IRAQ, CULTURE, CIVILIZATION, AND "THE INNER IRAQI"

Them crummy Commie professors taught all of us that dictatorships, other than Marxist, are bad. Authoritarian governments are bad. Non democratic governments are bad unless they are in Africa or other countries where non-whites are the majority. Commie teaching should be enough to at least make us check out the premise without making a moral equivalence that cannibalism is just as good as Western Democracy, that slavery is as worthy as freedom, or any other post modern crap. Some cultures and civilizations ARE better.

First, let me define my terms "civilization" and "culture" for purposes of this essay, and this essay only. Most people believe the terms culture and civilization overlap and don't think about a difference. For this essay let's say culture is the inner person; the head and heart so to speak. This includes arts, music and dance and various higher pursuits of human life which are also classified as cultural activities. Civilization is the tangible betterment of ways of living, forcing nature to bend to fulfil the needs of the people. It includes also organizing societies into politically well-defined groups working collectively for improved conditions of life in matters of food, dress, communication, and so on. Building roads is civilization, dancing on roads is culture.

We all know that civilization can be built by authoritarian government. Egyptian, Roman, China, and so on are obvious examples. Roads, buildings, improved standards of living etc. When there was nothing else but authoritarian government, culture existed and even flourished; there are drawings on caves when there was no government at all. In modern times, since 1700, what has been proven?

First: does authoritarian government kill culture or create it? A question that the Left always knows the answer to (it always "depends") but never explains. Conservatives have trouble answering it because of religious beliefs; fabulous art has been created under church restrictions..

When I ask, does authoritarian government kill culture or create it; I mean the main culture of a society; the arts, the myths, the "who were we" and "who are we now", inside. Did Hitler kill or assist German culture? In the case of Hitler, the Germans have long believed that civilization and culture are separate. No other country embraced this concept. Hitler's anti-Semitism was already a part of German culture. He took advantage of a collapse of German civilization after WWI, a collapse that saw inflation running at more than 20,000 percent per DAY. It can be said that Hitler was able to impose a new culture of militarism, Nordic myth, and racial superiority upon the civilization of Germany. He reached into a part of the German past and invented Aryan "culture".

Mussolini said he was "re-creating" Rome, simply bringing a culture up to date without changing the civilization of Italy. At first.

That's what they said. The results were that these "cultural re-creations" were wiped out by WWII and the dominant culture of the West; capitalism (sort of), democracy, and freedom were made dominant once again. All this proves democracy works best. Does it?

China has had two great civilizing periods both autocratic, Islam once ruled half the world and was totally autocratic, India before the Brits did beautifully (OK, not beautifully) before democracy, not to mention Ancient Egypt, all of Europe before 1793, and most other sub-cultures.

So what about Saddam Hussein and Iraq and "saving Iraq"? The culture and civilization of Iraq goes back thousands of years before Europe. Most refer to Iraq as the actual birthplace of civilization itself. So what is their culture? Is it Islamic? Now it is, but what was it before Mohammed? Who were the original Iraqis and what influences from way back when still obtain there? No democracy anywhere. Yet they invented the farm collective, a necessity because of the flooding of Tigress and Euphrates Rivers back in pre-history. The authoritarian Iraqis were known as Sumerians. Sumerians invented writing, double entry accounting, private property (even the King was held to contracts); they invented both the wheel and the plow, as well as the first mathematics system (based on 60). Their society was "matriarchal" meaning women had rights. They, not the much later Arabs or Greeks, invented banking. It was the ancient Iraqis and not the Greeks who invented the long narrative, they wrote stories down; their most famous narrative includes Noah building a boat to save himself and civilization from a flood, before the Jews and before the Bible. They invented an alphabet and the first calendars. We know they invented bureaucracy and that they had a yearning for some order. We know they had arts, statues, tall buildings called ziggurats, and that they traded with others. Without democracy.

Well the Sumerians got knocked off by the Akkadians, a Semitic people said to be descended from Noah (you know where this will lead, eventually) spread all the way to Lebanon and then got knocked off by a Sumerian revolution. By this time the transfer of power by war was fully in place. So Mesopotamia took over. Everybody agreed that The Garden of Eden was in Mesopotamia and it just so happens that the most warlike people at this time were the Assyrians (like in Syria) who lived there too so all hell broke loose forever. So it came to pass that the country was united by a guy named Hammurabi (a hostile takeover), the empire was known as Babylon and he invented law, known as the Hammurabi Code. The Code is considered the earliest legal comprehensive code of laws known in history. A copy of the code is engraved on a block of black diorite. A team of French archaeologists dug up this block and it is now in the Louvre Museum in Paris. The good old French stole and kept one of the great prizes of ancient Iraq.

I could go on with the Hanging Gardens, Nebuchadnezzar, Solomon's Temple, The Assyrian takeover (war again), then Cyrus the Great (war) Alexander the Great who died there (war), and lots of others tramped around Iraq. Persia (Iran) took over til the Arabs (Muslims) marched in and took over.

Baghdad become the seat of the first Muslim Caliphate and the city became the center of Islamic civilization. Baghdad was important both commercially and culturally as well as a famous center of learning in the Middle Ages. It was regarded in the tenth century as the intellectual center of the world, the cultural capital of the Islamic world, and a center of power in the world. It was where Arab and Persian cultures mingled to produce a blaze of philosophical, scientific, and literary glory. This era is remembered throughout the Arab world, and by the Iraqis in particular, as the pinnacle of the Islamic past.

If all that weren't enough, mathematics was invented there too. Abu Ja'far Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khawarizmi (680-750 AD), discovered algebraic equations, and some credit him with the invention of zero (before the Mayans). He introduced Hindu numbers to the Arab world. "Abu Ja'far" wrote a math book so influential that the title Abu Ja'far gives us the word "algebra". His books were translated into Latin and hit renaissance Italy like tactical nuclear culture shock. They couldn't speak Arabic, of course, so his name came out as "Algorismus". His name (misspelled again!) has gone into mathematics and computerspeak as Algorithm; for a step by step process for performing computations.

So there you have it, 4,000 years of hostile takeovers and dictatorships for one of the most creative people who have ever hit the planet. Yet democracy is nowhere in their culture or civilization. Saddam imposed himself after the Shah, promising "better things". He seized power by force, normal in that part of the world so there was nothing different from what they had been used to. He made a lot of the country more or less western in so far as streets, sewage, electricity, and TV goes. He, like Tito in Yugoslavia, suppressed all tribal (cultural) wars by killing anybody who crossed the line, which was nothing different from Cyrus, Alexander, or the local Muslim whatevers. Saddam tried to impose his will on his neighbors, Iran and Kuwait, not unlike the great Hammurabi or other leaders in that part of the world had done.

The big question for us right now is: How can Iraq embrace what they know nothing about? How can they embrace "democracy"? Especially since autocratic systems produced one of the greatest and most creative civilizations in the History of the World. Something for all of us to think about. Not that it can't be done, Europe had nothing but thousands of years of Kings and they did it, but it ain't easy. Suppose Iraqis DON'T WANT DEMOCRACY?

The "culture" has been Muslim for almost a thousand years. Their thinking, reading, education, the entire "inner Iraqi" is believing in an authority and obeying it. 4,000 years of Iraqi culture is against democracy. Put another way, "if it ain't broke don't fix it". And to Iraqis it ain't broke. Roads, tall buildings, manufacturing and so on mean nothing. Good medicine, an education as we define it, "things" mean little or nothing.

They don't get it. Every Iraqi wants to run things, wants to be the king. Compromise, working with others who disagree with you for the greater good is not a concept there. The dominant current culture is Muslim. Rule from the top. Obey or be killed. That is what they want. That is what worked for them in the old days. Allah, and what he says, what religious leaders say he says, is everything. They like it that way.

We are learning that now.