Imagine, if you will, that you have no allegiance to any country in the world. Imagine that you are an impartial, third-party observer, like an alien or a god. Imagine watching humans fight with each other across history. In order for humans from one empire to thrive, humans from another empire must die. It seems silly when you don't have any allegiances.
When cultures collide (militarily, economically, socially, or whatever the case may be) one...
Imagine, if you will, that you have no allegiance to any country in the world. Imagine that you are an impartial, third-party observer, like an alien or a god. Imagine watching humans fight with each other across history. In order for humans from one empire to thrive, humans from another empire must die. It seems silly when you don't have any allegiances.
When cultures collide (militarily, economically, socially, or whatever the case may be) one always has to prevail at the expense of the other. In preventing the death of one's own culture, another culture must die.
In his book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Samuel Huntington says this: "Every civilization sees itself as the center of the world and writes its history as the central drama of human history." Any civilization does what it must to prevent its own death. It is the good guy in its own history. This nearly always means the death of another culture or another culture's citizens.
In order to get a grasp on this, let's examine a well known and violent culture clash from today's world: The West vs. ISIS.
ISIS continues its terrorist attacks against Western culture. Western countries, feeling threatened and claiming self-defense, firebomb a known ISIS base. Western leaders believe they are preventing the death of Western citizens, but at the cost of causing other deaths, in this case ISIS members.
To look at it even more metaphysically, ISIS and the West are two fundamentally incompatible cultures. One is theocratic and fascist, the other is secular (in theory) and democratic. The continued existence of Islamic States and ISIS is a threat to the continued existence of the West, and vice versa.
Being citizens of a Western culture, ISIS seems the bad guy and us the good guys, bravely doing whatever is necessary to prevent the deaths of good, innocent people.
But, to return to Huntington, "The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion… but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do."
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