Newsletter: January, 02

Table of Contents:

[The West Remains the West] [On Islam and the West] [The USSR's Unacknowledged Dead] [The Fortunes of the War Museum] [Voices of Freedom]

Editor’s Remarks

Welcome to Canada’s first war of the 21^st Century. With the departure of a quarter of our Navy to the Indian Ocean, the deployment of six support aircraft, and now a light (e.g. small) battle group to Afghanistan, Canadians have gone off into combat once more. However, while the individual characters of most of our servicemen and women remain as good as they ever were — they lack the training, equipment, doctrine, and political support that they need.

The material and political handicaps that our military has endured in recent decades not only endangers our fellow citizens when they are sent into harm’s way --- as they so often are — it also reflects a fundamental immaturity at the heart of Canadian society and our leadership.

Canada was born in conflict and strategic rivalries. War and the threat of war shaped our early history and our development into a nation. Finally, it guaranteed our independence — an independence we seldom exercised until we gained a confidence in ourselves on the battlefield in the First World War, and in our impressive overall effort in the Second World War.

Canadians fought in both World Wars, in South Africa and Korea. Our aviators also engaged in combat in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the bombing of Serbia. While "Peacekeeping", Canadians fought armed opponents in the Congo, Cyprus, Bosnia and Croatia, and endured violence in a number of other missions. Our 20^th Century was a violent one and there is no guarantee that the 21^st Century will be much different. We must look to the state of our military and their arms.

The pursuit of Bin Laden was not yet concluded at the end of 2001; nor would it be completely safe to publish the obituary for the Al-Qaeda network; but events in Afghanistan have gone very nicely so far. This is so because the Western world displayed — as it almost invariably has for the last 2,500 years — some of its most fundamental characteristics when confronted by crisis. These characteristics include a massive economic, financial, and technological strength harnessed to political pluralism and an unmatched talent for battlefield lethality. The latest book by Victor Davis Hanson, Carnage and Culture, explains why this is so.

Carnage and Culture is a refutation of the primacy of geographical and environmental determinants of history advanced by Fernand Braudel (A History of Civilizations) or by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs and Steel. While accepting that all human beings are born with similar raw capacities for courage, compassion or creativity, Hanson throws down a gauntlet in declaring that not all cultures are created equal. This is a point that has just been proved yet again in recent months.

Some of the most fundamental characteristics of Western culture are political resilience, technological superiority, raw economic power and a deadly talent for battlefield killing. Hanson points out that these were clearly evident when the Greeks confronted the Persians, and can be traced through Rome, and then on into Western Europe after Rome’s collapse -- where these tendencies were weak but alive nonetheless. Thus, they were successfully transmitted to Medieval Europe and so down to us.

The basis for this clear political, financial, technological, productive and military superiority lies in an almost unique Western trait… we don’t hold with the idea of unchallengeable authorities and generally cherish the right to dissent (if not actually letting our dissenters always go unscathed). The cultivation of individuality, flexibility and an innovative spirit in every human endeavor gave the Greeks a decisive edge in their wars with Persia, and in every Western vs. Non-Western war since. These let us advance new ideas, experiment, exercise initiative, embrace success and discard failure more readily than other cultures do.

The net result outside of the military sphere is that Western Society is better able to provide for its members than other societies — except when they adopt Western practices. However, adopting the form of Western practices and institutions is only a second-rate solution. Western prosperity, resilience and potential really only come when fully embracing Western ways of thinking and behavior in every sense; thus in effect, becoming Western in form and content. This leads to the point that Western superiority is based on social and cultural institutions: Individual appearance or "race" has nothing to do with it.

Hanson points out that in almost every conflict between Western forces and those of non-Western cultures, the Westerners have soundly thrashed their battlefield opposition. In the battle of Cunaxa in 401 BC, 10,300 Greek hoplites destroyed one wing of the massive Persian Army, while having only one man injured by an arrow to the face (and Xenophon, who was at the battle, was probably not exaggerating). In the same part of the world, 2,390 years later, 40,000 Iraqi troops were killed in the six weeks of the 1991 Gulf War, while inflicting less than 200 fatalities on the Coalition that was liberating Kuwait.

The terrorism of September 11^th in the US marks the first major attack by a Muslim culture inside the core of a Western state since the Turks besieged Vienna in 1683. One of the main motivations behind the terrorist attack was a hatred for the West, and the United States in particular, because of the strength and resilience of our culture — especially when compared to that of Islam, which is unsuccessfully struggling to keep up. The use of terrorism is also a reflection of the Islamic world’s basic inability to successfully confront Western power in any other sphere of activity over the past century.

The rapid destruction of the Taliban’s hold on Afghanistan and the attendant damage to the Al-Qaeda network is another testament to Western power. With no local base, the US and its Coalition partners were able to leverage their way into access to local airspace, and to mobilize local allies to act as ‘game-beaters’ for a potent combination of special forces and airpower. The Western willingness to use local allies is a salient feature of its war-making among other cultures — the British used Indian troops to control India; Cortez generated an anti-Aztec rebellion; and Julius Caesar raised a Legion of Gauls to complete his conquests.

Typically, Western troops have the most to dread when fighting each other — witness the incredible violence of our World Wars. It also says much when "friendly fire" killed more American troops in the first month in Afghanistan than the Taliban and Al-Qaeda ever managed to do.

Nor was the direct destruction wrought by Osama Bin Laden’s minions that decisive — excepting the thousands of personal tragedies caused by the attack. Many of the corporations and businesses that lost office space and records were able to reconstitute themselves within days of the destruction of the World Trade Center — showing the flexibility and resilience that is normally characteristic of military formations in a major war. The worst economic effect of the attack was a loss of confidence and the interruptions caused to air traffic. However, the long term economic damage wrought by the attack shows every sign of being swiftly overcome in the near future. Economically, what is a problem today will be a fiscal hiccup in a few years from now.

In recent decades it has been fashionable to denigrate Western cultural superiority and even to assume that all cultures are of equal worth. This multicultural construct of the New Left is based on the self-loathing that typifies its ideology. The direct slap in the face received on September 11th should put an end to this notion, but probably won’t. Our culture, that of the Western World (although imperfect), is superior to all others in its strength and ability to provide for human needs and we should not be ashamed to admit it. People are equal — in capability at birth — but their cultures are what let their capabilities be fully developed; and Western culture is demonstrably the best in the world at this.

However, the destruction of the architects of September’s terrorism will not spell an end to this crisis. It is very likely that the 21^st Century will generate a Western vs. Islamic conflict of the kind Samuel Huntingdon feared in The Clash of Civilizations, and it may well be that a similar confrontation is brewing with China. As the decades unfold, one of the most vital strategic assets of the Western world will be its own sense of itself. It is time we rekindled a necessary degree of cultural chauvinism and use it to recognize our true worth and reinforce our real strengths.

Note: An earlier criticism of Islam, the January 1998 article "Can Islam Cope With Modernity?" has been added to the archive in the Institute’s new website located at: www.mackenzieinstitute.com

"Terror struck into the hearts of the enemies is not only a means, it is an end in itself. Once the condition of terror into the opponent’s heart is obtained hardly anything is left to be achieved. It is the point where the means and the end meet and merge. Terror is not a means of imposing decision upon the enemy, it is the decision we wish to impose on him."

-- Brigadier S.K. Malik, The Quranic Concept of War (Pakistan, 1979)

One of the impulses that shaped the Second World War was the Nazi belief that a total transformation of society could only be achieved in an all-encompassing war. Once this war began, the Frontgemeinschaft of the front-line troops would lead to the building of a Volksgemeinschaft of all Germans. This ideological impulse might arguably be as much of a cause of the Nazi invasion of the USSR as any other consideration.

Now, 57 years after the end of the Nazi threat, the West faces a new ideology that hopes war can achieve a total transformation of Islamic society while damaging ours. The terror unleashed in the autumn of 2001 is designed with the same purpose that the Nazis hoped for; external violence to cause internal change.

Ideologies cannot be defeated, they must be either totally discredited — in the minds of those the ideologues purport to lead -- or they must be destroyed. The iron glove that slapped the faces of the Western democracies in WW II is back, with a different fist inside it. For the West, the choice is the same — achieve survival in victory or our own destruction in defeat. However, the Islamic Fundamentalists have parallels beyond Nazism.

In the Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union, the West faced an ideological opponent that had an attitude "What’s mine is mine, what’s yours is up for negotiation." The attitude had simple roots — peace was only possible when the final society, communism, was universal. Accordingly, areas controlled by the Soviet Union were a part of the world that belonged to the emerging final society and were thus at peace, and everyone else would inevitably come to know peace only when they also became properly communist as well.

The Islamic faith has a similar construct. Islamic societies are part of the final society, everything else is just a matter of time. Islamic societies do have a place for Christians and Jews, as more heavily taxed second-class citizens in law and in status. Everyone else is to be converted, enslaved, or killed. Christian and Jewish governed societies are not yet a part of Islam and therefore retain their place on the "to-do" list of places to conquer.

In the end, the Soviet ideology was thoroughly discredited and defeated. Things may be more difficult this time. For a start, Islam is a religion and has been around a lot longer than either Nazism or Communism.

The Islamic World knows that it has problems, but only a few rare figures within it have ever recognized that their problems result from the faith that created them. Islam is one of the three largest religions in the World, but unlike Christianity and Buddhism, it is often incapable of dealing with the world in which its adherents must live.

Buddhism does not recognize the ‘reality’ of the world and whatever one does in the world — regardless of position — is important only in terms of the ‘merit’ it allows one to achieve on the path to enlightenment and escape. Christianity has been immensely flexible in its 2,000 year history, in that its structure and organization has constantly evolved while leaving the core tenets intact. Also, the Christian is expected to view the world as a place where faith and conduct contribute to an individual’s eternal reward later.

Buddha and Christ never dictated the structure and shape of society. Mohammed certainly did, and much of the Quran is the outline for relationships and structures in human society. In the three centuries after his death, religious jurisprudence (clergy and judges are the same people) cemented the rest of the law into place and largely put a final seal on the evolution of Islamic institutions.

The aggressive component of Islam is very real. When Osama Bin Laden fulminated about Western "Crusaders" he wasn’t being honest with himself or his listeners. Western Crusaders did temporarily occupy Palestine and Lebanon in the Middle Ages: But perhaps the Spanish term Reconquista — a reference to the long wars to vanquish the Muslim realms in Spain -- is more accurate in describing the Crusades. Islam was spread almost entirely by the sword and overran Christian Egypt, Christian North Africa, most of Christian Spain; Christian Syria and much of Christian Byzantium before Urban II called for the First Crusade in 1096.

Since the end of the Crusades, Islamic nations conquered the rest of what is now Turkey, overran much of the Balkans and twice put Vienna under siege. They also menaced all of the Mediterranean littoral until defeated at the Battle of Lepanto and at the siege of Malta. Muslim pirates raided most of the Mediterranean until 1830 when the French — tired of centuries of Maritime rapine and robbery — occupied Algiers and Tunis. If Bin Laden wants to play ‘historical grievances’ he really ought to recall that the rules of this game can work both ways. Moreover, if Christianity operated by the same rules that Islam does, Islam might not exist right now except as a minor cult in a corner of Arabia and an obscure historical footnote.

Since the attacks of September 11^th, a lot of commentators have made apologies for Islam and called it one of the World’s great religions (which, by dint of its numerous adherents, it is), and a peaceful faith -- which it certainly is not. Even today, violent Muslim persecution of Christians continues in Indonesia, Nigeria and the Sudan. Again, what is Islamic must remain Islamic and what is not is up for negotiation.

Christianity has a long and spotted history too — but it has some important characteristics that are not shared with Islam. First, the use of Christianity to justify violence is antithetical to Christianity itself. While violent men have used Christianity to justify themselves, they have only done so by violating its true nature — a point often remarked on by their own contemporaries and by history. In Islam, the faith itself justified violent wars of aggression from the very beginning of the religion. Christ admonished Peter for picking up a sword; Mohammed directly encouraged murder, massacre and battle during his own lifetime.

Secondly, Christianity (like Buddhism) is ultimately about individuals. Christ talked about single human beings and told them to behave decently to one another. He gave respect to lepers, tax collectors, prostitutes, and a foreign soldier. Islam is a religion of very comprehensive laws derived from the Quran: the Sunna (the collections of hadith — traditions of Mohammed): the qiyas which are the body of opinions written by qadi and mufti, who are religious judges; and the Ijma which is the consensus of a group of judges representing the community.

The difference is evident over centuries of evolution. Christianity has created a series of institutions — most notably the Catholic Church — and a series of communities, but these institutions and the accretion of customs and laws they have generated are always subject to change. The core beliefs that define Christianity were first listed in 322 AD (the Nicean/Apostles Creed) and have not changed since -- they don’t need to -- while Christian institutions have continually evolved and shifted. Islamic doctrine, and the faith itself, has remained more or less static since 1000 AD because the Quran, the Sunna and the Qiyas finished development around then.

To be fair, Islam did run into trouble in the next three hundred years as the Islamic heartlands faced invaders from the North (the Turks), the East (the Mongols) and Crusaders from Europe. The crises toppled existing political elites and their replacements made the bid for legitimacy to support their tenuous authority by literally being "holier than thou". This example has continued down through the centuries as ambitious leaders have embraced a rigorous interpretation of Islam as a tool of governance and societal domination — a tactic displayed once again in Afghanistan by the Taliban.

The net result of this unhappy history is that Islam has become moribund and is probably beyond reform. It certainly has a limited place in the modern world. The Islamic nations are the most violent in the world today — both in terms of internal warfare and state vs. state conflicts. In December, 2001 Freedom House — which monitors political and economic freedom as well as human rights around the world — observed that these tend to be at their lowest ebb in Muslim countries. Of the 10 most "unfree" countries in the World, seven are Islamic nations. The rest of the world is making progress towards individual freedom, the Muslim world is not.

This is not say that there is no individual merit to Islam — hundreds of millions of perfectly ordinary and decent human beings practice it and observe most of the duties demanded of them: Prayer, alms-giving, fasting (during Ramadan particularly). The fourth duty is that of Pilgrimage (Haj) to Mecca although jet travel has made this less of an ordeal than it used to be. Jihad (or exertion) is the fifth duty. This fifth duty does not necessarily entail war-making, but its most usual interpretations imply protecting the faith, overcoming non-believers, and purifying those who have fallen away from conformity.

This last point is the most sinister. While there is a long history of violent enforcement of conformity in Christianity — this was usually collective action against a very recognizable heretical movement (like the Cathars or Arians) that might have destroyed Christianity itself if unchallenged. In other cases, particularly during Christianity’s most shameful era in 14^th to the 16^th Centuries, the enforcement of conformity was normally a legal matter — often practiced with a diligence and fairness that exceeded contemporary civil legal practices. It also says much that we remain disturbed by the misuse of religious authority that appeared in those years.

In Islam, Jihad is a ready—made tool for the destruction of moderate or secular leaders by any individual who cares to undertake it. A liberal Muslim (of whom there have been many) who determines that perhaps it is time to re-interpret the older writings and that attitudes towards others should become moderated, can be harassed, persecuted and killed by any individual who feels ready to justify it on theological grounds. This is another reason why Islam has not evolved in any considerable manner over the last few centuries.

In the end, Islam’s inflexible nature and violent foundations will ensure that Islamic nations remain unstable at home and uneasy about the outside world. Nazism and Soviet Communism may turn out to have been simple challenges in comparison

Recently, a geologist acquainted with the Institute was conducting a survey of potential ore sites near Magadan and in the nearby Kolyma river valley. These are in the far north and east of Russia, atop the Sea of Okhotsk. The geologist had been little aware of the grim history of the place, until he kept noticing human remains scattered about campsites and survey locations. There are millions of shallow graves in the region, and the frost is forever bringing bones and skulls up to surface -- as if the dead are begging to be remembered. But few people visit this lonely area and almost nobody wants to recall who the dead were and why they died.

Auschwitz (or more properly, the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex of paired camps) is well remembered. Statesmen who visit Poland are expected to visit the site of the old Nazi death camp and it is a symbol of the many other sites that served the same function — the systemic degradation and destruction of huge numbers of human beings. Other sites associated with the Nazi’s mass murders are commemorated or preserved in one degree or another. Hundreds of histories record what was done, and what was done at Auschwitz will probably be recalled for centuries to come.

There is no such memorial for the victims of Soviet Communism. Their history has been chronicled — such as can be pieced together — but it has not been seared into anyone’s consciousness. Solzhenitsyn, who survived a term in a Soviet labour camp, was exiled for describing the Gulag archipelago. Most of the other books on Soviet mass murder have been written by foreigners, a very few of whom had first-hand experience of the system.

In addition to civilians killed during military operations or as hostages for acts of resistance, the Nazis deliberately murdered 10.5 million Slavs (Poles, Belorussians and Russians mostly), 5.3 million Jews, and 260 thousand Gypsies. All in all, according to Prof. R.J. Rummel — a leading scholar of mass murder -- they murdered 20.9 million people. The Soviets were far worse.

From the very first days of Lenin’s rule, until the last days of the regime in 1991, the Soviet system was a deadly one. While more likely to commit homicide through depraved indifference (e.g. through starvation and exposure), the Soviets killed somewhere around 61.9 million people according to Rummel’s estimates.

The bone-studded valleys and forests in the remote Kolyma region are not the only neglected gravesites in the former Soviet Union. The "archipelago" described by Solzhenitsyn was a large one that arched over the whole of the Soviet Union, and most major cities had a nearby site where the security forces could dump hundreds of thousands of bodies. But the Kolyma-Magadan camps were the nadir of the whole system and even Solzhenitsyn feared to describe it.

In 1991, the museum at the Auschwitz-Birkenau site estimated that between 1.2 and 1.5 million people were murdered at the camp, including some 800,000 Jews. Auschwitz remains an enduring symbol of Nazi atrocity and mass murder. The remote labour camps of Magadan and the Kolyma were an interconnected complex that probably claimed 3 million lives -- according to the best estimate of Robert Conquest in his book on the subject.

Germany has apologized over and over again for what it did. The vast majority of Germans feel a degree of shame for what was done, and the legacy of places like Auschwitz will hang over them for generations to come. In Russia, the legacy of the Gulags is seldom remarked on in public and most sites are left to decompose unmolested by mourners or monuments. It is extremely unlikely that the Germans will ever repeat the crimes they committed in the 1940s. This cannot be said for the peoples of what was the Soviet Union. Perhaps the soundless warning from the skulls in Kolyma is that the unacknowledged dead can always be joined by more.

While almost unrecorded in history, there is ample evidence to suggest that war and violence attended Canada’s Aboriginal peoples. The European settlement of Newfoundland and Quebec began as the nation-states of Europe positioned themselves in a period of strategic rivalry. The long contest between France and England determined the future of Canada — a process that was advanced by American-British conflicts and tensions between 1775 and 1867. Canada’s first real sense of itself as a nation developed in the First World War, and was further enhanced in the Second.

One might think that, for a nation conceived, shaped, born and matured as a result of conflict, Canada might have a really good museum on the subject. Guess what? We don’t.

Recent years and Ottawa’s antipathy to all things military have been unkind to the Canadian War Museum. Even in the 1970s, the majority of its collection was warehoused (often poorly) as the tiny building on Sussex Drive and its pathetic annex couldn’t house anything but a tiny fraction of an impressive collection of artifacts, trophy arms and art. Our national capital’s third industry, after government and electronics, is tourism. Moreover, a capital city is supposed to be a centerpiece of a nation’s history and culture. Ottawa does have some impressive museums, and manages to construct a new one every few years.

Starting the 1970s, the Museum of Natural History (in an impressive Victorian edifice) was restored and the cultural/anthropological collection was moved to the vast new Museum of Civilization on the Hull side of the Ottawa River. Contemporary aesthetics being what they are, the cultural illuminati have raved about the appearance of the new Museum of Civilization. The sort of people who are incapable of seeing the emperor’s new clothes have likened the building to a giant cow-flop bleaching in the sun.

In the 1970s, a vast new museum of science and technology was developed. Since then, the National Art Gallery has shifted into an impressive new tower of glass and light. Even the Aviation Museum got improved quarters in a gigantic new hanger. The War Museum has quietly sat in its tiny little building — almost unwanted and unloved. Unfortunately, like a neglected nestling, its squawking got some attention in the 1990s. First, it was placed under the aegis of the Museum of Civilization — which meant that another museum would be able to supervise its budget and programs. Among the unwelcome proposals that were put forward was a suggestion to rename it as the "The Museum of Conflict and Peacekeeping".

Another proposal was to include a permanent Holocaust exhibit on the site. Notwithstanding the nature of the tragedy, it really had little to do with Canada at the time, nor would a memorial to the 5.3 million European Jews killed by the Nazis be all that fair to the other 15.6 million other victims of Nazi totalitarianism. Moreover, concentrating on the Nazis would exclude the victims of other totalitarian regimes that Canadians have fought against — including Imperial Japan, the Soviet Union and Communist China. In any event this proposal was shelved, but the controversy underscored the fact that the War Museum was critically short of space.

While the War Museum remains under the control of the Museum of Civilization, it was able to call on some excellent help to review its position and make suggestions for the future. Barney Danson, a veteran infantryman from WW II and one-time Liberal minister of Defence, was called on to look at the issue and Jack Granatstein, (one of Canada’s leading military historians) also became involved. The net result is that the War Museum is to receive a more spacious building — one that will permit a much larger portion of its art and artifacts to be displayed.

There is just one last hiccup. The former RCAF station at Rockcliffe Park in eastern Ottawa has plenty of room and is home to the Aviation Museum. It would have been a natural and perfect partnership to co-locate the War Museum beside it. Alas, when Jean Chretien first came to Ottawa, a large tract of slum housing and dirty industry lay sprawled to the west of the downtown core. The La Breton Flats was demolished as an eyesore and has remained undeveloped since. Sometime in the immediate future, the long empty area will be revitalized with a new series of developments. Unkind rumor has it this revitalization might be a tribute of sorts to a long-serving Prime Minister. The first of the buildings slated to go into the former slum area will be the new War Museum.

Oh well… perfect solutions are unnatural in Ottawa and complaints after long neglect are ungracious. Still, a Rockcliffe site for the new War Museum would have been perfect.

"Without security there is no wealth or health. Security is the foundation of civilization and our prosperity."

"Laws excessive in number and poor in quality not only discredit the law, they also undermine what our ancestors constructed, a relatively stable and spontaneous law of the land, common to all, and based on rules of general application."

"The defect [of failing to recognize a threat -- .ed] was not, strictly speaking, one of intellect or intelligence. Not even of judgment, in the abstract. It was, rather, one of the imagination. There are people of apparently high IQ, people of apparently great experience, who are unable to conceive of minds and men markedly different from themselves."

John Thompson is President of the Mackenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: mackenzieinstitute@bellnet.ca