The West faces a fundamental choice. Will it wallow in self-loathing, or will it stand for the values on which our civilisation is built? The war between Israel and Hamas has sharpened that choice — and may well determine our own future.

A Warped Response

Why is the response of so many Westerners to the war between Israel and Hamas so distorted? It is indeed distorted to condemn only half-heartedly the atrocities committed against hundreds of civilians – including women, children, and the elderly – while denouncing, before it had even begun, the fight against terrorists who hide behind their own civilian population.

I believe this warped response to the conflict has everything to do with the West’s own deterioration. Having drifted away from its core values, the West has lost the moral clarity to see things straight. You might ask: has the West really drifted away from its own values? To a large extent, yes – including in the Netherlands.

A New Book

For years I watched with growing unease as our democratic constitutional state was being hollowed out, and eventually I wrote a book about it. In it I trace the fault lines I see opening up in our free, Western society, and I make the case for our precious values. Above all, I make the case for more debate — because where debate is absent, radicalisation looms, and ultimately oppression.

Tweet text: How the self-styled ‘right-thinking class’ undermines our democracy. Maaike van Charante @Repelsteeltje21 makes a powerful case for the return of healthy democracy in her latest book Debat ongewenst [Debate Unwelcome]. https://t.co/ik0NB5G33u Out 26 Oct. Order now! — Publisher Blauwburgwal (@blauwburgwal), October 20, 2023

Our Western values have become so self-evident to us that we assume they will simply sustain themselves. But they are fragile. It is staggering how carelessly influential groups in our society treat them — hollowing them out and twisting them until they serve only their interests. And the insidious thing is how gradually it happens.

For some reason, people tend to recognise a creeping danger too late. The first time I read Jacques Presser’s Ondergang — his account of the persecution and extermination of Dutch Jewry during the German occupation — what struck me was that the great evil did not come hammering at the door all at once. It crept closer, step by step. The erosion of our Western culture has proceeded even more slowly.

Cracks in Self-Confidence

The West has been losing its roots for a very long time. Earlier in our history, there was genuine and lively interest in other cultures, grounded in a healthy sense of self. But in the twentieth century, two world wars and the Holocaust blew gaping holes in Western self-confidence. How could our civilisation have been capable of this?

Not everyone took the time to reflect on that question, and those who did responded very differently. Legitimate horror and subsequent self-examination produced valuable insight in some — and in others, something darker: self-loathing, or resentment. Self-loathing born of an unbearable sense of guilt, and resentment directed at the victims whose fate forced a confrontation with unwelcome feelings of culpability.

Hatred of the West

After 1945, reflection could have produced a genuine “never again” — with the West’s founding ideals as its guide. Instead, resentment and self-loathing gained the upper hand in many quarters. And resentment finds its way to hatred of Jews with suspicious ease — note the irritation of some when Jews refer to the Holocaust: they are apparently not entitled to claim victimhood.

The self-loathing mutated into hatred of Western culture, and in a cruel inversion, the victims of the Holocaust were turned into symbols of the despised West. Activists who proclaim that Israel is a colonial project refuse to examine the obvious flaws in that argument. They prefer to feel morally superior to “those Jews” who must now carry the sins of the West — as Jews have always been made to carry the blame for whatever happens to be convenient.

Over the course of the twentieth century, hatred of the West curdled into the false humility of cultural relativism. A kind of penance through which the penitents could nevertheless position themselves on the right side. It became dogma: all cultures are equally valid. Multiculturalism became the new ideal.

Samuel Huntington

As early as 1996, Samuel Huntington argued in The Clash of Civilizations that multiculturalism threatened Western values. He wrote about the inheritance of Western civilisation — in which Americans too were rooted — and enumerated what lay at its centre: liberty, democracy, individualism, equality before the law, constitutionalism, private property.

He then turned to a small but influential number of intellectuals and publicists who, in his view, were attacking Western civilisation in the name of multiculturalism. They were waging war against the systematic bias towards European culture in education and the dominance of the Euro-American monocultural perspective.

Tweet text: In 1996(!) Huntington published ‘The Clash of Civilizations’. Read what he wrote about #identitypolitics and #multiculturalism 👇 He saw this #woke ideology as the greatest threat to Western civilisation. Who could have imagined it would spiral this far out of control. 😳 — Maaike van Charante (@Repelsteeltje21), June 4, 2022

That attack, Huntington wrote, reflected self-loathing and a drive towards self-destruction. He concluded: “The rejection of that creed and of Western civilisation means the end of the United States of America as we have known it. It also means effectively the end of Western civilisation.” A logical conclusion: a civilisation without a soul is a civilisation condemned.

Hollowing Out

Cultural relativism gained ground across the entire Western world. Particularly in the upper strata of society, it became a mark of sophistication to celebrate other cultures and to regard one’s own as crude and provincial. In the meantime, core values quietly dissolved — including in the Netherlands.

A telling example: for years, Dutch citizens who refuse to follow every passing fashion have bristled at the way Remembrance Day (4 May) has been appropriated as a grand celebration of the virtues of a self-congratulatory minority. Inclusivity takes precedence, but the essence is lost. Then pompous analyses conclude that “the war has become increasingly distant from us.”

Once, the Holocaust was a moral touchstone. After public consciousness was raised in the 1960s — thanks in part to Lou de Jong’s television series De bezetting [The Occupation, 1960] and Presser’s Ondergang — the phrase “Never Again Auschwitz” took on a profound meaning. But since the Holocaust was invoked for every conceivable cause, and politicians began designating their favourite victim groups as “the new Jews,” that meaning has faded.

The Foundation Is Gone

We are witnessing the soul – or at any rate the animating spirit – drain from our society. In recent years, I have written with increasing frequency about how our establishment is undermining our democracy and how fundamental rights are under attack. Western values are no longer the bedrock of our society; they are inert legislation, increasingly circumvented in practice.

Who still remembers the words of the great thinkers who once shaped our freedom? Who is still inspired by the ideals from which our human rights sprang? Where have the genuine democrats gone? Calls for exclusion and censorship are the order of the day, and tolerance for dissenting views often seems barely possible anymore.

But if the West does not stand up for its own values — if we as Westerners cannot manage to be inspired once again by the ideals that formed us as a civilisation — we will fall defenceless prey to enemies who know exactly what they stand for. Even if those enemies bring fanaticism and oppression. Even if they are terrorists.

Tweet text: “The West will not be overthrown — it will wither away and then be available for free to whichever stronger, more self-confident ideology comes along.” A sharp piece by @BartNijman 👇 on what the #HamasIsraelWar means for the West as a whole. https://t.co/pEhuw21qPa — Maaike van Charante (@Repelsteeltje21), October 23, 2023

Taking Sides

The response of much of the media to the pogrom of 7 October — and above all the uncritical transmission of Hamas lies about an Israeli strike on a hospital — laid bare how deep the rot runs. Those reactions shook me almost more than Hamas’s actions themselves. I had no illusions about the terrorists. From the media, apparently, I still expected something.

The one-sidedness of the coverage of Israel and Hamas — sceptical towards Israel, credulous towards Hamas — did not come out of the blue. The media are a mirror of society. Israel’s enemies are forming a toxic alliance before our very eyes. They are the Jew-haters from within Islam, and the (far-right) conspiracy theorists who can always devise some twisted rationale as to why “the Jews” are to blame.

But there are also the left-wing parties and their supporters who brand Israel as an outpost of the despised West. They whitewashed Hamas’s genocidal aims and the celebrations in the streets of Gaza following the pogrom of 7 October. At most, they offered dutiful expressions of sympathy with Israeli victims, before hastily pivoting to champion the real victims.

Light or Darkness

This is the logical endpoint of cultural relativism. Why place any value on the light that Israel embodies — liberty, democracy, individualism, equality before the law (see Huntington) — if you have decided that the darkness Hamas represents — oppression, dictatorship, groupthink, inequality — is equally valid?

Those who rally for Gaza might ask themselves who exactly they are rallying for. Are the civilians of Gaza well served by a terror regime that fills their children with hatred, uses them as human shields, and diverts humanitarian aid into yet more tunnels and weaponry? The footage showing water pipes being dug up to make rockets — posted online by Hamas itself — was telling.

Israel is far from perfect, but it is built on the same Western values we have allowed to decay. Several of the victims of 7 October turned out to be peace activists who had spent years working for the people of Gaza. Of course Israel has its extremists — inevitable after decades of bombings and rockets — but this democracy is not comparable to the Hamas regime.

That is not to say that Israeli forces will be welcomed as liberators by Gaza’s civilian population once they manage to defeat Hamas. It will be a bloody war, and Hamas has had sixteen years to stamp out all opposition and saturate the population with poison. Think of the videos showing young children cheerfully explaining how they plan to kill Jews when they grow up.

A Fundamental Choice

The West faces a fundamental choice, and the question is how much time we have left to make it. Israel knows where it stands: once again at the place where everything converges and judgment is rendered most harshly. It is cold comfort for Jews that many Westerners will only understand what is at stake when this canary in the coal mine is gone.

It will be of no benefit to the Jewish people if we then spend decades more holding commemorations to preach ‘never again’.

 

This article was originally published in Dutch.

You can support the work of Maaike van Charante at repelsteeltje.backme.org

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Translator’s note: Ondergang by Jacques Presser (1965) was the landmark Dutch-language history of the persecution and destruction of Dutch Jewry during the German occupation. It was translated into English as Ashes in the Wind: The Destruction of Dutch Jewry (1968). The television series De bezetting by Lou de Jong aired from 1960 to 1965 and was a defining moment in Dutch public consciousness about the Second World War. Both works are foundational cultural references for any Dutch reader and carry cultural significance beyond their historical content.