Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies Read Online Free PDF Page A

Berlin.
    Before 1933, the city of Berlin was the symbol of everything vile, not only to Nazis, but to quite a number of romantic German nativists. In the 1890s, an assortment of nature lovers, folklore enthusiasts, nudists, and promoters of a purer, more organic, more Germanic homeland wanted, in popular slogans of the day, to “get away from Berlin,” to “escape from the brick of Berlin,” with its factories, slums, nightclubs, leftists, democrats, Jews, and other foreigners. The great Prussian capital was seen as a hybrid, artificial copy of French, English, Austrian, and American cities. Berlin’s modernity was “un-German.”
    In Nazi propaganda, Berlin department stores, corrupting German womanhood with decadent, “cosmopolitan” products, such as cosmetics and cigarettes, were vilified as symbols of “Jewish materialism” and depicted in Nazi publications as slimy octopuses strangling small German enterprises and honest German craftsmen. 11 Artistic modernism and natural science were seen as a Jewish fraud. Jazz, or “nigger music,” was denounced as depraved Americanism.
    Outside Europe, it is the West or Americanism that is blamed for the metropolitan condition and the vanished rural idyll—Americanism and some local variation of the big-city Jews, such as the Chinese in Southeast Asia or the Indian merchants in Africa, who are believed to conspire, together with venal “Westernized” native elites, to poison and undermine authentic, spiritual, or racial communities. But these ideas of Americanism, or, to cite the term of an Iranian Islamist, “Westoxification,” were influenced by prejudices that originated in the West.
    When the Japanese intellectuals at the Kyoto conference in 1942 railed against Americanism, they were thinking less about modernity in America or Europe than about the style of their own big cities, Tokyo and Osaka: Hollywood movies, cafés, dance halls, satirical reviews, radios, newspapers, movie stars, short skirts, and automobiles. They hated this new metropolitan civilization because they regarded it as shallow, materialistic, mediocre, rootless, and un-Japanese—that is, unlike the kind of profound, spiritual culture they wished to uphold. In this, the Japanese deep thinkers were no different from many European intellectuals in the 1930s, even if their idea of spiritual culture may have been different in form. Indeed, like many Arab intellectuals, who were directly inspired by pan-German ideals, the Japanese were deeply influenced by German nationalists of the 1920s and 1930s, and applied their anti-Western, antiurban views to Japan.
    There was some historical amnesia here too, for Japanese cities had been commercial centers long before Harold Lloyd and Deanna Durbin set the styles. There is little evidence that the world of Kabuki theaters, fairground entertainments, markets, and brothels of old Edo was any more spiritual than the pleasure districts of 1930s Tokyo. But intellectuals also detested Americanism for a more personal reason. They knew that in an Americanized society, dominated by commercial culture, the place of philosophers and literati was marginal at best. Far from being the dogma favored by downtrodden peasants, Occidentalism more often reflects the fears and prejudices of urban intellectuals, who feel displaced in a world of mass commerce.
    The other thing the urban intellectuals feared about “rootless” metropolitan culture and mass consumption was mass participation in politics. Newspapers and radio gave everyone access to information that had been limited to the elites before. This was dangerous, for masses were thought to be irresponsible, uneducated, and swayed by mass emotions. Hollywood movies, as the film critic at the Kyoto conference warned, promoted individualism and democracy, and a multiracial society. The commercial metropolis was where singular cultures, rooted in blood and soil, broke down, and an urban civilization was forged out of