JOLLY DAYS

Occidentalism

Here is another take on Ian Buruma's (and Avishai Margalit's) theory of Arabic Occidentalism — stereotyping of the West in the Islamic world — which I referred to a few days ago. They see a trend in this anti-Western, anti-liberal-democratic stereotyping that goes beyond current Islamist prejudice — extending into Maoist and Nazi, Baathist, Khmer Rouge and kamikaze mind sets.

Mr. Buruma and Mr. Margalit's most valuable contribution, however, is to set out in vivid…detail the ugly lexicon of Occidentalism. As they show, the fiercest opponents of bourgeois democracy have diverged much more in the alternatives they propose — rule by the Volk, the vanguard, the community of true believers — than in the images and metaphors they use to describe their common enemy. To the Occidentalist imagination, the modern West comes to life as a collection of weak, complacent merchants, slaves to comfort who know nothing of self-sacrifice; or as a cold, mechanical, ruthlessly efficient “mind,” crushing every higher ideal in the name of commercial and technological advance.

Above all, the West is embodied for its enemies in what Mr. Buruma and Mr. Margalit call “the Occidental city.” Here the motifs of corruption and degeneracy find a geographic home and a wider cast of sinister characters: Jews, prostitutes, financiers, rootless cosmopolitans of every description. Through the eyes of the Occidentalist, the modern metropolis appears “inhuman, a zoo of depraved animals, consumed by lust.” It is a problem whose only remedy lies in the redemptive power of revolutionary violence.