Westerners against the West

AT TIMES like these people do say some daft things. Most irritating have been the Western pundits whose first reaction to any sequence of events anywhere is to blame the West. First to catch my eye was repeat-offender Robert Fisk of the British Independent. He's an excellent writer, but his opinions are frankly loopy. Consider this:

The docile, supine, unregenerative, cringing Arabs of Orientalism have transformed themselves into fighters for the freedom, liberty and dignity which we Westerners have always assumed it was our unique role to play in the world. One after another, our satraps are falling, and the people we paid them to control are making their own history – our right to meddle in their affairs (which we will, of course, continue to exercise) has been diminished for ever.

Gimme a break. When in recent history did "we Westerners" think freedom, liberty and dignity should be uniquely ours? America and the European Union have tried for years to promote reform and democracy in the Arab world. We didn't pay the local "satraps" (neither Mubarak nor Qaddafi were our satraps anyway) to control their people. We paid them as part of the Camp David peace treaty not to make war on Israel (Egypt) or for their oil and gas (Libya).

Next up is the egregious John Pilger, who thinks the Arab revolts show that the West in general and the United States in particular are "fascist":

The revolt in the Arab world is against not merely a resident dictator, but a worldwide economic tyranny, designed by the US Treasury and imposed by the US Agency for International Development, the IMF and the World Bank, which have ensured that rich countries such as Egypt are reduced to vast sweatshops, with 40 per cent of the population earning less than $2 a day. The people's triumph in Cairo was the first blow against what Benito Mussolini called corporatism, a word that appears in his definition of fascism.

I don't know why the formerly serious New Statesman gives Pilger house room (actually I do: depressingly, they sell a few more copies when he's on the cover). Maybe he hasn't noticed, but what most of the Arab protesters say they want are the very freedoms that they know full well, even if Pilger doesn't, to be available in the West. No doubt he believes they are labouring under some massive mind-control delusion engineered by the CIA.