Clash of civilizations: prophecy or contradiction in terms?

• Author: Vasillopulos, Christopher
• Position: Part II: myths: framing the problem

Acts done from passion seem very far from being acts of deliberate choice.

Aristotle (1)

PROLOGUE

CONSIDER SCHILLER'S ACCOUNT OF the destruction of Magdeburg in 1631. While he dwelled on the "brutal appetites" of the multinational troops, he also made a special point of stressing that Tilly [the Catholic commander], ignoring the scruples of several of his own officers, did nothing to restrain them once they were inside the city gates. "Here commenced a scene of horrors for which history has no language, no poetry no pencil. Neither innocent childhood, nor helpless old age; neither youth, sex, rank, nor beauty, could disarm the fury of the conquerors. Wives were abused in the arms of their husbands, daughters at the feet of their parents; and the defenseless sex exposed to the double sacrifice of virtue and life. No situation, however obscure, or however sacred, escaped the rapacity of the enemy. In a single church fifty-three women were found beheaded. The Croats amused themselves with throwing children into the flames; Pappenheim's Walloons with stabbing infants at the mother's breast. These horrors lasted with unabated fury, till at last the smoke and flames proved a check to the plunderers. To augment the confusion and to divert the resistance of the inhabitants, the Imperialists had, in the commencement of the assault, fired the town in several places. The wind rising rapidly, spread the flames, till the blaze became universal. Fearful, indeed, was the tumult amid clouds of smoke, heaps of dead bodies, the clash of swords, the crash of falling ruins, and streams of blood. The atmosphere glowed; and the intolerable heat forced at last even the murderers to take refuge in their camp. In less than twelve hours, this strong, populous, and flourishing city, one of the finest in Germany, was reduced to ashes, with the exception of two churches and a few houses.... Scarcely had the fury of the flames abated, when the Imperialists returned to renew the pillage amid the ruins and ashes of the town. On the 13th of May, Tilly himself appeared in the town, after the streets had been cleared of ashes and dead bodies. Horrible and revolting to humanity was the scene that presented itself. The living crawling from under the dead, children wandering about with heart-rending cries, calling for their parents; and infants still sucking the breasts of their lifeless mothers. More than 6,000 bodies were thrown into the Elbe to clear the streets; a much greater number had been consumed by the flames. The whole number of the slain was reckoned at not less than 30,000" (2)

Propaganda is the art of persuading others of what you do not believe yourself. Abba Eban (3) WHY THIS PHRASE

Attempting to explain to a colleague why I objected to the phrase, "clash of civilizations," I had to retreat from the definitions I employ below and ask the question: why not use, "clash of regimes" or "clash of empires"? Or, why not use another word for 'clash', like 'competition among states' or "conflict of nations.' Or, to be more provocative, why not say, 'war of civilizations' or the 'crusade against the infidel'? Let it be said, the term "civilization' is what I most object to. The reason, I think, is that it suggests religious based conflict without having the candor to say so. In other words, "clash of civilizations" is academic code for one section of humanity's hatred, contempt and fear for another group of human beings who seem to be so different as to be qualitatively different from 'us,' all of which is intensified in the belief 'the other' sees us as we see them. When I began this analysis I had not yet heard, 'axis of evil,' but it captures my meaning and my concern. I believe it should concern all of us who believe peace is preferable to war, competition better than conflict, accommodation than discord. More parochially, but not less importantly, those of us who are academics, that is, those of us who carry the gentle cudgels of reason and semantic precision have an obligation to notice when our language and our concepts are being used pejoratively and duplicitously, especially by those who claim to be among our number. I do not have to remind the reader of the numbing and catastrophic effects of euphemisms, like 'transportation,' 'relocation,' or 'cleansing.' Duplicity is not limited to making the horrific palatable. It can make the merely different hateful, subject to annihilation, and so subject in the name of an ideal. (4) What end is more worthy than the protection of 'our civilization'? I hardly know where to place the emphasis; on 'our' or 'civilization,' save in the end the 'our' always turns out to be controlling. So I am not about to embark on a semantic exercise, although it may seem so.

From a cave of rot and dirt In blood and sweat A new race shall rise Proud, generous, and cruel. Vladimir Jabotinsky (5) TOWARD A DEFINITION

Let us first box in 'civilized' as something which is not barbaric, warlike or crude on the one side, and something which is sensitive, mannered or refined on the other. A civilization, then, is a sociopolitical entity which fosters civilized and discourages barbaric acts. In its most elemental, if negative, sense civilization indicates the absence of war or a Hobbesian state of nature, where life is "solitary, nasty, brutish and short." More positively, it indicates the rudiments of civil society, including a sense of law, as the first definition in the Oxford Dictionary stipulates. Thus premised it is possible to extend the idea of civilization to cover the relationship of the necessitous to the desirable or the good, in the Aristotelian sense. It does not imply pacifism or even nonviolence. It may be good to kill in certain instances. A wolf kills a deer to feed itself and its cubs. A man kills to protect himself and his family. Here killing is both necessitous and good. But where there is an alternative to killing, when it is not necessitous, it is not good. It cannot be good in itself. Extending this idea to the societal level, war and all its killing may be necessitous and good, if the survival of the society is at stake. It cannot be good to destroy another society without this justification. Applying this idea to the "clash of civilizations" means that, notwithstanding profound differences, one civilization cannot destroy another and remain civilized. At most then the concept of the "clash of civilizations" can only indicate a competition, a rivalry more akin to the Olympics than to war. Is this not why war among the civilized attempts to apply many of the rules of sport to the most violent actions? (6) For strictly speaking one civilization cannot destroy, or even want to destroy, another civilization without being involved in a contradiction in terms. For no civilization would engage in war except for self-preservation and no other civilization can so threaten another civilization. Civilizations therefore can only be at war with barbarism within it and with barbaric regimes without.

This may seem a round-a-bout way to deal with what seems to many to be the obvious state of the world today. Yet it is immediately fruitful. It accounts for the religious language which is employed when the rivalry of civilizations seems to get out of hand. This language pays tribute to the...