Samuel Huntington
2,644 words
The decline of the West is still in the first slow phase, but at some point it might speed up dramatically. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations & the Remaking of World Order
In 1993, academic and White House strategist Samuel P. Huntington wrote a piece for the American geopolitical journal Foreign Affairs entitled “The Clash of Civilizations?” Three years later, Huntington dropped the “generally ignored question mark” and expanded his work into a book. (Yes, I know that makes the book 26 years old, and I have called this piece “Huntington at 25,” but I started it last year, plus we live in a post-truth society in which mathematical precision is racist.)
Geopolitics is hardly my area of expertise, but the book gained attention after 9/11 and I duly read it, largely due to its prognostications concerning Islam. Huntington obviously didn’t predict the 9/11 attacks, but two decades on it is possible to assess what he did predict, and what he may have got wrong. Huntington was writing The Clash of Civilizations[1] (henceforth CC) while the dust was still settling from the fall of Communism, and the book’s guiding principle is that once the central global battle of ideologies had been defused, future division and conflict would be caused by the reemergence of identitarian civilizations and the difference between cultures, defining “cultural identity [as] what is most meaningful to most people.”
In Spenglerian fashion, Huntington sees civilizations as cyclical, and there is no doubt about where we were on his graph in 1996:
The West is and will remain for years to come the most powerful civilization. Yet its power relative to that of other civilizations is declining.
Rejecting Francis Fukuyama’s thesis of the end of history, the one in which liberal democracy lives happily ever after, Huntington is forthright in declaiming that not only is there plenty more history to come, but it might not be too pleasant. There is a tension about the global map in terms of power relations:
The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.
After an introduction to the idea of civilization, culture, and the impetus provided by their historical affiliations and differences, Huntington goes on to consider something very much in the air a quarter of a century later, the creation — or even coercion — of a universal civilization, and the marque for that being Western. As Huntington makes clear, the desire of non-Western civilizations to modernize is primarily technological and thus economic; they have no interest in Westernization or Western value systems. Quite the reverse, as we shall see.
Huntington notes the ephemeral results of civilizations mixing together, and it is not that charming new South American restaurant on your street:
Somewhere in the Middle East a half-dozen young men could well be dressed in jeans, drinking Coke, listening to rap, and, between their bows to Mecca, putting together a bomb to blow up an American airliner.
You can buy Mark Gullick’s Vanikin in the Underworld here.
This raises the issue of whether the mixing of civilizations is a thing to be desired. If culture is the talisman of civilization, what becomes of the cultures of two civilizations which are blended? With Huntington’s example above, you get the worst of both worlds. More seriously, if one of the blended cultures is weakened, the other one becomes dominant. This is, of course, the position we are beginning to find ourselves in, particularly in Europe, where the elites are trying to ride the Islamic tiger. Entire ethnic cultures are put at hazard to make way not necessarily for one dominant global culture such as Islam, but one created by the elites to homogenize global behavior; designer civilization rather than the old, organic model. Although Huntington does not dwell on this, he does quote Ronald Dore, who “makes an impressive case for the emergence of a global intellectual culture among diplomats and public officials.” Monoculturism is not for nation-states, and is reserved for self-elected global commanders. Reading this into the present, it could be argued that the rise of elitist cabals such as the World Economic Forum was made possible by the weakening of individual Western cultures and civilizations.
The World Economic Forum may not exactly fit Dore’s template, but what we have come to call the “global elites” have made the destruction of individual nations’ culture in the West a priority, and this is nothing less than an attack on identity. Huntington stresses the importance of identity, and the fact that CC triggered a vehement response from other academics may be explained by the fact that Huntington was wise to the rise of identitarian ideas, first on the Left and now retroactively on the Dissident Right. The Left approve of the championing of all separate identities except, of course, that of the white man.
The gravitational pull of civilization and belonging to a definable culture has increased over the last century, and Huntington pinpoints a crucial moment after which the West’s control declined over a key element of global politics: the allocation of territorial sovereignty. Huntington writes,
In 1919 Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George, and Georges Clemenceau together virtually controlled the world. Sitting in Paris, they determined what countries would exist and which would not . . . A hundred years later, no small group of statesmen will be able to exercise comparable power; to the extent that any group does it will not consist of three Westerners but leaders of the core states of the world’s seven or eight major civilizations.
These select civilizations constitute the framework around which Huntington builds his theory. They are Sinic, Japanese, Orthodox, Islam, Western, sub-Saharan, Latin American, and Hindu. Some of these cultures have a “core state,” such as the United States for the West and China for the Sinic world, and some don’t, such as Islam and Latin America. But what they all have is a common cultural identity, something which is currently being used as stakes in a globalist game.
Samuel Huntington is not a writer “we” would naturally place on “our side,” but Guillaume Faye is, and The Clash of Civilizations actually makes quite a good companion piece to Faye’s Convergence of Catastrophes.[2] Faye cites Huntington and even calls his second chapter “Toward the Clash of Civilisations.”
Faye sees the West’s weakness in identitarian terms, for identarianism has as its main supporting wall the fact that identitarians must fight to defend their cultural identity. Europe and four of the main civilizations selected by Huntington differ in one major respect for Faye:
India, China, Black Africa, the Muslim world, whether Arab or Turkish, and so on, are affirming their identities and do not tolerate either a colonising immigration or cultural mixing on their own soil. Only the European pseudo-elites are defending the dogma of a ‘multicultural world’, which is a chimera.
And, where America’s core immigration problem is Hispanic, Europe’s arrivistes are Muslim. It’s all acceptable reconquista as long as it is whites who are ceding the land.
Huntington considers Muslim migration to only be a problem in the near future (in 1996), but it might have required a close reading of Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints for him to realize just how serious the demographic relocation would become:
Population pressure combined with economic stagnation promotes Muslim migration to Western and other non-Muslim societies, elevating immigration as an issue in those societies.
However, Huntington sees Muslim relocation as a trend which will come to an end:
[T]he Islamic Resurgence will subside and fade into history. That is most likely to happen when the demographic impulse powering it weakens in the second and third decades of the twenty-first century.
This unfortunately fails to take into account that the demographic engine-room is no longer solely in the Arabic world but is in the process of being transferred –imported — to Europe, which is still on track to become Bat Ye’or’s Eurabia. It’s just a question of when. As Huntington writes, “If demography is destiny, population movements are the motor of history.”
You can buy Greg Johnson’s The Year America Died here.
After a history of civilization and civilizations, Huntington devotes sections of CC to the balance, emerging order, and inevitable future clashes between civilizations. His varying angles on the return or continuing adherence to cultural identity expressed as civilization present a kinetic picture, one of combat and change in status. There is a constant subtext haunting the main one: the decline of the West, and specifically its “core state,” the United States.
In the final section, “The Future of Civilizations,” Huntington addresses a stress fracture in the West which turned out to be far more serious — particularly for the US — for Western confidence. “Americans cannot avoid the issue,” he writes. “Are we a Western people, or are we something else?” America’s foremost civilizational problem is not the threat of other civilizations, it is that it is at war with itself.
China and Russia seem, if anything, rather perplexed at America’s current cultural, political, and metapolitical internal strife, all of which is self-inflicted. The civilizations which vault over America may well be the ones who celebrate their own culture, not denigrate and demonize it. When Vladimir Putin was asked by a reporter from Russia Today what he thought about cancel culture, gender issues, and J. K. Rowling, the Russian President looked puzzled and said quietly: “If someone thinks that women and men are the same thing, then be my guest. But there is common sense . . . I stick to the traditional approach.”
In one sentence, a supposed enemy leader has done what the Western Left cannot do: invited someone who disagrees with him over gender to “be my guest.” Russia is not a home to LGBTQ and the rest of the woke carnival. Nor is Africa, the Asian sub-continent, Latin America, or China, incidentally. Especially China.
China and Russia — a pact between which must genuinely frighten Americans of whatever stripe — are finding their global importance flattered by the US’ self-dismantling. America has styled itself as the cultural core state of the West and, having mentioned Faye, we should remind ourselves that he was extremely anti-American and against “Americanization.” But if the core is rotten, if the center cannot hold, then China, Russia, and India are all waiting next in line, and as Huntington points out, some nations move with history, realigning themselves with a changing territorial center of gravity. Huntington also reminds us of the Chinese values — ingrained like facial features — of thrift, hard work, family. All of these are subject to sustained and deliberate attack across the West. Conservatives must always remember just how conservative other civilizations are and remain.
And if the center of gravity becomes Chinese, it will have been a victory won partly through its refusing to relinquish its past and ethnic culture, and partly because its greatest opponent has fallen into the hands of America’s sworn enemies. Unfortunately, they live there. China feels it has the right to world supremacy because it believes it deserves it and that it has the confidence to represent its own people. Huntington writes:
The Chinese government sees mainland China as the core state of a Chinese civilization toward which all other Chinese communities should orient themselves. Having long since abandoned its efforts to promote its interests abroad through local communist parties, the government has sought “to position itself as the worldwide representative of Chineseness.”
It bears pointing out that the Chinese Communist Party has no need to reach out to American Communist parties today given that the US is doing just fine in reaching Communism on its own. From caucus to school board, District Attorney to school principal, Chinese interests — as well as Communism in general — are being promoted across America, as they are increasingly in Europe, the United Kingdom, and the Commonwealth countries.
It is interesting to compare Huntington’s view of Chinese self-esteem and its ultimate aims with a recently declassified Pentagon report from 2013 showing the Obama government’s attitude toward the Great Dragon:
China sees itself as the center of the universe, all others are inferior, with varying degrees of inferiority. That is not an attractive model of winning allies and influence.
We shall see who is right, Huntington or the Pentagon. Two things are certain, however: When your greatest rival to becoming “the center of the universe” is destroying its own, you will win allies and influence despite your air of racial superiority. In fact — and this is the second point — whereas for the Americans racism is a bug, for China it’s a feature. From the same Obama administration’s Pentagon report — titled, incidentally, The Strategic Consequences of Chinese Racism: A Strategic Asymmetry for the United States: “The West confronted racism and developed a strong culture of anti-racism. China has not, nor is it likely to do so.”
The Chinese not only reject the new woke liberalism the West is trying to foist onto them, they openly satirize it. The Mandarin term baizuo apparently translates as “white Left.” According to Chinese writer Chenchen Zhang:
[B]aizuo is used generally to describe those who “only care about . . . immigration, minorities, LGBT and the environment” . . . hypocritical humanitarians who advocate for peace and equality only to “satisfy their own feeling of moral superiority”; they are “obsessed with political correctness” to the extent that they “tolerate backwards Islamic values for the sake of multiculturalism”; they believe in the welfare state that “benefits only the idle and the free riders”; they are the “ignorant and arrogant westerners” who “pity the rest of the world and think they are saviours”.
History will arbitrate as to which civilizations prosper: those who celebrate their history, culture, and identity, or those who despise it.
The Clash of Civilizations is well worth your time. It is a book of recent history you can zoom into for details of the post-Cold War world as nations were jostling for their new positions a quarter of a century ago, or zoom out of for a panorama which suggest that ethnic culture — and therefore the necessary cargo of genetic concerns, which Huntington avoids — is a far stronger cohesive, attractive force than ideologues such as those in Brussels have bargained for. In the end, this type of book will always be part futurology, and futurology is betting. In today’s infowars, we are all at the track, trying to pick a horse we like the sound of.
Huntington’s thesis is that the end of the Cold War was the beginning of another kind of conflict, and it certainly has been, albeit one which features cultural values both as weapons to be deployed by one civilization against another, and by the leading civilization against itself. Certainly no one could have predicted the last quarter century with much accuracy, but Huntington produced a mine of information with many rich seams. Perhaps chaos is the only thing we can be certain of, even if it is the leaders of the West who are willing that chaos on us all. Huntington talks of the “‘sheer chaos’ paradigm of world affairs,” in which we will see
a global breakdown of law and order, failed states and increasing anarchy in many parts of the world, a global crime wave, transnational mafias and drug cartels, increasing drug addiction in many societies, a general weakening of the family, a decline in trust and social solidarity in many countries, ethnic, religious, and civilizational violence and rule by the gun prevalent in much of the world.
And this can only accelerate. Faye echoes Huntington’s morbid prognosis in Convergence of Catastrophes:
It was during the Cold War that history seemed to be fixed, frozen. Now it has resumed its forward course, faster, madder and more uncontrolled than ever.
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Notes
[1] Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).
[2] Guillaume Faye, Convergence of Catastrophes (London: Arktos Media, 2012).
34 comments
This is a very interesting article and it is nice to be reminded about such an important book.
I read the book several years ago, and if I remember correctly, Huntington placed Russia in a different civilization from the West which includes mainly America and Europe but others as well such as Canada, Australia, etc. This seemed to me at the time to be a mistake on Huntington’s part. Aside from those terrible years from 1917 to 1991, Russia seems to me to be very much part of the West. Yes, its Christianity was Orthodox and thus not either Catholic or Protestant, but Orthodox Christianity is no more different from either of the other forms of Christianity as the other forms are from each other. I believe Huntington placed Russia in another civilization (sorry I don’t remember what Huntington called it) than the west was because of some longitudinal line he drew and Russia was on the wrong side of it. Russian music was classical just like European music; Russia produced perhaps the greatest literature (Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky) that was read by Europeans and Americans throughout the 20th century. Very few westerners read the literature of Japan or China. Russia produced a few great mathematicians such as Lobachevsky and Markov. Yes, they didn’t produce as many great ones as Germany and England did but neither did Italy. Etc., Etc. for different fields. I am not going to bother to name names.
Anyway, I own a copy and I will have to pick it up again and skim it quickly.
The number of great classical Russian composers is very high: the “might five” of which Mussorgsky is the most praised, then Tchaikovsky, Igor Stravinsky, Alexander Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, then under the Soviets (arguably the same level of quality as the best composers of their time) Prokofiev, Shostakovich.
Professor Duschene,
It is an honor to have someone of your caliber respond to my comment.
First, do you agree with Huntington or me on the question as to whether Russia is or is not part of European Civilization?
Second, I believe you are a Canadian. If you were advising the Biden Administration, would you advise them to have the CIA overthrow Justin Trudeau and replace him with the leader of the Trucker Convoy?
Before asking whether Russia is part of Western civilization, we might want to ask whether Russians are white; and if you think they are, and that whiteness is a foundational component in the determination of the West’s civilization’s identity, then Russians are members of the West.
What I am hoping is that Justin at least loses the aura built around him as a protype empathetic leader of globalism
Ethnic Russians are white. But how much of the actual population of Russia is in fact ethnically Russian (or a member of some other domestic white ethnicity)? And this is without getting into interesting ethnopsychological issues and their relation to racial identity. Is everyone who is racially white also psychologically white? Biden and Trudeau and Merkel are all whites, just racially disloyal (and ideologically leftist) ones. But what about Bosnian Muslims? Are they “white”? Racially, they look as white, more or less, as Serbs (so do many, though not a majority of, Turks). But ethnocivilizationally, can they still be called “Europeans”? What about Chechens?
If we separate babies from their parents, then whiteness is purely a function of race (I think this likely, but am not absolutely certain of it; maybe there are slight behavioral genetic differences between intraracial sub-groups that could become apparent if the cohort under study were sufficiently large). But as long as white children are raised in ethnic families, what makes a “white man of the West” seems to involve more than simple racial biology.
Of course, Prof. Huntington was right. Russia does not belong to Western civilization. Yes, it has some part of its territory in Europe, but that does not matter – Türkey has some part of its territory in Europe too. Similarly, Ukraine does not belong to Western civilization too (perhaps, except for the smaller western regions taken by Stalin from Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and Romania, developed in Austria-Hungary and not particularly connected culturally, religiously and ethnically with the rest of Ukraine).
Another thing is that I would use the word “Eurasian” rather than the word “Orthodox” in relation to these nations, meaning by Eurasian, first of all, the countries that are the heirs of the Türkic-Slavic symbiosis of the “Golden Horde”/Altyn Orda or “Great Ulus”/Ulug Ulus, i.e. e. state edifice of the western branch of the Genghisides. Note: I write Türkic, and not Osman Türkish.I mean Kıpçaklar/Tatarlar of the Great Steppe/ Uly Dala, not Anatolian Osmans.
This is how the Russian Eurasians of the first half of the twentieth century saw it, such as Prince Nikolai Trubetskoy and Professor Peter Savitsky, and later the outstanding geographer and historian Lev Gumilyov. The Westernization, forcibly introduced by the both anti-Russian and anti-Türkic semi-colonial regime, starting from the time of the Russophobe Peter the Great, was rightfully designated by these scholars as the “Romanov-German yoke.” Moreover, this Westernization has always been limited to a narrow circle of the corrupt elite and has never been perceived by the broad masses of the native peoples.
Perhaps, the final test determining whether Russia best fits as part of Western Civ or is its own thing will take place in the next couple decades. We’ll find out if they follow the West into suicide by multiculturalism or resist.
By the way, here’s the opinion of one of the great Russian writers you named.
Russians are as much Asiatics as European. The mistake of our policy for the past two centuries has been to make the people of Europe believe that we are true Europeans. … We have bowed ourselves like slaves before the Europeans and have only gained their hatred and contempt. It is time to turn away from ungrateful Europe. Our future is in Asia. – Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Spengler wrote in “Die Jahre der Entscheidung”, that Russia is a Master of Asia, more, it IS Asia. (Rußland ist der Herr Asiens. Rußland ist Asien.)
He wrotes, with reference to Bolshevism:
Dies Bolschewistenregiment ist kein Staat in unserem Sinne, wie es das petrinische Rußland gewesen war. Es besteht wie Kiptschak, das Reich der „goldenen Horde” in der Mongolenzeit, aus einer herrschenden Horde — kommunistische Partei genannt — mit
Häuptlingen und einem allmächtigen Khan und einer etwa hundertmal so zahlreichen unterworfenen, wehrlosen Masse. Von echtem Marxismus ist da sehr wenig, außer in Namen und Programmen.
In Wirklichkeit besteht ein tatarischer Absolutismus, der die Welt aufwiegelt und ausbeutet, ohne auf Grenzen zu achten, es seien denn die der Vorsicht, verschmitzt, grausam, mit dem Mord als alltäglichem Mittel der Verwaltung, jeden Augenblick vor der Möglichkeit, einen Dschingiskhan auftreten zu sehen, der Asien und Europa aufrollt.
Der echte Russe ist in seinem Lebensgefühl Nomade geblieben, ganz wie der Nordchinese (O.S. means of course not Han-Chinese, but Altaic peoples like Uyghurs, Qazaqs and Halha, who live in the Eastern Türkestan and Inner Mongolie – K.B.), der Mandschu und Turkmene. Heimat ist ihm nicht das Dorf, sondern die endlose Ebene, das Mütterchen Rußland. Die Seele dieser unendlichen Landschaft treibt ihn zum Wandern ohne Ziel. Der »Wille« fehlt.
Of course, Russia is ANOTHER Asia than China, Korea or Japan. But it is because Russia is not East-Asia, but Steppe-Asia, Siberian-Altaic Asia, Asia of the Türkic-Mongol World.
Ok, Maybe Russia is not as European as Germany or France. But when I think of Asia, I think first of China. Despite, your quotation from the great Fyodor Dostoyevsky, I think the Russian people as a whole, are much closer to Europe than Asia. Another thing I forgot to mention in my original comment is race. Russians are white; Chinese are yellow. Since race, for CC readers, is of primary importance, that would certainly count against Huntington and you and FD for saying that the Russians are more Asiatic than European. I would be very interested to hear what Greg has to say about this.
I agree with you. I was in Ukraine this year and felt totally at home like in Europe. But for their sake, I hope they distance themselves from Europe and reorient towards Asia.
Russians can reject liberal westernization as it has been reconstituted since WWII and still be considered members of the white-European race. Those who reject Peter the Great as a Russophobe who brought “alien” western values are ignoring that without westernization, as it was understood at that time, Russia would not have been able to compete with the Europeans. The argument that Russians = Türkic-Slavic symbiosis carries some validity but less than the argument that Russians who are not race mixed are Slavic. Culture also matters, and slavic Russians are Christian, the language they speak is Slavic and they are white.
Russia is not “Western” in the strictest sense. The Orthodox culture Huntington talks about is different, but it is still part of the European world.
There’s Western Europe, and there’s Eastern Europe. Not sure what the issue is here.
And Central Europe.
Eastern Europe is only a political construct, but not cultural reality. 1989 the Western border of Eastern Europe was on the intra-German border. 1991 it was on the border of the former Soviet Union. Then the Baltic States got independence and became Central Europe, not more Eastern Europe.
For me the word “Eastern Europe” is like an euphemism, a polite way to say “Not Europe”. or “geographically Europe, but culturally not”. So as the words “Eastern Slavs” are a polite way to say “not Slavs, but slavized Fins, Balts, Sarmatians/Alans and Türks”. The Eastern Slavs speac Slavic languages. But the Haitians speak French, and they are NOT the French. And the Jamaicans speak English, and they are NOT the English.
Eastern Europe roughly means “Orthodox Europe” and Western Europe means Catholic (or formerly Catholic) Europe.
“The Clash of Civilizations” … is a silly attempt to circumvent the notion of race in favor of “culture”.
The bigger dangers come from race-mixing not culture-mixing.
If one gets a stupid foreign ideea, if he he’s sane enough, he will be able to shed it easily if it harms him. But if the mixing is in his blood he can not do anything about it.
There is no “clash of civilisations”, there is only “the clash of races”. The whites have been manipulated ideologicaly to kill and hate themselves, while giving away for free everything that really counts.
Anyway, the book is full of cultural errors.
The first and one of the most annoying is the demarcation he makes between West and the Orthodox sphere. He might as well have been a soviet or Russian agent.
Well, civilization is more than just race. Back when Huntington was writing it wasn’t so apparent how terrible the racial situation would become so quickly, except to extremely marginalized people like William Pierce. Maybe SH took it for granted that Western countries would at their core still be racially European. Now, with Whites making up only 40% of first graders in USA, the list of civilizations would have to be revised – the West is a big question mark. But maybe you’re right that SH was a typical cuck avoiding race.
Culture is the direct product of race.
The race issue was evident for many at least since the beginning of the twentieth century. Many of them presented here on CC.
Beside Pierce, was the great Revilo Pendleton Oliver. I’m holding them dear.
Agree with both of your points. But normies, including academics, had no idea about the speed of the replacement. For example, 25 years ago London was White. Even now, people in our circles underestimate it probably cause it’s so skewed by age. In one more generation, i.e. 25-30 years, the White proportion of first graders in the US will drop to around 25%. Probably not something SH was thinking about.
I am a big fan of Oliver, but anyway the culture and the race are different things, but both are important. There are nations with great cultures, but without an uniform race. The Italians are not an uniform race, but they have their own culture. The Germans, the Spaniard, the Russians, the Anatolian Türks, the Ukrainians, the French – they all are people of someway different racial characters, but with unified culture. And yes, there is THE EUROPEAN CULTURE, but there is not ONE EUROPEAN RACE.
Yes, and I would add, that Oliver considered the Orthodox Christianity as another kind of Christianity, but not as a part of Western culture. For him the Orthodox Christs were not Western People. He simply wrote, that like the Earth is a sphere, the Christianity is a religion of the West.
And saying so I do not want to say, that Russians/Ukrainians/Greeks etc. are superior or inferior to the Western peoples. No, they are simply different. Someway alike, but different. And this difference is wort to be kept. That is the really positive diversity and no way the cause to any hostility.
Christianity is a foreign toxic ideea. Christianity can not define the race today. It only indicates that the Whites are not as sane as it should.
Many Whites are clinging to Christianity due to history, due to a certain degree of localization of Christianity. But today is not the case anymore.
I think there is no big difference between a wooden church and an antic pagan temple/altar. I have my theory here. Christianity stole the holydays, the symbols, the legends, even the architecture and malformed everything. While we are longing for symbols, rituals, community, trust. But everything is deformed by Christianity.
Christianity should be discarded ASAP. It has no purpose and should not define our race.
Christianity is the natural parent of communism. Now they work hand in hand.
Huntington opens his book saying that kinship, blood ties, common ancestry are still very important at the civilizational scale, but only to argue that modernization has been reinforcing the ethnic-racial ancestral ties in the non-west, from which point he criticizes those who assume that the “universal” values of the West come naturally with modernization. “The idea of a universal civilization finds little support in other civilizations.” He calls upon American policy makers to recognize that the liberal values of the West are not universal but particular to the West. He then relies on the universality of the West to avoid making ethnic-ancestral ties important to the West. The West is a cultural, not an ethnic entity. This way his book made it into mainstream conservatism. But if the values of the West are particular to this civilization, what is it about this particularity that generated universal values for itself? Why call these values “universal” or the West a “universal civilization” without a racial identity, if the West is merely a particular culture? Why did Huntington assume that the universality of the West precluded any racial particularity? In my estimation the West is a universal civilization because the European race developed a particular predisposition to think beyond kinship-tribal ties, to formulate universal truths and strive for the highest. Science is part of this way of thinking, and this aspect of the West’s universality was appropriated by the non-West as a matter of geopolitical survival, but the liberal side not so much, and the striving for universal perfection less so, with kinship ties still remaining very poweful outside the West.
Occidental ideea is not universal. It is specific for whites. Extrapolated to other races is dangerous, especially for the white race. It does nothing else than arming other races against our race.
But also, leaving other whites (Eastern Europe) on the outside is even more dangerous. It is seen as brother treason. When you have the same blood (demonstrable) you tend and are atracted to a certain culture. Christianity, communism, etc and so on are imposed by outside hostile forces and have nothing to do with the race.
SH ideea was perfect in the hands of Russians and their genocidal and imperial agenda.
Now, why the Russians are not attracted to the western ideeas? Many of them are, of course. But also they are lied, manipulated, sicked against their own interest. It also raises the question of how much mongol-tatar blood have the Russians.
Look how many non-whites faces and names in their government.
Here comes the biggest flaw of “The Clash …”.
Sorry, my previous comment should have been addressed to both Diomedes and Kok Bori. One mentioned Dostoyevsky and one mentioned Russia being part of Asia.
I suddenly remembered that the Romanovs were related to English Royalty. There is picture of Nicholas II and George V who were cousins standing side by side. Easy to find with Duck Duck Go. They look like identical twins. Does anybody think that any member of the Royal Family in England would have been allowed to marry a Chinese person in those days?
Well, that´s correct. Both “Romanovs” and “Windsors” were Germans. Because actually “Romanovs” were Holstein-Gottorp and “Windsors” were Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha. But in Russia those “Romanovs” were something like a colonial administration, and native Russians a couple of centuries have been something like aboriginal slaves, who could be bought and sold like “stocks and stones” – and so till 1861. Russia was only one of the big powers of that time, where the native, formally state-forming people were seen as “Untermenschen” by their own Royals and slavemasters.
Idk, looking back, Huntington seems like a proto neocon propagandist, whether wittingly or not, who can tell. That a conflict between the west and Islam is coming and to be expected, and that “Russia is not a part of the west,” sort of cleave to the preoccupations of the neocons, do they not?
Huntington proposed a taxonomic spectrum of relationships from friends to allies to rivals to antagonists to enemies. I have found it very useful and I think that including it in the Dissident Right toolbox could be very helpful to us as we press forward in the confusing jungle, oh sorry, rain forest, of our time.
We “must learn to distinguish among our true friends who will be with us and we with them through thick and thin; opportunistic allies with whom we have some but not all interests in common; strategic partner-competitors with whom we have a mixed relationship; antagonists who are rivals but with whom negotiation is possible; and unrelenting enemies who will try to destroy us unless we destroy them first.”
This unfortunately fails to take into account that the demographic engine-room is no longer solely in the Arabic world but is in the process of being transferred –imported — to Europe, which is still on track to become Bat Ye’or’s Eurabia.
Bat Ye’or’s “Eurabia”?
It implies that Europe is becoming hostile to Israel and the Tribe, and that the White man is duty bound to protect the Jews from the wrath of Jewish enemies (read: victims).
Her chief concern is her own tribe NOT White Europeans.
I find it odd that nobody so far has mentioned Huntington’s lesser known book “Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity”. In it he clearly takes a racialist position, meaning he understood that race matters without getting too explicit to reach a wider audience.
Amazing to me how some Harvard dude could write a book like this barely 30 years ago and today this type of thought is relegated almost exclusively to anons on the Dissident Right.
“1919 Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George, and Georges Clemenceau together virtually controlled the world. Sitting in Paris, they determined what countries would exist and which would not . . . A hundred years later, no small group of statesmen will be able to exercise comparable power…”
The Sub Saharan African population has multiplied ten fold since then and Asians have come close to that, so their collective population boom has magnified the influence Wilson and George had.
Good overall review of a complex work.
{Huntington considers Muslim migration to only be a problem in the near future (in 1996), but it might have required a close reading of Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints for him to realize just how serious the demographic relocation would become:
Population pressure combined with economic stagnation promotes Muslim migration to Western and other non-Muslim societies, elevating immigration as an issue in those societies.}
I just checked my copy, and Huntington does refer to “Jean Raspail’s searing novel”, and mentions it explicitly in a footnote on the next page.
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