East and West

The tide of revolution is not only rising in the West; the East is also turbulent, restless, tempestuous. One of the most momentous ongoing matters is the contemporary history of the political and social transformation of the East. This period of Eastern agitation and gravity coincide with a period of unheard of and reciprocal zeal of the East and West to know each other, study each other, and understand each other.

In its cocky youth, Western civilization treated the Eastern peoples with disdain and haughtiness. The white man thought his dominion over the man of color necessary, natural and just. He used the words “Eastern” and “barbaric” as synonyms. The exploration and colonization of the East were not carried out by intellectuals, but by businessmen and warriors. Westerners disembarked in the East with their goods and machine guns, but not with their talents and bodies for spiritual investigation, interpretation, and recruitment. The West busied itself with consuming the material conquest of the Eastern world, but not with attempts at its moral conquest. In this way the East preserved its mentality and psychology. To this day, the millenarian roots of Islam and Buddhism remain fresh and dynamic. Hindus still wear their old khaddars, and the Japanese, the most saturated in everything Western among those of the East, still hold onto something of their samurai essence.

But today, the relativist and skeptical West is discovering its own decadence and foresees an imminent turn. It feels the need to explore and better understand the East. Moved by a new and feverish curiosity, Westerners are passionately delving into Asia’s customs, history and religions. Thousands of thinkers and artists are extracting the threads and color from the East’s thought and art. Europe is avidly stockpiling Japanese paintings and Chinese sculptures, Persian colors and Hindustani rhythms. It is getting drunk on Orientalism distilled from Russian lives, art and fantasy, and confesses an almost morbid desire to orientalize itself.

Meanwhile, the East now appears saturated in Western thought, and European ideology has seeped deeply into the Eastern soul. Despotism, an old Eastern plant, anguishes in the face of this undercutting influence. Republican China renounces its traditional wall, and the concept of democracy, already showing its age in Europe, sprouts anew in Asia and Africa. Liberty is the most prestigious goddess in the colonial world, in these times in which Mussolini claims Europe has rejected and abandoned her. (“Demagogues killed the goddess Liberty,” the black shirts’ condottiere has said). The Egyptians, the Persians, the Hindus, the Filipinos, the Moroccans, they all want to be free.

It is the case, among other things, that Europe is reaping the fruits of its wartime evangelizing. During the war, the allies used a demagogic and revolutionary language to stir the world up against the Germans and Austrians. They proclaimed noisily and emphatically the right of all peoples to independence. They presented the war against Germany as one in step with democracy and advocated a new International Law. This propaganda deeply moved the colonial peoples, and with the war over, these same colonial peoples announced, in the name of European doctrine, their desire to emancipate themselves.

Marxist doctrine is penetrating Asia, imported by European capital. Socialism, which was in its early days a phenomenon limited to Western civilization, is currently extending its historic and geographic radius. The first workers’ Internationals were purely Western institutions. In the First and Second Internationals, only the proletarians of Europe and America were represented. At the founding congress of the Third International in 1920, on the other hand, there sat delegates of the Chinese Workers’ Party and the Korean Workers’ Union, and subsequent congresses saw the participation of Persian, Turkic and Armenian delegations. In August 1920, Baku hosted a revolutionary congress of the Eastern peoples backed by the Third International. Twenty four Eastern peoples met in this conference. Some European socialists, among them Hilferding, questioned the Bolsheviks’ wisdom regarding movements of a nationalist bent. Zinoviev, in his polemic against Hilferding, responded: “A global revolution is not possible without Asia. There live a number of men four times greater than in Europe. Europe is a tiny part of the world.” Social revolution historically needs the insurrection of the colonial peoples. Capitalist society tends to restore itself through a more methodical and intense exploitation of its political and economic colonies, and social revolution needs to stir up the colonial peoples against Europe and the United States, to reduce the number of tributary and vassal states of capitalist society.

The new European moral conscience also conspires against European domination of Asia and Africa. There are currently many millions of pacifist allies in Europe who oppose any and all bloody, belligerent actions aimed at colonial peoples. Consequently, Europe finds itself obligated to deal, negotiate and make concessions before these peoples. The Turkish case is, in this respect, very illustrative.

There appears in the East then a vigorous desire for independence, at the same time that Europe is losing the strength needed to twist and suffocate it. In sum, we can confirm the existence of the historical conditions necessary for Eastern liberation. More than a century ago, a revolutionary ideology made its way from Europe to the peoples of America, and set ablaze by its bourgeois revolution, Europe could not avoid the wave of American independence engendered by this ideology. Now, equally, undermined by the social revolution, it cannot take up arms to repress its colonies’ insurrection.

In this grave and fertile hour of human history, it appears that something of the Eastern soul will make its way to the West, just as something of the Western soul will make its way to the East.