What is Occidentalism? Buruma
and Margalit define it as “the dehumanizing picture of the West painted by its
enemies” (3). The West which is often viewed in parallel with American due to
its global political influences is understood as “a machinelike society without
a human soul” (9). The collapse of the Two Towers in New York City is a
deliberate act to bring destruction to a sinful city by the enemies of the
West. The sinful City of Man is “hubris, empire building, secularism,
individualism, and the power and attraction of money” (16). Even the Bible
defines the city as “the mother of prostitutes and of the abominations of the
earth” (Rev. 17:5). The building of a city is a demonstration of lust after
worldly fame as what Moses writes, “Come,” they said, “let us build ourselves a
city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for
ourselves” (Gen. 11:4). The image of the city as a whore depicts the
significance of trade. The authors point out that “the most symbolic figure of
commodified human relations based on flattery, illusion, immorality and cash”
is the prostitutes (19). Despite saying so, Occidentalists’ hatred towards the
West is not simply for its trade but its soullessness. “It sees the great city
as inhuman, a zoo of depraved animals, consumed by lust” (22). Trade itself is
a universal system but modern capitalism is the product of western civilization.
In the eyes of its enemies, the
West is seen as weak due to their favor for comfort. One Taliban fighter
commented, “The Americans would never win, for they love Pepsi-Cola but we love
death” (50), the authors quote from the British Newspaper reporter. Besides
loving Pepsi-Cola, West is also well-known for loving money. No wonder, Sanbart
calls the west as “crazy for money”. Such are the depictions of the West in the
eyes of its enemies.
In their subsequent chapter,
the authors define the West as the “merchants” and the Occidentalists as the
“heroes”. The West is defined as merchants because they only care for profit
and love for comfort or “Komfortimus”
using Sanbart’s term (53). In the eyes of the Occidentalists, the West’s love
for comfort will definitely makes them “weak, tired and rotten” (58). The
heroes are willing to sacrifice their own lives to fight the soullessness of
the West as well as their greed, immorality, imperialism and capitalism. Their
motto is to die for an ideal for it is better to die for a higher cause than to
live in Komfortimus (72).
The
mind of the West is the mind of “idiocy”, “soulless” and “as effective as a
calculator”. It is incapable of “doing what is humanly important” and unable to
“grasp the higher things in life” (75). It is “arrogant, impudence, truncated”
(76) and “mechanical” (80).
“Wars against the West have
been declared in the name of the Russian soul, the German race, State Shinto,
communism and Islam” (101). Using Manichaean terms, the authors state that wars
against the West is “a holy war fought against an idea of absolute evil” (102).
All this rage is because the West is seen as ‘the symbol of idolatrous,
hubristic, amoral, colonialist evil, a cancer in the eyes of its enemies that
must be expunged by killing” (139). The West has to be responsible for its
imperialism. Its empire has inflicted much pain and trigger hatred in the
Occidentalists. According to the authors Israel has to bear some of the
responsibility for turning hatred from the Middle East towards its own country
(138).
Historically, there were always
people, who would fight and kill those who they regarded as enemies whether
they were the monarch, the colonizers, the perpetrators etc. The authors call
their readers to not fight fire with fire (149). The left wing, the right wing,
the black, the white, the occidentalists, the orientalists and even denominationalism
are only creating bigger gap. We may need to reflect seriously on what does “loving
our enemies” mean to us.
