Hybrid Cultures and the Hermetically Sealed Cultures Essay

Hybrid Cultures and the Hermetically Sealed Cultures - Essay Example Huntington views the Arab world as being primarily 'sealed' because it avoids the advances and the cultural hybrid elements of democratic countries. According to his view, there is a certain core collective of nations who try to derive their power by opposing western influences and define their own place in an increasingly diverse world. Barber's more capitalistic interpretation understanding of global imperialism is in direct contrast to Huntington's view. He believes America is a hybrid country that is "democratic", even though it is aggressive toward countries that exercise their own sovereignty as 'sealed' cultures. The primary foundation for Huntington's argument on the "clash of civilizations" after the Cold War is that there is not a single country to which American allied nations could rally against in a bi-polar construct. Huntington's perspective is based on American bias on the danger that Communism posed through the Soviet Union as an example of the new Arab threat: During the Cold War global politics became bipolar and the world divided into three parts. A group of mostly wealthy and democratic societies, led by the United States, was engaged in a pervasive ideological, political, economic, and, at times, military competition (Huntington, ,p.21). The criterion for this belief is based on the American view that the conflict with the Soviet automatically created a situation in which they became the two dominant forces and the rest of the countries allied themselves on either side based on whether they followed a capitalist or communist ideology. However, America's identity as a democratic society with immense wealth that had to subdue poorer communist societies is often generalized through Huntington's "triumphalist" view of American domination. In fact, the harshly undemocratic nature of American hegemony in Latin America and other nation states presents a stark contrast to the idealized discourse of freedom and liberty that Huntington defines in the conflict between American and the Soviet Union. This fact is over-generalized in Huntington's view and supports a deliberately biased superiority of western civilization over the rest of the world before 1991. The first basis of Huntington's theory on Muslim culture as to the historicity of violence that was founded in its early beginnings does not hold ground considering that Judaism and Christianity also propounded the use of "the sword" to fight with one another and also against other religions. Surely, the comment made by George Bush about a "Crusade" against Muslim terrorism reveals the age-old Christian tradition of using military force in the name of Christ (Ford para.2). Although Huntington likes to compare Christ's seeming passivity to his enemies in the Christian faith, the United States (as a Christian nation) has certainly gone against the dictates of Christ's message by attacking Iraq without any evidence of WMDS. Similarly, the hollowness of the hybrid foundation for western