| Bach |
16 augustus 2025 22:33 |
Anderen zijn minder trots op de zogezegde 'westerse normen en waarden' waardoor minder hoog van de toren blazen misschien wat gepaster is qua houding. Laten we hopen dat de waarheid ergens in het midden ligt zou ik zeggen, beseffend dat hoogmoed vaak voor de val komt. Net nu, temidden van de steun van dat westen aan de extreme misdaden begaan in Gaza, morele authoriteit claimen als westen is echter minstens ongepast. Dit gedrag past wel in het profiel, hieronder geschetst, waarvoor het westen volgens de auteur werkelijk staat. En dat is niet iets om over te stoefen. Een beetje tegengewicht tegen pocherig zelfbedrog is wel op zijn plaats hier, en opent mogelijk een weg naar wat meer gezonde en leerzame bescheidenheid.
The West is a culture of death
ON THE MORAL COLLAPSE OF THE WEST AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
Citaat:
...
The West is a strange, recent, and spurious concept.
The term “West” actually refers to a cultural configuration that emerged with the global unification of political Europe and what, in 1931, would come to be known as the “Commonwealth” (part of the British Empire).
This configuration achieved unity under the banner of financial capitalism, starting with its hegemonic emergence in the last decades of the 20th century.
The West has nothing to do with cultural Europe, whose roots are Greek-Latin and Christian.
The West is the realization of a policy of economic and military power, which originated in the Age of Empires, led to two world wars, and resumed its rule of the world in the mid-1970s.
Unfortunately, even in Europe, the idea that “we are the West” has become part of common sense.
Historical Europe, for example, has always had fundamental structural links with the East, both near and far (Eurasia), while the West perceives itself as intrinsically opposed to the East. Thus, cultural Europe is in obvious continuity with Russia, while for the West, Russia is totally other than itself.
This premise serves to illustrate a serious long-term concern that I cannot hold back.
The concern is linked to the fact that the West, shaped around the framework – mental no less than practical – of financial capitalism, has eradicated the soul of the European peoples.
European culture and spirituality, that extraordinary efflorescence stretching from Sophocles to Beethoven, from Dante to Marx, from Tacitus to Monteverdi, from Michelangelo to Bach, etc., is the first victim of Western culture, a utilitarian, instrumental, abysmally petty culture that understands the beauty of art, territories, and traditions only if they are an “asset” that can be transformed into “cash”.
We have learned to accept this measurement of every value as a price, and every price as a profit margin.
Our society, our education, our communities have been forced to accept these equivalences that turn the soul into a desert. And this was done because it promised to preserve the West's status of power, dominance, and material hegemony over the rest of the world.
Although many people have tried, with some success, to oppose this desertification drift, it has nevertheless imposed itself on institutions, academies, and schools. Those who want to resist this impoverishment must do so in secret, as individual resistance, paying personal prices, while everything else – funding, programs, privileges – goes in the opposite direction.
But today we have reached the end of the line, the turning point.
The desertification of the soul that the West has produced has shaped one of the most morally infamous ruling classes in history. Before the emergence of the Western mentality, about a century and a half ago, there were certainly tyrants more bloodthirsty than today's Western leaders, but no form of life as cynical.
The West does not kill and exterminate out of hatred, nor out of conviction, nor to set an example, nor even out of a sheer sense of superiority.
No, the West kills because it finds it increasingly difficult to perceive the distinction between life and death as relevant. Because it is, at its core, a culture of death in the fundamental sense that it does not recognize an essential difference in value between the vitality of a bank account and that of a child, between that of an algorithm and that of a puppy.
Today's West, exemplified paradigmatically by the American and Israeli ruling classes, but equally well represented by the servile trash that speaks on behalf of the European Union, is reaching levels of abjection rarely seen before.
It is no longer a question of “double standards”. It is a daily commitment to unlimited lying, to the frank acceptance that every statement, every word, every thought counts only for the effects in terms of money and power that it can produce.
You can say everything and its opposite.
You can deny the evidence and then deny that you denied it.
You can break promises and treaties.
You can conduct negotiations while trying to kill the person you are negotiating with, and then protest with a straight face because the other person no longer wants to continue negotiating.
You can manipulate official information 24 hours a day and then call for exemplary punishments to counteract the manipulative power of hairdresser Pina on social media.
You can build, in Milan as in London, the most classist, gentrified, oligarchic, and exclusionary society, while gently preaching hospitality and inclusiveness.
You can watch a genocide live on worldwide television for two years and explain that it is self-defense.
Etc., etc.
So, my problem, in addition to my disgust at everything that is happening, is the awareness that we will not be able to escape the historical condemnation of this spiritual obscenity.
We will be involved even if we have not personally approved anything, even if we have contested it in every way available to us.
We will be involved because this depravity is the West, and we have accepted this label, we have learned to think of ourselves as the West, and the world perceives us as such.
When we are called upon to pay the bill by 7/8 of the planet – and no one should delude themselves that this will not happen – it will be incredibly difficult, perhaps impossible, to explain that the great, millennial European culture has nothing to do with the nihilistic desert of the contemporary West.
Just as in the immediate post-war period many people could not bear to hear German – the language of Goethe and Mozart – without a feeling of disgust (some of the older generation will certainly remember this), so, but in a much more radical way, the same could happen to anything that smacks, rightly or wrongly, of the West.
“After all, if studying Dante, Cervantes, or Shakespeare led you to two world wars and then to outright nihilism, what lesson should the world learn from this tradition?”
This reasoning, in its crudeness, may seem unreasonable to us only because we are used to always being the ones who judge and never the ones who are judged.
Losing world hegemony is now inevitable, and far from being a problem, it will be a blessing.
But losing respect and understanding for everything that has been part of Europe's long history has already happened in part due to internal regression, and the final blow could be dealt shortly.
Losing one's soul is immensely more serious than losing power.
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