UP tuition hike targets rich students
The article “UP tuition hike targets rich students” by Perseus Echeminada in The Philippine Star and posted at : http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/storypage.aspx?StoryId=59657
is a clear example of PR journalism. It relies heavily on one side of the debate and its facts are half-truths.
The lead says: “Only incoming freshmen and transferees who belong to the “high-income bracket” will be affected by the 300 percent tuition increase approved by the University of the Philippines, a UP official said”
This is not the whole truth. Not all will be affected by the 300% increase because some will have to pay only 200% or 100% increase depending on the evaluation of the revised Socialized Tuition and Financial Assistance Program (STFAP). But ALL incoming freshmen and transferees will suffer the increase in miscellaneous fees.
With bureaucracy and corruption everywhere, who will know who will pay how much? For those who know the right contacts, they will pay as low as possible. They will get 100% scholarship. Those who have no contacts, they pay the full price. Those who cannot provide the necessary legal documents, they will pay even more.
There might come a time when middle income parents will wish that their children will not pass the UPCAT (UP College Admission Test) so they can just sent them to other public schools or even cheaper private schools.
The article then says: “She (Isabela Reyes, director of the UP System’s Information Office said in a statement) said it was approved to help the university cope with inflation.”
So, for UP to cope with inflation, the students’ parents/guardians will have to fork out the extra money. The fact is that they (the parents/guardians) are already helping pay the salaries of UP Pres. Roman, Chancellor Cao and Isabela Reyes through taxes. Now, they will have to dig deeper into their pockets so the Roman gang can do what they please at UP without asking the government (and the Filipino people in general) for more money.
Reyes was supposed to have also said: “The adjusted fees are nowhere near the true cost of an undergraduate UP education, not to mention the cost of an undergraduate in other comparable universities in the country”.
Now, now… UP is supposed to be a PUBLIC SHOOL. Therefore, its fees SHOULD BE NOWHERE NEAR THE COST OF AN UNDERGRADUATE IN OTHER COMPARABLE UNIVERSITIES IN THE COUNTRY. IN FACT, IT SHOULD BE TOTALLY FREE.
If the reporter or his source wants to compare costs, then it should compare UP with other public schools like PLM, Makati City College, PUP and all other public universities. Or it could be compared to the public state universities in foreign countries where public schools – with the best educational standards, certainly better than UP – are FREE.
Then the article says: “UP students who support the increase, when interviewed, said only freshmen and transferees whose families have an annual income of P1 million will be affected by the tuition hike.”
Who are these anonymous students? Why didn’t the reporter asked members of the UP Student Council or even the Student regent so as to give more balance to the report.
The report went on: “Reyes also said that contrary to claims of those opposing the increase that no consultations were held, a series of consultations with students in UP campuses in Baguio, Cebu, Tacloban and Mindanao was conducted.
“The deans of UP Manila also held consultations with their students on various occasions and (UP) president Emerlinda Roman herself responded to all requests for interviews (with) the (student publications) UP Collegian and the UP (Los Baños) Perspective,” Reyes said.”
Consultations? I heard that Roman and Cao did not even want to talk with the Student Council officials because, according to them, the increase will affect only the incoming students and thus the present Student Council does not represent the future students!
This convoluted logic is shared by people like Solita Monsod, who in her newspaper column wrote that today’s UP students are not (and should not be) concerned about the tuition fee hike because they will not be affected by it.
If the reporter is a good reporter, he should have asked more students and investigated some events that reportedly happened between the students and Chancellor Cao. I received reports that student were angrily pounding on Cao’s car in protest over the tuition hike. I have also been informed that a day or so after that event, a student was hit by Cao’s car. I don’t know if that was ever aired or printed in the media.
The report says: “The Board of Regents, at its 1,216th meeting, unanimously approved the other night Roman’s recommendation to adjust and implement a revised Socialized Tuition and Financial Assistance Program (STFAP).”
If this is the tuition hike approval where the Board voted 7-0, as announced in the media, the question is, what happened to the other Regents? Were they absent? Why? The Student Regent and the Faculty Regent went public that they were opposed the tuition increase. So what happened to them? Did they boycott the BOR meeting?
To give the report a seeming balance, the last quotes were from the employees union who stated their opposition to the tuition fee hike.
Contrary to opinions of people like Solita Monsod and Emerlinda Roman, The UP tuition fee hike is a valid concern for all Filipinos because University of the Philippines is a PUBLIC institution, even touted as the country’s premier State University.
All Filipinos who have hopes that their children, nephews/nieces, grandchildren, etc, would one day study at UP should be concerned. All Filipinos should be concerned with what is happening to UP because UP does not belong to Roman, Cao and their academic clique. It does not even belong to the faculty members ( many of whom act as if they own their departments or colleges). UP belongs to the whole Filipino people.
Peace Offering for the Holidays
The government declared last 24 October a national holiday to commemorate the Eid al-Fitr, the Muslim festival that celebrates the end of the fasting month of Ramadhan. Using the holiday cheer as a bridge to better relations between communities is always a good idea.
For the Christmas / New Year holidays, ABS-CBN Foundation, Inc. and Knowledge Channel are coming up with a 10-part drama series that they hope would bring peace to our land. Titled SALAM (Peace / Kapayapaan), the program focuses on the lives of four children - two Muslims and two Christians – living in conflict-torn Mindanao. The producers of the show hope to impart lessons on Peace that can inspire children and adults to work for peace not only in times of war, but in everyday life.
The program is sponsored by USAID and uses the Department of Education’s Peace Education Teaching Exemplars for Elementary Schools as the framework for the structure of the contents and story line.
The series will premier on Knowledge Channel in late November and on ABS CBN in Dec. 30.
SCRIPT COMMITTEE
Ian Victoriano, who has been writing for both the Foundation and the Knowledge
Channel for several years now, wrote the script for the 10 episodes. But each script had to undergo rigorous screening from the Script Committee composed of Mariles Gonzales, Production Manager of the Foundation; Cita DC Musni of Knowledge Channel; Claudette Sevilla, the Executive Producer; Nanette Losaria of the Department of Education; Mian Villanueva, a child psychologist; and myself as the Moro consultant.
Some of the scripts breezed past the committee but others had to undergo major revisions. For example, I was quite taken aback by the script for episode 2. While it was ostensibly pro-peace, it actually promoted further conflict as stereotypes were strengthened and prejudices upheld. Thanks to the concept of a Script Committee, the script was analyzed and revised accordingly.
While it is horrible for a writer to sit and listen to other people criticize his/her work, the concept of a committee in this case is necessary since the final media product needs not only to entertain but also to inform and even to advocate ideas.
But Ian, the scriptwriter, seemed to be comfortable working with a Script committee. He says, “Working with the Peace Project has been very educational for me, as I became aware of the various issues related to peace. I learned that this consists largely of breaking stereotypes and conventional modes of thinking and trying to create hope amid situations of conflict.”
JON RED
Writing the scripts was quite a learning process for Ian. Translating them into the small screen (TV) was the job of the director. Indie (independent) filmmaker Jon Red is the director for the series.
Because the medium is TV, Jon might not be able to express as much artistry as he would want to. But he is optimistic. “It allows me to apply my indie filmmaking attitude to each episode. We do a lot of experimentation. It may not be big-budgeted as the telenovelas and fanasteryes, but it has the biggest theme and we treat it as cinema,” he says.
Jon likes the fact that the show has a “very important and relevant theme” and that it addresses the youth. “The youth is my favored sector of the Pinoy audience,” he adds.
Incidentally, I once wrote a critique of Jon Red’s film Utang ni
Tatang. I noted the presence of Rabelaisian concepts in that movie. I showed Jon my paper titled Bakhtinian Carnivalesque in a Pinoy Film, and he seemed to agree with it.
THE E.P.
In films, the director is usually the big boss. But in television, the Executive Producer calls the shots. S/he handles the administrative side and may even intervene in the creative aspects. The Executive Producer for the Peace Project series is Claudette Sevilla. “Getting the right people – creative staff like the writer, director, assistant director, consultants and talents – is critical,” she stresses.
“Peace is not an easy subject matter to deal with where educational television is concerned,” Claudette admits. “Doing this project is a very big challenge for me as an Executive Producer. It is a little complicated but the good thing is, I feel happy and fulfilled especially when I see a beautiful episode completed and I would imagine the children who will be watching it,” she adds.
KNOWLEDGE CHANNEL
Knowledge Channel won a grant from USAID to produce two sets of modules – one about livelihood projects and the other about peace. ABS-CBN Foundation won the bid to do the Peace modules.
“These modules were produced with the thought that peace is something that must always start from within; it is not a lofty or grandiose idea that must take decades or billions of pesos to work. If we are able to educate or imbibe the value of peace to our children now, the outward or nationwide peace should not be such a far-away dream in the future,” says Channel operations head Cita dela Cruz-Musni.
PEACE IN THE WORLD
Peace on Earth and Goodwill to Men/Women. That is the spirit of the holidays. Unfortunately, it is not the spirit of the world today. Bush’s “War on Terror” has a direct effect in the Philippines as Ms. Arroyo subscribes to the Bush doctrine. The militarization of Mindanao and other parts of the country continue. The peace talks with the MILF have stalled and MNLF leader Nur Misuari remains under government detention.
The controversies on the Danish cartoons of Prophet Muhammad and the Papal remark merely highlight the tension now gripping the Muslim and Christian worlds. There is so much misunderstanding and misconception. And nowhere is it more evident than in the Philippines.
The USAID-funded Peace TV series of Knowledge Channel / ABS-CBN Foundation could go a long way in bridging the wide communication gap between the Muslims and Christians in the Philippines. Three hundred and fifty years of Moro-Spanish wars and 30 or so years of Moro-American conflict plus the MNLF / MILF – GRP (Government of the Republic of the Philippines) wars since the 1970s have taken their toll on the collective minds of the inhabitants of the Philippine Islands.
However, the producers did not think that the TV series should dwell on the Moro conflict. They were really more concerned about values that encourage peace in any situation. Thus, Mindanao became simply a backdrop for the show. One reason for this is that the series will be shown nationwide and not just in Mindanao. But isn’t the Mindanao problem a national issue?
MEDIA’S ROLE and THE MINDANAO PROBLEM
Media’s role in peace-building cannot be over-emphasized. Media products are simply so prevalent in today’s society. In fact, media create social reality.
Practically all the media products about the Moros during the Spanish time, the American era and even up to today, including textbooks, have been critical of the Moros. Rarely do we find books, films or TV programs that portray a true understanding of the Moro culture, history and general way of life. Marilou Diaz-Abaya’s Bagong Buwan is the only film I know that took the Moro’s point of view seriously regarding the Mindanao problem.
In Philippine media, the only Moros that get attention are the Abu Sayyaf and everyone else tagged as criminals, bandits, bombers, etc.
The centuries-old animosity between the Muslims and Christians in the Philippines cannot be solved simply by signing peace agreements with armed groups. The Tripoli Agreement and the Jakarta Peace Accord between the Philippine government and the MNLF failed even if they were international pacts signed under the auspices of the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC).
Lasting peace can only be achieved if it involves everyone – the leaders and the people, the young and the old, the fighters and the intellectuals, the conservatives and the radicals. Media must constructively inform, educate, and advocate ideas that would be conducive to lasting peace.
PEACE TV MINI SERIES
The Peace TV mini series of Knowledge Channel / ABS CBN Foundation is a good way to start, i.e., by educating the children. Hopefully, more media products, especially TV and film, will be made that will dig deep into the issues of the Mindanao Problem which will make people understand the enormity of the problem. Only a peaceful Mindanao can bring real progress to Manila and the whole Philippines. (END)
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Published in Mr. & Ms. magazine Dec ‘06 - Jan ‘07
Fast Forward to the Past:
Huntington hopes to bring the postmodernist world
back to the Medieval Age.
© by Datu Jamal Ashley Abbas
<blockquote><em>For peoples seeking identity and reinventing ethnicity, enemies are essential, and the potentially most dangerous enmities occur across the fault lines of between the world’s major civilizations.</em></blockquote>
- Samuel P. Huntington
The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
On 11 September 2001, two commercial airplanes allegedly hijacked by a few Arab young men deliberately crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, totally erasing the two giant skyscrapers from the Manhattan skyline. Reportedly, another plane similarly hijacked crashed into the Pentagon . Some three thousand people were killed and many wounded. The targets couldn’t have been more planned by whoever the perpetrators were. One was the West’s, if not the world’s financial center, while the other is its military headquarters. Another plane that reportedly targeted the White House crashed somewhere else. Americans were stunned that anybody would dare attack America, the world’s only superpower.
United States President George W. Bush called for a new “Crusade.” Criticized as “politically incorrect”, Mr. Bush changed his choice of words. It was not a crusade after all, he said, but a mere “War against Terrorism.” The terrorists simply happen to be Muslims. The world then witnessed the Anglo-American overkill in the second attack on Iraq which finished off what George Bush the Elder started more than a dozen years ago. This time, however, the United Nations refused to give its imprimatur to the invasion.
In fact, the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, an African, called the American-led war on Iraq as “illegal”.(The Philippine Star, 11/23/04) .
Is the world witnessing the “Clash of Civilizations” predicted by Samuel Huntington? Huntington enumerated the various arguments of his theory in his now famous essay in Foreign Affairs (Summer 1993).
Another writer, S.R. Gill (1991), noted that the first US invasion of Iraq was not just a war among states but a struggle over “organizing principles of society” which actually began during the Crusades. This was a war between the West’s capitalist secular materialism and Islam’s metaphysical social doctrines.
Although there are many who claim that there is no clash of civilizations, their arguments are mostly grounded on the premise that the US-led war is against terrorism and that the majority of Muslims and other non-Westerners are also against terrorism. Corollary to this thinking is the idea that the West is not against the Muslims per se.
In a follow-up to his now famous essay, Huntington wrote The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (1996:Simon and Schuster). In the last two pages of his 321-page book, he presented the idea that all civilizations must band together to preserve Civilization (with a capital C) against the invading barbarians. He did not mention who these barbarians were. It was left to Bush the Younger to name them: the Terrorists.
Mr. Huntington made it quite clear who were America’s greatest threats – the Muslim and the Chinese civilizations. Mr. Bush made it quite clear who the terrorists are, for now – Muslims.
The US invaded and conquered Iraq, a country with no known terrorists associated with Bin Laden, the alleged mastermind of the attack on the Twin Towers. In fact, Saddam Hussein and Bin Laden belong to opposite ideological poles within Islamic thought – one is a fundamentalist and the other is a secular socialist. The only thing they have in common is that they are both Muslims. And of course, Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” were proven to be Mr. Bush’s and the Central Intelligence Agency’s figment of imagination.
Graham E. Fuller (2002), former Vice-Chairman of the National Intelligence Council at the CIA says:
PRESIDENT BUSH has repeatedly stressed that the war on terrorism is not a war on Islam. But by seeking to separate Islam from politics, the West ignores the reality that the two are intricately intertwined across a broad swath of the globe from northern Africa to Southeast Asia.
Transforming the Muslim environment is not merely a matter of rewriting school textbooks or demanding a less anti-Western press. The simple fact is that political Islam, or Islamism — defined broadly as the belief that the Koran and the Hadith (Traditions of the Prophet’s life) have something important to say about the way society and governance should be ordered - remains the most powerful ideological force in that part of the world.
Fuller realized that Islam and politics cannot be separated. Yet he distinguished “political Islam” or “Islamism” from Islam itself. This shows either utter misunderstanding or deliberate misinformation of the Westerners regarding Islam. All Muslims, whether politicized or not, necessarily believe “that the Koran and the Hadith (Traditions of the Prophet's life) have something important to say about the way society and governance should be ordered.” If a person does not believe that, then he is simply not a Muslim. Islam is not a race. It is a system of beliefs and ideas. A Muslim is one who believes in the ideas presented in the Qur’an and the Hadith. Islam, as embodied in the Qur’an and Hadith, is necessarily political. While hundreds of millions of Muslims live in non-Islamic states, it does not mean that they do not believe in the political prescriptions of the Qur’an and Hadith.
Any Muslim schoolboy/girl will affirm that there is no separation of the Church and the State in Islam.
In the same vein, there are millions of Muslims who do not practice polygamy and divorce. But that does not mean that they do not believe in the logic of such practices as stipulated in the Qur’an and Hadith. They simply do not believe their circumstances warrant or even permit such practices.
Creating a new category of people called Islamists is very convenient. According to Western logic, Terrorists are Islamists and bad Muslims; while, good Muslims (i.e., Western lackeys) belong to Islam, the peaceful religion.
It must be pointed out that while the US and its allies officially and publicly reject the idea of a civilizational clash, the US religiously follows the recommendations of Huntington’s (1993) foreign policy advice; namely, “to limit the expansion of the military strength and expansion of Confucian and Islamic states” (thus the two attacks on Iraq); “to moderate the reduction of Western military capabilities and maintain military superiority in East and Southwest Asia” (thus the warning on “evil axis member” North Korea to stop its nuclear experiments); to exploit differences and conflicts among Confucian and Islamic states (the old divide and rule strategy – Gulf States vs Iraq for example); “to support in other civilizations groups sympathetic to Western values and interests” (increased military aid to friendly governments fighting Muslim separatists like in the Philippines); and “to strengthen international institutions that reflect and legitimate Western interests and values and to promote the involvement of non-Western states in those institutions.”(These institutions include the UN, and its various arms including World Bank and IMF.)
Quoting from Michael Dibdin’s novel, Dead Lagoon where one character declared, “Unless we hate what we are not, we cannot love what we are”, Huntington (1996) revealed his philosophical viewpoint quite succinctly. By following the political prescriptions of a man with this Weltanschauung, George Bush (père et fils), aided and abetted by Mr. Tony Blair, can only bring the world back into the Dark Ages.
Huntington divides today’s world into 8 civilizations based either on race or religion; namely, Western, Latin American, African, Islamic, Hindu, Orthodox, Sinic, and Japanese. By Western, Huntington means the successor states of the Holy Roman Empire and excludes Greece and Eastern Europe which used to form part of the Eastern Roman Empire a.k.a. the Byzantium Empire.
WESTERN CIVILIZATION
Huntington’s Western civilization began with the Fall of the Roman Empire in 476 which gave way to the reign of the barbarian kingdoms of Europe. But while the western part of the Roman Empire was overwhelmed by the barbarians, the Greco-Roman civilization continued in the eastern part. The Eastern part (Byzantium) of the original Roman Empire outlived its Western counterpart for a thousand years, finally succumbing to the Ottomans in 1453 (Van Doren 1991) although it was ready for conquest by any power one hundred years earlier (Toynbee 1976)
But the idea of an empire in the West remained alive. From 800 to 1806, a so-called Holy Roman Empire existed, which was neither Roman nor holy nor even an actual empire. To compete with the Roman Empire in the East, the popes or bishops of Rome, allied with the barbarian kingdoms in Western Europe. By nominating and crowning the Holy Roman Emperor, the Bishop of Rome (Pope) proclaimed its independence from the Byzantine emperor.
It seemed that for Huntington, the schism between Eastern and Western Roman Churches/Empires marked the separation of Greece from the West. The lingua franca in Western Europe was Latin while in Eastern Europe, it was Greek. Christianity evolved into Roman Catholicism and Protestantism in Western Europe while it evolved into Orthodox Catholicism in the Eastern (Byzantine) Roman Empire.
In other words, for Huntington, today’s world is just a replica of the world during the time of Charlemagne and the Dark Ages. He could not care less about the European Age of Reason or the Age of Enlightenment. For Huntington, ”Western civilization emerged in the eighth and ninth centuries. It did not begin to modernize until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The West was the West long before it was modern. The central characteristics of the West, those which distinguish it from other civilizations, antedate the modernization of the West.”( Huntington:1996, p.69)
The dominance of the West was brought about by the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries, yet for Huntington, the West became the West when a bishop of Rome (Pope Leo III) crowned the Frankish king Charlemagne as Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. It was also the time of the Viking conquests, when the Danish king Canute ruled over England. The Vikings also ruled Ireland, Iceland and Normandy in France.
Perhaps for Huntington, the most significant event in the 8th century was the Battle of Tours a.k.a. Battle of Poitiers when the Franks led by Charles Martel stopped the advance of the Muslims in Europe. This event has always been trumpeted in history textbooks read in most of the world’s high schools, including the Philippines, as Christian Europe’s triumph over Islam. Yet it is hardly mentioned that the attacking army was from Spain led by the Governor of Cordoba. They had defeated Aquitaine but when their leader was killed by Martel and his army at Tours, the Muslims returned home to Spain. And for 700 years more, Spain was part of the Islamic civilization. Europe was not always Christian.
Huntington does not seem to understand that in the Middle Ages, the great civilizations of the world – Islamic, Byzantine, Chinese and Indian consider Western Europe as a land of barbarians.
Huntington wants to put Christianity (Roman Catholicism and Protestantism) back in the foreground of Western civilization forgetting the fact that Christianity brought Western Europe into the Dark Ages. The history of the West was always marked by conflict with its own religion, Christianity.
Christianity was not even of the West. It came from the East and introduced to the West. The Roman Empire at first ridiculed the Christians and later killed them for sport. Just when the Romans finally embraced Christianity, the barbarians overwhelmed the Romans and destroyed their civilization. Edward Gibbon, in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, identified two reasons for the fall of the great Roman Empire: barbarians and Christianity. (Van Doren:1991)
Aurelius Augustinus (St. Augustine) developed the concept of “The City of God”. He said that Pax Romana was The City of Man. But Jesus was “the magister interiore, the inward teacher, the revealing Word of God. The City of God therefore is not an earthly city. It is within the heart and soul of every true Christian…it is not at Rome or any other ‘place’.”(Van Doren, p.94) Henceforth, the Christians decided to leave the City of Man and concentrated on the City of God by living in cloisters and monasteries.
The Emperor Justinian ordered the closure of Plato’s Academy, after a thousand years of existence. Thus Europe’s entry into the Dark Ages was complete.
Europeans suffered almost a thousand years under the Papacy, a time historians call the “Dark Ages”. Ironically, it was the Muslims who re-introduced Aristotle and ancient Greek texts to the Christians. Thus, thanks to the Muslims, the Europeans became “Enlightened” (the Age of Enlightenment) and “Reborn” (Renaissance).
Humanity was back at the center of the cosmos and not God.
England’s Henry VIII established his own Church of England. The Reformation came. The Protestants killed Catholics and vice versa and a century of devastating religious wars among the Christians followed.
By the 18th century, Europe’s phobia with religion culminated in the French Revolution with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the secularization of the State. For Europe, Humankind was again, the measure of all things. With Darwinism, capitalism, Marxism, humanism, secularism and the “scientific method”, man’s alienation from God was complete.
The greatness of European (including North American) civilization was due to the secularization of the state, and putting Man at the center of the Universe and positivistic science as the approved approach to learning. The West’s “modern man” comes from a world created by Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley and Hume.
And now, contrary to historical evidence, Huntington is saying that God and Christianity is the raison d’etre of Western civilization!
PARANOIA
Throughout his book, Huntington showed his fear of the fall of the US and Western civilization: “the West…as a mature civilization on the brink of decay” [p.304}, “to preserve Western civilization in the face of declining Western power” [p.311], etc.
The fall of the other superpower, USSR, apparently had hit a nerve in Huntington. Afraid that America the superpower would go the way of its former rival, he desperately woos Europe to be on America’s side. He claims that “the end of the United States of America…means effectively the end of Western civilization” (p.307).
And with superpower America out of the way, “the West is reduced to Europe and a few lightly populated overseas European settler countries. Without the United States the West becomes a miniscule and declining part of the world’s population on a small and inconsequential peninsula at the extremity of the European land mass.” (ibid.) Statements like these cannot hope to get the nod of Europeans.
In his Foreign Affairs essay, Huntington wrote, “As the ideological division of Europe has disappeared, the cultural division of Europe between Western Christianity, on the one hand, and Orthodox Christianity and Islam, on the other, has reemerged.” In other words, Huntington says that after the Cold War, Europe is again divided between Us (Western Christianity) and Them (Orthodox Christians and Muslims). To stop Western Europe from creating its own destiny without Uncle Sam, Huntington blows the trumpets of war and calls on its Cold War allies to remain within the American sphere of influence because the Cold War remains in place, but with a different name – clash of civilizations.
Huntington appears to want a return to the Middle Ages scenario. For him, the world is still divided into medieval empires, which he calls civilizations. He is against people who call for universalism or world society. He claims that “universalism threatens the West and the World” (1996, p. 318) because “a multicultural world is unavoidable”. By a multicultural world, he merely means that the world is divided into several unicultural worlds.
His premises are quite faulty. First, nobody is calling for one world civilization. If anything, everybody is clamoring against American attempts to dominate the world’s culture. Even the Europeans were clamoring against the “McDonaldization” of Europe since the 1970s. Hollywood, the world’s biggest exporter of American culture, has received some flak from writers all over the world. For an American foreign policy expert to say that “universalism threatens the West and the World” is quite ironic. There is nothing in the history of humanity that would merit a call for universalism or one world culture. That is the dream of only a few imperialist Americans.
On the contrary, multiculturalism is already an accepted fact. Cultural studies have been part of the world’s academia since the late 1960s. But Huntington is not calling for world multiculturalism either. What he is saying is that the world is composed of groups of nations belonging to particular cultures and each is mutually exclusive. And he fears that a multicultural America would be a weak America and an exception to the rule.
When Huntington says “the security of the world requires acceptance of global multiculturality”, what he is actually saying is that America should divide the world into Us, Them, Potential Us (Allies) and Potential Them (Enemies) and thereby base American foreign policy.
AMERICA’S WESTERN IDENTITY
Huntington says, “multiculturalism at home threatens the United States and the West.” (Ibid.,p.318)
America, a country of immigrants and the melting pot of the world, must now reject calls for multiculturalism because, for Huntington, “a multi-cultural America is impossible because a non-Western America is not American.” (Ibid.) Huntington says, “The preservation of the United States and the West requires the renewal of Western identity.”
For present-day Americans whose cultural roots do not lie in Western Europe, this could be very problematic. The Blacks might just have to stop calling themselves African-Americans, the Hispanics would have to forget Latin America and consider Spain as the origin of its culture, and Eastern Europeans might just have to be wary of its mother culture especially if they happen to be Orthodox Christians. And the Jews will just have to identify themselves with Western (i.e., Roman Catholic and Protestant) civilization.
The Asians may just have to go home. Huntington states,” Whatever economic connections may exist between them (U.S. and Asia), the fundamental cultural gap between American and Asian societies preclude their joining together in a common home.” (p.307)
As for the Muslim Americans, they have started feeling the heat since 9/11 according to news reports.
GLOBALIZATION
In Huntington’s multicultural world, humans are divided into unicultural civilizations. He fears universalism and globalization. Globalization is the growth and acceleration of economic and cultural networks which operate on a worldwide scale and basis. For communication scholars, globalization is linked with debates on “world culture” and emerged as a critical concept in the 1980’s. The growth of global culture has resulted from major shifts and developments in multinational markets and corporations, communication and media technologies and their world systems of production and consumption.
For Huntington, however, globalization can bring a clash of civilizations with a “global religious revival” (p. 68) brought about by people regarding the world as “a single place”. Quoting from Roland Robertson’s Globalization Theory and Civilizational Analysis, Huntington states, “ in an increasingly globalized world – characterized by historically exceptional degrees of civilizational, societal and other modes of interdependence and widespread consciousness thereof – there is an exacerbation of civilizational, societal and ethnic consciousness.” Putting the word exacerbation in italics gives the statement an ominous tone as if such consciousness could only breed extremist agitators bent on world chaos.
HISTORY
A true understanding of history reveals that empires come and go, civilizations rise and fall and no civilization was ever untouched by another. The prevalent Western discourses would want people to believe that the great Western civilization controlled much of the world since time immemorial and that only now because of de-colonization, globalization and the end of the Cold War that the other civilizations are starting to challenge the Western Order. Huntington wrote:
“These conflicts between princes, nation states and ideologies were primarily conflicts within Western civilization, “Western civil wars,” as William Lind has labeled them. This was as true of the Cold War as it was of the world wars and the earlier wars of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.”
Huntingtom and Lind obviously were looking only at Western Europe. There were “civil wars” (intra-civilizational wars) everywhere all the time. In the Islamic sphere, wars were everywhere – Umayyads against Abbasids against Fatimids against Ottomans. Sultans were fighting sultans. In the Balkans – everyone was fighting everyone. Even in the Malay Archipelago – Sulu vs Brunei vs Maguindanao vs Buayan. Huntington’s view of history is Eurocentric, to say the least. In the 17th to 19th centuries, the Ottoman Empire was very much a world power. Japan was a big power in the first half of the 20th century. Huntington further wrote,
“With the end of the Cold War…In the politics of civilizations, the peoples and governments of non-Western civilizations no longer remain the objects of history as targets of Western colonialism but join the West as movers and shapers of history.”
Even before or during the Cold War, non-Westerners were already movers of history. Turkey was in World War I and Japan bombed Pearl Harbor which started the Pacific War (of World War II). China has been a major actor in world politics since Mao Ze Dong. North Korea fought America to a virtual draw while Vietnam defeated France and America. Turkey divided Cyprus against the will of Western Europe which supported Greek hegemony in Cyprus.
In fact, never in the history of the world had Western Europe obtained total control of the world. Note that in Huntington’s list of civilizations, he differentiated between Western and Eastern Europe (Slav-Orthodox). After the fall of the Roman Empire, the barbarians established various kingdoms. And for one thousand years, they were mere “objects of history as targets of” either the Byzantine or Islamic imperialism. In the 17th to 19th centuries, some of the successor kingdoms of the Byzantine and Islamic empires like Serbia and the Ottomans respectively contested for world power. Russia was never conquered by the Europeans although Napoleon and much later, Hitler, tried. China, too, was never conquered although it was very briefly dominated by Western interests.
Even in the Western Europeans’ colonization efforts, there were resistances everywhere. For instance, the Moro sultanates successfully defended their domains from Spanish colonization for 350 years.
CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS OR RELIGIONS?
Huntington says, “Civilizations are differentiated from each other by history, language, culture, tradition and, most important, religion.” There will be a clash of civilizations, he says, because “a person can be half-French and half-Arab and simultaneously even a citizen of two countries. It is more difficult to be half-Catholic and half-Muslim.” Among the world’s civilizations, he names the “Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and possibly African civilization”.
Islam, Hinduism, and Orthodox (Catholicism) are religions. Confucianism is usually considered a religion by Europeans and Americans. But where are the non-Orthodox Christians – the Roman Catholics and the Protestants? Are they supposed to be the religion of the Western civilization?
But the Latin Americans are Christians, too. And there are many Christians and Muslims in Africa. And what about the Orthodox Christians of Eastern Europe, whose countries now belong to the European Union? Don’t they belong to the Western civilization? Apparently, Huntington considers Western civilization as including only Western Europe.
It was in Western Europe where the world witnessed the institution of religious intolerance called the Inquisition. And of course, there was Western Europe’s Wars of Religions. How many millions died in these religious wars? In Belgium and Holland, Protestants battled Philip II’s Catholic supporters. In England, Cromwell massacred the Catholics, Queen (Bloody) Mary purged the country of Protestants, and supporters of the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots and the Protestant Elizabeth I fought each other. In France, Catholics killed Huguenots / Protestants and vice versa. In Ireland (which continues up to today in Northern Ireland), Protestants and Catholics kill each other. And of course, there was the Thirty Years War.
The French film La Reine Margot gave a dramatic spectacle of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre when reportedly 20,000 Protestants were killed during the celebration of the mock wedding of the Protestant Henri, King of Navarre and the Catholic Margret de Valois, daughter of Catherine de Medici.
And in more contemporary times, it was in Western Europe where the genocide of six million Jews by Christian German/Austrian/French and other European Nazis.
Huntington equates civilization with religion. And he predicts a clash of civilizations cum religions. But a look at history will confirm that civilizations do not necessarily have one religion. The Mongol Empire had several religions – Islam, Hinduism, Confucianism, Buddhism, etc. The great Western Roman Empire and civilization started as pagan and in its dying years became Christian. The Persians were pagans then became Zoraostrians then became Muslims. Spain was pagan, then Christian then Muslim then Christian again. Even emperors changed religions just as Ashoka of the Mauryan (Hindu) Empire converted to Buddhism, the pagan Constantine to Christianity and the Muslim Akbar of the Mughal Empire created a system of beliefs that incorporated Hindu and Christian ideas into the Islamic ideology.
To cap it all, it must be noted that Jesus Christ was a Middle Eastern Jew (and not a European), Gautama Buddha was Hindu (not Chinese), Marx and Engels were Germans (and not Slavic). Yet Europeans became Christians, Chinese became Buddhists, Russians became Communists.
The Huntingtonian concept of one civilization-one religion is obsolete. The emergence of a European Union composed of diverse ethnic and religious groups is a telling argument against the inter-civilizational clash theory.
Most countries of the world have different religious and ethnic groups and so conflicts would happen within nations. This has been happening since time immemorial because the creation of empires, kingdoms or nation-states is usually by force. During the Cold War, America’s policy had been to help one party in a conflict if USSR was helping the other. But with the collapse of Russia, American foreign policy needed a new scenario. Hence, we now have Huntington’s clash of civilizations.
CHANGING WORLD
For the past two decades, the world has been witness to amazing events and movements -- the Information Technology revolution, Globalization, the ascendancy of free market economy, the collapse of Communism, the rise of so-called Islamic consciousness in Muslim peoples, the dismemberment of countries (USSR, Yugoslavia, Indonesia) and the reunification of others (Vietnam, Yemen, Germany), the union of Europe, and the formation of regional trading blocks (NAFTA, APEC, ASEAN). Kenichi Ohmae (1995) even predicted the death of the “nation-state”
The Fall of Russia and the Rise of a United Europe
When the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s, Europe decided that it was time to unite. The European Union is comprised of twenty-five European countries. Turkey; however, has been left out. Perhaps bitter memories still remain for the Western Europeans (the original members of the European Union), who for centuries, fought the Turks — the Seljuks (during the Crusades) and later, the Ottomans.
Today, we are supposed to live in a uni-polar world where there is only one superpower – USA. The US may be the most powerful state, but there are other super states. The European Union is now a super state with military and economic power and strong relations with their former colonies.
Even with the break-up of USSR, Russia remains a super state, whose nuclear arsenal is next only to that of the US.
China, with its one billion or so citizens plus the prosperous overseas Chinese states like Taiwan and Singapore with enclaves in Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines, is a super state slowly flexing its muscles. It recently got back Hong Kong and Macau from their European colonizers.
India, too, has one billion people and like China, owns a few nuclear bombs. China and India, with their fast-growing economies, are vying to be the standard bearer of developing countries.
WAR ON TERROR
The Muslims stayed in the sidelines during the ideological Cold War. Today, in America’s war on Terror (read: Islam), Russia and China would most probably choose to remain in the sidelines and take the time to re-think their ideology(ies). The Chinese civilization has not yet given up on Communism while the Communists are not totally out of power in Russia.
With a relentless pursuit of the so-called War on Terror by the Americans and some Europeans, the Muslims all over the world may be forced to unite in order to survive. Islam has given the Muslims the mechanism for a Super or Supra State – the Ummah or the worldwide Muslim Community.
Fazlur Rahman (1981) advised, “The survival of the Islamic world as Islamic is conditioned not only on activist ferment, but on patient and complex intellectual labor which must produce the necessary Islamic vision.” It is imperative for the Muslim world to come up the necessary vision before it is too late.
The anti-Muslims are quick to label any form of an Islamic vision as terrorism. The Philippine government, for example, called Madaris breeding grounds for terrorism. Madaris are elementary and secondary schools teaching Islamic ideology and Arabic language. Yet nobody in the world has called Christian or Catholic or Jewish or capitalist schools as breeding grounds for terrorism even if there were / are terrorists who are / were Christians (Oklahoma bomber), Catholic (IRA), and Jewish (Zionists).
American action in Afghanistan and Iraq, and threats on Iran are forcing the Muslim world to prepare for a fight.
Some Muslim thinkers say that the Qur’an has given Muslims the wherewithal to control the world – form a Community (Ummah), put up an Islamic (Super) State (Khilafa), elect a Caliph (Khalifah), implement the Law (Shari’ah) based on the Qur’an and the Sunnah. The important thing is for the Ummah or Islamic Community to be one.
THE SECULAR VS THE RELIGIOUS
Unlike in Christianity where there is a dichotomy between “the City of Man” and the “City of God”, in Islam there is only one City – the City of God with Man as the vicegerent. While Christianity preaches a “Kingdom of Heaven within”, Islam prescribes a Kingdom of God on Earth with the Divine Word (Qur’an) as its constitution and the Prophet’s Sunnah as its by-laws.
The Bible tells man “to render unto Caesar what is Ceasar’s and render unto God what’s God’s”. God did not even have a law for man to implement. The Christian’s law was Caesar’s – Roman Law. And in the last 500 years, the Ceasars of the West have been busy claiming domains for themselves such that in today’s Western world, service to God has been relegated to occasional Sunday or Sabbath prayers. Practically all spheres of human activity and all fields of knowledge have been declared as belonging to the realm of the Caesars.
While there has been a long and bloody struggle between the secular and the religious in Europe and America – in all fields of endeavor, the secularization of the West is almost complete notwithstanding the comeback of the religious fundamentalists in the 1970s which culminated in the election of “born-again” Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush to the US presidency,
In Islam, there is no separation between the Church and the State. There is no clergy in Orthodox (mainstream) Islam. Muslim belief is centered on the Unity of Things (Tawheed) and the primordial importance of God in the Universe. All actions by all humans and animals must be God-oriented. Caesars (or Caliphs) themselves are there only to execute God’s Law. But most importantly, nobody (priest or bishop) mediates between God and the ordinary man. The Qur’an states it plainly: “No man carries the burden of another” yet “No man carries a burden more than it can bear.”
The Muslim therefore is necessarily religious AND secular. The Qur’an itself is proof that Islam is secular as most of its prescriptions concern worldly affairs and not spiritual.
Yet Western media portray the Muslims as religious fanatics. The controversial Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad is a case in point.
WESTERN POWER
In today’s world, the structure of power is heavily in favor of the West. But the changes brought about by modern technology have made the power equation a little confusing. The fall of Communism was not brought about by losses in the battlefields. Wars can be fought anywhere, including in the Mass Media or even in cyberspace.
If the West continues to follow the prescriptions of Huntington, then an explosive Clash of Ideologies between the Islamic East and the Capitalist West is a probable scenario.
But in this day and age, the number of one’s nuclear warheads cannot guaranty victory.
PARADIGM SHIFT
Paradigms are shifting in almost all fields of scientific discipline. In Physics, Newtonian mechanics is now found wanting. Einstein’s Relativity theory and Quantum mechanics now more correctly explain physical reality.
Perceiving the world through Huntington’s viewpoint is neither like looking at the cosmos not in Einstein’s viewpoint nor even in Newton’s perspective. Rather, it is like looking at the universe through the telescopes of Ptolemy. In the Ptolemaic system, the world revolved around Earth. The Christian Church supported this idea. Anyone who dared contradict this view was a heretic and infidel and must be burned at stake.
Huntington and his disciples, especially George the Younger, believe that the world revolves around America. Anybody who dared disagree with this idea is “evil” and a “terrorist” and must be bombed to Kingdom come.
Huntington and his disciples need to re-read history, increase their knowledge of the world’s cultures and wake up to reality before they are destroyed by their own ignorance.
ENDNOTES
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