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Saturday, November 2, 2024

Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World

“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”

The above line is, in my opinion, the most thought provoking one in Samuel P. Huntington’s book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World

In history books, we find accounts of between 50 to 70 major empires which once ruled large parts of the world. All of them were founded by warlike people who possessed the capacity to unleash unimaginable violence to crush and enslave other people and conquer their land.

In our time, due to the rising popularity of progressive, libertarian, postmodern and woke philosophies, most people have forgotten the fundamental fact of history that the Western empire was carved through violence. People blindly accept the myth that the West won in the last 250 years because of democracy and free trade. 

We should not fall for the notion that democracy and free trade lead to civilizational success. In the 18th and 19th centuries, when the West expanded its powers, the Western nations were neither democratic, nor free traders. Democracy and free trade became popular in the 20th century and since then the West has been declining. 

We should listen to Huntington when he says that powerful civilizations are forged by “superiority in applying organized violence.”

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