The Clash of Imperialist States and Cooperative Civilizations

EDITORIAL, 13 Jul 2026

#959 | Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service

War and War in the Age of Planet-destroying Globalized Capitalism

Since Russian Federation waged its NATO-induced war against Ukraine post-Cold War proxy war – in April 2021, the talk of “civilization” – as in “civilizational states” (Russia, China, etc.) has been in vogue again.

Thirty years ago, following the dissolution of the USSR after the Cold War ended, with the North Americans sounding triumphalist, Samuel Huntington, the renowned Harvard political scientist, first published his influential “The Clash of Civilizations” (in Foreign Affairs, 1993), which he later published as a 367-pages book, with the expanded title, The Clash of Civilizations Remaking of World Order” (Simon and Schuster, 1996).

Huntington in effect recycled centuries-old Orientalist myths – for instance, “the rule of law” was a quintessential feature of “Western Civilization”, stemming from Roman law or that social pluralism and “civil society” were exclusive to “Western civilization” (pp.70-71).   Needless to say, Christianity is the flag bearing faith, in Huntington’s conception of the Civilization in the West.

It is worth-remembering that from the early expeditions of Christopher Columbus in the late 15^th century to later colonial projects, what we today call “Westerners” (western “explorers” “discoverers”) set sail towards unknown continents searching for gold and seeking to spread Gospel (Catholicism).

Such Orientalist tropes pervaded the Western ruling or elite circles for way too long since the early phase of the colonization of peoples, societies and places outside Europe (or “the West”.    The terms “colonization” was coterminous with “civilizing” or mission to civilize “savages” – with no literacy, nor writing cultures, nor Christian God.

Their appeal has proven enduring if only because such West-centric or Euro-Supremacist nonsense reinforces the profoundly Pavlovian self-conception of people who identify themselves exclusively as “Westerners” (Europeans and their descents) as “superior”.  Hence Huntington’s “National Bestseller”.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls these (academically) institutionalized myths “sanctioned ignorance”, and, need I add, a near universal perspective that lurks in publishing capitals, media outlets, and prestigious centres of higher education, located in Europe and N. America.

As a student at the time, I found reading “The Clash of Civilizations” an exercise in character building (that is, it helped to build my tolerance towards celebrated trash):  of the 367 pages (including the Index), overwhelming majority of the pages reek the glaring ignorance of the author, a renowned Harvard political scientist, about the gigantic topics: “civilizations”.   Ignorance about other cultures and traditions – intellectual, ideational, philosophical, epistemic, spiritual and so on.

So, I was only thrilled to hear, in person, two of the world’s foremost dissident intellectuals, namely the late Edward Said and Noam Chomsky, shred Huntington’s “descriptive hypothesis” (which proved utterly false but self-fulfilling) – that in the post-Cold War, wars would be fought between cultures, not states or ideologies.

In the fall of 1993 (if my memory serves me well, the late Edward Said, a Palestinian Christian delivered a distinguished memorial lecture at my alma mater, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, dissecting Huntington’s glaringly Orientalist assumptions, which led him to demonize Islam (Islamic civilization).    He did so with his characteristic intellectual clarity and personal dignity amidst hackling by a group of Jewish American students at Wisconsin, who were shouting “you are a terrorist”.

A year later, I attended Noam Chomsky’s public lecture on the same topic – Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations –inside the city hall in Milwaukee, where Golda Meir grew up as a 5-years-old immigrant Ukrainian Jewish girl, before choosing to settle in the Mandate Palestine in the late 1920’s.   Meir belonged to the circle of Zionist Jews, who didn’t believe in God, but believed Palestine was God’s gift to Jews, to paraphrase, the renowned anti-Zionist New Historian of Israel Professor Ilan Pape, the author of “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine” (One World, 2006).

In the days and weeks following the Palestinian resistance’s jail break on 7 October 2023, Zionist Israeli leaders such as Benjamin Netanyahu and his ceremonial President Isaac Herzog have invoked the word “civilization”, albeit the hyphenated version of “Judeo-Christian Civilization”.  The phraseology appears designed to appeal to the centuries- old (Christian) Civilizational narrative, where (“Superior” or ”Civilized”) Europe/West is historically and ideologically juxtaposed and pitted against non-Christian, non-European, non-Western people, or “people without history”, as the Berkeley anthropologist the late Eric Wolf put it, tongue-in-cheek.

More recently, at the Munich Security Conference, Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio bragged about how Western Civilization was built and why the United States is intent on resuming the project of Christian – “Judeo-Christian?”  – Civilization with pride and conviction.

I couldn’t help how Bertrand Russell would react to the resurgence of civilizational discourses, or rather “strategic buzz words”, without much civilizational depths in understanding the world and its histories.

In his influential essay, “Why I am not a Christian” (1927), the English philosopher and writer advocated (rational/scientific/empirical) “knowledge, kindliness, and courage” to make the world of humans a better – and openly binned “(t)he whole conception of God (as) a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms.”  Russell put it bluntly, “It is a conception quite unworthy of free men.”

Here it is rather instructive to quote the great English rationalist philosopher and anti-war activist at length:

In the so-called ages of faith, when men really did believe the Christian religion in all its completeness, there was the Inquisition, with its tortures; there were millions of unfortunate women burnt as witches; and there was every kind of cruelty practised upon all sorts of people in the name of religion.

You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step towards the diminution of war, every step towards better treatment of the coloured races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organised Churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organised in its Churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.

Today, we live in the age where not only the “churches”, which promote Christian Zionism and unconditionally back Israel in its holocaust against Palestinian people, but also many an influential Jewish synagogues that serve as venues for the real estate markets for illegally occupied Palestinian lands and Jewish charitable events to generate funds for Israeli Defence Force, Israel’s equivalent of Himmler’s SS.

Still, the allure of the Western Civilization persists.

I wish to point out that there are two branches of Western Civilization”:  those who wished to spread the Gospel of Creation and those who initially sought to explain the Creation in a Rational (empirical and scientific) manner.

They remain ever present in the talks about the Western civilization.

In a videotaped lecture on Rationality and Civilization, appearing on stage at the MIT with Chomsky, I watched Steven Pinker, another internationally acclaimed writer and Harvard psychologist, rather confidently asserted Rationality is the outcome of the European Enlightenment or the Age of Reason, popularized by René Descartes’s one-dimensional paradigm, “I think.  Therefore, I am.”

Both are deeply problematic in that they relegate anything – cultures, modes of understanding/seeing (the world), beings, and forms of governance – that they cannot comprehend as, “savages” “sub-human” “primitive” and you get the drift.

In his Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940), Walter Benjamin, the Nazi-fleeing German-Jewish philosopher and cultural theorist wrote, “(t)here is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”

As an educator concerned about the enveloping genocidal racism in my own native Myanmar, I developed and led Genocide Education mass grave tours in Cambodia tailored for groups of Myanmar opinion-makers for 3 consecutive years (2013-15) I totally concur with Benjamin.   I was taking Myanmar Buddhist monks, nuns, writers, cartoonists, Christian clergy, etc through the main Khmer Rouge killing field museum and torture centre in Phnom Penh before taking them on coaches to visit the 11^th century civilizational site in Siem Reap where we visit UNESCO World heritage monuments such as Angkor Wat.

However, the Indian philosopher and poet Rabindranath Tagore gifted us a far-more-to-the-point observation about Civilizations, East or West or anything that bears the honour, when he wrote around 1917: “civilizations are based on human corpses.”

I have long embraced a fundamental scepticism towards anyone who utters the word “civilization”.

Almost a year ago, the editors of China Daily published, with a glee which one could almost imagine, a news report entitled “Russian philosopher Dugin hails China’s civilizational model”

The Russian, who is referred to as “Putin’s guru” was in Shanghai for the 2^nd World Conference on China and gave an exclusive interview to China’s official paper wherein he singled out “China’s unique civilizational development and its role in shaping a multipolar world order, while offering insights into how Chinese cultural traditions have contributed to the country’s remarkable rise.”  In Dugin’s words:  China is “one of the most beautiful, most complete, most perfect examples of a civilization state.”

After professing his admiration and “love” for China, the Russian lost his mind as he romanticized China’s capitalist successes, when he told China Daily, “What is absent in China’s capitalism is the hatred, the desire to establish your prosperity on the suffering of others. That is an absolutely anti-capitalist approach.”

Dugin is evidently blind to the ugly and painful realities for local non-Chinese or China communities, which have resulted directly from China’s resource extractive and dam construction industries in the Balkans, in Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar, and in Africa.  Just Google China’s logging and rare-earth mining in Myanmar or China’s damns on River Mekong in Southeast Asia.

While Civilizations are definitely built on corpses (thanks to savage wars for land, labour and resources or riches), once an entity has come to bear the label “civilization” it has deposited in the mindset of its civilizational members its accumulated wisdom, or insights into the art of living, war and peace, be it (pre-capitalist) Persian or Iranian Civilization or Indic Civilization, or Chinese Civilization.

Underneath these “Civilizations” are to be found multiple layers or multiple interfaces or “hybridity” of ideas, cultures, faiths, art, music, and other humanly expression.    Civilizations are sufficiently large to absorb, integrate, and embrace anything of intellectual and cultural values, without the need to clash.

Huntington’s idea of clashing civilizations betrays the intellectual immaturity, absence of the grasp of the word “civilization” in its truest and finest meaning, and depthless-ness.   Such paradigm reproduces Spivakian “sanctioned ignorance”, which in turn gives rise to a sense of Superiority.

Any group that acts with a sense of Exceptionalism or Superiority will remain menacing for the cause of World Peace, be they Americans with their Pavlovian City Upon the Hill (built on millions of corpses of native Americans, enslaved Africans and “peoples without history” in Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Caribbeans) or the Israeli Jews who feel they are God’s chosen people with the divine right to ethnically cleanse the Un-holy Land of imperially stolen land of Palestine.

Imperialist states remain in perpetual savage stage while Civilizations have matured and learned to show Russell’s kindliness, courage and wisdom – for humanity.    For certain, whatever the Russian philosopher Dugin thinks of China and its anti-capitalist Capitalism one thing is certain to me:  Capitalism endangers Savagery (not to mention, Planetary Destruction) while Civilization has learned to value Humanity, if only because it has come to know and appreciate the mass graves on which it rests.

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A Buddhist humanist from Burma (Myanmar), Maung Zarni, nominated for the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize, is a member of the TRANSCEND Media Service Editorial Committee, of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, former Visiting Lecturer with Harvard Medical School, specializing in racism and violence in Burma and Sri Lanka, and Non-resident Scholar in Genocide Studies with Documentation Center – Cambodia. Zarni is the co-founder of FORSEA, a grass-roots organization of Southeast Asian human rights defenders, coordinator for Strategic Affairs for Free Rohingya Coalition, and an adviser to the European Centre for the Study of Extremism, Cambridge. Zarni holds a PhD (U Wisconsin at Madison) and a MA (U California), and has held various teaching, research and visiting fellowships at the universities in Asia, Europe and USA including Oxford, LSE, UCL Institute of Education, National-Louis, Malaya, and Brunei. He is the recipient of the “Cultivation of Harmony” award from the Parliament of the World’s Religions (2015). His analyses have appeared in leading newspapers including the New York Times, The Guardian and the Times. Among his academic publications on Rohingya genocide are The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingyas (Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal), An Evolution of Rohingya Persecution in Myanmar: From Strategic Embrace to Genocide, (Middle East Institute, American University), and Myanmar’s State-directed Persecution of Rohingyas and Other Muslims (Brown World Affairs Journal). He co-authored, with Natalie Brinham, Essays on Myanmar Genocide.

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 13 Jul 2026.

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