The West is its own worst enemy

Marcello Veneziani

The Hamas massacres in Israel and the invasion of Ukraine have been read as an attack on the West that forces Westerners to pick sides. These are actually two different cases: if the Hamas attack also has a hostile nature towards the West, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was not aimed against Europe but aimed at most at restoring the area of Russian influence, as in the times of the Tsars and the USSR and avoiding NATO bases on the Russian borders.
But in both cases the call to defend the West and to take sides accordingly rises .
It is useless to deny it but in the "conservative" world an unavoidable crossroads resurfaces between those who always take the side of the West, primarily the USA, and those who do not recognize themselves in a West that denies its identities and its own origins; its history, its thought, its tradition, its faith, its natural communities and runs towards a posthuman and nihilistic drift. We go around this gap but we cannot avoid it. It is easy to side with the West and with everything it expresses, if one immediately recognizes its economic and social model as the non plus ultra; its interests, its fluid lifestyles and its prevailing ideology, such as the representation of good, freedom, democracy, rights, progress and well-being. And vice versa, it is easy to take sides against the West if you are an enemy of the capitalist model, of unbridled consumerism, of past colonialism or if you live with shame and a sense of guilt the historical, civil and religious legacy of the West and its " imperialism".
But it becomes more difficult to take sides on one side or the other if on the one hand we love the civilization from which we come and on the other we hate its decadence and its denial; and the primacy of individualism, economics, technology, the absence of values ​​except woke, black or politically correct ideological codes. If you are always on the side of the West, you fall back in defense of this West which denies its civilization, its identities and its Greek, Roman and Christian roots. In the end you only defend its level of well-being and its power, renouncing everything else, also putting freedom and democracy at risk. If, on the other hand, you oppose the West, you risk working for executioners or enemies, from Islamic fanaticism to Chinese dictatorship, and of supporting regimes and countries that deny freedom, rights and democracy . We don't like this West, and American supremacy, but could we ever side with the Brics countries and their new allies, knowing full well we are still in the opposing camp? Can we side with Putin, the ayatollahs or Xi Jinping because we hate this West? We need to go beyond the apocalyptic and the integrated.
On a cultural levelor principles, a point of coherence can be found by embracing civilization and criticizing some aspects of civilization, loving and supporting our national, European and Mediterranean, civil and religious identity, and rejecting the uniform and alienating global model promoted by technocapitalism. Activating the ability to distinguish on an international level (e.g. India is a preferable interlocutor compared to China).
But when history forces you to choose either side of the field, and in quick and bloody times; when there is an ongoing war, or an extermination, what do you do, stay in the middle, lock yourself in the tower, choose one or the other knowing however that you are betraying an essential part of your European being? There are those who solve everything by waving the flags of the moment without hesitation, the Ukrainian one, the Israeli one, as the current government does; accepts the elementary Manichaeism of the media and the strongest subjects in the West, does not ask critical questions, does not recognize precedents and assumptions, does not see things from multiple observation points, does not calculate the long-range effects, the pain and the revengeful resentments it arouses. It divides absolutely between victims and executioners, without asking the question whether today's executioners are yesterday's victims and vice versa; the message is easier and perhaps more advantageous, even on a personal level. But for those who love reality and truth and have certain principles at heart, there is no such simple and one-sided solution. All that remains is to stick to the sense of reality, to the primacy of the good or where it is not possible, to the preference of the lesser evil, to the distinction of plans, times and priorities, to balance, in the consideration of the different points of interest and observation . To give a hot example in the present, defeating Hamas terrorism is a priority to be shared, but the program cannot only be the sacrosanct safeguarding of Israel, without considering the need to guarantee the life of the Palestinian people and give them a state and a territory. Frustrations and denied basic rights arm extremism and undermine the future much more than talks and negotiations.
Enormous questions press in the background and recall the theme of Christianity in decline , the question of the technique that pervades everything, the acceptance or otherwise of capitalism as an insurmountable, correctable or surmountable horizon. And then the relationship between Europe and the United States, and between Europe and the rest of the world. The West is not a compact block, to say the West means to designate at least three worlds that are irreducible to each other, indeed often divergent: the United States, Latin America and Europe. One more reason to set aside the idea of ​​the West as a single body and speak on one side of Europe or the archipelago of homelands, and on the other of the Multiverse, that is, of a plural world with multiple areas of cohesion.
Precisely realism should require us to start from a consideration: the West is not the entire world nor the paradigm of the universe but is now a minority reality, destined to be increasingly less central, if not unsuccessful, in many challenges and many areas. A West that is also ashamed of itself, of its identity, of its history and of its culture, tradition and religion . Within the West, European priorities and interests do not coincide with Atlantic ones. The consequence is to accept the idea of ​​a multipolar world, consider Europe one of these areas and overcome the claim that the USA can continue to be the supreme arbiters of the planet. How far this position differs from or meets that of the present government is of little interest to us: this is not a question of right or left. It's about defending reality, common sense, balance, looking for pieces of truth in the polygon of life, defending civilization and humanity, starting with those closest to you.