Huntington's
Paranoia
By Zawahir Siddique
30 September, 2004
Countercurrents.org
Book review of
Samuel P. Huntington's book "Who Are We? The Challenges to Americas
National Identity" in which Huntington trains his guns on the
Hispanics and African Americans
Hugo
Chavez, president of Venezuela, comfortably emerged victorious in a
much publicised referendum, amidst international observers that included
former US President, Jimmy Carter. The Venezuelan Presidents victory
came a month after he attacked American president George W. Bush on
July 21, calling him a meddling Emperor of Evil who was
abetting his (Chavezs) opponents in the referendum . Since Chavez
survived a coup in 2002, he has often accused the US of wanting to overthrow
him, and of supporting his opponents. Chavez is known for his concerns
for the poor but he normally infuriates the rich and the powerful news
media with his rambling speeches that denounce the wealthy elite. As
Mr Chavez grew more powerful, his critics claimed he was leading Venezuela
towards a Cuban-style authoritarian government. He was also criticised
for courting countries which attract US or international disapproval,
namely Cuba, Iraq and Libya.
Interestingly,
apart from being the worlds fifth-largest exporter of oil, Venezuela
is also a Spanish-speaking country [or should we call a Hispanic
country?]. Samuel Huntingtons latest book, Who Are We? The Challenges
to Americas National Identity, warns Americas policy-makers
that they must check the Hispanization of America because
it could become a major threat to the integrity of the worlds
[only] super power.
This most recent
book from Samuel Huntington attempts to open a new front in the existing
fear-driven perpetual-war scenario. The author admits that the Smith
Richardson Foundation and other far-right funding sources have paid
him to produce this work: the same sources that back the Dick Cheneys
of America and sponsor Huntingtons Harvard University professorship.
Huntingtons
The Clash of Civilizations (1996) tried to persuade the American public
to accept that war between the West and Islam is inevitable. In this
new book he promotes a white nativist movement, to be herded
by panic and hatred against the proposed new enemy: Hispanics, particularly
Mexican immigrants. This book must be regarded as part of a sequence
of Huntingtons ealier pro-fascist productions. It began with The
Soldier and the State (1957), which complained that the second world
wars aim of victory over Axis Germany and Japan hindered the anti-Russian
balance-of-power objective; it includes the Trilateral Commission
study, The Crisis of Democracy, in which Huntington demanded
Hitler-Schacht austerity instead of a constitutional republic. Later
came other racist provocations, notably against Muslims, and now this
tirade against Hispanics has arrived in Americas public space.
Many are awed by
Samuel Huntingtons status as national-security advisor to the
corrupt rulers who run Americas government. They may not be aware
that in 1986 and 1987, Huntington was twice rejected for membership
of the National Academy of Sciences, when he was exposed as a cheap
pseudoscientist.
Yale mathematics
professor Serge Lang challenged Huntingtons book, Political Order
In Changing Societies (1968), in which Huntington classified South Africa
under apartheid as a satisfied society, with a purported
social-science study of the matter as a reference. After heated controversy,
Huntington was quoted in the New Republic as responding that satisfaction
described the fact that the people for some reason are not protesting
[the regime]. Huntington also claimed that when that study was
made in the early sixties, there had been no major riots, strikes or
disturbances in South Africa. Professor Lang assembled a 50-page list
of clashes in South Africasuch as the famous Sharpeville Massacre
of March 21, 1960and sent copies of his meticulous indictment
to each of the Academys hundreds of members. Huntingtons
nomination was rejected twice in secret balloting.
In Who Are We?
Huntington portrays America as a traditionally racist society, supposedly
always allied to British imperialism; he thus seeks to make the bestial
war on terrorism appear natural rather than a usurpation.
He chooses interestingly among familiar culinary metaphors for American
civic identity, rejecting melting pot (too monolithic and
suppressive of legitimate differences) and tossed salad
(too diffuse) for a sturdy Anglo-Protestant tomato soup:
new arrivals contribute croutons and distinctive spices to it, without
changing the soups basic constitution (Anglo-Protestantism).
The widespread
adoption of the name African American over black
in the 1980s does not impress the author. Given the pervasive
penchant of Americans to prefer single-syllable over multi-syllable
names for almost everything, this high and growing popularity of a seven
syllable, two-word name over a one-syllable, one-word name is intriguing
and perhaps significant.
It is also interesting
that the author doesnt take Black Americans seriously in this
book. It was the Black civil rights movement that made Huntingtons
Anglo-conformism possible for millions of non-whites, and yet he takes
no hints from that breakthrough and its subsequent breakdowns. The
fabric of American civic trust has been nowhere more severely tried
than in blacks cultural, electoral, legal and public psycho-dramatic
renderings of disaffection with white America, he claims.
Huntington percieves
that the attacks in the US on September 11, 2001, demonstrate that America
was then more vulnerable to attack than it had been for almost two hundred
years. The last time that something like September 11 happened
in the continental United States was on August 25, 1814, when the British
burned the White House. Huntington pinpoints religiously
driven militant Islam and non-ideological Chinese nationalism
as potential external enemies of America.
Huntington declares,
unequivocally, that America has been enjoying an unchallenged super
power status since the collapse of the Soviet Union until
September 11. Huntingtons intellectual credibility is further
undermined when he makes a sweeping statement, typically without supporting
evidence: When Osama bin Laden attacked America and killed several
thousand people, he also did two other things. He filled the vacuum
created by Gorbachev with an unmistakably dangerous new enemy, and he
pinpointed Americas identity as a Christian nation. The
author also justifies President Bushs terming two Muslim states
the axis of evil as having its parallel in former President
Ronald Reagans reference to the Soviet Union as the evil
empire. He goes on: The rhetoric of Americas ideological
war with militant Communism has been transferred to its religious and
cultural war with militant Islam.
Huntington, however,
sees two crucial differences between the communist movements
against western democracies and contemporary Islamist
movements. First, he points out that a single major state supported
the communist movements. Islamist movements, in Huntington's perception,
are supported by a variety of competing states, religious organizations
and individuals, and Islamic political parties and terrorist groups
have many different and often conflicting objectives. The second alleged
crucial difference that Huntington points out is that the
communists wanted to mobilize a mass movement of workers, peasants,
intellectuals and disaffected middle-class people in order to bring
about fundamental change in the democratic political and capitalist
economic systems of the western societies into communist states. Militant
Islamist groups, by contrast, thinks Huntington, do not expect
to convert Europe and America into Islamic societies. Their principle
aim is not to change those societies but to inflict serious damage on
them.
The cultural gap
between Islam on the one hand, and Americas Christianity
and Anglo-Protestantism on the other, as perceived by Huntington,
reinforces Islams qualifications for the status of Americas
public enemy number one. And on September 11, 2001, Osama bin
Laden ended Americas search. The attacks on New York and Washington
followed by the wars with Afghanistan and Iraq and more diffuse war
on terror make militant Islam (or more broadly political Islam)
America's first enemy of the twenty-first century. This is anti-Muslim
rhetoric, incitement and provocation at its most inflammatory.
On Americas
creation, the author says, America was created as a Protestant
society just as, and for some of the same reasons, that Pakistan and
Israel were created as Muslim and Jewish societies in the twentieth
century. According to Huntington, immigrants become Americans
only if they absorb Americas Anglo-Protestant culture and
identify primarily with America rather than with their country of birth.
This is the litmus test of what he calls Americanization of the
immigrants. The more powerful stimulus to white nativism,
according to Huntington, is likely to be the threat to their language,
culture and power that Whites see arising from the growing
demographic, social, economic and political roles of Hispanics
in American society.
The bifurcation
of American society on the basis of two languages and two cultures as
a major cause of disintegration of Americas civil society is well
described throughout the book, especially in one chapter, Mexican
Immigration and Hispanization. Bilingual families having more
money, the spread of Spanish as Americas second language, and
English-speaking whites disadvantages in competition for jobs
and promotion because of their lack of fluency in Spanish, are all discussed
in alarmist tones. To add to these threats, the author also
highlights Hispanic resistance to assimilation into Americas
Anglo-Protestant identity, massive immigration from Mexico,
and high fertility rates of Mexicans (Hispanics) as major
challenges to Americas National Identity.
In 1917 Theodore
Roosevelt said: we must have one flag and one language.
On June 14, 2000, President Clinton said, I very much hope that
Im the last President in American history who cant speak
Spanish. On May 5, 2001, President Bush celebrated Mexicos
Cinco de Mayo national holiday by inaugurating the practice of delivering
the weekly presidential radio address to the American people in both
English and Spanish. On September 4, 2003, the first debate among the
Democratic candidates for President was conducted in both English and
Spanish. Aware of these developments and the growing Hispanic presence
in America, Huntington warns, If this trend continues, the cultural
division between Hispanics and Anglos will replace the racial division
between blacks and whites as the most serious cleavage in American society.
Huntington therefore
advocates an America not divided by two languages and two cultures,
but with one language and one core Anglo-Protestant culture that
has existed in America for over three centuries. In line with
this narrow-minded and intolerant racist mindset, he calls for a movement
that he labels White nativism, which according to him would
be both racially and culturally inspired and could be anti-Hispanic,
anti-black and anti-immigrant. The author compares the rivalry
between Whites and Hispanics in America to that of Muslims and Serbs
in Bosnia. In 1961 in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the population was 43
percent Serb and 26 percent Muslims. In 1991, it was 31 percent Serb
and 44 percent Muslim. The Serbs reacted with ethnic cleansing.
Huntington tries to put the White-Hispanic rivalry into a similar framework.
In 1990 the population of California was 57 percent White and
26 percent Hispanic. In 2040 it is predicted to be 31 percent white
and 48 percent Hispanic... As the racial balance continues to shift
and more Hispanics become citizens and politically active, white groups
may look for other means of protecting their interests.
The income gap between
the United States (a First world Country) and Mexico (a
Third World Country) is the largest in the world between
two contiguous countries. The two-thousand-mile border between them
makes it impossible to prevent illegal immigrants from entering
the US, although the white Americans make very difficult and dangerous.
Mexico is apparently the only country that the United States has invaded
and whose capital it has occupied, placing American Marines in the halls
of Montezuma, and then annexing half of its territory. Mexicans
cannot forget these events, and feel that they have special rights in
these territories. Huntingtons fear of Mexican assimilation is
evident when he says that No other immigrant group in American
history has asserted or has been able to assert a historical claim to
American territory.
It is worth noting
that Huntingtons most famous work, The Clash of Civilizations
(1996), which induced extensive debate among makers of foreign policy,
followed an article that was written in 1993, which triggered a national
debate, and which led eventually to this book. Similarly Who Are We?
follows his essay on foreign affairs, which was aptly called The
Hispanic Challenge.
Americas
recent military expeditions in Afghanistan and Iraq have resulted in
its suffering substantial setbacks. Public opinion in the Western world
has not been all that favourable to Uncle Sams war on terrorism.
Now Huntingtons White Anglo-Protestant Nativism is
under immense threat from the Hispanization of America.
Huntington has ignored the growing Muslim population in America, as
well as the significance of the Afro-American proportion
in the demographic composition of the worlds only superpower.
Huntingtons racist inclinations are evident when he says that
Americas integrity is based on its White Anglo-Protestant
Nativism.
Huntington also
ignores such Latino responses to Black disaffection as an editorial
in San Diegos Mexican-American newspaper La Prensa in 1992 that
declared Latinos the new bridge between blacks, whites, Asians,
and Latinos. Latinos, the editorial said, will have to bring
an end to class, color, and ethnic warfare. To succeed, they will have
to do what the blacks failed to do: incorporate all into the human race
and exclude no one. Thus, the growing Black consciousness and
the Hispanic Challenge are the two inevitable threats that
confront the worlds strongest democracy in the 21st
century.
Zawahir
Siddique is a PhD Student, Department of Engineering Design
and Manufacture University Malaya Kuala
Lumpur