Of Roberto Siconolfi
Source: Roberto Siconolfi
The mainstream political and cultural vulgate often projects us into very delicate discourses with the analytical ability of football team fans. One of these is the lightness with which issues of knowledge are addressedinternational politics, geopolitics, political-institutional conceptions, value systems, rights, conflicts and systemic events deriving from them (es. immigration). SecondImmanuel WallersteininThe rhetoric ofcandies. Critique of European universalism(2007) “there is nothing more ethnocentric or more particularistic than universalistic claims“, and never is a more fitting definition to describe the view on the Western world.
In the 1999, at a World Bank conference in Florence, an American economist said that societies struggling to become prosperous need a“suitable” cultural tradition. For neither tenth-century China, nor fifteenth-century Southern Europe, dominated by the Catholic Church, they had this “suitable” cultural tradition, then they failed. This greatly irritated the Chinese delegates who left.
Another episode occurred in 2000, at another important World Bank conference in Washington dedicated to “gender differences”. In the introductory report, a famous American feminist said that Africa was bad even before colonialism because thelocal cultures were “patriarchal”and “oppressive” towards women. Also in this case the
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But even more important was the episode of the conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, organized by the Academy for International and Area Studies of Harvard University, In the 1999, when the organizers beat a lot on the equation betweeneconomic developmentedProtestant ethic, they said that thanks to it northern Europe and the USA had developed. For them, the world would have been better if these values had spread across the entire planet.
The presumed superiority of the Western model
This speech shows us thepresumption of superioritythan the West, at least in its conceptual categorization, pours on other peoples, of their life systems and their traditional models of reference. A speech that refers us to that whole set of clichés, stereotypes and at best axioms valid for the Western model, but not for the rest of the world, and which goes by the name of “civil and human rights”. In the name of "
Fundamental rights for human beings, including that of individual freedom, to life, to the property, all’autodeterminazione, to a dignified existence, to religious freedom, to social security.
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Civilization of the savages?
In the end, thePalestinian question, where before the eyes of the whole world the genocide of a people takes place for various reasons, all dubious and questionable. Let's not talk about Africa, where the already old work of twentieth-century colonization continues with even worse logic, see the issue of the CFA franc or imigration processesfavored by economic business and humanitarianism aimed at unlimited hospitality. All operations that have brought and carry the mask of human rights or Westernization, and where, except in some specific cases, the political leaders that lead the West in thiswork of civilization of savagesthey are democratic and social democratic in nature.
Dignity" of societies
But then what would this superior point of view be capable of judging and deciding on the fate of others? What are we exporting to these countries, the
Form of government founded on the principles of popular sovereignty, of the legal equality of citizens, the protection of citizens' rights and duties, of the separation and independence of powers.
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