Mick Hartley

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto is an Oxford academic, with a number of books to his name including “Civilizations: Culture, Ambition, and the Transformation of Nature“, which I acquired a year or so ago when it had been remaindered, in the belief that it might be something along the lines of Jared Diamond’s “Guns Germs and Steel“. It didn’t take me long to abandon it. The underlying theme is that the West is always the problem. He imagines a man from Mars coming to Earth: what would he make of it? According to Fernandez-Armesto he would be struck most of all by the overwhelming contributions of Chinese civilsation. Um, yeah right: if he happened to land on Guy Fawkes night.

A new edition of De Tocqueville’s classic “Democracy in America” provides an excuse for Felipe Fernandez-Armesto to look at the current state of America:

Until now, democracy always had one big advantage over other systems. It made wars hard to start. Democracies got involved in wars reluctantly — usually when despotisms attacked them — and only under severe necessity. Now, even this virtue seems spent. America’s lengthening list of bombings and invasions in its tough, unenviable role as global policeman has included some indefensible mistakes. More recently, American governments — with British complicity — have launched three morally deplorable wars: first, against peaceful Serbs in their own homeland, where almost all of them were entirely innocent of the abominations of Kosovo; then against Afghanistan, on the pretext that the invasion was part of a justifiable war against terrorists; and now against Iraq, which, however objectionable the regime at the time, threatened no one and had virtually no means of making war much beyond its own borders. It is hard to imagine a government doing anything more evil than starting an unjust war. We used to think democracy indemnified us against such evil. We know better now.

A “morally deplorable” war “against peaceful Serbs in their own homeland, where almost all of them were entirely innocent of the abominations of Kosovo”? Presumably then Fernandez-Armesto would regard the war against the Nazis as morally deplorable, where almost all the Germans were innocent of the abominations carried out across Europe.

“The world is under threat”, he continues, “from two great American role-models favoured by the current Administration”. I’m almost embarrassed to quote further. The two role models? The Lone Ranger and Donald Duck. We’ve certainly come a long way from De Tocqueville.