Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies by Ian Buruma, Avishai Margalit Read Free Book Online Page A

only to Babylon or Rome. In comparison to this capital, what will London stand for, or Paris?” 18
    Germania left few traces. A row of street lamps, and a couple of embassies—of Italy and Japan—are about all that remains of Hitler’s great master plan. But the aspiration to rival the Occidental capitals by creating controlled cities on a Babylonian scale did not die with him. Such cities have sprung up, not in Europe, but in North Korea, China, and Southeast Asia. Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, is what Germania might have looked like, a neoclassical necropolis of outsize marble and granite temples to totalitarian power. As a warning of dictatorial hubris there stands the empty tower of the Ryugyong Hotel, a gigantic pyramid of 105 stories, which has been a concrete shell ever since the money ran out and the building was considered too unsafe to complete. The giant skyscrapers in Pudong, a new industrial suburb of Shanghai, are tributes of another kind, to the raw economic might of an authoritarian state: command capitalism stripped of political liberty. There are plans to erect the highest building on earth there. The glass and steel towers in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur are softer versions of the same. These cities have all, in their different ways, overcome the West by creating brutal copies of the civilization they hope to surpass.

[HEROES AND MERCHANTS]
    I N THE FIRST WEEK OF THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN, A British newspaper reporter spoke to a Taliban fighter on the Pakistani border. The young jihadi was full of confidence. The Americans, he said, would never win, for “they love Pepsi-Cola, but we love death.” This view of the West as soft, sickly, and sweet, a decadent civilization addicted to pleasure, reflected similar sentiments of warriors in other holy wars with the West. Japanese bombers, who tuned in to the jazz radio stations of Honolulu before smashing the U.S. fleet in Pearl Harbor, felt the same way. Three years later, when Japan was all but ruined, Japanese naval strategists thought the United States could still be defeated by a show of superior Japanese spirit: kamikaze attacks by young men who were asked to embrace death as a sacred sacrifice.
    Wars with the West are also part of European history, and the cult of death is not an exclusive trait of crazed Asiatics. In November 1914, the German army launched a series of futile attacks on the British in Flanders. More than 145,000 men died in the fog and the mud, many of them young volunteers from patriotic youth organizations. Some, like the kamikaze pilots thirty years later, were the brightest students from the best universities. This exercise in mass slaughter became known as the Battle of Langemark. According to legend, promoted by German nationalists between the wars, the young men marched to their almost certain death singing the “Deutschlandlied.” The famous words of Karl Theodor Körner, written a hundred years before in the Liberation War against Napoleon, were often evoked in remembrance: “Happiness lies only in sacrificial death.” 1
    As is true of all propaganda, the rhetoric of heroic self-sacrifice had historical precedents. After the Seven Years’ War—fought by European powers mainly over colonial possessions—had laid waste to large parts of Germany in the mid-eighteenth century, Thomas Abbt, a mathematician, wrote a famous essay called Dying for the Fatherland . He extolled to his fellow Prussians the “pleasure of death . . . which calls our soul like a Queen from its prison . . . and finally gives the blood from our veins to the suffering fatherland, that it may drink and live again.” 2 Far from being a Prussian martinet, however, Abbt was a gentle philosopher at the heart of the German Enlightenment, a liberal for his time, friendly with Jewish writers such as Moses Mendelssohn. His evocation of sacrifice and beautiful death was more poetic than bellicose.
    Germany’s response to the superior might of