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

belief in progress, law, and reason was not just “Jewish,” but also French, rooted in the Enlightenment and the Revolution. Modern anti-Semitism in Europe—the idea, that is, of a Jewish conspiracy to rule the world—began as a reaction against the French Revolution. French opponents of republicanism saw Jews and Freemasons as secret plotters to undermine the Catholic church and other traditional institutions. Napoleon’s emancipation of the Jews and his aim to impose universal standards and laws all over Europe provoked paranoid beliefs that he was a puppet of the Jews, and even that he was a secret Jew himself.
    These French delusions infected other Europeans, especially Germans. In Mein Kampf, Hitler argued that France, enslaved to the Jewish stock exchange, and “cunningly directed by the Jew,” was taking its revenge on Germany. 12 He also believed that America was thoroughly “Jewified” and that the British Empire was “becoming more and more a colony of American Jews.” 13 It is always risky to apply rational analysis to the Führer’s dinner table rants, but one thing Hitler, and the writers whose ideas he borrowed, had in mind was a very different notion of community. Membership in a Volk was “organic” and by definition exclusive, while citizenship in the French republic, the United States, or Britain was, like their cities, theoretically open to all. In the words of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, one of Hitler’s beloved pundits, British citizenship could be had “by every Basuto nigger” for two shillings and sixpence.
    Jews, America, France, and Britain were, as objects of hate, often interchangeable, and Nazi Germany, like our contemporary Islamists, was at war with them all. There were those in Germany, the “nation in the middle,” who felt surrounded by enemies, Bolsheviks to the east and the “Jewified” democracies of Europe and America to the west. The Weimar republic was seen by its enemies as “a hostile power in Western pay.” Before taking on Stalin’s Asiatic hordes, Germany went to war with the West. This assault on the liberal democratic states, seen as artificial, rationalistic, racially hybrid, materialist, and lousy with greedy Jews, was a pure example of murderous Occidentalism in the heart of the European continent.
     
     
     
    LEON TROTSKY ONCE DESCRIBED THE HISTORY OF CAPITALISM as the victory of town over country. This was not a criticism so much as an observation. To Marx and Engels, as well as Trotsky, the country was an uncivilized place populated with idiots. And so, incidentally, were Asia and other parts of the non-Western world. In The Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels note that “the bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns . . . has created enormous cities . . . has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones.” 14 And this, they predicted hopefully, prepared the ground for global revolution.
    Things didn’t quite turn out that way, but the idea that the homelands of the Western colonial powers represented, as it were, the City, and the colonies the Country, is persuasive, even though some of the world’s most sprawling cities have since emerged in the old colonial periphery. These huge conurbations, often little more than suburban slums spreading out from decayed historic city centers, are consumers at the lowest rungs of the new global economy: pirated DVDs showing Hollywood action films, cheap U.S.-style leisure wear, and a twenty-four-hour din of American pop music or its local spin-offs. To idle youths living in these cultural wastelands, globalization, as the closest manifestation of the Western metropole, can be a source of endless seduction and constant humiliation. To the more highly educated ones, globalization has become a new word for imperialism.
    When Europe still had formal empires, the City provided ideas, technical know-how, scientific innovations, administrators, businessmen,