Those who hate the West

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

A statue of Ibn Khaldun, the godfather of race science, that hasn’t been torn down

Never before in history has such a successful civilisation generated such self-loathing as the modern West. There’s no evidence of the Abbasids agonising over the slave trade as they counted their gold, nor of Qin nobles sparing a thought for the brutalised corvee labourers who built their palaces. Late Roman thinkers blamed the erosion of Roman values for their empire’s decline, not the values themselves.

Other cultures have had their share of internal critics, but for failure rather than success. The Soviet empire collapsed because Russians were fed up of queueing for bread, not because their hearts bled for Uzbek conscripts or the Afghans they killed. Modern Algerians and Turks move to Europe for a better life, not to make amends for the predations of Barbary corsairs and Ottoman colonial administrators.

The Westerner who hates his or her own civilisation – which they might express as ‘whiteness’ or ‘colonialism’ – precisely for the way it achieved its moment of dominance is, I would argue, a unique phenomenon in history. It’s worth trying to understand what they believe and why, and what it means for our civilisation’s future.

Those who hate the West have moved beyond campus activism into a broad chunk of public life. They have entered education, broadcasting and mainstream politics. They have hijacked other social causes from the labour movement to gay rights to environmentalism, portraying Western colonialism as the fount and keystone of all modern ills.

Right-wing nativists like to invoke a time before mass migration when society was cohesive and crime rare. Similarly, those who hate the West look back to a time before Western colonialism and imagine a world without systems of dominance and oppression. Neither of these worlds has ever existed.

This is of more than academic importance. The mental harm of thinking oneself intrinsically evil must be significant. And it turns talented people against the societies that created them.[1] The West still has so much capacity for goodness and innovation, but it can only be unleashed if our bright young people are not at war with their heritage.

Another harm comes from the backlash whereby people who reject post-colonial guilt swing too far in the opposite direction, returning to a crude form of nationalism that threatens the delicate multiethnic trust that we have built up over generations. The polarisation between those who hate the West and those who worship it does not serve us well.

Neutral evil

The claim that the Western colonial project was uniquely evil doesn’t withstand scrutiny. Western empires did bad things, sometimes horrific things, but little that hadn’t been done before – and little that isn’t still being done at smaller scale elsewhere. That’s not to excuse colonialism but simply to place it accurately in the historical context.

Empire’s most heinous sin, slavery, is a constant in history, sometimes with explicit racial or religious justifications. The aforementioned Barbary corsairs specifically targeted Christians, sometimes describing their slave raids – often in service of the Ottoman empire – as a form of jihad. The Abbasid empire before them was served by a thriving long-distance slave trade operated by Vikings. Its Slavic victims were so numerous that they gave us the word ‘slave’.

The ‘scientific racism’ brought about by European empires was an innovation, but more in science than in racism: Ideas of racial superiority also warped the knowledge-seeking frameworks of earlier times. The 14^th century Arab thinker Ibn Khaldun, for example, claimed that Africans were intellectually inferior to other peoples and thereby easier to enslave – foreshadowing European ‘race science’ by hundreds of years.[2]

Moreover, racist patterns of dominance bordering on slavery persist in many parts of the world. African and Asian domestic workers are commonly abused in Gulf Arab countries. India’s caste system is a racial hierarchy in all but name. Russia’s modern ‘republics’ – ethnic-minority administrative regions – are significantly poorer and contribute more conscripts to the army than the ethnically Russian oblasts.

The imprint of Western colonialism endures to this day, but so does that of earlier empires. India and Pakistan would be very different were it not for the Mughals, who were just as foreign and just as rapacious as the British who followed them. Iran’s native religion, Zoroastrianism, was progressively snuffed out by Muslim conquerors from the 7^th century onwards; 1,400 years later, the sons of Ahura Mazda are ruled over by an Islamist theocracy.[3]

A little knowledge

How have those who hate the West come to have such an unbalanced view of our place in history? Much of it comes down to education and culture. The tragic climax of European nationalisms in the 20^th century led us to be much more circumspect about our own history, rightly casting aside jingoism in favour of a humble evaluation of our moral account.

But we have not applied the same treatment to other civilisations. In museums, documentaries and history classrooms, non-Western civilisations are given a hagiography. I have seen wonderful exhibitions on Islamic science but none that interrogate Islamic slaving; plenty on Chinese art and innovation but nothing on what the Qianlong Emperor did to the Dzungar Mongols.[4] Under this benevolent new Orientalism, our own history is alone in being subjected to post-colonial revisionism.

In contemporary culture, too, our critical eye looks only inward. In boardrooms, classrooms and dining rooms, we have spent countless hours dismantling our racist biases and teaching our children to be better. And yet the violent antisemitism in Islamist ideology remains a taboo, and pointing it out can itself bring accusations of racism.

Most middle-class Westerners have been on holiday in the developing world and called it travelling. They have spent the whole time among other Westerners, spoken only English, and seen only as much of the culture as the tourism industry wants them to see – in other words, the nice bits. This gives them an inaccurately rosy picture of life in other places.

Activists are often even more deluded, since there is a whole industry in place to conceal the dark side of the people they seek to help. As a young student of Arabic I spent a few months volunteering at an UNRWA school in Palestine. On the first day, the headteacher introduced a group of us Westerners to the students. He said a few words to them in Arabic, including a phrase that our NGO minder translated as: “They’ve come from all over the world to help you learn”.

That sounded lovely, but it’s not what the headteacher said. What he actually said was: “They’ve come from all over the world to help in our struggle against the Jews”. The NGO minder, whose livelihood depended on a steady stream of Western volunteers, knew how we would react to an accurate translation and so chose to mislead us. The other well-meaning young Westerners failed to notice the misdirection and remained naïve.

Public broadcasters practice a similar deception. The BBC has often, when interviewing Palestinians in Arabic, mistranslated ‘Jews’ as ‘Israelis’, turning a racist opinion into a political one.[5] Elsewhere, racist attitudes in non-white societies are too often euphemised as ‘ethnic tensions’.

Those who hate the West are victims of our own structures of learning and information. We are exposed to our own misdeeds but insulated from those of others; and so wickedness, rather than being inherent in human nature, becomes a product of Western civilisation.

The answer must be more learning, not less. Awareness of our own history, warts and all, strengthens our society and reduces the risk of repeating the mistakes of the past. But to avoid bright, compassionate people from spiralling into self-hatred, it must be accompanied by a proper understanding of the world beyond our shores.

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[1] The post-colonial mindset also explains much of the modern left’s hatred for Israel, some of which drifts into antisemitism, as I have argued here.

[2] “The only people who accept slavery are the blacks owing to their low degree of humanity and proximity to the animal stage,” he wrote, according to The World: A Family History by Simon Sebag Montefiore.

[3] I wrote an essay on Iran’s fascinating history and how it affects the modern country, here.

[4] Long story short: a genocide that killed around half a million Dzungars, almost exterminating them, and the repopulation of their lands by ethnic Chinese.

[5] There is no good reason to do this: Arabic has distinct words for ‘Jew’, ‘Zionist’ and ‘Israeli’, with exactly the same meanings as their English counterparts.