It really is the Culture

I thought I'd never see the LA Times printing an article which didn't give into the mantra of the West being the root of all evil, but Max Boot has a great perspective.

My own perspective comes from having lived in a third world country, India, for a year. There I saw how dangerous the communication gap between cultures can be. In India's case, though they have a large muslim population and an overwhelming poverty problem, they don't give into too much of the victimhood that spews from the West. Surely, you see lots of references to the "colonial yoke" of the British Raj, but mostly, Indians realize that most of their problems are of their own making. That the West does some good.

Still, we have to remember that, culturally, when the West communicates with the Middle East it is effectively talking to its past, its medieval past where your loyalty lied with your people first. England, for over a hundred years, pursued the vague notion that the French owed them something. Though the French were certainly a pain in the rump as they are today, the English did more harm to themselves by believing these fairy tales. Reading contemporary medieval writings, one can see how even intellectuals failed to look to themselves for their problems. At its height, this type of thinking was what led to Fascism and to the two great wars and hundreds of millions dead. Germany's problems in the 1930s were of their own making, not of the Jews or anyone else.

Introspection is a gift of the modern age and one that is wholly lost on the Middle East. Perhaps they will have to go through what we did.