Tony Blair & George W. Bush: The bromance that brought you 20 years of the “War on Terror.”
1,405 words
A big problem with white people is that we think everyone wants to be like us. I’m not including those of us on the Dissident Right who have been disabused of that notion, but if we are talking white people in general, it is a big problem. Too many whites believe that inside every POC is a white person dying to get out.
A lot of white people believe that they are Homo sapiens’ final form and the only reason everyone else isn’t like white people is because we are simply ahead of the curve. Whites have had all these philosophical, scientific, and political revolutions that other races haven’t, after all. Whites perfected the art of rational inquiry. The thinking goes that once other races and cultures have access to the same ability to reason, education, and material conditions that whites have that they will inevitably arrive at all the same conclusions that whites do. Thus, whites are basically waiting for non-whites to “catch up,” but once they do, they will be exactly like us. It is simply inconceivable to many whites that they won’t be.
Much mischief has come from the idea that non-whites can be like whites, but a great deal of mischief has also come from believing that they want to. An excellent example of this would be the War on Terror, which is now finally winding down to a close.
I have no doubt that the architects of the War on Terror had their own cynical and nefarious reasons for waging it, but many of ordinary citizens supported it for altruistic reasons. It’s ironic that many liberals at the time called the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan “racist,” but in reality, you had to have drunk some of the same anti-racist Kool-Aid to believe they were ever a good idea.
There was a popular phrase going around during the Bush years: “universal values.” The thinking went: Despite the fact that the peoples of the Earth may have different religions, different customs, and different conceptions of morality, there are certain values that are “universal” and which everyone –regardless of their race, color, or creed, all over the globe — agreed upon. If anyone didn’t, it was only because some sort of evil people had brainwashed them.
“Universal values” was a form of projection. It was whites projecting a white worldview onto non-whites. When you actually take a closer look at what these “universal values” were, it was all just a bunch of stuff that white people like.
According to a 2003 speech by United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, “universal values” were “peace,” “freedom,” “social progress,” “equal rights,” and “human dignity.” These are all very vague terms.
Perhaps everyone in the world likes the idea of “freedom,” but you will find vastly different conceptions of what that means across the world. In the West, when we think of “freedom,” we think of individual liberty and the freedom to say and do what one wants. In a Communist country, freedom might be conceived as freedom from the ruling class and wage slavery. Some countries might see freedom as freedom from foreign interference. To the National Socialists, “freedom” meant the freedom to pursue their national destiny. For example, the 1935 Nuremburg rally was called “the Rally for Freedom,” which was addressed toward the restrictions and war guilt that had been imposed on Germany by Britain and France.
Therefore, the kind of freedom that Kofi Annan seemed to be talking about is hardly universal. But you repeatedly heard this phrase during the Bush years as the authorities kept insisting that things that what white people want are in fact what everyone wants.
In a 2003 speech to a joint session of Congress, George W. Bush’s best friend Tony Blair said (emphasis mine):
There is a myth that though we love freedom, others don’t; that our attachment to freedom is a product of our culture; that freedom, democracy, human rights, the rule of law are American values, or Western values; that Afghan women were content under the lash of the Taliban; that Saddam was somehow beloved by his people; that Milosevic was Serbia’s savior. Members of Congress, ours are not Western values, they are the universal values of the human spirit. And anywhere . . .
George Bush said similar things, even years after the fact. In a 2016 retrospective interview on his presidency, Bush claimed (emphasis mine):
One way is to say there are some universal values that transcend individual sects, such as the universal right for people to be free, or the universal right for women to live in a culture that respects them. Those are universal thoughts. These aren’t western thoughts. When I was President, people would say we’re trying to impose our values. I always felt like that was kind of an excuse for isolationism. The values that I thought we were proposing transcended American and British values. They’re universal rights. The idea of a child growing up in a society where it’s peaceful is a universal thought. The ability for people to express themselves in a public square, that’s not a religious thought. That’s a thought that speaks to the humanity and the importance of every individual.
There was a lot of flapdoodle about Iraq and Afghanistan being national security threats to the United States, and yet it can’t be understated the extent to which race denialism was leveraged to sell the War on Terror. The go-to examples of “universal values” in action were always Germany and Japan after the Second World War. According to their narrative, the Allies walked into two very illiberal countries, slapped some people around, and turned them into good liberals. Surely the same trick would work again in Iraq and Afghanistan. But for that to make sense, you had to believe that there was no fundamental difference between Germans and Japanese on the one hand, and Iraqis and Afghans on the other. The whole argument was fundamentally based in race denialism.
Again, it is inconceivable to entirely too many whites that non-whites don’t want to be like us. Iraq was a dictatorship and Afghanistan was a religious theocracy, and many whites would find living in either system intolerable. I have no doubt that many — including those at the top with their more cynical motives as well — genuinely believed that Americans would be greeted as liberators. But when the initial invasions were over and the populations of both countries didn’t embrace the “universal values” being touted by the occupation authorities, cognitive dissonance kicked in and you started hearing another phrase that was particularly popular in conservative circles: “slaves in love with their chains.” Muslims were just too dumb to know what was good for them, it was claimed.
With the Taliban’s recent blitzkrieg across Afghanistan, the cognitive dissonance has been ratcheted up to 11. Neither liberals nor cuckservatives can really explain why the Taliban was able to take over so quickly or why the Afghan army gave so little resistance. They blame Trump’s decision to pull out or blame Joe Biden for bungling the withdrawal, but neither can explain why liberal values, if they are so “universal,” did not take hold like over the course of twenty years like everyone said they would.
Some are just in denial and will point to the people falling from airplanes as proof that liberal values actually did take hold in Afghanistan – as if people clinging to a plane as it is taking off are the ones who are in their right frames of mind. I would like to think that reason and a belief in science are part of Western values, and if someone thought it was physically possible to survive a thousand-mile flight on a jet by holding on to a wheel, then they clearly did not embrace our values.
For me, what is so satisfying about the Taliban’s stunning victory in Afghanistan is just how much it completely destroys the notion of “universal values.” In January 2003, Tony Blair told a group of British ambassadors:
In the end, all these things come back to one basic theme. The values we stand for — freedom, human rights, the rule of law, democracy — are all universal values. Given a chance, the world over, people want them.
Well, in Afghanistan, they were given the chance. For twenty years, they had the chance to let Blair’s “universal values” grow on them — and yet after twenty years, the vast majority of Afghans still said “no.”
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11 comments
The nature of these men must be extreme jealousy and mistrust. As if their women will instantly have an affair if they go out of the house. We had more conservative gender roles before the 60s and assuming your woman was stepping out without good reason for suspicion was considered pathological behavior in men, not the norm. These people must behave really badly by nature if they are so suspicious of the world.
The West’s post-1945 foreign policy has been based entirely on the Left’s assumption that “all people” want the same things. And this concept is in turn derived from the higher Left premise that All Men are fundamentally “equal” in cognition, temperament and aspiration. Falsehoods all.
From these Left principles, applied globally post-1945, have come the endless wars, political stalemates, turmoil, and the spawning of tyrannies such as Soviet Union, Cuba, China, North Korea.
May all people of the world discover this: it is entirely upon the falsehoods of Left ideology that the political debacles of the 20th and 21st centuries have been informed and driven.
This perspective is quite the oversimplification, to put it lightly. For one thing, Afghans (and middle easterners in general) are genetically closer (as can be evidenced by the phenotype in a large portion of middle easterners) to Whites than Whites are to East Asians. “Iran” and “Aryan” are practically the same word. By the logic of this article, liberal democratic values would have a harder time thriving in places like Korea and Japan. But that is not the case.
Another consideration is the fact that Islamic and Western civilizations were quite alike for hundreds of years. They were rivals in the Middle Ages. Again, by the logic of this article, the fact that the grandeur and conquests of Islamic civilization once rivaled the grandeur of Western civilization would be impossible because race supposedly determines destiny.
Why Afghanistan, and the middle East in general, is as it is today and why the West is as it is today is a complicated question. I sure don’t know the answer. But boiling it down to racial essentialism in light of the reality of history is extremely short sighted.
Are you a Leftist? What gave it away was your use of the term “racial essentialism”. That’s a Leftist term. On the Right, we call it “race realism”.
Race essentialism and race realism (at least in my terminology) are two different things. Race realism acknowledges the biological reality of races, while race essentialism is the tendency to view race as the essence, the “first cause” of social realities. You can acknowledge the biological reality of race while not being a race essentialist. Race realism is arguable, but race essentialism, as I argued above, is myopic understanding.
You started out correctly, then lost it. “Race realism” is not “arguable”; it simply denotes telling the truth about race as we know it empirically. Race realism is racial honesty. It implies no particular political commitment. One can acknowledge that race exists, and that races differ in many modal traits and behaviors, while still being a liberal, socialist, Christian, fascist, Islamist, etc. The term “race realism” is used to distinguish those who are willing to acknowledge existent racial differences from those who are not.
Your definition of “racial essentialism” is pretty good: “the first cause of social realities”. It is a good jumping off point, because biological inheritance is indeed the foundation upon which cultures and societies are built. “Racial essentialism”, however, might better be thought of as the hypothesis or doctrine that races behave in consistently different but repeatable ways which supersede cultural, social, religious and political influences (though that there exist such influences, and that they do affect racial behavior, probably would not elicit much disagreement from very many self-styled “racial essentialists”). Thus, we know that Africans, regardless of cultural values, spoken languages, or political forms, commit very high rates of crime relative to other races. The race realist will admit this fact, gleaned from sociological data. The racial essentialist will not only admit the fact, but will hypothesize a genetic cause for it (that something ‘essential’ to blacks causes them to commit crime at higher rates than other races).
This is just a start. I think we still need more precise formal definitions, although the concepts should be clear.
I would say too that the majority of East Asian countries are not liberal and Democratic in the western mold, really only South Korea and Japan are, which are ensconced in the US economic orbit. Most of them and the largest by far are totalitarian like China.
The Japanese are Sui Generis and two nuclear bombs in the head do a lot to change a political culture. Shimoguni Konjo and all that. Honorary Englishmen. South Korea? That’s a regime propped up by arms and is yet to be resolved.
I feel that Bush and his cohorts felt some kind of guilt for all the colonialism in the past and felt like, if done correctly would reshape countries that never asked for reshaping. Colonialism was of another time and era and even birthed the USA. There was no need to feel any guilt. Rather than try to make colonies in their own image, they should have paid them in locally acceptable currency, like beads and blankets, and cut out when they pulled out all the resources they desired. Seeing Africans riding in classic convertibles dressed like British royalty was never going to work out. Instead the westernized leaders hightail it out with billions when the going gets tough. I feel kind of bad for how Khadafi was treated by obama. He deserved to be in charge after cooperating with us. Sadly, bad Americans led to his demise.
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