Western Civilization? A Very Good Idea

I take no credit for the title of this piece. It is attributed to Mohandas Gandhi in response to a question asked by a reporter as to what he, Gandhi, thought about Western Civilization. He replied that it "is a very good idea". It used to make me chuckle, to think of this wizened half-naked man making this quip in his dry inimitable style. But, I believed that the end of the last Great War, and the end of colonization, had evened the score. The West had redeemed itself, and we should let bygones be bygones. The West had learned that war and domination were things of the past. This was a new world, and this time it was going to be different. Why then, am I now reminded of this quip?

A recent article in The Guardian by Anthony Dworkin (Which Way to War, February 18, 2003) presents a clinical analysis of what constitutes a legitimate military target. The author sucks his breath and says the concept is slippery. To be fair, he is not decided one way or another. To Western strategists, this must indeed present serious difficulties: should we bomb a water supply, or a power station, or the Ministry of Fisheries and Agriculture? Careful analysis is needed. The answer is provided, it seems, by a formula that is based on a trade-off between military objectives and humanitarian concerns. Dworkin with all seriousness says that this formula is a "hard-fought trade-off". The wonder of Western science is that it presents us with formulae. Plug in the relevant numbers and the equations fairly churn out the answers. This is the reductionist calculus of western warfare, where there is a ready answer to the optimum number of humans who must be killed and dismembered in order to dislodge Saddam Hussein. By such laughable formulae does the West reorder our complex world.

I hate to dwell on Dworkin so much. I have no idea who he is, and I am willing to believe that he is a hard-working journalist and probably a decent person. But after months of reading the Western Internet media, his article brought this current crisis into focus and spelled out in great detail everything that is wrong with our world today. In one astonishing paragraph he writes:

"In the meantime, there are some reasons to hope that a war in Iraq, if it happens, might not affect civilians so badly. First, according to the law of proportionality, a country must cause no more civilian deaths than can absolutely be helped. America’s sophisticated hi-tech weapons thus put a greater requirement on it to make sure that its precision-guided strikes don’t kill innocent people whose deaths could have been avoided."

I read this paragraph several times, groping to understand what is being said. The first statement is plainly wrong. In a war, civilians will be affected, and they will be affected badly. One can be reasonably sure of that. If they were not, then a war would be as jolly as a cricket match. Next, there is no law of proportionality in war. By its very nature and for the purposes that it is conducted, a war is disproportional in terms of death, loss of resources, infrastructure, and its psychological effect. A war is designed to reduce a nation into submission. One does not cause "more civilian deaths than can absolutely be helped." It is a meaningless statement, as the fire bombing of Tokyo or Dresden, or the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki testify. Further, a war is not measured by death alone. It is also measured by the terror and the horrible effect it has on people who survive and try to rebuild their lives. The author’s final sentence reflects the sheer incoherence and the extraordinary naiveté of a people who believe that their intentions are good. A precision-guided strike is exactly what it is. You line up a target and the bomb will strike it precisely. What the target really is, only a post-bombing debriefing will tell. If four hundred civilians are killed in a bomb shelter, the generals shrug their shoulders and say, "See! We told you so! They were being used as human shields," or "this is acceptable collateral damage". We have heard these shoddy arguments time and again. It has supported every gross violation of the rights of civilians during war, and made the loss of human life statistically acceptable. When the West reveals the numbers, if it chooses to, the deaths of dark-skinned people are a fact of life. They are after all untermenschen, and would have eventually died of disease or poverty. Dworkin stresses America, as though the US is the only agent. But, by and large, the wars that have been fought, particularly against Iraq and Afghanistan, have involved the US and European coalitions, and Australia. For the West, an alliance of Western nations is indeed a coalition of the brave, a coalition of the just, a coalition of the free. For the rest of us, it is a coalition of hypocrites. Bombing the poor to freedom has become a virtual dogma in the West.

Dworkin continues and states that Bush and his officials are already planning on providing humanitarian assistance while the [Iraq] war is continuing. Woodward’s grotesque book "Bush at War" highlights the compassionate president’s concern about such matters while Afghanistan was being bombed. So we need not doubt Dworkin’s words. After all, if we are unloading several tons of munitions over the countryside, why not drop a few peanut butter and jelly sandwiches as well? Given the US army’s propensity to bomb civilian targets, surely the sandwiches will land on some peasant’s head. Could get it right this time, no? This streak of humanity in the West is somewhat spoiled by the excited crowds rushing back home to catch the 6 o’clock CNN news, which graphically depict the smart-bombs busting Iraqi bunkers (during Gulf War I). The sheer thrill of watching a real smart-bomb (whatever that is) is so much better than a computer game. Welcome to this concept of leisure in the Western world. The dehumanization of the non-Western world, now complete, has never really been in question. It began with the Vatican’s sanction of colonization. What we have to wonder about is the claim to civilization, so often stated, and with such lofty assurance.

I fell over laughing when I read Dworkin’s concluding sentence "this is in fact a legal requirement, spelled out in the fourth Geneva Convention". "Oh dear me!" I cried, as I wiped away my tears, I had completely forgotten the Geneva Convention. As had everyone else during the Vietnam war, the Cambodian war, the last Gulf war, the continued sanctions and bombing of Iraq without a war being declared, and the Afghan wars. But, who knows? It may serve us well in the coming war. You can always clutch at your cherished ideals while dealing out death and destruction. As a last resort, one can always explain away the failure of the West as being well intentioned. But, as someone once remarked, "the path to hell is paved with good intentions".

So, I am reminded of that great little man, Mahatma Gandhi, his dry sense of humor and his knack for getting to the heart of the matter. Is there such a thing as Western civilization? Is there civilization anywhere at all? How do we reconcile the image of Churchill, the fearless leader who never said surrender, with the arch imperialist who loathed the idea of freedom for India and approved of the gassing of Iraqis? How do we reconcile the image of Americans as a freedom loving people with their brutal occupation of the Philippines, their current paranoia, xenophobia and their blind belief in the "goodness" of America and their Presidents? How do we reconcile the image of France which has given so much to the culture of the world with the brutal wars they fought to retain Algeria or Vietnam? How indeed do we reconcile our image of the cradle of civilization, the Middle East, with the ranting of their fanatics and their medieval beliefs and their suicide bombings that kills innocents? Or for that matter, the hypocrites of the Bharatiya Janata Party that currently rules India, pious in their belief in a Hindu civilization, and who so casually slaughter Muslims and Christians?

Perhaps there is no such thing as civilization, except that there is a process towards civilization. We never achieve that goal, but always move towards it. This is our hope, our fervent heartfelt hope, although everything that is happening in the world today seems to be pitted against the realization of this hope. When we reduce the value of human life to a blind calculus, either for narrow political purpose, or for the control of others, or through racist beliefs, then the process of civilization ends. There is no understanding of people or cultures, no compromise, no accommodation, just dehumanization and a descent to barbarism. But then, I am not being original. Open any history book, and the lessons stare us in the face.