by Roberto Pecchioli – 23/02/2019Source: Heretically
There is a fierce debate going on in Great Britain. It's not about Brexit or the monarchy, but something infinitely more serious: whether or not to tear down the statues of Winston Churchill and Lord Nelson. With the naivety of those who live on the extreme outskirts of the empire, we thought that the terrifying bombings of German cities were blamed on the conservative politician, Dresden and Hamburg above all. To the Admiral of Trafalgar the active participation of a brilliant military commander in British colonialism. It's not like that. Churchill apparently was a “white supremacist”: This is how a frowning Scottish MP describes it. The statue of Nelson in the London square named after his most prestigious victory is in danger for the same reason: Lord Horatio was racist. A bunch of freaks don't ask for it, but austere progressive voices hosted by the prestigious The Guardian.
The wind, you are, it comes from the Atlantic and in fact the idea of ​​demolishing steles and monuments did not spare Christopher Columbus in the USA. The news is that we will not even pay homage to two heroines of nineteenth-century feminism, le suffragette Susan B. Anthony e Elizabeth Cody Stanton. Their sculptured figures will not adorn New York: feminists yes, proud fighters for the vote for women, ma, Alas, racist too. A critic wonders: once the principle has been established to do away with every character from the past whose vision of the world does not coincide with ours, where we will end up? Wise question, with a very simple answer in its dramatic nature: we will end up in nothing, in the pneumatic vacuum of a civilization that has reached its terminal phase.
More serious is asking why we have reached this point, since only from the answer can the hope of reversing the trend arise. We start from the worst of the bad teachers, Sigmund Freud, and by the most acute critic of American liberalism, Alexis de Tocqueville. Totem and Taboo is Freud's work in which psychoanalysis and anthropology meet in the midst of the controversy with Jung. “The word taboo expresses two opposite meanings: in one sense it means sacred, consecrated, in the other left, dangerous, prohibited, unclean, and represents a sort of horror endowed with hidden demonic force that unleashes an objectified fear, a ban of an almost sacred nature.” Taboo is no different, in its psychological nature, from the Kantian categorical imperative, since it acts in a coercive form, excluding any truly conscious motivation.
The conclusion is obsessive neurosis as a normal condition of Westerners (neo)liberals. The taboo is also a totem, the concrete or hypostatized object endowed with a profound symbolic meaning that unites a specific community or social group. The figurative definition of totem in the dictionary published by Repubblica is interesting, central to liberal libertarian progressivism: object of superstition to which a reverential cult is attributed. Our conclusion is that the denial of the idea of ​​race, therefore the unquenchable hatred towards any form of ethnic differentiation, it is the totem of our time. Taboo becomes any idea, act, person or people who dare to deny the value of the totem, universalized because universal, in aspiration, it is the anthropology it represents.
Not by chance, even another intangible symbol of contemporaneity, feminism, it is put aside if the suspicion of racism affects or only touches personalities such as the American suffragettes mentioned. The drift of a civilization that is characterized in a negative sense is surprising, anti, against something that it also avoids defining to include any conduct unwelcome to those who control and guard the totem. In our opinion the anti-racist totem-taboo hides another, which allows and reinforces the first. It's about equality, an ancient idea that modernity took from the French revolution but also from the American one. Tocqueville confirms this, the French thinker of the post-revolutionary era, whose capital work is Democracy in America, fruit of a long stay in the United States.
He was the first to understand the inexorable tendency towards the absolutization of equality, destined to translate into conformism, social massification, since the most serious pathology of democracy is not accepting difference. Tocqueville's vision is even more interesting for the observation that within democracy, alongside the tension towards equality, there is also a passion for possession, the egomania of having, an inclination destined to never be satisfied, which explains the bizarre co-presence of the totem of equality and its radical denial in the economy and in the concrete organization of society.
This is how Tocqueville expressed himself: “I don't know a country where there is less independence of spirit and less authentic freedom of discussion than in America. The master doesn't tell you anymore: think eat me or die; but he says: you are free not to think like me; your life, your goods, everything will remain there, but from this moment you are a stranger among us.” Chilling in its accuracy is the prediction of which we see every detail come true: “If I try to imagine modern despotism, I see an immense crowd of similar and equal beings circling around themselves to obtain small and petty pleasures on which their soul feeds. Above this crowd, I see an immense tutelary power rising, which is responsible for ensuring the well-being of its subjects and watching over their fate. It's absolute, meticulous, methodical, provident, and even mild. It would resemble paternal authority, if it had a purpose, like that one, to prepare men for manhood. Ma, on the contrary, it only seeks to keep them in perpetual childhood. (…) Wouldn't it perhaps also take away their strength to live and think?”.
Equality removed from its economic-social consequences is the totem superior to any other. Differences must be fiercely denied as non-existent, freak of nature that society has the right and duty to correct. In recent decades, the most powerful weapon has become political correctness, that is, the change in meaning of words to change the vision of reality. The goal is always to get to zero, prohibit, demonize difference, excluding income. In New York they are passing a ban on unfavorably commenting on the hair of black people, with very high fines. These days there is an attack against sexual difference in the world of sport. A former world football champion, Fulvio Collovati, he was suspended by Rai for criticizing the wife of the footballer Icardi. His crime is sexism, neologism that condemns the idea of ​​inequality between the sexes.
On the altar of the principle of equality, the most obvious difference, the ethnic one, it is denied and persecuted as a capital sin, maximum and unforgivable horror. An icon of tolerance and peace like Gandhi does not escape postmodern censorship. The Mahatma is in danger of being kicked off the moral pedestal he occupies. In London they would like to knock down – two for the price of one- his statue, located in the same square as Churchill's. The accusation is the same: even the venerable Indian chief was racist. He would have supported apartheid against Africans when he lived in South Africa and advised civilized Hindus against mixing in public with African "aborigines". In Ghana, a country that should have more concrete concerns, one of his monuments has already been eliminated.
The game of massacre would not spare Tocqueville, guilty of offending Islamism, since he wrote that he believed “few religions as lethal to man as that of Muhammad.” To the fatwa of Muslims, the conviction for blasphemy, corresponds to the Western interdict in the name of political correctness. Jesus himself has little hope. The Bible has already been withdrawn from a Welsh university, but what about his attacks on the Pharisees, of the absurd claim to be “away, truth and life”?
The totem and the taboo have another surprising feature: they act on all eras at every level. In fact, they surpass another pillar of modern ideology, relativism, through generalized equivalence, presupposition of the theory of the identical. The obligation not to draw up rankings or rankings is made absolute by denying any temporal or cultural contextualization. In some American universities Shakespeare is marginalized. Naturally he is accused of racism, Shylock, the Moor of Venice, contempt for disabled people (Caliban in the Tempest, Riccardo III), but it is not immune from accusations of sexism either (The Taming of the Shrew, the character of Lady Macbeth). As for Dante, he was homophobic, so much so that sodomites are in Hell, but also racist (be men, and not crazy sheep, so that the Jew does not laugh at you among you). Saint Paul is proscribed for his letter to the Corinthians. In England some preachers have already been denounced for having spread Pauline passages against homosexuality.
The apostle James is racist: Santiago the Matamoros. Things aren't any better for Cervantes, whose description of the poor maid Maritornes, low, fat and crooked-eyed is a distillation of sexism and aesthetic racism dating back to Homer. His Thersites, deformed antihero, trembling and pacifist, he is the opposite of the Greek ideal of beauty combined with goodness and courage. (kalòs kai agathòs). Totalitarianism combines with sectarian ignorance as it is forbidden to contextualize, that is, insert facts, ideas and people in the time and place in which they matured. Impossible, new ideas are better, definitive, indisputable, universal. Overthrowing Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, we are giants forced to support the dwarves of the past. The germ is in the Enlightenment, which enthroned reason as the sole criterion of a humanity that had finally emerged from a millenary childhood. The universals of the past are not just rejected, but ridiculed, simple babbling of children.
The most obvious inequality among human beings is that of external appearance, the color of the skin, distinct physical and biological characteristics. It must be denied without exception as its collapse would cause the entire building to collapse and fall to the ground. The identical does not allow exclusions because the goal is to build one-size-fits-all humans, unique color, single sex. Series products, economy of scale to which the criteria of industry and livestock can be applied. Therefore the past and every idea received must be rejected at the root; man is first deconstructed – the operation, in the West, is almost finished – therefore re-generated in a different form. The new and indistinct man becomes a product, an assembly of pieces until the next finish line, the transhuman, the man who is no longer such, but a detached piece, a prosthesis among others. If he proves unable to adapt, must be modified until the creation of the cyberanthrope, final junction of the man-machine conceived by Descartes, theorized by the sensist La Mettrie, gear of the universe megamachine.
The profoundly iconoclastic character of the terminal West should never be forgotten. Its main task is to raze memory to the ground, old ideas and values, erase its vestiges also through the oblivion of great personalities. The burning of Nazi libraries is replicated in a politically correct manner, the invitation, which degenerates into intolerant obligation, to hide texts that are not "inline". La damnatio memoriae ricorda la anticultural dystopia di Fahrenheit 451, while anyone suspected of deviating from the anti-racist and egalitarian totem-taboo is subject to the ostracism that Leo Strauss defined as reductio ad hitlerum. At least once a day, we are all Hitler, when we make a judgment, we express a preference or, never be, we assert an idiosyncrasy, let's admit a dislike.
The only prejudice admitted is that which denies judgment, that is, the distinction, critical thinking. Criticism means judgment, whose prohibition leads to closed-mindedness, prodromo dell'aphasia. He was an interpreter, partly unaware, Francis Fukuyama in his theorization of the end of history. In other respects, we could say the opposite: with postmodernity the legend ends, the mythography, and History with a capital letter can finally assert itself, the adventure of post-humanity freed from the old obsessions in the race to surpass itself. Races and ethnicities do not exist, the differences are an error of creation, starting with the distinction of the sexes, anyone who disagrees is destined to the same end as the statues of yesterday's heroes, scoundrels today.
The English press reports on vegan attacks in supermarkets shouting anti-carnivore slogans with physical threats to butcher's customers. The columnist hypothesizes that they will soon breed, killing and eating animals will be considered as hateful as insulting someone for their race or sexual orientation today. Nothing strange, the so-called "speciesism", that is, the attribution of a higher ontological and moral status to human beings compared to other living beings is another postmodern frontier currently being demolished. We take the following definition from the animal-ethics.org website: “Speciesism is a form of discrimination against those who do not belong to a certain species. In most modern human societies it is considered normal to discriminate against animals of other species.” The difference, In short, it doesn't exist, it has no justification and must be furiously expelled from every aspect of reality. Equality passes through the equivalence of species, Leonardo, beetles and hedges have the same value and equal dignity, that is, no dignity.
We are alienating ourselves from ourselves, we emerge from the human by believing in new dogmas. Different totems are erected, ancient taboos are broken down to raise new ones. The fracture point of Western civilization is the loss of the sense of limit combined with the denial of transcendence. An animal regression called civilization in the name of anti-racism, fanatical equality, ontological denial: animals of other species... For the Greeks, absolute evil was hubris, the arrogance of exceeding the limits, arousing the anger of the gods. God takes away the mind of those who want to ruin; the statues torn down, denied ideas generate debris, they leave dust where there was, good or bad, a civilization. The new world is binary, open/closed, like the computer language made of infinite sequences of zeros and ones. The zero, we fear, he is Western man.
 
source – https://www.ariannaeditrice.it/articolo.php?item_id=61653