World War III and The Law of Eternal Return: An Addendum

I want to make an additional point regarding my earlier paper World War III and The Law of Eternal Return, which I didn’t include in it because it didn’t fit into the flow of that piece.

That point is this. One expects the racial, ethnic and national tolerance fostered by liberal elites in the West to erode very quickly if the war predicted in the aforementioned paper comes to pass. Ugly sentiments against Chinese people in general, as opposed to just the CCP, can be expected to bubble up rather swiftly.

If this seems unlikely, think of the wave of violence against East Asians during the COVID pandemic. Conspiracy theories notwithstanding, the pandemic was in no way an intentional action on the part of Beijing – and yet it stimulated rage against Chinese people (and East Asians generally by extension) from a not negligible section of the population. Never underestimate your fellow citizens’ capacity for stupidity.

What will happen if and when the first American ship is sunk and hundreds of young Americans are, very intentionally, sent to the bottom of the sea? What will this do to public sentiments towards Chinese? One can already picture the bricks flying through the windows of Chinese supermarkets (or at least those not displaying their loyalty to DC with a sufficient lack of subtlety).

Indeed, since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine how many leaders in the West have felt at all at pains to say, “not all Russians!”? Instead, Finland – with nary any protestation from the West – closed its borders to young Russian men trying to flee conscription (that is to say, trying to avoid being sent to kill Ukrainians). One still waits for Western elites to decry calling Russians “orcs” – a term vastly more dehumanizing than “Fritz” or “Charlie”. One also did not hear the Western media denounce Hong Kong protestors in 2019 (with whom I have great sympathy) using the racial slur “Zhina gou” against Mainlanders.

This is not to say that Western elites are secretly racist, or to make a false equivalence (Chinese state internet censors are vastly more tolerant of the crudest racism against Africans and Jews than the decentralized censors of corporate America). To do this would make me guilty of what I have called “naïve cynicism”. Naïve cynicism is the very modern idea that political actors are driven primarily by self-interest, however conceived, rather than a commitment to a set of principles (however wrong-headed or even outright evil those principles may be). Rather, what I’m suggesting is that modern war has a corrupting influence on even non-combatants.

This corruption could operate by either one of two mechanisms. Condemning bigotry towards the ethnicity of the enemy may be felt to detract from support for the war – where winning the war is felt to be a greater good than consistently opposing ethnic or racial hatred. It is especially easy to see how one could justify this to oneself when the scope of the hatred is limited to one or two ethnicities. Alternatively, leading the conflict may genuinely instill bigotry in the hearts of elites where previously there was none. Let us not forget, elites are humans too.

The point being made in this addendum is simply this. Notions of historical progress should be treated with suspicion. The liberal order condemns racial and ethnic hatred. This is decidedly a good thing (bracketing the issues one may have with American critical race theory). The West is generally far less racist and bigoted than it was even a few generations ago. However, one should treat with suspicion the notion that this constitutes real and irreversible progress. Racism is sometimes falsely identified as a traditional value, when it is in fact thoroughly modern. It does not therefore take much for a modern to become racist, including those who construct their entire political identities around an opposition to racism. I suspect that war would be more than enough to bring out ethnic animosity in many a cosmopolitan liberal.