Stardate 20020203.1227

(On Screen): The fundamental flaw with the leftist argument about cultural imperialism is that they assume that Western culture (and in particular American culture) is spreading through force and coercion. The people of the world take our ideas and our culture only because we are shoving it down their throats, and if only we'd stop doing that, our culture would stop spreading and the cultural diversity of the world would be preserved in all its glory.

Only it's not like that. If there are McDonald's restaurants in Paris, it's because the people of Paris like eating there. No-one goes out on the streets of Paris and forces people into the nearest McDonald's at gunpoint. If no-one wanted to eat there, the restaurants would close.

If people in Cairo wear Levis, if people in Kuala Lumpur wear Nikes, if people in Kabul watch Schwarzenegger movies, if people in Bangalore watch Baywatch, if people in Kinshasa listen to rock music, it's because they like it.

We don't have to actively spread our culture to the world; it is seductive. Cultural competition is darwinian; and one culture can replace another quite easily. It happens because of a billion individual choices by a billion people, not as the acts of a few. We don't have to actively spread our culture, because it is spreading on its own. And so are our political ideals.

Ideas and attitudes are the most dangerous things we humans have ever created. Wars have been fought over them. And the most dangerous ideas in history are secularism, and self determination. The idea that religion should be an individual thing but never a governmental thing, and that individuals should be permitted to decide for themselves how they want to live without asking permission from their neighbors or the local priest, threaten the old order more than guns or bombs.

One way to tell how confident someone is in their ideals is to see whether they're willing to let you hear what their opposition has to say. If one side says "Read both sides" and the other side says "You should only listen to us because their ideas are too dangerous for you to experience", then you can be sure that the second guy knows his idea will lose. Censorship is the intellectual equivalent of protectionism. It uses the law to protect ideas which cannot survive on their own.

We don't defend ourselves against the cultures of the world because we are not threatened by them. When we eat at restaurants serving Mexican food, or Thai, or Brazilian, or French, or Italian, or Chinese, it is because we like how they taste. When we watch Japanese movies, it's because they're good. We don't go screaming about cultural imperialism because our culture is not imperiled.

Our enemies hate us because our ideas are better. They try to suppress our culture in their nations because they know their cultures cannot survive competition. We openly permit anyone in our culture to see any other culture's ideas that they wish and adopt whatever they feel like. The hard-core Islamists know that if the people in their nations have access to Western culture and Western products, that many of those people will embrace our ideas and abandon theirs. They know this because they see it happening every day. By the same token, they know that their ideas are freely available to us and yet only a vanishingly small number of our people adopt their ideas and attitudes.

The Taliban's Committee for the Preservation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice tried to suppress all traces of Western culture. People would be beaten for possession of tape recordings of western music, or for having books containing western ideas. Conversion from Islam to any other religion was an offense punishable with death, often after months of torture.

Deep down, many of those responsible for this repression were doing this for what they perceived as the good of those they repressed. (Others were doing it because they were sadistic thugs.) They knew that there was one true right path to follow, but also knew that when presented with the temptations of the world that most people would abandon the true right path. Only by preventing them from even seeing anything except the true right path could people's souls be saved.

It is this deep insecurity which is their biggest weakness, because ideas cannot be suppressed. The technological progress of the Twentieth Century was astounding, and no-where more so than in communications. It is now impossible to prevent people from gaining access to ideas from foreign lands. Even efforts as draconian as those taken by the Taliban were not sufficient; within days after they were kicked out of Kabul, people had unearthed hidden stashes and had begun to listen to Western music and to watch Western movies.

Censorship is not only wrong, it's futile. It's impossible. And any ideology which can only survive through the suppression of foreign ideas is now doomed. Those we fight in this war know it.

And that is why they hate us.