Huntington’s nine world civilizations. Click to enlarge.
The phrase “the clash of civilizations” comes from a 1993 article and 1996 book of the same name by Samuel P. Huntington, an American professor of political science at Harvard. Huntington says that with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 the main threat to world peace will be the clash of civilizations. The West will find itself increasingly challenged by China and the Muslim world.
With the world no longer divided by ideology like it was during the Cold War, cultural identity matters most. That means countries will tend to band together – and break apart – along the fault lines of civilizations: Western, Islamic, etc.
Examples of this realignment (by 1996):
- Islamist terrorism,
- the rise of the European Union,
- the expansion of NATO,
- fault line wars: Bosnia, Chechnya, Sudan, Sri Lanka, Eritrea, East Timor, Mindanao.
As of 1996:
- top civilization: Western (led by US).
- challenger civilizations: Sinic (led by China), Islamic.
- swing civilizations: African, Latin American, Hindu (led by India), Buddhist, Japanese and Orthodox (led by Russia),
The West will remain on top in the near future. For now no other civilization can hope to defeat it outright in war. But it will be increasingly challenged by Sinic and Islamic civilizations, with the swing civilizations siding with or against it. That means:
- Democracy and strong human rights will become less common as the West becomes less able to force its values on others.
- Weapons of mass destruction and terrorism will spread as a way to balance the West’s huge advantage in war.
- Immigration to the West, especially Muslim, Mexican and African, will threaten to weaken it culturally from within.
The kinds of nation states that make up each civilization:
- Core states – take the lead: Russia, US, China, Japan, India. Civilizations without a core state (in 1996): Islamic, African and Latin American.
- Member states – the rank and file: Bahrain, Belgium, Bostwana, Bolivia, etc.
- Cleft states – divided between two civilizations. Likely to sink into civil war, break apart or practise ethnic cleansing. Examples: Ukraine, Nigeria, Lebanon, Yugoslavia, Sudan, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Philippines, China.
- Torn states – want to join another civilization. It never works out. Examples: Turkey, Mexico, Australia.
Lone states do not belong to any civilization, like Haiti, Ethiopia and, apparently, Israel.
The US is in danger of becoming a cleft state through immigration, especially Mexican immigration to the south-west, which used to be part of Mexico. Non-Hispanic whites are set to become a minority nationwide, further weakening the country culturally – just when the West will most need its leadership.
Samuel P. Huntington (1927-2008)
Huntington is an Orientalist, anti-Asianist and white supremacist. He views the US through a diseased host model where White Americans are the “true” Americans while other Americans are a threat – to their own country.
In terms of Andrea Smith’s Three Pillars of White Supremacy, Huntington is Third Pillar all the way: Islamophobia, Yellow Peril, the Mexican Reconquista, all of that.
Huntington does not ask what is best for the world as a whole or even the US as a whole, but what is best for white people.
See also:
Abagond 
He [Huntington] is also co-author on The Crisis of Democracy which has some interesting things to say about the threatening specter of democracy trying to emerge from the public.
Huntington does not ask what is best for the world as a whole or even the US as a whole, but what is best for white people.
I haven’t read Clash of Civilizations, maybe what you say [above quote] is a way to interpret it; though I’m guessing it would be an overly narrow interpretation, but not irrelevant. In Crisis of Democracy, if one insists on only extracting race/racism information one misses the broader modus operandi of elites, namely: the nation should be run by the rich, by the business class, by the political class. Everyone else [any “sub”-group of the public you might imagine] should not upset this proper, orderly fabric.
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He views the US through a diseased host model where White Americans are the “true” Americans while other Americans are a threat – to their own country.
Abagond, what can you cite from Clash of Civilizations to not only support what you say but basically prove it?
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It has been some time since I read (parts of) Clash of Civilizations. I had the biggest problem that he doesn’t give any reason on what base he devides the world in civilizations. For example when he discusses if Latin America belongs to the West or is a civilization on its own he just says:”Meh, they’re something else.” Without giving any reason and even though many western political theorists, even right-wing, saw it differently.
He has a very essentialist view of civilization and culture. And that premise is so stupid, that I couldn’t take anything else he said serious.
Additionally his prediction that conflict would primarily arise at the borders of his “civilizations” is obviously wrong.
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@ Legion
I originally had “rich white people” but thought “white people” was easier to support (meaning non-Hispanic whites by context). But, right, in his heart of hearts he seems to be thinking of white elites mainly: the business class and their political hacks.
The last map in his book is entitled: “THE UNITED STATES: A CLEFT COUNTRY? PROJECTED PERCENT OF POPULATION THAT WILL BE BLACK, ASIAN, NATIVE AMERICAN, OR HISPANIC IN 2020, BY COUNTY”. That says it all.
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“The last map in his book is entitled: “THE UNITED STATES: A CLEFT COUNTRY? PROJECTED PERCENT OF POPULATION THAT WILL BE BLACK, ASIAN, NATIVE AMERICAN, OR HISPANIC IN 2020, BY COUNTY”. That says it all.”
“That says it all.” <—–Not necessarily.
Yeah, so for establishment professionals like Huntington, it's all about the right values to support an elite structure at the top of society. If you don't have the right values to contribute to that m.o. about elites being in power, then you end up somewhere else in society: jail, a shit job, a spiritual crank, a frustrated civil rights lawyer, a tenured Jew at MIT, a blogger on racism, etc.
Establishment prostitutes like Huntington could always take the white dominance thing for granted. They could take for granted that little "Timmy" (a little "all-American" white kid) is going to want to grow up to join the already set up power system. Huntington could take for granted that there will be enough of these little "Timmies" or "Jimmies" or whatever.
The problem that a guy like Huntington is highlighting with that map is an implicit one. The problem isn't the skin colours of those people. It's what their skin colour likely signifies: that they are in touch with the unfair and wrong aspects of America and this internal perpsective is probably reflected in their values. Those values are not imperialist and exploitation oriented in the way (if at all, one would hope) that elite values have been since the time of The Founding Fathers. The Cleft Nation problem would arise because as long as American institutions are still staffed with those who uphold the current paradigms, those staffing the institutions will need to marginalize (which is a whole spectrum between ignoring, jailing and killing) those Americans and new immigrants who have always had values antithetical to the ruling paradigms in the US but were small enough in number to be managed by the dominant elite interests and their cadre of intellectual prostitutes, like Huntington.
I am going to search for a recent comment on another thread that serves as an example of this threat to the established ways elites want to do things. It was a comment that I quite liked but that’s because, I too, have “wrong” values.
If the immigrants and current non white Americans want to serve the established elite American paradigms, then a lot of the professional class would not be nervous about a thing. But, they know that a black man (and possibly other non white men) did not grow up being “little Timmy” so to speak. When I think back to my own childhood, my Father always had Malcolm X’s autobiography out in view. It was never shelved, it was always (or often, anyway) on a table someplace. I knew what Malcolm X looked like and basically who he was, long years before I ever read the book. I was a cute little thing as most kids are, but I was not exactly “little Timmy”, and that truth holds for many non whites who grew up in the West.
Of course, this thing like Huntington’s map, shows that what elites will do is whip up racism as a way to prolong elite rule, as the numbers of whites continues to dwindle to whatever whites think of as an emergency level. They have done this sort of thing already, though. The black incarceration rate is a way to roll back prior victories from the Civil Rights era and to give an urgent distraction to a segment of society that presumably would have continued pressing their human rights. But now there is this tremendous diversion of locking up huge numbers of the males from this particular societal group.
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The comment was something Kiwi said:
“My family has probably faced worse things than racism, like extreme poverty and war, but that does not make racism any less wrong. I believe in America’s potential to live up to its ideals and that Asian Americans and other nonwhites have a duty to this country by fighting racism to make it [America] greater.”
(bolding, my emphasis)
The comment is, at the surface, more about combating racism but implicitly I’d say that comment does speak to the dangerous Pandora’s Box of values, so detested by Huntington and a large and significant host of others.
https://abagond.wordpress.com/2014/05/26/ta-nehisi-coates-the-case-for-reparations/#comment-238861
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Just had a look at Huntington’s wiki. It’s so sad to have as part of your legacy that you were once an adviser to the S.A. state during Apartheid. That’s just the sort of thing that makes these people deserving of being called prostitutes.
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When reading this, I paused just before the last 3 paragraphs and right after reading
thinking to myself, OMG, what kind of white nativist imperalist “Yellow Peril” style of hocus pocus is this!
And is Latin America also not the West?
Then I read the last 3 paragraphs.
I felt like that sounded as if he thinks the US should revert back to the pre-cold war post reconstruction era of 100-135 years ago, after they settled the west coast, seized mexico, killed off nearly all the Native Americans already, whipped blacks into submission and separated them out and blocked the borders from immigration from the foreign ENEMIES.
Anyhow, I will not read this book if that is its message. And if the USA takes this frame of view, I will not go back.
Anyhow, isn’t that what Hollywood is all about? aliens attacking the Earth, or infiltrating its human inhabitants with the goal to take it over? And the Earth is led by the USA to fight off the alien invaders? That IS what I see as the main theme of US American culture.
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If Huntington ould’ve lived around 1900 with the same mindset he would probably also have been an anti-semite and he would’ve devided his “western” civilization into protestant and catholic and East and Southeast Asia would have just been “the East”. His book is intellectually pretty weak, but surpassed by his later book “who are we”.
Much more interesting is how “clash of civilization” became the catchphrase of the years after 9/11 (in the west), comparable to the phrases “iron veil” and “cold war”, that dominated international thought for generations.
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Venezuela wants badly to be a core state for Latin America as a whole, and Guatemala has always dreamed of being the core state of Central America.
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@ Abagond
Well, what do you think?
https://abagond.wordpress.com/2014/06/18/the-clash-of-civilizations/#comment-238929
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Kartoffel said: His book is intellectually pretty weak, but surpassed by his later book “who are we”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Are_We%3F_The_Challenges_to_America%27s_National_Identity#Describing_American_identity
Ah, that does look interesting.
@ Abagond
Now, that book might be a better choice for you to do a post on cultural racism, rather than picking on Amy Chua. 🙂
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^ I think we should have posts on both Huntington and Amy Chua and compare them both. They both represents 2 aspects of cultural racism in the USA.
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@ Jefe
Why does she have to be a “cultural racist”. Isn’t this just a convenient term for her opponents to use to dismiss her because she rankles them with her views? Chua is not someone who can be easily dismissed unlike dolts like Limbaugh or Malkin.
• For now, I’m more interested in who originated that term: “cultural racism”. Where does that term come from? I’m more interested in establishing the terms’ legitimacy than using it to insult, say, Amy Chua.
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@ Legion
Amy Chua needs to be picked on, big time.
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@ Legion
The term “cultural racist” is pejorative, used to discredit that line of thought, because “racist” has a bad tone. Probably a term like “culturalist” or “cultural essentalist” would be more accurate.
On the other hand the term “cultural racist” has some merit to it, because the thought system of cultural essentialism is very similar to racism. The individual is reigned by his culture instead of his race, but in their mind culture is an equal fixed and unchangable entity. They are basically the equivalent to race realists.
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@ Legion,
I used the term cultural racist with no pleasure and not out of convenience. She wrote books about the advantages cultural attributes associated with certain racial and ethnic groups. So, we do have to link “culture” with “racist” to convey the meaning.
Michelle Malkin and Rush Limbaugh are a completely different league. I wouldn’t call them cultural racists, but whiteness ideologists.
@Kartoffel
If Ms. Chua had only referred to cultural attributes, and not associated them with races or ethnic groups, then maybe we could use those terms. She did not. So those terms become misleading.
@Abagond,
Gee, if you did a post on Amy Chua, expect 3000 comments and lurkers to come out of the woodwork depending on how you word it and what point of view you take.
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@ Legion
What is now the US has always been a cleft nation – by design – since at least Bacon’s Rebellion a hundred years before the Declaration of Independence. Divide and conquer.
Huntington is horrified at the coming loss of a non-Hispanic white majority – just as Madison Grant was horrified in 1916 at the coming loss of a Nordic majority. Just as nativists in the middle 1800s were horrified at the coming loss of a Wasp majority. And probably in 2176 yet another New York Wasp will be horrified by the coming loss of some other racially contrived electoral majority of “true” Americans who racially identify with the top 1%. The US is always about to go over the waterfall but never does. Because the whole thing is politically contrived.
That Huntington sees Mexico and Jamaica as non-Western, as belonging to alien civilizations, says more about him and current US politics than it does about Mexico and Jamaica, both Christian nations. It is strange to divide Christendom into four “civilizations” (Western, Orthodox, Latin American, African) but not the Muslim world.
The unity of the US is BUILT on racist fear of the Other who threaten to destroy America As We Know It. Jefe is on point about alien invasion disaster flicks.
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^ about the advantages of cultural attributes
BTW, I don’t dismiss Amy Chua per se. I would like to read her books. But I don’t think I will agree with much of what she says.
For one thing, she is using the modern day brain drain Chinese and Indian immigrants (and ignores the rest, both current and historical) as the examples of those groups and their successes and traces it to their cultural attributes. That’s not cultural racism? But it doesn’t mean that I dismiss her.
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Latin America is part of the West geographically and culturally
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Huntington’s Clash of civilizations is also a great example for the Africa is a country stereotype. It’s rather bold to just assign all of non-muslim sub-saharan Africa to one “African culture” without elabourating why. I’ve got the feeling that he’s mainly concerned with Latin America and the Islamic World and made everything else up along the way. His map of South East Asia also doesn’t seem all that thought through.
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But this guy is a “professor of political science at Harvard”. Shouldn’t he know better?
He is training the future leaders of the USA. 😮
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The professor clearly doens’t “do” overlaps or believe they exist in the world.
(Overlaps being language, history, religions, culture, etc.)
No: the world and the peoples in it are cut into separate, cut and dried, boxes.
Europe even has a line down it to cut it off from Asia. The prof’s maps is proof.
A civilisation that went on for more than 2,000 years (Byzantium, Constantinope, Istanbul), for example, never happened.
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(Above comment is meant tongue-in-cheek, btw.)
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Huntington’s Clash of civilizations is also a great example for the Africa is a country stereotype.
Wait! You mean Africa’s not a country! 😀
(jk)
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@Legion
“If the immigrants and current non white Americans want to serve the established elite American paradigms, then a lot of the professional class would not be nervous about a thing. But, they know that a black man (and possibly other non white men) did not grow up being “little Timmy” so to speak. ”
But I think they do want to serve it. I think a good many of the Asian and paler Hispanics coming to America will be coopted into whiteness. I don’t think we will see any great uprising or overthrow of “the system” because of immigration. Rather, I tend more to view the possible contraction of empire as being far more dangerous to the status quo and to relations between American ethnic/racial groups.
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Jefe said this: She wrote books about the advantages cultural attributes associated with certain racial and ethnic groups.
then concluded this: So, we do have to link “culture” with “racist” to convey the meaning.
We have to? Why not call it Ethnography? Now you can’t study cultures or make observations about cultures without being a member of a branch of racism!?
She assigns cultural attributes to ethnic groups for the most part, I believe. But also acknowledges cultures within cultures, so she might name races too sometimes, I haven’t read her closely enough yet. Anyway, it is not possible to talk about culture and not also mention ethnic groups; ethnic groups exist via their cultural characteristics.
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@ biggiefriez
But I think they do want to serve it.
Yes, it’s “normal” to chose the path of least resistance. People immigrate to have better lives, not to ruin things. Certainly many will join the existing system and if it means getting a little immoral dirt under one’s fingernails, that will be a trade off that a great many can make.
Another view:
Social change is just hard work. The people who are here [in the US] must keep working, in productive ways, to bring about the type of society they see as more just. Then, newcomers have more of an option to join that ongoing established change instead of going to the well entrenched systems of power. What I’m alluding to here is what has been called “dysfunction of the left”. I won’t elaborate, the description speaks for itself.
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@ Abagond
The unity of the US is BUILT on racist fear of the Other who threaten to destroy America As We Know It. Jefe is on point about alien invasion disaster flicks.
Not racist fear alone. It is your focus, but it is not the whole story.
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^ I have only read pieces of her book also, so I probably shouldn’t comment too much about it.
But, she mentions Indians and Chinese as ethnic groups that are predictive successful performers in the USA. But we know the examples she is using are from the brain drain immigrants and their children. If it were purely a cultural thing, then shouldn’t descendants of the pre-1965 immigrants also have produced the same success?
IF it were purely cultural attributes it would be one thing. But it is not. It is the attributes (and perhaps not purely cultural ones either) of a very select group of immigrants that came to the USA, and then extrapolated to a whole entire race. That is what makes it culturally racist behavior.
Now, I am not saying that there are not gleanings of inspiration from what she writes. I need to read more of it to make a better judgement.
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Abagond never said racist fear alone.
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^ Sure, but that is the focus of the blog, it was the focus of his last sentence.
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I know Asian American Heritage month was last month, but we need a post on Yellow Peril.
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@ Jefe
I am tempted to rebut, but I wont. The following applies to me also:
I have only read pieces of her book also, so I probably shouldn’t comment too much about it.
———————-
Now, I am not saying that there are not gleanings of inspiration from what she writes.
I think there may be a good deal more than just the gleanings.
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@Legion
“Yes, it’s “normal” to chose the path of least resistance. People immigrate to have better lives, not to ruin things. Certainly many will join the existing system and if it means getting a little immoral dirt under one’s fingernails, that will be a trade off that a great many can make.”
You speak as if people immigrating to the US had a moral system that is corrupted upon arrival. I would argue that many if not most of the Asian and Hispanic immigrants coming to the US have the same if not more virulent levels of racism and are generally more socially conservative than white Americans.
No. I think that for Hispanics and Asians, they are leaving systems that were already geared toward “white is right” and continue that upon arrival. They come in and work hard and are not politically active. Then if possible their children are coopted into whiteness. At least the model Asians and whiter Hispanics are coopted.
I believe the elite will coopt as many as needed to keep a majority.
The danger for the elite is not immigration, it is the contraction of the empire that justifies the whole endeavor/system and the subsequent loss of support from their base, the white middle class who has only accepted the continued enfranchisement of non-European Americans as the price of their continued financial well-being.
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What I do agree with her, to some extent, is the attitude that many white Anglo-Americans AND black Americans have towards Education. I swear many of American parents feed their kids stupid pills or let the school system do it to their kids.
It is like the emphasis is on community and work (like chores or tasks, or labour experience) rather than on study and family. Not that there is anything wrong with the former, but the emphasis is not on the laltter.
Now does THAT have to do with the social or cultural origin of the parents? Maybe. But I don’t think it is necessarily an ethnic or racial thing.
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@ biggiefriez
You speak as if people immigrating to the US had a moral system that is corrupted upon arrival. I would argue that many if not most of the Asian and Hispanic immigrants coming to the US have the same if not more virulent levels of racism and are generally more socially conservative than white Americans.
Yes, I think your argument is probably valid in many cases. Unfortunate as that is.
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biggiefriez wrote:
“I would argue that many if not most of the Asian and Hispanic immigrants coming to the US have the same if not more virulent levels of racism and are generally more socially conservative than white Americans.”
_ _ _
ITA.
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@biggiefriez: Not trying to create an echo chamber but i agree with that.
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Don’t lay down your life, all by itself. NO, preserve your life, its the best thing you got. And if you got to give it up. let it be….even Steven!
Malcom x
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@Kiwi
Some years ago a British TV channel did a documentary on a synagogue in India. The Jewish lady caretaker was all gushing sweetness to the white interviewer. He warmly recommended a visit to this place if one was in the area. But who was he recommending it to?
Almost a week later I was with my son in that very town and in that very area. Why not visit? As I approached the place I saw the caretaker out on the porch. She too saw us two chocolate colored men approaching. She began muttering to the security man sitting near. I knew what the outcome would be. In the most patronizing fashion she said that we could not visit.
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@Kiwi
Somewhere in Paul Theroux “Great Railway Bazaar” you will read that a white back-packer meets local girl in Bangalore. In no time at all he kisses her and, lightning quick after that, screws her. And she takes him to meet her parents the next day. This guy, according to Theroux, was waiting to meet a fellow white to tell him how astonishingly easy it is to bed a local after just a kiss.
If only the local choco boys were so lucky!!!!
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I see it must be a coincidence that some people are talking about “cultural racism” , and that i talk about this all the time as what is the real underlying culprit underneath racism directed at the Afro diaspora…which is no diminishing thing on the way i mean it…it is very implicating and the problem that needs to be faced , is exactly what I mean
so, I hav e to clarify, my definition has nothing to do with any author or scholor out there who may have used those words…words are semantics that can take on differant meanings depending on the context and i guarentee you no intellectual authors, or university think tanks or individual pundits anyone may have seen using that expresion are using “cultural racism” in the same context as i am, they couldnt even grasp what i am trying to say, its not part of western thought or discourse
and you can beleive the cultural racism i amtalking about is what is experianced on a daily basis by black Americans, from the media and what they face in the business world…a prreasure to culturaly assimulate and surpress or bury Afro diasporic culture…the so called Afro diasporic culture that comes out on the media is manipulated to either fit a stereotype or to show black Americans acting white
so i catagoricly seperate my meaning of cultural racism from anything i see being disscussed here
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I actually agree with you here, but everyone faces this pressure.
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This is what I am talking about. Ivy league schools are just a form of World White Order institutions. This guy clearly demonstrates and admits to being a full blown White Supremacy person. Long Beach State has or had a professor by the name of Kevin MacDonald that has these types of views.
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I just saw this again. This New York based Hari Kondabolu makes jokes about the fear of white people about 2042, the predicted year when non-hispanic whites are projected to be less than 50%.
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/04/hari-kondabolu-waiting-for-2042_n_4723174.html)
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With that said if Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Brown, Cornell, Univ. of PA, Darthmouth, or Columbia offer you a full scholarship and you don’t take it because you don’t want to be a sellout, you are beyond stupid. I’d gladly go get a free full ride in any of these programs.
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Um… like 1/4 to 1/2 of the northern region of Cameroon is Islamic
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Absolutly , about the scholorship….its not that these institutions cant teach you anything…its just that they teach you about western culture
There is very little in all western education that indicates it has any grasp of what Afro diasporic culture really is , what it brings to the table and the enormous contribution to and value it has to humanity and civilisation…
You can find out about the value ancient China , Índia, the Arabs etc have brought to civilisation , in the western scholastic diologue…to a limited degree , to be sure, but , its there
But you really cant find this about the contribution of what the below north Africa, pre Islamic black ancient Africans gave us…and how its value and message comes down and touches us culturaly all the way into today , even though its being utilised on the comic book leval
People have to ask the question , ” what is really Afro diasporic culture?” before they can really understand ” cultural racism”
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@ melody
That is hardly not the only mistake. Ukraine, for example is also a cleft nation, part Catholic, part Orthodox. Huntington knows that since he talks about it in the book. So the map, apparently, is meant only to give you a rough idea.
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Latin Americans are almost all universally christian (catholic or protestant) in their religion or worldview, they speak western european languages as their mother tongues, and most countries (except Cuba) are multi-party democracies. Why is it not considered to be western? One can make the argument that Latin America is more similar to western europe then these so called western nations. Argentina, Uruguay, and Costa Rica are majority white countries, meaning that a majority of their population is of non-mixed european descent. Other countries, like Chile, Colombia and Cuba have large white minorities. This map, like the Mr. Huntington, are skewed.
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I think it’s because the dominant group in the 19th century was constructed as protestant and germanic, including WASPs in the US, the British, the Dutch, Scandinavians and protestant Germans, while Southern Europeans and white Latin Americans were put into another group less worthy than Northern Europeans. This idea was supported by a racial belief that Sothern Eurpeans are of mixed race and an orientalist view of Catholicism. At some point Southern Europe was incorporated in the West, while Latin America was left out. How and why that happened I don’t fully understand. Also I’m not clear on what role France played in this.
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@ Prometo @ Kartoffel
Huntington sees Latin America as an offspring civilization of the West that has evolved separately so that it is now out of step with North America and western Europe. Compared to the West, its culture is much more corporatist, authoritarian, Catholic and Amerindian. Also, not all Latin Americans consider themselves to be Western.
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I wonder what makes a nation “Western”?
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^ Ditto.
I suppose it depends who you ask.
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@Abagond
Huntington is a great source if you want to know how white Americans thought about Latin America and Souther Europe in the 90s (there have been a development since than that still goes on), but he won’t help you understand how that belief system came into being.
@ Bulanik
An abundance has been written about that question. Any rational defintions are pretty useless, the best way is to look at what pro-western conservatices like Huntington wrote. Much more interesting is how the idea of “the West” shifted over time.
As far is I understand, the idea is pretty old but the term didn’t really came into widespread use until the First World War. The British and French tried to construct an entity that could be placed against the Germans. But it still was only one possible “international identity” until the Cold War.
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@ Kartoffel, true, the definition is complicated, and goes way back.
For that reason, time, or era didn’t come immediately to mind, though.
Think of the modern-day habit of classifying Israel, casually, as a “European” and Western nation, according to event. And think, too, about the impact of the Great Schism from nearly a thousand years ago between the Greek- speakers of the East and the Latin-speakers of the West.
This word didn’t become widespread until the First World War? I didn’t know.
I don’t understand what you mean about about the French and British.
Could you explain that a bit?
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I’m more familiar with 19th-century history from the german perspective, so I’m taking a bit of a leap here. My udnerstanding is the following: Until 1910 the international power play was pretty open, the British weren’t firmly at the French’s side. But during WW1 and after they developed a bond that went beyond political convenience, they tried to distinguish themself from the Germans on the basis of a common culture. That’s the birth of “the West” in the modern sense.
That’s of course a very rough simplification. Ideas of a West have been around since the Ancient Greeks, and the idea of a West composed of France, the UK and the US have been around at least since the 1850s. But it was in WW1 when it was picked up.
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@ Abagond
Amy Chua needs to be picked on, big time.
Do you see her as a promoter of this:
https://abagond.wordpress.com/2013/08/06/white-racial-frame/
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@ Legion
Amy Chua in effect promotes the white racial frame because she supports the Bootstrap Myth and cultural racism. However, she might also be operating from what Feagin calls a home-culture frame.
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I think that our planet is so small, and so prone to massive disasters and changes, that it should make more sense for us to work together to improve our situation, instead of always fighting and killing each other over bullshit such as religion, skin colour, different cultures, etc.
I do realize that I travel like crazy, so it is easier for me to see how we are all connected and all WAY more similar that we are different. If you live in a little place, and don’t travel, it is easier to get stuck in an “us vs. them” mindset.
Thanks for your blog…I recently found it by accident and have read some interesting posts and comments on it.
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Did I just read that Oklahoma state Rep. John Bennett just said that
Oh, my. We are back to the 1890s.
But then again, this theme has always been in the USA. Destruction from within.
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[…] (The Clash of Civilizations, Abagond, 2014) […]
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Oh how rich, Latin America is just completely separated from Latin Catholic Europe(which created it). Really just goes to show how utterly deluded Saxons are. Sometimes I think Northern Europeans are fond of thinking of themselves as exclusive because geographically they are rather isolated when compared to the Mediterranean or Eastern Europe(Eurasia).
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Except that remaining culturally western is in America’s best interests. The world doesn’t need another Mexico, it already has one.
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@Hellinism:
You must admit the food’s fantastic, better than Greek!
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@Herneith Greek food is 100 times better. Have you ever had gyros? Saganaki? Loukaneko?
Mexicans aren’t assimilating and they’re Mexicanizing America. This is a sad state of affairs. That’s why we need to deport illegals, build the wall, and pass the RAISE Act. Our culture deserves the right to survive.
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@ Hellenism
It is a myth that immigrants used to quickly assimilate to the United States. In fact, if anything, assimilation was much slower and incomplete the further back in our history you look.
Writers in the late 1800s and early 1900s used to bemoan the lack of assimilation of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. They would point out that you could walk miles in New York City, passing through neighborhoods where you would successively hear languages like Polish, Russian, Yiddish, Italian, and — yes — Greek, but in all those miles never one word of English.
Germans began immigrating to the area where I grew up in the mid-1800s, yet three and four generations later, the children were still speaking German as their first language. In the early 1900s, there were still more German-language newspapers than English, and church services were all conducted in German. That came to a screeching halt with World War One, but up until about ten years ago, there were still elderly people living in the area who spoke German fluently as their mother tongue.
The Dutch began immigrating to what would become the colony of New York in the early 1600s. Two hundred years later, most of their descendants still spoke Dutch as their first language. Martin Van Buren, our eighth president, learned Dutch as his mother tongue even though he was born as a U.S. citizen several years after the Revolution to parents who were fifth-generation residents of New York. He continued to speak Dutch at home for his entire life.
Mexican Americans are actually assimilating in language more quickly than the Dutch of New York or the Germans of the Midwest did 100 and 200 years ago. It doesn’t seem that way only because the wave of immigration from Mexico is currently ongoing. The Mexicans you meet who don’t speak any English are not the American-born children and grandchildren of Mexicans who immigrated here 20 or 40 years ago.
I know quite a few Mexican Americans who are the first or second generation to be born here, and they all speak fluent American English. However, there is a wide disparity in their Spanish language skills, ranging from true bilingualism to barely knowing a few basic words. Some of them actually took Spanish in high school because they wanted to learn more of their language of origin than they could get from their assimilated monolingual parents.
If the U.S. was truly about full assimilation, none of the towns where I grew up would still hold Oktoberfest and Sommerfest celebrations. There would be no Swedish Days in little Minnesota towns or Scottish Highlander Games down south.
There would be no Mardi Gras, no St. Patrick’s Day parades, no Jack-o-Lanterns, no Santa Claus or Christmas trees.
There would be no stores selling Amish-made furniture, because there would be no Amish.
There would be no Mexican restaurants — or Italian, Greek, or Chinese either. Instead of eating sushi, pad thai, and pizza, we’d be relegated to such English delicacies as bubble-and-squeak.
This is not the first time in U.S. history that fears have arisen about a specific group of immigrants not assimilating. That fear has remained pretty constant. What changes is the ethnicity of the group the fear is centered on.
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@Solitaire,
In addition to the immigrants you mentioned, we can also look at the fear of Native Americans not assimilating until well into the 20th century — hence the “need” for boarding schools.
To look at where native US born Asian Americans make up the majority, we may have to go to Hawaii, where it is common to meet 4th and 5th generation Asians. But any casual visitor to Hawaii will not fail to notice how much Asian culture is still retained there – and many can still speak Japanese, Hakka and Zhongshan dialects, as well as Ilocano and other Filipino languages.
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@Hellinism:
Yes, I’ve partaken of Greek food, Souvlaki, moussaka, spanakopita, feta cheese etc. etc. Mexican food has Greek food beat for taste and variety.
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The gyros didn’t even originate in Greece.
“grilling a vertical spit of stacked meat slices and cutting it off as it cooks was developed in Bursa by Turks in the 19th century Ottoman Empire.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyro_(food)
“Originally invented in the 19th century Ottoman Empire, it [doner kebab] inspired similar dishes such as the Arab shawarma, Greek gyros, and Mexican al pastor.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doner_kebab
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The gyros didn’t even originate in Greece.
I’ll take a pulled beef burrito over a crappy gyro any day! In fact, I’m going to purchase a burrito bowl!
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@ Herneith
Have you had gyros on the U.S. side of the border?
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@Solitaire
That’s super interesting! Even the white, English speaking Irish took a couple generations to adapt in the 1800s. My two best American friends are second generation – one Polish one Chinese and both are native English speakers, as American as any other. If language and accent are the quickest keys to assimilation then immigrants have never been assimilating faster! Racism and xenophobia, it seems, have always been the main barriers for integration.
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Has anyone seen Ron Paul’s latest tweeted cartoon about “Cultural Marxism”?
I wonder how much of the American population actually sees the world this way.
US Senator Ron Paul took it down, but it has been captured all over the place already. So, you still have to own up to it.
Should have a companion cartoon – Uncle Sam punching up Native American icons.
I think the main reason why there is this fear is because, deep down inside, they know they did it to someone else already. Why feel threatened by a multi-cultural society?
–> A post on “Cultural Marxism” would be good.
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“Huntington does not ask what is best for the world as a whole or even the US as a whole, but what is best for white people.”
If a policy is not best for the world as a whole, then it will create a less stable world that will not be best for White people (or anyone else) in the long run.
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[…] (The Clash of Civilizations, Abagond, 2014) […]
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[…] Abagond, J. (2014, June 18). The clash of civilizations. Abagond. Retrieved July 19, 2014, from https://abagond.wordpress.com/2014/06/18/the-clash-of-civilizations/ […]
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