The Islamic Danger to Western Civilization

[EagleEye]

http://www.westerndefense.org/special/TwinTowers2001.htm

1. The Historical Background of Islamic Resurgence

The West itself is largely responsible for creating and fostering the dangers to its civilization. Throughout human history empires rose by military conquest and fell when their rulers took their power for granted, indulging their greed without counting the cost. The basic pattern progressing from war to occupation, exploitation, negligence and collapse has not changed. Often, exploitation was oppressive and cruel from the outset. The more enlightened the exploitation, the longer it lasted, always providing the rulers dealt efficiently with their security problems. These multiplied when it inevitably turned into over-exploitation. A correlation between over-exploitation and negligence seems illogical, but historical evidence supports it. Greed has always blinded power-wielders to danger. It still does.

The problems of exercising power at the end of the 20th century are more complex than in the past because the technological advances of the last nine decades enormously increased the destructiveness of weapons and the ability to communicate instantly with any part of the globe. The main beneficiaries were very big business, the superpowers and terrorist movements. When the century began, Great Britain was boasting of an empire on which the sun never set. But there were also a French empire, a German empire, an Austro-Hungarian empire, a Dutch empire, a Portuguese empire and an Ottoman empire, besides major power centers in the United States, Russia and (after 1905) Japan. Except for some parts of the already disintegrating Ottoman empire, British influence in these states - and many more - was negligible or non-existent.

The first major trauma was caused by the 1914-1918 War, which pitted Great Britain, France and Russia against Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey. Most of the fighting took place in Europe and the seas surrounding it. It soon degenerated into inconclusive trench warfare with enormous casualties on both sides, providing the stimulus for the development of military aircraft, tanks and other new weapon systems. The US entered the war on the British side in 1917, when the strength of the main protagonists was nearly exhausted. Russia was defeated and had a communist revolution later the same year. The US intervention turned the scale. An armistice was signed in 1918.

President Wilson of the US was, therefore, an influential participant in the peace negotiations that followed. The United States was a melting pot of races and nationalities. Yet Wilson’s main contribution to the settlement negotiated was the selective imposition of a national self-determination principle based largely on language to fix the new European borders. It was imposed on the defeated. A resurgent Poland was created from German, Austrian and Russian territory. The mistrusted Russian communists were also compelled to cede large areas to Rumania, Finland and the new Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Austria-Hungary was broken up. It ceded Transylvania to Rumania, Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia to the new Czechoslovak Republic, Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina to the new Serb-dominated Yugoslav Republic and even German-speaking Southern Tyrol to Italy. Austria and Hungary became separate mini-states. The Ottoman Empire was deprived of its Arab provinces in North Africa and the Middle East, which became British or French protectorates, and had to yield some territory in Europe to Greece. But Wilson did not dare to propose self-determination for the overseas colonies of European states. German colonies were eventually put under British, French or US rule.

It is important to stress the American role in promoting ethno-linguistic nationalism in Europe during the 1918-1939 period - if only because the general trend of US propaganda now is to blame nationalism for all the world’s ills (though still promoting it when this is politically convenient, e.g. in the Balkans). Yet the US rarely intervened actively in European affairs during the inter-war years. The economic crash of 1929 and the following depression intensified its isolationism that had paid off so well in 1914-1916. It was maintained even when Hitler surged to power in Germany, though the Americans shared the Anglo-French preoccupation with the potential threat of Soviet communism and began, like the British, to regard the Nazis as a possible bulwark against Russia.

The communist threat was certainly a factor in the Anglo-French appeasement policy allowing Hitler to renege on his international commitments, remilitarize the Rhineland in 1936, rearm massively and then occupy Austria and Czechoslovakia. But the crucial factor was the lack of political courage of the ruling British and French politicians. By 1939, war with Germany was the only alternative to Nazi hegemony - a point those who today believe war is always the worst of all possible evils would do well to consider.

The 1939-1945 war was the second great trauma of the 20th century. It claimed some 52 million dead. The United States, still regarding isolationism as the most profitable policy (excellent for business and saving American lives) kept out of the war until December 1941, and might well have kept out longer had Japan not attacked and destroyed much of its Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor. By then Britain, despite Winston Churchill’s inspired leadership, was almost on its knees and dependent on American supplies - both military and civilian. France had surrendered already in 1940. But Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 had diverted to his eastern front forces essential for a successful invasion of England. Thus the over-confidence and greed of Germany and Japan probably prevented their victory.

By the time they were finally defeated in 1945, the United States was the only power of global economic stature. Britain, France, Germany, Japan and the Soviet Union were totally exhausted by the war and their economic infrastructures had suffered enormous damage. Washington could virtually dictate the rates of their economic revival. It chose to give priority to its wartime enemies over its wartime allies. It would be too charitable to ascribe this exclusively to a desire to avoid the pitfalls of the punitive policy that helped the rise of Hitler after World War I, or even to the fear of Soviet communism. The main American goal, carefully camouflaged by meaningless rhetoric, was to prevent a revival of Great Britain as a great power in its own right and to limit the ability of France to influence events on the continent of Europe.

Though an important positive result of the above US behavior was that Germany and Japan were diverted to seek satisfaction in economic progress and adopted democratic forms of government, "Realpolitik" was its dominant motive. A rapidly revived Great Britain was the only power with the potential to rival the US in the economic sphere - if it retained its colonies and its influence in India, Canada, South Africa and Australia. But in 1946 Britain was down and out. Protecting and even administering its overseas territories seemed an impossible burden. So it was in the US interest to promote decolonization before the British economy revived sufficiently to renew British interest in regaining the status of a major economic and military power. The correct idea that ethnically uniform states would create greater stability was only partially applied in practice even in the post-World War I treaties. Now, the goal was to deprive Britain and France of their influence overseas and to penetrate the ex-colonial markets they had previously largely reserved for themselves. So no attention whatever was paid to ethnic or tribal uniformity. The borders of the new, ex-colonial states were identical with those of the colonies or protectorates they replaced, cutting across ethnic and tribal lines. This caused bitter internal conflicts and sometimes genocide, especially in Africa.

The Communist Party regime of the Soviet Union was no less totalitarian than Nazi Germany’s, persecuting and often killing its political opponents. But its atheist, materialist ideology with its gospel of universal class warfare seemed far more dangerous than fascism to the post-1945 power-wielders in Western democracies. For communist propaganda not only proved attractive in many underdeveloped countries, where, like the US and for similar reasons, it stressed anti-imperialism, but also tended to strengthen socialist movements in the West that could not be relied upon to protect the interests of big business there.

Moreover, Stalin was quick to realize the crucial military importance of nuclear power. The US had ended the war with Japan by killing scores of thousands of Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear bombs and he did not want to be subjected to nuclear blackmail. By the early 1950s, the Soviet Union had plenty of atomic bombs of its own. These nuclear weapons assured its superpower status. To the West’s chagrin, economic power proved irrelevant in the matter. It sufficed for the requisite military production and living standards above the level at which the population might revolt. More was not necessary.

The bipolar world Stalin created lasted nearly four decades, until Mikhail Gorbachev destroyed it (with crucial help from Ronald Reagan’s "Star Wars" policy) by undermining the foundations of Soviet power and stability. His reforms wrecked the Soviet economic system without putting anything effective in its place, while his advocacy of a united Germany opened the floodgates, drowning the Warsaw Pact and ending Soviet influence in central Europe and the Balkans.

During these four decades, the military balance between the two superpowers resulted in a relatively stable world. They jockeyed for position, trying to gain adherents among the uncommitted states and sometimes precipitating regional wars, but each was determined to keep its allies firmly in their subordinate places. The Soviet Union intervened with its armored forces to keep Hungary communist in 1956. That same year, the United States (jointly with the Soviet Union!) served Britain and France with an ultimatum, compelling them to evacuate their armed forces when they attacked Egypt after Gamal Abdul Nasser had nationalized their key strategic investment, the Suez Canal. This served notice to the entire Middle East that the US would not permit Britain and France to regain any independent influence in the region or to resist its decolonization gambit, which the USSR enthusiastically supported for reasons of its own.

The UN, created after World War II, reflected these US and Soviet policies. The rapid progress of decolonization gradually peopled it with a big majority of underdeveloped authoritarian states, generously permitted to pass non-binding resolutions in its General Assembly. The UN Security Council, however, had teeth. Its five permanent members had the right of veto. Britain, France and China were usually afraid to use it. The US and the USSR were not so shy.

The United States is a democracy. The Soviet Union was not. But the key difference between the two superpowers was the American emphasis on economic development and economic means of wielding power, while the Soviet Union emphasized ideology and military strength. In the UN, the large majority of states was authoritarian, ideologically much closer to the USSR than to the US, and thus tended to cooperate with the Kremlin. During the 1950s, this faced Washington with a dilemma. It needed decolonization to keep its European allies politically subservient, but the ex-colonial states might abandon it unless their ruling elites were permitted to expropriate foreign investments. The decision to allow them to do so was destined to change the balance of economic power. Another effect of the new composition of the UN and the superpowers’ propaganda was more insidious. Reinforced by the rapid development of television and electronic communications, it caused a gradual change in West European attitudes to nationalism and immigration. By the end of 1997, the ethnic composition of the population of Western, Northern and Southern Europe had been radically altered by the influx of Asians and Africans - many millions of them Moslems. There was no move in the opposite direction.

For the USSR, globalism was a means of promoting communist ideology and Soviet hegemony. For the US, it was a means of promoting capitalist profits and US hegemony. This was the basis of the peculiar love-hate relationship between Washington and the Moslem world. During the 20th century, oil and natural gas gradually supplanted coal as the main source of energy. A very substantial proportion of the world’s oil and gas reserves were in Moslem states, among them Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Iran, Iraq, Libya and Indonesia. Before World War II, British, French and Dutch companies competed with the Americans for control of these resources. After this war, it was no contest. The Europeans were left with just enough to keep them satisfied.

The decision to allow Moslem states to assume full sovereign rights over their oil and natural gas resources and expropriate them in part or sometimes in toto was thus primarily a US gamble based on the hope that these states would cooperate with American oil companies, leaving them effective control and a lion’s share of the profits. In practice, effective control duly passed to the Moslem states concerned, which also appropriated a steadily growing share of the wealth energy produced. Though there is no shortage of oil and never has been, restrictions on output and the fact that (apart from the US itself) communist USSR and China were the two other biggest oil producers, enabled the Moslems - and particularly the Arabs - to use oil embargoes as a political weapon.

Elsewhere in Asia, Japan - at first with substantial US help, but later taking full advantage of its miniature defense budgets - could concentrate on civilian production, exploiting its skilled manpower and technological resources to become an industrial power of the first magnitude. China developed more slowly, but by the 1990s was also an economic giant. Considerable economic progress was also made in India, South Korea, Hongkong, Taiwan and Singapore. The Moslem provinces of India were detached to form Pakistan already in 1948. Until the end of the century, possibly owing to its other Moslem connections, the US consistently supported Pakistan (and its ally, China) against India, virtually pushing the latter into the arms of the Soviet Union. But this was only one of its serious mistakes in Southern Asia. In the 1960s, the American superpower fought a half-hearted war against communist North Vietnam and managed to lose it, its client, South Vietnam, becoming part of a united Vietnam under communist rule. The blunder in Afghanistan was even graver. In 1979, the Soviet Union sent forces into this country and succeeded in establishing a friendly government in Kabul. There was a revolt, chiefly of Islamic fundamentalist elements supported by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. The US gave it every possible aid. Unfortunately for the West, the revolt succeeded. The new Afghan government was friendly to fundamentalist Iran and bore no grudges to the Russians. So Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the US turned against it, fomenting an even more fundamentalist rebellion by the Taleban movement. This too succeeded. In the process, Afghanistan and the Peshawar region of Pakistan became centers of anti-Western Islamic terrorism.

For emphasis

The decision to allow Moslem states to assume full sovereign rights over their oil and natural gas resources and expropriate them in part or sometimes in toto was thus primarily a US gamble based on the hope that these states would cooperate with American oil companies, leaving them effective control and a lion’s share of the profits. In practice, effective control duly passed to the Moslem states concerned, which also appropriated a steadily growing share of the wealth energy produced. Though there is no shortage of oil and never has been, restrictions on output and the fact that (apart from the US itself) communist USSR and China were the two other biggest oil producers, enabled the Moslems - and particularly the Arabs - to use oil embargoes as a political weapon.

The addiction to oil must be ended.

[EagleEye]

America supporting Terrorist Muslims in the name of anti-Communism was stupid foreign policy in my opinion...

[newman]

America supporting Terrorist Muslims in the name of anti-Communism was stupid foreign policy in my opinion...

America also had a stupid foreign policy of replacing muslim kings and sultans with 'democraticly' elected leaders.

Kings can be kept 'in the pocket' but the presidents turned into rogue dictators.