January 14, 2004

The Kingdom of Silence (update - originally posted Jan 2nd)

In the current New Yorker magazine is an excellent article by Lawrence Wright who goes to work for a major Saudi newspaper. It's not online so you will need to track down a copy of the magazine (January 2, 2004 issue) Well worth reading though - good insights into the Saudi culture. UPDATE: The text of this article is now available on Lawrence Wright's personal website here. Plus, there is an interesting article by John Derbyshire in National Review: bq. Sometimes I find myself reading something idly, something I did not particularly seek out for purposes of enlightenment, something I read just to while away some time in a doctor's waiting room or suchlike, yet which turns my mind to the main issue. This happened the other day. The item I was reading was Lawrence Wright's fine long New Yorker piece about his experiences in Saudi Arabia. bq. Wright had been hired by the English-language Saudi Gazette to train young Saudi reporters. He spent several weeks in Saudi Arabia early in 2003, a period which overlapped with the start of the Iraq war. In this New Yorker piece (it is in the January 5 issue) he tells of his experiences inside the Saudi press, and passes comments on the talk, attitudes, and beliefs of urban Saudis. bq. Some of what he says is familiar to us by now. The Saudis are resentful of America. Many of them hate us, and those who do not hate us do not love us. They are addicted to wildly improbable conspiracy theories, mainly involving Jews. None of them is capable of imagining much in the way of human motivation, certainly not at the national level, beyond money and blood-lust. Wright: "One of the relentless themes of the Saudi media was that the twin objects of American power were oil and murder." They are spoiled rotten by their oil wealth, and incapable of doing any kind of real work, all of which is done by foreigners. (Recall P. J. O'Rourke's report from the 1991 Gulf War about Western journalists in Saudi Arabia running a book on who could be the first to spot a Saudi lifting anything heavier than his billfold.) Derbyshire goes on to say: bq. When you read about the Arabs — I have been reading a great deal this past couple of years, though I continue to think that David Pryce-Jones The Closed Circle is the best general introduction to the topic — you build up a picture of how comprehensive is the failure of their societies in the modern age. They are not merely political failures: they are military, economic, cultural, and social failures, too. In these respects, they are no threat to us. bq. Their very failure, though, and the massive inferiority complex it leaves them with, gives rise to a threat of sorts, as of course we found out on 9/11. To get a good analogy for the scale of that threat, carry out the following thought experiment. Finally, someone sent Steven DenBeste a link to the Derbyshire article in NRO and he has weighed in with some thoughts and also quoting an earlier essay of his own: Steven: bq. I have always contended that the primary reason "why they hate us" is because they are utter failures who are lashing out at us because our success casts their failure in stark contrast. In September of 2002, I wrote: bq. The nations and the peoples within the zone of our enemy's culture are complete failures. Their economies are disasters. They make no contribution to the advance of science or engineering. They make no contribution to art or culture. They have no important diplomatic power. They are not respected. Most of their people are impoverished and miserable and filled with resentment, and those who are not impoverished are living a lie. bq. They hate us. They hate us because our culture is everything theirs is not. Our culture is vibrant and fecund; our economies are successful. Our achievements are magnificent. Our engineering and science are advancing at breathtaking speed. Our people are fat and happy (relatively speaking). We are influential, we are powerful, we are wealthy. "We" are the western democracies, but in particular "we" are the United States, which is the most successful of the western democracies by a long margin. America is the most successful nation in the history of the world, economically and technologically and militarily and even culturally. ... bq. We're everything that they think they should be, everything they once were, and by our power and success we throw their modern failure into stark contrast, especially because we've gotten to where we are by doing everything their religion says is wrong. We've deeply sinned, and yet we've won. They are forced to compare their own accomplishments to ours because we are the standard of success, and in every important way they come up badly short. In most of the contests it's not just that our score is higher, it's that their score is zero. bq. They have nothing whatever they can point to that can save face and preserve their egos. In every practical objective way we are better than they are, and they know it. Pretty harsh but also pretty accurate - even they realize that. If one of their Royalty needs heart surgery - they go to a US or European hospital... DenBeste continues, pointing to this; bq. In 2002, an Arab study group working under the auspices of the UN published a comprehensive report about the state of the Arab world, and found many very disturbing things. One of the most disturbing was this: about half of Arab teenagers wanted to emigrate. bq. When you read that overall evaluation of every element of their society and culture and the way their nations are run, it's not really very surprising; in objective terms, things ain't good. bq. And their failure is so pervasive, and so long-standing, and so dramatic, that it has led to a cultural inferiority complex, a complete loss of self-confidence. Memories of past greatness centuries ago only makes the shame of modern failure worse. Wright says that one of the arguments made against the theory that 15 of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudis was to say that Saudis weren't actually capable of doing such a thing – not, mind, because they were too high-minded or moral, but because it was beyond their abilities. He concludes with the following including a well deserved blast at the "multiculturalism" so prevalent in todays academic and leftist thought: bq. Studying other cultures is good. Learning about them, and from them, is good. Automatically dismissing them as inferior simply because they are alien is stupid. bq. But such study must be open-eyed and honest. One must be able to recognize that which is valuable in others, but also that which is destructive. Discrimination against "the other" is stupid, but indiscriminate glorification approaching worship is even more stupid, and in the current world it can get you killed. bq. The Arabs are failures in the modern world. Their problem is their culture. Their culture, and in particular the extreme manifestations of Islam and the temporal power it has gained, is what makes them fail. And they do know they are failures, and they do hate it, and one of the big reasons they attack us is because we are successful. bq. It is neither racism nor insanity to say these things; it is a cold and rational appraisal of the situation. If we refuse to recognize these factors in planning our response to the 9/11 attacks, we're bound to act in ways which are unlikely to help and which have a good chance of making the situation worse. bq. The most extreme form of multiculturalist sensitivity and compassion is a luxury we can no longer afford. The potential price in blood, ours and theirs, is much too high. This is an emotionally charged and complex issue but the basic truths are out there for everyone to see. We need to realize that this is the 'root cause' (to steal a meme) and the only way to stamp it out is to help this culture get back on it's feet and to disconnect them from the cycle of fanaticism and it's accompanying culture of death. This isn't going to go away without some proactive action on our parts... Posted by DaveH at January 14, 2004 4:50 PM