The other day in a discussion, the concept of Europe going from zero to jackboots in ten seconds flat came up, and people asked whether that was because Europe was uniquely evil or because the rest of the world lives in permanent jackboots.
Well, from my perspective (and like everything on this blog, it is and remains YMMV) it's neither. It's definitely not the first. And it's not quite the second. It's both simpler and more complex.
And then I realized that this is probably what feeds a lot of the oikophobia in our culture. We know that Europe goes zero to jackboots at the touch of a button, or even if no one looks at the button, or even if the button is just looking like it would like to be touched. We know Europe spent most of its history at bloody war with itself. And we know the US at least twice came in and ended what promised to be one of Europe's long-running set tos.
Because the rest of the world is not really like that, it's easy to believe the reason Europe and America are like that is because they're uniquely evil. This explains all the belly aching and tooth grinding about colonialism, and the behavior of the hastily misseducated products of third worlders swarming through our borders, who are convinced they are owed something because their countries of origins are only not successful because they lived under the boot of "colonialists."
This does not explain why most countries that were colonized and where the colonialists left are now objectively worse for the people who live in them. And no, the explanation is not the Marxist cant that the colonialists took away everything worth money from such third world shitholes. That's demonstrably not true. Mostly because what is worth money changes by the year, if not by the century, and that no country in the world is so devoid of raw materials it couldn't come up with something to export. (Clears her throat at Japan and anime.) To try to explain the poverty of post colonial countries by "We wuz robbed" ends up in the idiot who told me Portugal would have its own computer industry, if the US didn't steal and destroy all great Portuguese inventions.
In this as in anything else, and though I come from a Western country (but a marginally "first world" one) I have a different perspective.
Mostly, Europe and America aren't uniquely evil or uniquely war like or uniquely much of anything. We are mostly "Uniquely organized."
For America this comes from being Europe's "child" and having inherited a lot of cultural history as well as in the way of adult children, trying to "improve" on the parents' flaws.
For Europe it's more complicated and to be fair, I'd guess it's the result both of Roman invasions, which brought with it Rome's great innovation: the erasure of tribalism. Oh, not totally but to a great extent. If you were a Roman Citizen you were a Roman Citizen, and that subsumed whatever you'd been before to the point it didn't matter much. This allowed the tribe and race blended legions to work, and it allowed colonies to integrate as "Roman." Further erasure of tribalism was brought by conversion to Christianity when everyone no matter how they looked or how barbarian (ah) their speech were "G-d's children" and therefore human and treated as such. (Oh, not perfectly. Never in the history of ever has "if only everyone" worked. But that was the ideal, and as the ideal it had a great impact on how other humans were perceived and how one worked with/for them.
And then there were the pressures, from the Islamic invasion and aggression to the constant warrying of the micro states that emerged from the fall of Rome, the Germanic invasions, the Crusades that pushed back Islam. All of it resulted in loyalty to king/country (even when the country was so small it required a passport to swing a kitten.) which in turn brought a certain organization and discipline.
Look, it's not that the rest of the world isn't war like or doesn't commit violence. It's that the violence tends to be one on one. Crime is higher -- and the statistics disguise that in various ways -- and there's more group on group hatred, from soccer riots to tribal warfare. It is an "of course" background to life.
Then there is the totalitarianism, face saving and information control. Any society that engages in this loses the ability to make war effectively.
They're just not organized enough to do war the European way. (Some parts of Europe aren't either. Looks at Russia, which bought its own propaganda and wasn't aware its vaunted military victories were mostly due to the harshness of their weather.)
No, I'm not arguing that war is good. I am arguing that war is preferable to constant low level tribal warfare or group on group violence. It's preferable both in its results, because war you can "isolate' in a way and recover from and rebuild, since they are episodic break outs, while the rest is constant and grinding and so demanding that people never get organized enough to go to war as a country/civilization.
Also that lack of organization/ability to standardize and pull together also affects the good sides of civilization. So food, clothing, all the essentials, will be produced by less efficient means, demand more work, and therefore cost more, while the risk of everything being destroyed by interpersonal/group violence and uneven enforcement of laws worsens all of the above.
War is bad, of course. But it's not the worst any civilization can face. The grinding sort of total lack of organization and TRUST in laws or your fellow citizens that brings a lack of ability to wage war also brings a lack of ability to have most of your citizens eat and have clothes to wear on the regular, and it renders things like electrical power and water service that don't go out randomly aspirational, and things like AC and houses that aren't in the process of falling down constantly the wildest of pipe dreams.
Europe conquered the world on being slightly more organized than the average bear. I mean, colonialism, that boogaboo of modernists is just a characteristic of all life on Earth. Not even humans. If plants hadn't colonized the land, if amphibians hadn't done the same, there would be no humanity. Every species colonizes, and every species tries to edge out others as they do. Ditto for varieties under those species.
What Europe did wasn't anything strange and novel, but what every human civilization that can has done since the beginning of time. Europe was just much better at it than the rest of the world in the 18th through 20th centuries. Kind of like Rome was much better at the colonizing game than any of its contemporaries, and therefore left an outsized footprint in the history of humanity.
And what America did, coming in to stop wars and not colonizing was utterly strange, bizarre and wonderful. And yes, I grew up on the Marxist analysis, which told us that America "colonized" markets. I want to kindly -- or not -- tell the Marxists to kindly go do onto themselves like nymphomaniac with the dildo, but harder, faster, and using a chainsaw lubed with ghost pepper juice. America's dominance of markets in the aftermath of WWII wasn't due to anything America did but to Europe having succumbed to the raging stupid of socialism, first before WWII and then after. That there were two varieties of socialism doesn't make it better. The war between various varieties of socialism destroyed all the infrastructure and their ability to produce. And their falling hard and fast for the crazy international socialism after WWII and keeping restrictions on, loving regulations, felating price controls and convincing themselves that any proper economy is regulated top down caused them to never become worthy competitors for the US, who btw was doing onto itself much the same, but slower, and with enough resistance to feed and clothe the world.
This doesn't make America an economic colonialist or imperialist. It makes America so far the savior of civilization and means if we fall civilizations goes down hard.
I won't go into the factors militating our fall. You know them. But there are enough signs of life and fight against to have hope. And at any rate giving up and letting evil have its way is not a rational course. If we must go down, let us do so with honor and still fighting. (And taking a body guard to hell with us, in minecraft, if it comes to that.)
Who knows? Unlikely wins have happened, and we're the land of unlikely wins and third chances where the underdog always has one more try at pulling the win from the loss.
Just know though that when they push the "bad" of colonialism and European and American history, they have less than no point. What they're pointing at is not uniquely bad. It's uniquely organized, disciplined and non-tribal. Which are the same characteristics that have ushered in more prosperity than humans have known in the entire history of the world before us.
The default state of mankind is not just poverty. It's poverty, tribal warfare, massacres of women and children, constant insecurity and grinding fear.
And that's where we'll fall if "evil" Western civilization falls. At the end of that tunnel there isn't some imagined utopia. There's the utter darkness of savagery, which is -- like colonialism -- very human, affecting every race and subrace at some time or other. And is a horrible, destructive trap that can stop humanity in its tracks, and mire us in suffering, hunger and loss for thousands of years on our journey to the stars. (All that colonizing material should by rights go to our species, yes. I mean, the blue xenomorphs of Alpha Centauri might be very noble and all, but I am human and therefore I'd prefer #teamhuman to win.)
Support Western Civilization unashamedly. The alternative is not only not better, it's unimaginably (for those raised in Western civ) worse.
*Because these are my two weeks of fundraising, I'm obligated to add the following:
This blog is reader funded. I don't have a grant or a patron. You're my patrons and only you can compensate for the toil of keeping the blog going day after day, year after year. For the full explanation of why a funding drive, and what I intend to use it for, if you're interested, go here.
There are several ways of supporting me.
GiveSendGo, for which I make no promises meaning I'm not giving you anything for your contribution; Chapterhouse, for which I will give you my fiction that is in process and yes there will be typos, backtracking, characters who change names suddenly and other mishaps; and Patreon, for which I give you cat pspsps posts. For the more exotic ways to donate: email me for paypal address. The book promo email will do for that: bookpimping at outlook dot com. And there is the snail mail address at: Sarah A. Hoyt, 304 S Jones Blvd #6771, Las Vegas, NV 89107.
I know times are tough — for all of us — and I don't hold it against anyone who can't contribute. But all contributions are greatly appreciated. – SAH*
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