One of the books I picked up in Sihanoukville was a slim plastic-wrapped volume entitled Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies. The cover artwork is a nineteenth-century caricature of the West as a grotesquely fat capitalist in the center of a spiderweb, surrounded by piles of lucre. I didn't think too much about the plastic wrap, assuming it had some innocent purpose. That now seems unlikely. Because unless Penguin Books has seriously let down their standards, I bought a pirated book. The paper is of decent quality and the pages are all aligned properly, but the whole thing has visible artifacts and a lack of clarity that suggest a low-resolution scan, or outright photocopying. It's unfortunate that I am now in possession of a work of copyright infringement, as under the DMCA I think that Penguin Books is legally authorized to throw me in jail, expropriate all my property, and send professional assassins after my family.

At any rate, Occidentalism is about, well, the converse of Orientalism. For those that don't recall their literary criticism classes, count yourself lucky. Orientalism is the irrational love of things Eastern and/or "uncivilized", and the assumption that the Easterner/primitive people and customs are good, pure, and superior. Classic examples of Orientalism are John Locke and his Noble Savage, and the Beatles and their silly quests for Indian gurus.

Occidentalism is the distorted view of the "civilized" West from the West's enemies. The West is generally the United States, UK, France, and sometimes all the rest of western Europe too. The Occidentalist view is that Westerners are greedy, shortsided, non-heroic, idolatrous, prostituting merchants, without souls, and not even really human. Being without souls killing them is a non-evil act; and while Westerners may have some temporal success at the moment, God will surely lead the believers to triumph, as long as there is suffient faith and willpower to rise against the evildoers.

The books traces these ideas through different cultures and philosophers, elucidating how most of the same steriotypes can be traced backwards from current Islamofacists to early twentieth centurn facists and nationalists in Germany and Japan, to Russian revolutionaries at the turn of the twentieth century, to German nationalists in the mid-nineteenth century.

It's written in an academic style, so the prose is rather dry. But the index and references are quite good, and although it's short, it suggests quite a few other things to read to fill in the ideas further. Students of international relations or anthropology should certainly be interested in this book.

Posted by: Boviate at 08:39 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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