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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (57195)	11/14/2002 9:22:25 PM
From: Bilow	Respond to of 281500

Hi Brumar89; Re western products being "bait" for western values. I'd say it's more complicated than that. The US has what amounts to a very attractive (given human nature) "lifestyle" package. The rest of the world has extreme difficulty picking and choosing which parts of the package they will accept. As the Islamists in Afghanistan recognized, once the nose of the camel is in the tent, the rest of the camel eventually gets in. So they banned television, but theirs was a hopeless cause. US culture (and cultural values) are supreme because once a fad has been tested and succeeds in Peoria, it has proven itself to be a decisively attractive concept. The stuff we do spreads around the world not because we have a strong military, or because we're smarter (the fact is that we invented none of our cultural concepts, but instead borrowed them from other societies), but instead because our society is built from so many different immigrant groups that everything eventually gets tested here. And the habits that pass the test will eventually spread to be universal human habits. The German concept of cutting down an evergreen tree and installing it in the home, for example, turned out to be so attractive that it became common in the US, but now the habit, along with the rest of Christmas celebration, has spread to the East, despite the lack of belief in Christianity. The Japanese have no spiritual or religious basis for Christmas. While in the west there is a slight (though increasingly inscrutable) pretense towards a celebration of the birth of Christ, and years of tradition of families gathering, here in Japan the holiday is completely imported, and largely market driven. My Christmas experience here started with music. Early December, every store was heard playing Christmas music. English-language Christmas music. And not just Bing Crosby roasting mistletoe in an open sleigh, but in the low-rent Korean grocer in Shitamachi, I heard Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, the trance remix. This was the touchstone moment; after which the even more peppy versions of songs that meant family and tradition that I heard as I was shopping for rice balls in over-lit convenience stores fit readily into my holiday. ... links.net Another example is the concept of adults having a costume party on October 31, and children running around the neighborhood begging for candy, which has spread from the US to Mexico despite the fact that Mexico already had a "day of the dead" ceremony that takes place on the same day: Halloween customs are mixing with Day of the Dead traditions throughout Latin America, robbing some graves of their marigold-petal decorations and leaving the dead to spend their night on earth alone. Most Mexicans don't seem to mind the change -- many are happily donning costumes to try trick-or-treating. At Mexico City's witchcraft market, shoppers crowd a growing number of costume stands, shunning tables that sell Day of the Dead supplies like papier-mache skeletons, sugar skulls and bright orange flowers used in offerings to the dead. Halloween is especially popular in Mexico's north, where U.S. traditions are often imported by returning migrants. In Ciudad Juarez, which borders El Paso, Texas, television ads urged Mexican citizens to celebrate Day of the Dead and stop going north to trick or treat. ... asia.cnn.com And it all goes both ways. Americans, for example, celebrate Cinco De Mayo at nearly every bar in the country without the slightest concept of what happened on the 5th of May, 1862 (the Mexican Army beat the French at the somewhat obscure Battle of Puebla). Pretty soon they'll be celebrating it in France, LOL, this despite the fact that before it caught on in the US, it was largely celebrated only in the Puebla area of Mexico. But the concept of having a few beers with your buddies at that time of year is sufficiently attractive that the celebration jumped the border, and then jumped again back into the rest of Mexico. The other parts of our culture are similarly attractive, and similarly spread universally. Men in the US wear suits on formal occasions. Suits are cut so as to emphasize the masculine figure. That's universally attractive across the whole species. So what do Afghan men wear when they get married? You guessed it: In certain ritual aspects, Kabul weddings resemble Western ones. The bride and groom cut the cake together, feed each other pieces of it and then do the same with cups of juice. The bride wears a frilly white gown; the groom, a dark Western suit. The newlyweds are driven to and from the festivities in gaily decorated vehicles. A white sedan is preferable, but a rented taxi will do if the family is too poor to own a car. msnbc.com Humans are the best imitators on the planet, and the US gets exposed to the maximum amount of things to imitate. This applies to more than just our wedding and celebration customs. And there is plenty of evidence for the spread of those, but I thought I'd concentrate this post on the very human concept of partying. I don't mean to make the adjustment problems we now see to be trivial. There is a definite time delay between the acceptance of US (read: "world") celebrations and the acceptance of western values, and that time delay is probably measured in decades, not years. -- Carl

To: Brumar89 who wrote (57195)	11/16/2002 8:01:36 PM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

I hope you are right about western products being "bait" for western values. I'm skeptical. If that were the exact nature of the formulation, I’d be skeptical too. It isn’t, though. Let me try a reconstruction: The desire for a materially better life – which these days usually translates into desire for American products – can be a powerful engine of discontent with and resistance to regimes that cannot satisfy that desire. The process of satisfying that desire is in itself a generator of progressive values. Material improvement requires manufacturing and trade, education and communication, development of a middle class with responsible management roles. All of these trends push a country toward openness and liberalism, and make it almost impossible to combine material progress with dictatorial or theocratic control. Is that more plausible? I think it amounted to appeasement in fact. Though likely no one consciously intended that. Perhaps a better question: taking hindsight out of the equation, was there a practical, effective, and politically acceptable military response available at that time. We should always remember, when discussing military response, the time-honored terrorist progression. The terrorists attack, expecting and intending to generate a military response. They then disperse their assets among a civilian population, ensuring that the military response will involve collateral damage. They then use that collateral damage to recruit more terrorists and to stir up world opinion against the attacking power. They repeat the process until the patience of the attacking power is worn down. This is a cycle that we can and should avoid.