On Barbarians

Interesting little screed. Although a bit funny (intentionally so, on Southern’s part), there’s a lot going on here. Let me unpack it a bit.

Southern begins the book claiming that the West is dying, blaming Western education and ideas of “Western” (white?) guilt. With all due respect, it seems more likely that it wasn’t that Southern’s education failed her, but that she was kind’ve an idiot. What senior in high school can’t name five classical authors? Shakespeare, Fitzgerald, Twain, Dickinson, Poe. That wasn’t hard, was it? Although history education does not go into as much depth as it needs to, she claims that all she knew about the Roman Empire was that it existed, and she didn’t know anything else about Western history. Ridiculous.

Her next two chapters were perhaps the most provocative. She first looks at progressive Baby Boomers before moving onto conservative ones. Her take on the sixties movements were interesting, especially when she attempts to grapple with French May, Marcuse, and Rudi Dutschke. She connects these events to a leftist attempt to infiltrate universities and brainwash students. I agree with her that the Academy has a left-wing bent, but they’re hardly radical Communists. Most academics that I’m familiar with are social democrats (capitalists!) or those just to their left. In her analysis of the New Left, she also does not give any thought to the role of anti-Communism, which is unfortunate. After all, anti-Communism was a major mobilizing factor in the 60s and one of the most prominent characteristics of the New Left. Her treatment of Boomer conservatives isn’t much better. She sees Barry Goldwater’s movement as the epitome of the “old Right” before former progressives joined for disagreeing with the New Left on issues like Vietnam, etc. What’s interesting about this is that Goldwater himself remarked that he was considered a moderate in the 90s. Surely he would disagree with Southern’s statement that modern conservatism is further to the left than that of the 60s and before. In 1996, he went so far as to say, “We’re the new liberals of the Republican party. Can you imagine that?”

Southern’s chapters on immigration and Islam are far less coherent. Her chapter on Islam mostly dwells on how it’s ok to be afraid of Muslims, her ridiculous characterization of three different “types” of Muslims, and a short (really strange) analysis of the Crusades. Unsurprisingly, this chapter has fewer footnotes than any other chapters—there are only three, one of which is a New York Times opinion piece on the Crusades. This chapter should have been completely re-written before publication (with far more research involved!). The chapter on immigration comes with the assumption that discrete states have been the natural way human societies have been organized throughout history. This had me scratching my head, as discrete states actually seem to be quite unusual in the past (before the 20th century, at least). For example, when the British took over Burma in the late nineteenth century, they weren’t sure what the borders of the kingdom of Burma were, so they went to the Thai king and asked him. He didn’t know either, so he recommended that the British ask people around where the borderlands were thought to be. Those people didn’t know where the borders were either. Although this is just one example, it is illuminating for examples of political organization before the modern period. Even states like the Byzantine Empire, the Islamic caliphates, and China tended to have territories that better resembled “borderlands” than “borders.” Immigration was common in the past, cultural change is a process of history, but it rarely requires the annihilation of one culture or another. Cultural fusion has been one of the most dynamic and productive processes that ever occurred. Her case on the welfare state is interesting, but her case on economics is mostly concern-trolling without enough analysis.

Her penultimate chapter is insignificant and much else has been written on it elsewhere, but her final chapter is a really bizarre call-to-action. She urges readers to embrace nationalism, which is reasonable in itself, but in doing so she argues that figures like Hitler were socialists and Islamophiles (the first is false, the latter is true), which makes them more in common with the Left than the Right. First and foremost, Hitler can hardly be called a “socialist.” Even the Leftish branch of the “National Socialist” German Workers Party were purged (or executed!) during the Night of Long Knives. One of the main goals of the NSDAP was also its militant antagonism towards Marxism (which Southern frequently conflates with Socialism). Under the definition Southern seems to work under, Hitler would certainly not have been considered a Socialist. On his Islamophilia, he absolutely did have an appreciation for Islam, but this was rooted in his idea that Islam was intrinsically imperial, masculine, and violent. Those who actually study Islam would hardly agree with this. In recent years, the scholarly literature on the relationship between Hitler and Islam has flourished. Southern would be smart to actually consult this.

She also attempts to draw a line between the nationalism of mid-nineteenth century Europe (1848, 1870-71, etc.) to today as a way of sanitizing the ideology. This is also a place where there are gaps. Nationalism was transformed at the end of the nineteenth century (particularly in Europe, before being exported to North America). Some of these transformations include ideas based on revanchism, the biological root of the “nation”—“Blut und Boden,” and the legacy of the relationship between nationalism and ethnic cleansing, even where genocide did not occur (the population exchanges between Greece and Turkey, the formation of nation-states in central and eastern Europe, etc).

If you are familiar with Southern’s videos, you’ll probably already know her viewpoints and will find this useless. If you’re on the Right and are unfamiliar with her views, you may find them convincing. However, nobody outside of the Right (and even then, a specific segment of the Right) will find her convincing.

As a final thought, it’s clear that Southern needs to read far more. Most of her sources come from online editorials and videos on the Web. There’s a massive body of literature on pretty much everything she discusses in this book and she’d be better off to engage with that. This is meant to be a manifesto, but even manifestos need to be rooted in thought and must grapple with complexity.