Asia faces a civilizational war

by Archishman Raju

‘Hope’ by Sliman Mansour.

“I always wonder
what they think the niggers are doing
while they, the pink and alabaster pragmatists,
are containing
Russia  
and defining and re-defining and re-aligning
China,
nobly restraining themselves, meanwhile,
from blowing up that earth
which they have already
blasphemed into dung:
….
My days are not their days.
My ways are not their ways.
I would not think of them,
one way or the other,
did not they so grotesquely
block the view
between me and my brother.
 
And, so, I always wonder:
can blindness be desired?
Then, what must the blinded eyes have seen
to wish to see no more!”

James Baldwin - Staggerlee wonders

The news from West Asia today makes one wonder with James Baldwin if blindness can be desired. This last ugly act of a decadent western establishment supporting the Nazi state of Israel will be remembered by history. Could they sink lower than they have already? Perhaps they can no longer restrain themselves and are ready to blow up a world rather than accept that they are no longer at the center of it. 

The Israeli leadership is salivating at the thought of a regional war with Iran with the help of its backers in the West. They have sunk to a level of barbarity previously unseen. The Israeli state and society is in urgent need of a de-Nazification campaign. 

This should not be taken as mere rhetoric but is the inescapable conclusion of the events that we have witnessed. Nor does the status of Jews as victims of the Nazis provide any justification for Israeli acts. As the South Africans have documented, the Israeli intent has been single-minded: the complete elimination of the Palestinian people as such. Take the comments of the Israeli minister for “Heritage”, “The north of the Gaza Strip, more beautiful than ever. Everything is blown up and flattened, simply a pleasure for the eyes” or the motivational speech given to Israeli soldiers by a reservist “Be triumphant and finish them off and don’t leave anyone behind. Erase the memory of them. Erase them, their families, mothers and children. These animals can no longer live”. Such messages are commonplace in the Israeli media and popular discourse.

The Israeli Prime Minister said in his Christmas message, “This is a battle not only of Israel against these barbarians, it’s a battle of civilization against barbarism”. Clearly, the Israelis are attacking an entire civilization with the intent to totally destroy it. Despite the Israeli state engaging in one of the worst and most cowardly military campaigns in recent history, and possibly in modern history as such, which has destroyed Gaza and killed mostly women and children, 34% of the Israeli population believes the military campaign has not gone far enough. 

This state can not persist without the support of Israel’s western backers who are in a symbiotic relationship with Israel. Their depth of the relationship is exposed by the punishment meted out to the American college students who show the moral courage to protest against this immoral and unjust war. What are the Western elite thinking? They continue to provoke Russia and are considering providing Ukraine with long-range missiles that can target inside Russian territory. All this while they work towards their main objective, which is to “contain” China. People around the world can only assume that it is a leadership that has completely lost its mind. It lies openly and shamelessly, makes promises that it does not keep. None of this is new, but it is the scale and brazenness that has reached a new historic low. 

While the main objective of the Western leadership has been to counter China and Russia, they continue to spread chaos in the rest of Asia. In South Asia, the western leadership has worked in more devious ways by spreading instability and color revolutions. Most recently, they have successfully manufactured a color revolution against Sheikh Hasina and put in place Mhd. Yunus, a person with no political experience but innumerable western accolades. The principal achievement of Mhd Yunus has been the opening up of the most poor and vulnerable to international finance. He has thus obtained powerful backers like Hillary Clinton who have historically supported him and continue to do so. 

It was only last year that Imran Khan was arrested a few months after an attempted assassination. His great crime had been to openly criticize the West. As he said in a public meeting addressing himself to the West, “What do you think of us? Are we your slaves?”. Sri Lanka continues to struggle under its financial debt to the IMF. South Asia is going through a period of instability and crisis. 

While doing all this, the West claims to fight for “democracy”. But “democracy” is just a code-word for the supremacy of western civilization. It always has been. The British were fighting for democracy even when they were colonizing us. They argued that we were simply not “fit” to democratically rule. 

One must understand that what all of this points to is that the West is involved in a full-scale civilizational war against Asia. In all this, the West has the support of the “good” Asians: Japan, South Korea and Taiwan who, however, are less than 5% of Asia’s population. 

The role of India in Asia thus will be closely watched by the world. India’s position carries historical weight as a result of our clear foreign policy since the days of Nehru and Indira Gandhi. The current Indian leadership has vacillated and failed to show any such clarity. What purpose does it serve to engage in the Quad and discussion of the “Indo-Pacific”, a totally artificial category meant to facilitate U.S. involvement in Asia? Why is there news of India providing military assistance to Israel? The people must work to pressure the leadership to take a clear stand on these issues otherwise India will be left behind by history. 

The other side of our changing times is the emerging new world order. China facilitated the Beijing Declaration on ending Division and Strengthening Palestinian Unity uniting several different political forces in Palestine. Sergei Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister speaking at the U.N. condemned the Israeli attacks on Lebanon which tampered with and blasted pagers, as terrorist. He said,  “Another outrageous example of terrorist methods as a means of attaining political aims is the inhuman attack on Lebanon by means of turning civilian technologies into deadly weapons. This crime must be investigated immediately,”. 

The Russian Prime Minister has just traveled to Tehran signaling their support for the Iranian leadership. China and Iran have already signed a 25 year strategic cooperation agreement. The Russian leadership is looking to enter into a strategic partnership with Iran. Similarly, Russia entered into a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership with North Korea. 

One of the most significant developments is the rise of BRICS. It is now clear that BRICS will become an alternative to Western institutions. There is increasing discussion on the possibility of de-dollarization. While de-dollarization will still take some time and effort, BRICS is slowly becoming the center of a new democratic world order. BRICS has exceeded the G7, the grouping of white nations (and Japan) in terms of GDP per capita and will only continue to grow. 

There is a need to theoretically understand and explain our moment. Samuel Huntington in his “Clash of Civilizations” argued that civilizations were the right unit for historical and geopolitical analysis rather than nations. In this, he was building on Toynbee and others who themselves took from the Arab historian Ibn Khaldun. 

This concept of civilization is gaining more and more importance in our times. It was brought up by Vladmir Putin in the Valdai discussion club meeting last year. China also started a Global Civilization Initiative last year which had three aspects to it: 1) A respect for civilizational diversity, 2) Increasing people-people exchanges, 3) Exploring different civilizational paths to modernization. 

The question of a civilizational path to modernization has become pressing in our times. However, the question of civilization must be put within a historical framework. We must recognize that the enemy of civilizational diversity is the supremacy of western civilization. Second, civilization must not simply be taken to mean culture in the abstract but must rather be seen as a dynamic entity shaped by the masses of people. The dialectical understanding of historical movement in terms of civilizations remains an outstanding intellectual challenge. In Asia, India and China, given their long history of peace and civilizational exchange (temporarily interrupted in the modern era) are uniquely positioned to take on this task. 

Both Huntington and Toynbee display their racism in their treatment of Africa. Both consider it doubtful that Africa has had civilization at all. If we are to fully understand the paradoxical development of Western civilization, it can only be done by an epistemology that gives Africa its proper place in history. 

There is a need to struggle not just for maintaining and strengthening civilizational diversity but further to fight for intercivilizational unity. This fight necessarily involves the struggle against the supremacy of Western civilization and therefore must be based in the unity of Asia and Africa. The struggle against the Western civilizational War is in the intercivilizational unity with Asia and Africa at its center.