Guénon saw Westernized Easterners as more dangerous than colonial conquest itself

Evidence

Guénon’s attitude toward the Easterners would change in his later The Crisis of the Modern World, 141: “It is true that the encroachments of the West are nothing new, but hitherto they have been confined to a more or less brutal domination over other peoples, whose effects went no deeper than the domain of politics and economics: despite all efforts at a propaganda that worked under many different guises, the Eastern attitudes of mind remained unaffected by all deviations, and the ancient traditional civilizations survived intact. Today, on the contrary, there are Orientals who are more or less completely ‘Westernized,’ who have forsaken their tradition and adopted all the aberrations of the modern outlook, and these denatured elements … have become a cause of trouble and agitation in their own countries.” — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 825

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the West’s distinctive capacity to remold subjectivity from within, a theme running through Hallaq’s broader critique of modernity.