DEALING WITH THE BARBARIAN

Conan! What is best in life?
To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women!

There's a joke going around which some would consider offensive, but it illustrates a point I'd like to make. It goes something like this:

An American Indian, a Muslim, and a Texan are talking one day.

The American Indian says, "I am sad, because once my people were many, but now we are few!"

The Muslim says, "I am happy because my people were once few, but now we are many. And do you know why?"

The Texan drawls, "Cause we ain't started playing Cowboys and Muslims."

Something we try not to talk about much in polite society and the modern society is what to do with the barbarian. Barbarians aren't so bad in one sense; typically all a barbarian means is someone who isn't as cultured, civilized, and technologically advanced as another culture. It isn't that the barbarian has no culture, has no technology, and has no advancement, even the ancient barbarians such as the Mongol, Hun, and Vandal had some of these. Its just that compared to other, more advanced cultures, they are lacking.

Take the American Indian tribes. They had language, art, literature, music, technology, politics, business, and education just as any culture does. They simply weren't as advanced and sophisticated as the European colonists who showed up in America. The Iroquois had their chants, but the Italians had opera. The Caddo had their bows and spears, while the English had Brown Bess muskets and cannons. The Hopi had pictographs and ritual painting, and the Dutch had Rembrandt. The Sioux had their myths and religious beliefs, and the Genevans had John Calvin.

Yet it was more than simply the trappings of civilization which set them apart. Rome was more sophisticated philosophically and conceptually than the Gauls. Rome pondered the meaning of life, the proper use of rhetoric, the significance of virtues, and the use of strength versus the need for restraint. The Vandals worried about surviving the next day and using strength to get what they wanted. There was a qualitative difference between the Gaulish civilization and the Roman civilization.

And it was this distinction in philosophy and worldview which made all the other differences happen. Civilization brings its benefits because thinkers and ideas lead to practical reality. The existence of the car and the cell phone trace back to the radical thoughts of the reformers and the philosophies of the Greeks. Without them asking the questions and pondering life more deeply than mere survival and brute existence, no advances could have been made. Some civilizations are actually better than others, a concept the modern left and academic types reject categorically.

Today, the barbarians are still around. Tribes in isolated areas still have little sophistication, civilization, or philosophical effort. What little advancement they attempt is usually crushed by fear, tradition, taboo, and the need for the leadership to dominate the rest of the tribe (usually by medicine men or shaman who dominate the culture of a tribe). In many ways, the radical Muslim culture we face today is the most significant barbaric opposition to civilization. Not all Muslims are barbarians; many live in the western world, enjoying western culture and ideals which do not interfere with their faith, like any other religion. Yet there is a strong, dangerous, and loud portion of the Muslim world which certainly is barbaric.

And they are barbaric by deliberate effort. Wahhabist and Ismaeli Islam both cling to a very backward, anti-civilization view of the world. They reject technology, music, art, and most of western culture as corrupt and sinful. They consider it arrogant and evil to listen to rock music, dress in a more modern way, use gadgets and modern conveniences, and live a modern, worldly manner. And unlike the Amish or some very fundamentalist Christian sects, they believe that no one should do this, and are willing to kill to enforce that idea. Where barbarians exist, we're always faced with how to deal with them.

In the past, dominant, more sophisticated cultures used their technological, educational, and ideological edge to crush and destroy the barbarian. Over time, the far superior fighters in the American Indians were defeated by sheer numbers and superior technology of the European invaders. The gun, the train, the telegraph, and concepts such as organized law enforcement and non-tribal coordination of multiple peoples in a nation rather than small independent groups defeated every single Native American tribe that fought and put them all under control.

That is the way of history: one nation with greater strength destroys another or dominates them. Whether right or wrong, it has been repeated thousands of times around the world. The first American Indian tribes to find horses and learn to use them wiped out dozens of lesser tribes, taking their lands. The Anasazi were utterly obliterated by Apache, Ute, and Navajo tribes, among others. Today, we question that, believing that the greater man will not use his strength to dominate the lesser. We think that the use of force to silence or stop the barbarian makes us barbaric, and that the principles of freedom and justice do not permit the old patterns any longer.

The problem we face is that this philosophy works wonders when dealing with other sophisticated, advanced cultures; it just doesn't matter to the barbarian. Gandhi was able to implement passive, non-violent resistance to break the will of the British and bring independence to India. He suggested that be used against the Germans but thankfully no one tried that except the Jews, who were herded into ghettos and systematically murdered. There is a point at which the civilized man has to face the hard, painful fact that civilized tactics and concepts sometimes aren't sufficient to the task.

We face pirates for the first time in centuries. The last time, they were eliminated by swift, decisive, and bloody action. Pirates died when they were caught, and were put on display for everyone to see. Pirate bases were attacked and demolished. Pirate leaders were executed. Piracy stopped, save in small areas where no one was able to do this (mostly in the Southeast Asian waters). So far, few have shown the willingness to deal with these pirates in the same way, and many even defend them as poor, young, and abused by the cruel west.

Islamic radicals are seen the same way. The very same people who'd die first at the hands of the Wahhabist are the ones to step up and defend them, saying we should not fight them because we deserve their rage after years of oppression and murder. When swift, strong action is taken to fight the danger of radical Islam, the news is full of pictures of old women holding up complete bullet cartridges claiming they were shot at her, and scenes of a green helmeted man carrying the same body from the morgue ten times while posing heroically by a child's spotless, dust-free toy.

How will we face the barbarians of today? Will the soft hand of civilization and diplomacy work to stop a culture that views these attempts as weakness, fear, and submission? Will western civilization swallow up the Muslim, seducing their youth and leading them away from their rigid beliefs? Or will Islam swallow up western culture instead? What path will we walk, and will we have the courage and strength to follow through on it, whatever the cost in public relations and future condemnation may come?

Past generations thought that the barbarian had to be eliminated, either through war or forced assimilation; you either fought them until they died or were reduced so much they were no longer significant, or you assimilated them into your culture by force, destroying their barbarism through civilization and social change. Some hope that western culture's seduction will accomplish the second, some hoped that the war on terror would do the first.

I don't claim to have the answers, but I suspect there may have been a good reason the people of the past acted the way they did, a reason that had nothing to do with racism or fear of the unknown.