as long as they can be enforced.
Islam will not,
by its own dogma and tradition cannot, tolerate any non-Moslem minority as
equals within what it regards its territory. There are lessons to be learnt
from the genocide of the Armenian Christians early this century and in l9l5 in
Ottoman Turkey. Or from the massacres of the Greek Christians in Asia Minor
(Smyrna, or Izmir, in 1922), of the Assyrian Christians (a. k. a. Nestorians)
in Iraq in the thirties, the Bahais in Iran, the Maronite Christians in
Lebanon. What are the people of Israel expecting from their Moslem neighbours
engaged in endless, never resolved conflicts even among themselves?
The stake for
the Moslems is the restoration of their religious and national self-respect,
not survival, as it is for Israel whose land area is less than two tenths of
one percent of the combined area of the Arab League countries. The belief that
by surrendering a sliver of West Bank territory to another Moslem state Israel
could appease the Arabs is another one of those false Western political and
psychological convictions which have cost the democratic countries so much in
blood and treasure in this century. They could cost Israel its life as a
sovereign state.
It is
surprising that the government of the United States where the effective tool of
market research has been invented and come into use as a business routine, ignores it and does
no homework on the psychology of the Middle East, Islam, indeed all of Asia. As
in Iran of the Sha ten years ago the U.S. State Department now falls prey to
its own projective and wishful thinking and the misjudgments that are its
result. Whoever reads the history of Islam without prejudice will come to the
conclusion that all Israel can hope for is a precarious truce by deterrence,
not lasting peace. Christian Europe
has lived in confrontation with Islam for about l,000 years. In our age of “instant information
retrieval”, it calls for some reflection on how a military and political
experience of the past that went on for so long,is so well documented and left
its legacy in so many ways, is now ignored and largely forgotten. One man who grasped this astonishing
fact was President Harry Truman.
“The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know,” he
said. The military confrontation between Islam and Christianity in Europe ended
largely some 300 years ago as a result of the technological leap forward of the
West with which the fatalistic, static Orient could no longer keep up. The
Israelis, strangely unhistoric in their old-new state, are learning the lessons
of this chapter of history the hard way.
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