17.07.2025

Rise of the barbarians

Israel’s apologists insist it defends ‘western civilisation’. But, argues Paul Demarty, the truth is rather more complex. After all, ‘civilisational’ thinking so often plays out as barbarism, Israel today being the prime example

There is a cliché in circulation among pro-Zionists - that Israel is the easternmost redoubt of something called ‘western civilisation’, and that is why we must all rally to its ‘defence’.

On the contemporary right - at least that part of it that maintains support for the genocidal Zionist state - this is such a weather-worn commonplace that its content is never seriously interrogated. There are different versions of it, of course, and we shall come to those; but they do not seriously compete. A premillennialist, ‘end times obsessed’ Christian may happily share in this proposition with a secular-Jewish neoconservative, entirely unperturbed by the substantive difference in their respective claims.

Why? One possible explanation would be that it is wholly vacuous. If we poke into the idea of western civilisation, we find simply nothing - or, certainly, nothing worth defending. We all know that Mahatma Gandhi, when asked what he thought of western civilisation, is supposed to have replied, “I think it would be a good idea” (although this is probably apocryphal). For many on the left, there is little to add to the pseudo-Gandhi but to fill out the details: the endless lists of crimes committed by colonial powers, most especially, which had western - or more particularly European - civilisation as their ideological veil.

This view is mostly correct, and certainly infinitely preferable to the ‘westernism’ of ideologues like Douglas Murray or the historical revisionism of the great empires undertaken by the likes of Niall Ferguson and Nigel Biggar. Yet we do have a problem, in that - whatever it is we mean by western civilisation - its products certainly include Marxism (and, moreover, purported replacements like Foucauldianism, post-colonialism, decolonialism and so on). It seems we must take a little more care.

Western story

So, then, to the story of western civilisation. It begins suspiciously far east - in the eastern Mediterranean, with the development of the classical high point of Greek civilisation, which at its greatest extent (in the period of Alexander and the Macedonian kings) stretched deep into Asia and subordinated the far more ancient kingdom of Egypt. Greek became the lingua franca in much of this territory.

The voraciously expansionist Roman republic ended up absorbing the core of the Hellenic cultural zone, including its Syrian province, among whose peoples were the Judaeans - a people linked together by a common religious heritage. The obstreperous monotheism of this people was a hindrance to integration into the imperial culture, yet there nevertheless had already developed a Hellenised version of the Jewish religion (many of the great Greek philosophers had flirted with monotheism, or at least distinguishing an ultimate ‘Creator God’ from the subordinate figures called ‘the gods’, so this was not an enormous reach).

So when a particular apocalyptic Jewish sect emerged, who believed the Jews’ prophesied messiah had come in the person of Jesus, their propaganda spread along the (Greek-speaking) lines of least resistance. Their scriptural proofs came from the Septuagint, the then current Greek translation; and the body of writings that would become the New Testament, too, were all written in Greek (indeed, modern scholars sometimes talk of the ‘Greek Bible’ and ‘Hebrew Bible’ rather than the New and Old Testaments). Many of the early intellectuals of Christianity were steeped in Greek philosophy, especially in Plato, and grew up in cities like Alexandria - cauldrons of intellectual and religious conflict that often descended into vicious violence.

With the Roman empire’s adoption, in stages, of Christianity as its official religious practice, and then the collapse of the western empire less than two centuries later, the stage was set for the first version of ‘western civilisation’. While both halves of the empire survived, after all there was merely the ideology of Romanitas (Roman-ness) - a particular idea of the good life proper to (free, male … ) citizens of the empire, characteristically urban and focused on the acquisition of a certain very formal education and advancement in civil affairs.

The failure of the western empire destroyed the material basis of Romanitas in that territory, and the old elites were steadily replaced by what would later evolve into the feudal aristocracy, whose basis of power was rather rural and military. There was still one thing that connected the eastern empire with its former territories (leaving aside Justinian’s brief reconquest of most of Italy): Christianity. So the first version of the ‘western civilisation’ ideal became the idea of ‘Christendom’ - above all, when much of the previously Christian world was conquered by adherents of a new monotheism, Islam.

‘Christendom’ was a notably resilient idea, surviving the east-west schism between the Catholic and Orthodox churches, and even periods of open conflict between the two sides that reached their nadir around 1200 with Orthodox persecution of Latin Christians in the Byzantine empire and the sacking of Constantinople by westerners during the fourth crusade. What distinguished west from east in these centuries was, of course, partly a matter of language, but also of social formation: high-mediaeval feudalism versus late-antique slavery and imperial political forms.

Capitalism first

Both these social formations were on borrowed time. The first merchant republics already existed in Italy (it was a financial tangle with the Venetians that sent the crusaders off to loot Constantinople, after all). The Reconquista in Iberia and the crusades refreshed - largely by means of looting - the western intellectual class with Greek texts preserved within the Islamic states. Between the first stirrings of capitalism and the fortuitous influx of these ‘new’, yet ancient, texts, conditions were created for the renaissance (literally ‘rebirth’) - an intellectual-cultural movement somewhat autonomous from the church, at least in its inspiration - and therefore the possibility of new ideas of Europe, the west, and so on.

The unity of western Christianity was shortly to be destroyed too with the reformation; the political structures of the mediaeval era were replaced by the first modern states, in republican and absolutist variants. The earlier merchant republics, meanwhile, had already proven themselves prone to extractive colonialism, in which respect they were to be grotesquely outdone by the northern Europeans. As ‘Christendom’ had rallied crusaders to fight the Seljuk Turks, so the greatness of the European/western intellectual heritage served well as a justification for subjecting conquered peoples to slavery and imperial exploitation.

So far as the positive content of this heritage was concerned, the main thing remained Christianity - by now thoroughly marginalised in its near-eastern homeland, under the control of the Ottoman empire, meaning the west alone remained to spread the gospel. (The fact that apparently no two westerners could agree on what that gospel actually was seemed not to bother the class of colonial administrators.) Yet Christianity was in decline even in this heartland; decisive advances in natural science and natural history caused serious crises. The alliance of church and state itself was badly shaken across the continent with the French Revolution, whose radicalism and élan gave living form to the idea of a humanism that was not primarily of a religious character.

The French revolutionaries, as Marx was later to note, drew heavily on classical antiquity for their outward cultural initiatives. They did their work “in Roman costumes and with Roman phrases”. Heroic neoclassicism abounded in art and architecture (itself partly an inheritance from the Baroque mode adopted by early modern Catholicism). Though Marx went on, in the famous first pages of The eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, to argue that “the social revolution of the 19th century cannot take its poetry from the past, but only from the future”, Marx himself was a student of classical philosophy, whose thought betrays a distinct debt to Aristotle via the renaissance humanist, Giambattista Vico.

The most astringent critics of western civilisation as it actually existed, in other words, drew on the same canon as its apologists. Marx has some affinity to Shakespeare’s Caliban, who rebukes his slave-master, Prospero:

You taught me language, and my profit on ’t
Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language!

I bring this up not to commence some fatuous exercise of drawing up a balance sheet - on the plus side, Marx; on the minus side, the East India Company … The point is rather that it is wrong to see in ‘western civilisation’ simply an ideological fig-leaf: a wholly empty category serving only to justify exploitation and murder. Rather it is born into trouble: it simply cannot do the job that ‘Christendom’ once did, and so it is contested from its very birth.

And so, it is quite true that Israel ‘defends western civilisation’, in that it repeats some of its worst crimes: the genocidal settler-colonialism that all but wiped out the native peoples of North America, and entirely wiped out native peoples here and there (Tasmania, for instance). By doing so, it asserts what ‘civilisations’ must always assert when they conduct themselves in this way: that there is a hard membrane between civilisation and barbarism; that there are, forever, Greeks and barbarians (so called by the Greeks because their ‘inferior’ languages sounded like the ba-ba-ba of the infant). Civilisation is thus that which must be defended.

Muslim other

Today’s ‘barbarians’ are Muslims, and today’s defenders of ‘the west’ are obsessed with ‘halting the growth’ of Muslim communities in Europe and the US. One could cite various pseudo-intellectuals here, but we will go for the real stuff, and mention the cretinous US Republican, Randy Fine, who got into hot water recently for tweeting at Ilhan Omar (after she objected to Benjamin Netanyahu’s latest DC visit): “I’m sure it is difficult to see us welcome the killer of so many of your fellow Muslim terrorists”.

His comments were so crude that even the Democrat leaders who so frequently denounce ‘the squad’ had to back up Omar on this one; but any idea that Israel defends western civilisation must in the end devolve to some equivalent idiocy. The idea of civilisation is reduced merely to ‘not barbarian’; so evacuated, it becomes simply an occasion for … well, barbarism - but better our civilised barbarism than their barbaric barbarism!

As soon as we return to some positive idea of western (or, for that matter, any other) civilisation, we find not some shining, perfect tradition, but a long course of struggle, between opposing ideas and opposing interests - and indeed opposing ideas about how to conceive such first-order conflicts. The problem is there in the very etymology, indeed - a tradition is, literally, a handing on of something; but that also gives us the word, ‘traitor’ (traditor), for those who ‘handed over’ the holy books to the Roman authorities in a particularly severe persecution of the early Christians. Those who hand on traditions also hand on the means of those traditions’ dissolution and transformation.

There is, thus, good news and bad news for revolutionaries. The good news is that we have just as valid recourse to the moral and intellectual resources of ‘western civilisation’ - such as it is - as anyone else. It is good to have Aristotle in your locker - and Vico, Locke, Kant, Hegel and whoever else you like. All these thinkers have their limits - often blindingly obvious in retrospect - yet all push our thinking to certain distinctive extremities, and moreover each could only do so in succession with critical reference to their predecessors. What is handed on is an argument, and we take our place within it.

The bad news is precisely that western civilisation as such cannot be defended - what is best in its intellectual heritage overspills its boundaries and points beyond the opposition between the civilised and the barbarian. It therefore demands we leave behind ‘civilisational’ thinking as such, which ultimately - as we have seen - plays out in barbarism.