America—Bearing the Onus of Western Civilization’s Sins

Western Civilization is generally credited with providing the world with the idea of democracy. The Western nation that did that, of course, was Greece in the Classical Period which occurred about 400 years before the birth of Christ. Unfortunately, democracy in Classical Greece was a short lived institution. It quickly gave way to tyranny. And tyranny is a much more lasting product of Western Civilization that democracy has been.

Tyranny, of course, has many forms, and Imperialism is one of them. Since the fifteenth century, the nations of Western Europe made it into an international philosophy which resulted in European colonies in the Americas, the Near and Far East, and Africa. In a formal sense, formal Imperialism came to an end in the few decades after the Second World War.

In a sense, one of the reasons for the Second World War was the defense of Western European Empires. Japan wanted to wrest them from the Europeans and create an Empire of its own. The Italians wanted an Empire in Africa, and the Germans wanted a goodly part of Eastern Europe. Although the Allied victory in World War II frustrated these desires, the Allies also managed to lose the Empires they had fought so hard to create and defend, giving substance to the old saw that there are no winners in war.

But although formal empires ceased to exist, the notion of imperialism never died. It is alive and well today and still constitutes the international policies of the Western World. The idea has merely taken a different form.

At the end of World War I, France and Great Britain carved up the middle east into protectorates, fully sanctioned by the League of Nations—another creation of Western Civilization. As a matter of fact, all of the nations that make up the Middle East today are artificial creations of the Western powers. Although the Arabs were promised an pan-Arabic state when the Fist World War was being fought, the Western nations reneged on that promise when the war was won when they created these artificial client states. Today these former client states are attempting to shake off the yoke of Western dominance and ending once and for all the era of Imperialism, and for the most part, the United States of America has taken on the burden of keeping that from happening. It is a policy that will inevitably fail. The desire for independence is no less powerful among Arabs than it was among the peoples in other parts of the world, including America in the 1700s. No people wants to be dominated by a foreign power.

The American attempt to frustrate the Arab desires to rid themselves of foreign domination today takes the form of a War on Terror. An interesting expression, really, since war is itself a form of terror. To the people of Iraq, for instance, does it make any difference if the terror is in the form of a suicide bomber or a car bomb than an American missile which strikes unannounced and is launched from miles away? How can one be more terrifying than the other?

But terror and the War on Terror require some background to be understood. The Muslim Brotherhood is said to be the sire of all current terrorist organizations. How and why did it come into existence?

British troops occupied Egypt in 1882, and British resident administrators become its de facto government. In 1914, Egypt officially became a protectorate of Great Britain. An Egyptian nationalist movement led by Zaglul Pasha eventually forced Great Britain to relinquish its rule, and Egypt became an independent nation in 1922, but British troops remained in Egypt ostensibly to defend the Suez Canal. Because of the presence of these British troops, which the Egyptian Waft party opposed, the Muslim Brotherhood was established, and because the corrupt Egyptian government under the rule of King Farouk was Western oriented, the Brotherhood turned to what we call terrorism today. The terrorism eventually succeeded in overthrowing Farouk and expelling British troops; however, various succeeding governments were themselves corrupt and, although somewhat less so, still Western oriented. These governments tried to suppress the Muslim Brotherhood, but each attempt at suppression only succeeded in spreading its influence throughout the Arab world. Today the progeny of the Muslim Brotherhood are the people whom we call terrorists today.

Had the Imperialism of the Western nations made a clean break with the doctrine after the Second World War, there would be no conflicts in the Middle East today. Israel, which is itself an artificial creation of the Western powers made in an attempt to expiate the sins of Western European anti-Semitism, would never have been established in Palestine. And it is because the United States of America has taken on the burden of defending this artificial state that these Arabian Terrorists have targeted us.

  The Jews of Europe were made homeless by the anti-Semitism of Europeans. They were an unjustly displaced people who were subjected to unimaginable horrors during the war. That, of course, was a great wrong that needed an atonement. But displacing the Palestinian people was also a great wrong. The Western powers either forgot or ignored the age old maxim that one wrong cannot be righted by another wrong.  Americans today are atoning for that second wrong with blood and money. The War on Terror cannot have a happy outcome. There will be no winners in this war.