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The Oil Cringe of the West: The Collected Essays and Reviews of J.B. Kelly Vol. 2. [Kindle Edition]

J. B. Kelly , S. B. Kelly

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Book Description

This, the second volume of JB Kelly’s essays and reviews, covers the oil crisis of the 1970’s —a period which first alerted the Western world not only to the deep-seated animosity and contempt with which it is held by the Arab world, but also the duplicity and double-dealing in which Arabs, especially the Saudis, routinely engage when dealing with Western leaders. America’s feeble response during this challenge undoubtedly confirmed in the minds of Arab leaders that the Western world is essentially weak and can easily be manipulated. As JBK pointed out, there were ‘substantial grounds for believing that the motive behind the excessive prices now being charged for Middle-Eastern oil is political and religious rather than economic, and is designed to redress the balance between the Islamic countries of the Middle East and Western Europe, which has been tilted in favour of the latter for two centuries or more.’ It was summed up by the exclamation from one Arab oil state official in December 1973: “It is our revenge for Poitiers!” (a reference to Charles Martel’s defeat of the Arab armies in France in 732).

It is clear from his letters to the newspapers and monthly political, that JBK was becoming increasingly concerned in the 1970’s by the deleterious effects that the steady haemorrhaging of Western wealth to the East, through extortionate oil price rises by OPEC as a form of Danegeld, was having on the fabric of Western civilization. He was the first commentator to highlight the fact that Islam was wielding the oil weapon by way of revenge against Western Christendom and that this had been made possible by Britain’s craven abdication of her responsibilities by withdrawing from the Gulf in 1971, and thus relinquishing some control over the supply of the black lifeblood of the industrialised world. Kelly is especially critical of the ‘twin pillars’ strategy initiated by Henry Kissinger in which America relied on the goodwill of Iran (under the Shah) and the Saudis to maintain stability in the Middle East while selling them enormous amounts of advanced weaponry in order to repatriate at least some of the tremendous wealth being transferred to the Muslim world because of an accident of geology.

Kelly also discusses other topics such as the Lebanese civil war and the efforts of various publications to marginalize both his work and that of other like-minded scholars such as Eli Kedourie. This volume shows JB Kelly at his combative best.


Editorial Reviews

Review

John Kelly sets the standard by which historians are to be judged. A careful researcher, he made sure of the facts and expressed them in beautifully measured prose. More than that, a lifelong determination to do justice to the truth completes the special authority of his writings.

David Pryce Jones, Sr. Editor of National Review and author of The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs

John Kelly had an unrivalled knowledge of the historical and diplomatic sources for Arabia and the Persian Gulf region over the last two centuries, and equally important, an incisive mind which saw through what he regarded as the, then fashionable, cant about the supposed iniquities of British imperialism and the alluring prospects held out by nationalism for democracy and freedom in the Middle Eastern lands; such views, so prevalent then, seem pathetically misguided today. The present collection of essays and reviews, many of the latter of considerable length, complements Kelly's books, now standard works on the history of the Gulf region, and well illustrate his insights in bringing fresh historical materials to light and showing how he set out to combat and correct uninformed, sloppy and tendentious writing on the modern Middle East.

C. Edmund Bosworth, Professor Emeritus of Arabic Studies at the University of Manchester and the British editor of the second edition of The Encyclopedia of Islam.

“Thou hast been weighed in the balance and found wanting.” That is the judgment of scholar J.B. Kelly on the rise of revolutionary Arab nationalism and the long Western retreat from responsibility in the Middle East since the 1950s. But what has been found wanting—the failed revolutionary regimes or a West surfing home on the wave of the future? Or both about equally? With a matchless dry wit Kelly describes in this collection the long tragi-comedy of how ruthless socialist tyrants and deluded Western diplomats between them kept the Arab world in a state of progressive backwardness and eventually midwifed Islamist terrorism. If we had listened then, we might not have to laugh through gritted teeth now.

John O’Sullivan author of The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister

--New English Review

The received wisdom and unexamined assumptions underlying the Obama administration’s diplomatic efforts to forge peace between Israel and her enemies are as predictable as the ignominious collapse of this latest attempt. We are now well into the seventh decade of this false knowledge and the spurious narrative dominating American foreign policy under administrations of both parties. Just how old and worn this narrative is can be seen in the late John Barrett Kelly’s The Oil Cringe of the West, a collection of reviews and essays that originally appeared in the critical decade of the 1970s after the Six Day and Yom Kippur Wars.

Kelly was a New Zealander who earned his PhD at the London School of Economics. In the 1970s and 1980s he was one of the most influential scholars on the Middle East. Like Elie Kedourie and Bernard Lewis, he was a respected advisor to governments and commentator and on the region who was not afflicted with the sentimental romanticism and civilizational self-loathing that continue to distort Western foreign policy. Dedicated to facts and objective analysis, Barrett was no partisan, criticizing all sides equally when criticism was due. More important, he was the enemy of unexamined opinion and ideological fashion, which of course made him an enemy to the anti-imperialist, Arabophilic establishment, especially in England.

Kelly’s 1973 description of the foreign policy establishment’s view of the Israeli-Arab conflict and Britain’s culpability in creating it is a jewel of concision and eviscerating wit. That view pertains “less to the mundane affairs of men and governments than to the most solemn matters of faith and dogma––of British guilt and Arab innocence and the doctrine of redemption through vicarious atonement.” One can hear the echoes of this sensibility throughout Obama’s notorious 2009 Cairo speech. Also reprised by Obama is Kelly’s reconstruction of the historically false narrative generating that sensibility, which deserves quotation in full: “Britain promised independence to the Arabs during World War I and betrayed that promise afterwards. The worst act of betrayal was the Balfour Declaration which led to the formation of the state of Israel. Arab unity was stultified by British obstinacy in propping up reactionary regimes and opposing revolutionary movements. Although Britain has at last seen the error of its ways and has left the Arabs alone, it still bears the stigmata of past misdeeds. Until these have been erased and the guilt purged, the Arabophile order must toil at its penitential labours, ritually flogging the irreverent and ceaselessly chanting the orisons of repentance.”

Forty years later we still see in England the baneful effects of this false history in an anti-Semitism disguised as anti-Zionism, in the cringing appeasement of Muslim sensibilities, and in the vigorous Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions movement that seeks to dismantle Israel politically on behalf of the Arabs who want to destroy her root and branch. And ever since Edward Said’s fatuous Orientalism––that toxic stew of historical lies and Foucauldian folderol––this same myth-history now dominates the American establishment as well. It bespeaks not just the noble-savage/Marxist romanticizing of the colonial dark-skinned battlers against Western imperialism, but the concomitant self-loathing and cheap guilt that in Britain followed the intellectuals’ disenchantment with the Empire, and that has been aped in America by professors and pundits who think that biting the cultural, political, and economic hand that amply feeds them is the height of cosmopolitan sophistication...

Bruce Thornton

--Front Page Magazine

About the Author

Professor John Barrett Kelly was one of the foremost commentators on the Middle East, and noted for his independence of mind; along with Bernard Lewis, PJ Vatikiotis and Elie Kedourie he was one of the so-called “Gang of Four,” pre-eminent scholars in the field who believed that Western policy towards the Arab world was distorted by sentimental illusions—notably, that it mistook the tyranny imposed by Arab nationalist regimes for progress.


Product Details

  • File Size: 2155 KB
  • Print Length: 354 pages
  • Publisher: New English Review Press (March 17, 2014)
  • Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
  • Language: English
  • ASIN: B00J3AE0HC
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  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,278,263 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
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