PART 1: World War III - what, me
worry? By Chan Akya
Sam
Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations is
now being made operational in the Middle East,
thanks to the neo-conservatives' vision of the
West triumphing over Islam. The end game that most
right-wing observers look to now is a
conflagration that sees the West take on Islam,
supported by a coalition of willing allies in
Africa and Asia. Meanwhile, Islam counts on its
army of the faithful to lend support.
Be
that as it may, I believe that both the West and
Islam overestimate their hold on, if not their
importance to, the Chinese and Hindu
civilizations. The prospect of World War III,
rather than
forcing them to choose sides,
is more likely to cause policy paralysis, despite
the fact that both India and China stand to
benefit from the conflagration. While it is in
their interest to cause an outright war between
the two sides, they are more likely to engage in
navel-gazing.
Neither the West nor Islam
has covered itself with glory as far as China and
India are concerned. While the Chinese would
consider the West as hurting it more particularly
in the past 100 years, for India the balance tilts
more against Islam. This observation is more
pertinent when seeing the eventual place the two
societies envisage for themselves in the world. It
is interesting to note that while their
philosophies are different, the basic outcome has
been the same, namely that both China and India
were splendidly isolated from the rest of the
world in the heyday of their civilizations. There
is little moral justification for either country
to support the West or Islam.
Early Indian
and Chinese explorers found little to occupy them
in their journeys outside of their countries. The
contact between Chinese and Indian cultures led to
the export of Buddhism from India. In a study of
Buddhism's reach, we can gauge how the two
cultures would react to a changing world.
The India that Prince Gautam was born into
was dominated by the Hindu system, albeit one run
by the principles of Manu, rather than the more
egalitarian Vedic culture. The doctrine of Manu
was a product of the Aryan conquest of the ancient
peoples of India, including the Dravidians in the
south of the country. In this world, with its
multifaceted rituals and barbaric animal
sacrifices, the arrival of Buddhism portended
substantial changes. The language of the ruling
classes, Sanskrit, was quickly subsumed by the
language of Buddhism, Pali.
As the first
great emperor of India, Ashok, converted to
Buddhism, ancient Hindu culture suffered its first
real shock in 1,000 years. The response was
revolutionary more than evolutionary, with the
country's ruling classes quickly removing public
practices forbidden in Buddhism, such as animal
sacrifices. The kinder, gentler culture that arose
from this period did not have to wait long for its
turn to revenge. The ascetic principles of
Buddhism were simply incompatible with running a
large country that was already a melting point for
various races. This failure to impose discipline
was to cost Ashok's followers dearly, ending the
dynasty barely 100 years after his death.
Still, the damage to Hindu culture was
done. With a weaker resolve at the center,
regional kingdoms became more powerful, in a
development that was not to reverse for 1,000
years. That left the individual kingdoms more
vulnerable to the onslaught of a new group of
invaders from the West, namely Islam. As smaller
kingdoms quickly crumbled against the onslaught of
Islam, Hindus took refuge behind the apparently
cosmetic differences. They were also helped by the
historical fact that while Islam unites in times
of defeat, victory is often fatal for Muslims.
Thus it is that from the 9th through the
13th centuries Islamic conquerors of northern
Indian states usually found themselves under siege
from their co-religionists. The most famous battle
of all during the period featured the Mughal
leader Babur against a Muslim ruler, Ibrahim Lodi,
on the other side of Panipat. Furthermore, to pay
for the various battles, Muslim rulers had to
impose various taxes on their populations. I
believe this was the main reason for their lack of
enthusiasm in converting the Hindu population to
Islam. The second reason was of course the
ultimate in scorched-earth policies that history
has ever known, namely the mass incidents of
sati (female suicides) in kingdoms that
Muslims conquered. In any event, Islam left alive
a culture that would in future pose a great
threat.
Buddhism also weakened the
patriarchal Chinese culture, but did provide a
benefit in that it acted to homogenize cultural
practices across the country. Thus people in
southern China could relate to their northern
cousins more than previously was possible, because
of the role of Buddhist monasteries and temples.
The common schools for monks, in Tibet and other
places, provided China with its first glimpse of
mystic as against practical religion.
The
key development in China's history, though, was
under the Emperor Qin, who unified the country
through substantial warfare combined with a common
language. The resulting monolith of an empire was
able to shrug off the Muslim warlords from Central
Asia with relative ease, particularly when
compared with the problems that a splintered India
down south faced. For this reason, Islam generally
treated China and its culture with grudging
respect, quite unlike its view of other cultures.
This state of affairs remained for a long
time, until the West gained enough technical
mastery of weapons first developed by China to
take on the Chinese empire. It is at this point
that China's relative insularity was to go against
the country - a failure to observe and learn from
the decline of Hindu civilization against Islam.
The Western conquest of China followed a pattern
similar to that of India's decline, namely gradual
wars in the periphery that weakened central
authority, finally culminating in an assault
across the country.
There are today not
enough Christians or Muslims in China to push the
country in the direction of supporting either the
West or Islam in any global conflagration.
However, a resurgent West poses more of a threat
to China's patriarchal culture, which is not very
different from the centralized authority-driven
culture of Islam. Given that, it is more likely
that China would tilt toward supporting Islam, as
its weapons-proliferation efforts over the past
few years have shown.
The missile used by
Hezbollah this month to sink an Israeli ship was
an Iranian variant of a Chinese Silkworm; similar
ancestries can be established for many of the
medium- and long-range weapons currently in the
hands of Islamic tyrants. It is also noteworthy
that the only working nuclear weapons in the
Islamic world belong to Pakistan, and are almost
entirely reverse-engineered from actual Chinese
bombs. This leads me to conclude that an
escalation of the conflict in the Middle East
would eventually necessitate the West to demand
adequate support from China, failing which the
country itself could become a target. The waxworks
of Beijing are likely to grant enough concessions
to the West to avoid being attacked, and then lie
in wait for their revenge.
The Indian
situation is more precarious. While much of the
country's right-wing intelligentsia would push it
to war against Islam, there is enough of a fifth
column in place to thwart the country's historic
quest for vengeance. India's Muslims number more
than any other country's in the world with the
exception of Indonesia. Add to these the
populations of both Pakistan and Bangladesh, and
Indian military might is in essence boxed in.
Neither the Indian air force nor the army
can offer much assistance to the West. The only
aspect of Indian military that the West may
benefit from is also its least developed one,
namely the Indian navy. I do not see the
likelihood of India playing any role in a direct
confrontation between Islam and the West, and
therefore it is more likely that it sits on the
sidelines waiting for the West to do its job.
Next: China and India in
World War III
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