War of the Worlds
By Shelby Steele. Mr. Steele, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, is the author of "A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America" (HaperCollins, 1998).
A week ago today, I set out to write a piece for this page on the recent United Nations conference against racism and intolerance in Durban, South Africa. My point was to be that the conference was an absurd and theatrical confrontation of First World guilt and Third World anger born of ineffectuality. Then, after last Tuesday morning, I put all that aside. Against the horrors of that day, the conference seemed remarkably trivial.
But now I believe there is a relationship between that bizarre little conference and Tuesday's horrors. After all, Tuesday's events were also a collision of the First and Third worlds, and I believe their subtext was also one of Western guilt and Third World ineffectuality.
Decisive Heritage
In looking at difficulties in the black American community over the years, it has always astounded me how much white Americans take for granted the rich and utterly decisive heritage of Western culture. There is no space here to reiterate the vast and invisible web of ideas, principles, values and understandings that have evolved over the millennia to undergird the American civilization.
To mention only the fewest highlights, there was the magnificence of Greek thought, the Roman development of law, a renaissance of reason, the concept of a social contract, the idea of the individual as a self-contained and free political unit with rights and responsibilities, free markets, the scientific method, separation of church and state -- all this and so much more converging to make the American and Western way of life successful in so many ways. It is not too much to say, as Francis Fukuyama did a few years back, that the West now represents -- all things considered -- the Hegelian "end of history." If the Second and Third worlds now "Americanize," it is more out of Darwinism than a love of blue jeans and Big Macs.
The evil of slavery and colonialism was that these oppressions kept their victims out of history, disconnected them from the evolutionary struggle. The great white advantage has been living inside history, adapting to its constant demands, nurturing the values and the habits of life that allow one to keep pace. This is the cultural capital that whites too often take for granted and rarely think of insisting on in the former victims of exclusion. It is so easy to look at minority weakness and think of sweeping programmatic solutions when a simple insistence on responsibility for one's own development might serve far better. (After all, this is how Israel came to thrive after the Holocaust.) Oppression made such attitudes irrelevant, so that even when freedom came there was an incomplete knowledge of how to seize it.
And this is where a new kind of trouble began. Where slavery and colonialism once imposed inferiority, new freedom has too often only added the fresh embarrassment of inferiority without the excuse of oppression. I think the Durban conference was inspired by this embarrassment. Its founders realized they would never get reparations of any significance. The wiser among them know that reparations are no answer anyway. I believe this conference -- with its almost religious embrace of victimization -- wanted to keep racism alive as a face-saving excuse, to let it temper the shame of so much ineffectuality in the face of freedom, so much correlation between independence and decline.
Today the First World is dealing with an embarrassed Third World that is driven to save face against the anguish of an inferiority that is less and less blamable on others. The deep appeal of a Jesse Jackson or a Yasser Arafat, one reason they hang on as leaders despite every kind of public and private failing, is their ability to hide inferiority behind blame, to be the parent who sees no wrong in the child.
But blame is only the most common defense against this embarrassment. Terrorism is another. The shame of languishing in the midst of freedom generates a touchy, narcissistic sensibility and an abiding faith that, but for the evil of others, one's superiority would be self-evident. The terrorist act is a self-referential event, a self-congratulation that smothers the feeling of inferiority in one glorious blaze of spite. Here, finally, is the effectiveness that is so absent elsewhere. Even if you cannot build the World Trade Center's towers -- emblems of demonstrable Western superiority -- you can come along of a Tuesday morning and, like God himself, strike them down.
But there is another actor in this drama -- white guilt; one of the most powerful yet under estimated forces in modern societies. At least 50 whites have told me in the same conversation both that they feel no racial guilt and that on some occasion they have not said something they truly believed for fear of being marked a racist. But white guilt is precisely the latter, not a belief in one's guilt but a vulnerability to being stigmatized as a racist because of one's skin color alone. And this is the larger terror that hangs over the Western world.
White guilt is what causes minority and Third World "inferiority" to stand as a negative moral judgment on the Western way of life. It presumes that Western success is the result not of three millennia of cultural evolution (much of it enhanced by contributions from what today we call the Third World) but of the ill-gotten gains of slavery and colonialism. Western success is presumed to have come at the price of Third World inferiority.
This doesn't just mean that Western moral authority is hostage to helping the Third World overcome inferiority. More importantly it means that Western culture is inherently sinful, that its superiority is a measure of its sinfulness. Thus, the World Trade Center towers become monuments not of a great civilization but of a great evil.
Moral Equivalency
White guilt pushes the West into a place where it can redeem its moral authority only by making a virtue of moral equivalency. This means that weakness, backwardness, even sinfulness in minorities and the Third World are unmentionable. Yasser Arafat visited the Clinton White House more than any other world leader. American civil rights organizations almost entirely live off white corporate and foundation money despite their total ineffectiveness in solving black problems. Western money has gone to blatantly corrupt Third World leaders for decades.
White guilt morally and culturally disarms the West. It makes the First World apologetic. And this, of course, only inflames the narcissism of the ineffectual. In the vacuum of power created by guilt, a world-wide class of guilt hustlers has emerged. America and the West must cease this three-decade-long indulgence in guilt, moral equivalency, and apologia. None of this redeems the West or uplifts the Third World.
In the place of this there should be only a profound commitment to fairness. Here, something like fanaticism is not out of place. After this, America and the West should unapologetically pursue their self-interest, let others take the lead in their own development, and allow the greatness of Western civilization to speak for itself.
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The Road to Infamy
By Garry Kasparov. Mr. Kasparov, a former world chess champion, is a Journal contributing editor.
The scenes from lower Manhattan recall some evil cinematic conspiracy, with one startling difference: There was no agile, death-defying superhero around to save the day. In real life, people are protected from such diabolical dangers not by 11th-hour daring, but through a slower-moving and far less spectacular craft -- foreign policy. In the years since the Cold War ended, this particular guarantor of the peace has failed us. Why?
An operation of this magnitude requires meticulous preparation. Those who masterminded and carried out Tuesday's attacks may have been working on their plans for years. But the road to the tragedy began much earlier.
It began, to be precise, in the early days following the end of the Cold War. Then, talk of the "peace dividend" was not followed by a comprehensive Western foreign policy necessary to meet the challenges and threats of the post-Cold War world. In fact, these threats were not even properly identified. Undoubtedly, the Clinton administration bears heavy responsibility for misdirecting U.S. foreign policy. But we need to admit that the seeds of these wrongdoings were sown by George Bush senior.
The first mistake was the result of an otherwise admirable human quality -- mercy. In 1991, the decision to stop coalition troops 24 hours short of destroying Saddam Hussein's elite Republican Guard was the decision of impeccable gentlemen. But leaving Saddam unpunished was the first signal to Osama bin Laden and his ilk that the West will go only so far in bringing mass murderers to justice, especially if the necessary measures are not backed by the international community.
The second mistake was a post-Cold War foreign policy that, increasingly, came to prize regional balance of power and "peace talks" over the defense of democratic values and the fight against repression and terrorism. The world owes Israel an enormous debt for destroying Saddam's French-built nuclear reactor in 1982 and thus preventing nuclear blackmail in the region and perhaps beyond. But in the years since the collapse of the "evil empire," terrorists and their supporters learned how in this New World Order, democracies are held to a different standard of behavior than dictatorships.
Thus a liberal Western media have put Israel on a moral plane with those who have unleashed a bloody new intifada. And the Israeli army has come to look much worse through the eyes of the international media than the backstage perpetrators of terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians.
The West's rhetorical, but ultimately weak, defense of freedom and democratic values has sent a strong message to those who would threaten our way of life. It's worth noting that no right-wing dictatorship has been found guilty of sponsoring international terrorism, while their Marxist counterparts are famous for harboring terrorists and drug traffickers.
Indeed, it was Vladimir Putin's KGB that nursed and nurtured the world terrorist web which now appears to have spun out of control. At the end of the day, what was the common ground for IRA, ETA and PLO terrorists if not KGB and Stasi training, or a regular supply of Czechoslovakian plastic explosives? President Putin's hand-on-heart statements against international terrorism simply do not square with the regular visits to Moscow of the leaders of the very states that have harbored terrorists and with Russia's stubborn supply of military technology to Iran and others.
Such incongruities do not go unnoticed by those seeking to destabilize the civilized world. They are read, correctly, as weakness. Were the plans for Tuesday's attack being hatched even as European justice fought to try Gen. Augusto Pinochet? Certainly, they were well under way as Europeans engaged in debate over whether Ariel Sharon can be tried in a Belgian court for alleged crimes in Lebanon in 1982. Perhaps the final instruction came as Western nations were arguing with Arab states in Durban over the text of a resolution condemning Israel as a racist state.
The public mood across the civilized world has now changed -- I hope forever, or at least for the lifetime of my generation. The anger and energy that this attack has produced must be harnessed to correct the mistakes of the past. Secretary of State Colin Powell has a historic opportunity to rectify the mistake Gen. Powell made 10 years ago.
The task at hand cannot wait for a broad-based international coalition, and indeed it would likely be hobbled by one. A United Nations where Syria, Sudan, Cuba and others can vote to expel the U.S. from a human-rights commission is not equipped to meet the terrorist threat. NATO is sufficient for carrying out decisive attacks if the political will is there.
States sponsoring terrorism must be isolated politically, and confronted militarily if necessary. This will not be accomplished with a few air strikes. It may well require a large-scale deployment of American and NATO forces to lands where terrorists have been harbored and trained. America's aversion to risking the lives of its soldiers must be overcome in the name of saving the lives of those the soldiers are sworn to protect.
It might be tempting now to demonstrate resolute action to regain public confidence. But even the physical elimination of bin Laden and his henchmen does not constitute a victory in the war against terrorism. Anything short of a deployment of NATO troops to make arrests in Baghdad, Tehran, Damascus, Kabul and wherever else terrorists and their affiliates are found to be, will be a betrayal of the memory of the victims of the first mass killing of the new millennium. Without analyzing the mistakes of the past, we will fail today in devising the right response to the crisis facing the civilized world.