The Thin Veneer of Globalization

By Victor Davis Hanson 

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON says that the spread of economic wealth and instant media coverage are working to the advantage of America’s enemies.

It is a cliché to say that billions now live in an interconnected world of instant communications and increasingly shared popular tastes and culture. Yet, as the United States fights its first war in this era of economic globalization, some of the consequences of the trend have proven far more bizarre than the anomalies of jet travel to rural China or cell phone service in the Libyan desert.
First, the terrorists and their supporters are appropriating and redefining Western language itself. The word “militia” is hallowed in our Bill of Rights because it traditionally refers to an ad-hoc group of free, well-armed, property-owning citizens who organize for their republic’s defense. But now, thugs wielding Kalashnikovs and RPGs, kidnapping and bombing civilians and elected officials, have gotten the Western media to call them “militias,” as though they were Minutemen.

In the global village, our enemies outsource much of their own hateful propaganda to collaborators in the West.

Martyr, from the Greek word for “witness,” used to refer to early pacifist Christians such as Saints Paul, Peter, or Stephen, who were willing to be executed as proof of their undying faith. Now, the world learns that suicide murderers from the Middle East fall under the same name.
Second, the dangers are not just linguistic blurring. In the global village, our enemies outsource much of their own hateful propaganda to collaborators in the West. Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez holds up Noam Chomsky’s 2003 book Hegemony or Survival during his internationally televised rant at the United Nations. Presto! Chomsky’s stale anti-American screed becomes a mail-order bestseller, ranking number one on Amazon.com.
The same happened earlier when Osama bin Laden urged the world to read William Blum’s Rogue State. Once known mostly to conspiracy nuts, Blum’s book apparently found its way into Dr. Zawahiri’s propaganda ministry—and the endorsement resulted in rocketing sales and broader dissemination of preaching about America’s evils.
Bin Laden and Zawahiri may be hiding in the caves of a pre-modern Hindu Kush, but their infomercials and televised diatribes seem to echo the worst of what Americans themselves say about America. Al-Qaeda has rambled on about Kyoto, Halliburton, George Bush reading “a silly girl’s story about a goat” on the morning of 9/11, and most of the other agitprop iconography found in Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11”—a film that Hezbollah offered to help distribute. But then, whoever thought bin Laden would take time out from planning various suicide murders to complain, as he did in an October 2002 tape, about the lack of campaign finance reform in the United States?

Who cares if Western technology and rationalism alone accounted for the designs and fabrication of the world’s best weapons?

During World War II and the Cold War, it took days or even weeks to learn of the slurs from obscure Nazis or Stalinists. Not now. The instant celebrity status of global goons—Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah or the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq—in our world of shared celebrity worship would turn the Third Reich’s Joseph Goebbels green with envy. The globe-trotting Ahmadinejad of Iran makes the cover of Time, and, as nearly a rock star, breezes into the Council on Foreign Relations in New York to opine about the nonexistence of the Holocaust. I doubt that same organization would have once stomached odious P. W. Botha explaining away apartheid.
Third, there are even scarier military consequences to the new global village than a glad-handing Hugo Chávez leading cameramen around Harlem. With Iranian petrodollars, mail-order arms catalogs, and global delivery service, Hezbollah trumped Israeli reservists in southern Lebanon who had superior night-vision goggles, laptops, body armor, and high-tech anti-tank weaponry—making one wonder if decentralized “militias” can now special-order munitions more efficiently than cumbersome state bureaucracies.
Who cares if Western technology and rationalism alone accounted for the designs and fabrication of the world’s best weapons? Terrorists don’t need to know how to make or even to fix their latest Western purchases. They need only enough cash, and a few hours of training to learn how to use them.
We are blurring away all moral distinctions in our synthesized language, books, and films, and we are becoming gullible enough to accept the fallacy that the more our enemies look and talk—and shoot—like us, the more they naturally will think and become like us. If we stay on this track, then we really will lose this war.

Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He was a full-time farmer before joining the faculty at California State University at Fresno, where he initiated the classics program. He is the author or editor of 15 books, most recently “A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War” (Random House).