By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, January 30, 2020
An ancient habit of Western elites is a certain
selectivity in condemnation.
Sometimes Westerners apply critical standards to the West
that they would never apply to other nations.
My colleague at the Hoover Institution, historian Niall
Ferguson, has pointed out that Swedish green-teen celebrity Greta Thunberg
might be more effective in her advocacy for reducing carbon emissions by
redirecting her animus. Instead of hectoring Europeans and Americans, who have
recently achieved the planet’s most dramatic drops in the use of fossil fuels,
Thunberg might instead turn her attention to China and India to offer her “how
dare you” complaints to get their leaders to curb carbon dioxide emissions.
Whether the world continues to spew dangerous levels of
carbon dioxide will depend largely on policies in China and India. After all,
these two countries account for over a third of the global population and
continue to grow their coal-based industries.
In the late 1950s, many elites in the United States
bought the Soviet Union’s line that the march of global Communism would “bury”
the West. Then, as Soviet power eroded in the 1980s, Japan Inc. and its
ascendant model of state-sponsored industry became the preferred alternative to
Western-style democratic capitalism.
Once Japan’s economy ossified, the new utopia of the
1990s was supposedly the emerging European Union. Americans were supposed to be
awed that the euro gained ground on the dollar. Europe’s borderless democratic
socialism and its “soft power” were declared preferable to the reactionary
United States
By 2015, the EU was a mess, so China was preordained as
the inevitable global superpower. American intellectuals pointed to its
high-speed rail transportation, solar industries, and gleaming airports, in contrast
to the hollowed-out and grubby American heartland.
Now the curtain has been pulled back on the interior rot
of the Chinese Communist Party, its gulag-like reeducation camps, its
systematic mercantile cheating, its Orwellian surveillance apparatus, its
serial public-health crises, and its primitive hinterland infrastructure.
After the calcification of the Soviet Union, Japan Inc.,
the EU, and the Chinese superpower, no one quite knows which alternative will
next supposedly bury America.
The U.S. and Europe are often quite critical of violence
against women, minorities, and gays. The European Union, for example, has often
singled out Israel for its supposed mistreatment of Palestinians in the West
Bank.
Yet if the purpose of Western human-rights activism is to
curb global bias and hate, then it would be far more cost-effective to
concentrate on the greatest offenders.
China is currently detaining about a million Muslim
Uighurs in reeducation camps. Yet activist groups aren’t calling for
divestment, boycotts, and sanctions against Beijing in the same way they target
Israel.
Homosexuality is a capital crime in Iran. Scores of
Iranian gays reportedly have been incarcerated and thousands executed under
theocratic law since the fall of the Shah in 1979. Yet rarely do Western
activist groups call for global ostracism of Iran.
Don’t look to the United Nations Human Rights Council for
any meaningful condemnation of worldwide prejudice and hatred, although it is a
frequent critic of both the U.S. and Israel.
Many of the 47 member nations of the Human Rights Council
are habitual violators of human rights. In 2017, nine member nations persecuted
citizens who were actively working to implement U.N. standards of human rights.
There are many reasons for Westerners’ selective outrage
and pessimism toward their own culture. Cowardice explains some of the
asymmetry. Blasting tiny democratic Israel will not result in any retaliation.
Taking on a powerful China or a murderous Iran could earn retribution.
Guilt also explains some of the selectivity. European
nations are still blamed for 19th-century colonialism and imperialism. They
will always seek absolution, as the citizens of former colonial and Third World
nations act like perpetual victims — even well into the postmodern 21st
century.
Virtual-signaling is increasingly common. Western elites
often harangue about misdemeanors when they cannot address felonies — a strange
sort of psychological penance that excuses their impotence.
It is much easier for the city of Berkeley to ban
clean-burning, U.S.-produced natural gas in newly constructed buildings than it
is to outlaw far dirtier crude oil from Saudi Arabia. Currently, the sexist,
homophobic, autocratic Saudis are the largest source of imported oil in
California, sending the state some 100 million barrels per year, without which
thousands of Berkeley motorists could not get to work. Apparently, outlawing
clean, domestic natural gas allows one to justify importing unclean Saudi oil.
Western elites are perpetually aggrieved. But the next
time they direct their lectures at a particular target, consider the source and
motivation of their outrage.
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