Sometimes you come across an editorial that really clarifies things. Shelby Steele has such an editorial up at the Wall Street Journal. He takes on a taboo subject, and one that has caused some argument here at BT when I raised it a few months ago. How have the moral scruples of the West contributed to the West’s inability to win wars of liberation in the post-World War Two era? How could France and America lose a military fight with the Vietanmese? How could Russia fail in Afghanistan? And are we losing in Iraq because we refuse to bring the full measure of our military might into the fight?
In the past, I have argued that we have lost the ability to win these fights because we have lost the ability to commit what are now termed “war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and/or genocide”. And, I have stated that our unwillingness to commit such acts (at least openly, unapologetically, and over a sustained period of time), is a very good thing. However, Steele sees it as a very bad thing. But, reading his reasoning is quite enlightening.
Iraq
Steele believes that the collapse of colonialism, post-World War Two, is better understood as a collapse of the legitimacy of White Supremacy. Now, he is going to be forced to walk a very fine line in his argument. If he is merely being descriptive, his observation could be seen as obvious. The Holocaust, as well as the brutality of the war, had a jolting effect on the moral authority of the West, as well as its claim to higher civilization. Moreover, as India and China asserted their independence, the preeminence of White civilization declined. But, Steele goes beyind beyond being merely descriptive. He sees the loss of the legitimacy of white supremacy as a problem that must be somehow rectified. Unless we rectify it, we will not be able to use the level of violence necessary to win wars against lesser powers. Let’s looks at his argument.
It began, I believe, in a late-20th-century event that transformed the world more profoundly than the collapse of communism: the world-wide collapse of white supremacy as a source of moral authority, political legitimacy and even sovereignty. This idea had organized the entire world, divided up its resources, imposed the nation-state system across the globe, and delivered the majority of the world’s population into servitude and oppression. After World War II, revolutions across the globe, from India to Algeria and from Indonesia to the American civil rights revolution, defeated the authority inherent in white supremacy, if not the idea itself. And this defeat exacted a price: the West was left stigmatized by its sins. Today, the white West–like Germany after the Nazi defeat–lives in a kind of secular penitence in which the slightest echo of past sins brings down withering condemnation. There is now a cloud over white skin where there once was unquestioned authority.
I call this white guilt not because it is a guilt of conscience but because people stigmatized with moral crimes–here racism and imperialism–lack moral authority and so act guiltily whether they feel guilt or not.
They struggle, above all else, to dissociate themselves from the past sins they are stigmatized with. When they behave in ways that invoke the memory of those sins, they must labor to prove that they have not relapsed into their group’s former sinfulness. So when America–the greatest embodiment of Western power–goes to war in Third World Iraq, it must also labor to dissociate that action from the great Western sin of imperialism. Thus, in Iraq we are in two wars, one against an insurgency and another against the past–two fronts, two victories to win, one military, the other a victory of dissociation.
The collapse of white supremacy–and the resulting white guilt–introduced a new mechanism of power into the world: stigmatization with the evil of the Western past.
Interestly, Steele makes little to no effort to rationalize the ‘evil of the Western past’. He isn’t apologizing for our treatment of Native Americans, for slavery, for Jim Crow, or for imperialism. He is not trying to rehabilitate the legitimacy of white supremacy either, although that seems somwhow implicit in his argument. He is saying that our guilt about past human rights abuses constrains us from committing human rights abuses in the present. And, for Steele, that is the problem. Why? Because sometimes we really do face enemies that need defeating, and we cannot defeat them if we contrain ourselves with human rights considerations.
One could dismiss his argument out of hand. It certainly has a visceral objectionalness to it. But, he may have a point. Insofar as he does have a point (in that, there could be a war that needed to be won and could not be won without total ruthlessness) he opens up an interesting area for hypothetical debate. But, his argument fails when it comes time to administer the remedy. For Steele, white people have so evolved, and so repudiated the legitimacy of white supremacy, that we no longer need feel guilty about the white supremacy of the past…and therefore we can kill, torture, and relocate brown people without remorse of conscience. Only when we learn to stop feeling guilty, will we once again be able to conquer new territory.
Possibly white guilt’s worst effect is that it does not permit whites–and nonwhites–to appreciate something extraordinary: the fact that whites in America, and even elsewhere in the West, have achieved a truly remarkable moral transformation. One is forbidden to speak thus, but it is simply true. There are no serious advocates of white supremacy in America today, because whites see this idea as morally repugnant. If there is still the odd white bigot out there surviving past his time, there are millions of whites who only feel goodwill toward minorities.
This is a fact that must be integrated into our public life–absorbed as new history–so that America can once again feel the moral authority to seriously tackle its most profound problems. Then, if we decide to go to war, it can be with enough ferocity to win.
So, Steele and I agree on the reason that we cannot win wars like Iraq and Vietnam…we refuse to use biblical levels of force. But, whereas I take that as an incredibly good sign, he sees it as an enormous problem. Where I take that as a lesson that we should avoid entering into such wars, he sees it as an obstacle to the successful use of necessary force.
Nothing could better define the differences between the right and the left.
