Drawing-room presumption combined with the coarse manners of taverns: this is what the “political” mentality of the self-marginalized extremes has generally been reduced to.
They pride themselves on a kind of political “wisdom” derived from reading—often done without reflection, but rather to extract fossilized truths—from texts and doctrines taken out of context, whose original spirit has been lost.
But a log king has never been a king, and the donkey of relics does little more than bray.
Like Nietzsche’s last man, in support of their acquired certainties, many exchange knowing glances, and anything that challenges their prepackaged schemas becomes, to them, suspect, laughable, fabricated…
It is a contagious pathology: I call it the religion of impotence.
Of course, some of these fossilized “truths” do originate from actual truths; the problem is that it is rare for them to be recognized as they truly are when they are fixed a priori into crude and abstract representations.
And yet…
There exists a truth that could genuinely guide us, one that has been handed down since before we ourselves were born: the spiritual and systemic unity of communism and capitalism. A truth so obvious—and precisely for that reason so little examined—that most have even forgotten it. And if someone reminds them of it, they sneer and reply—in a capitalist society that developed along the lines of The Manifest—that communism no longer exists.
They are usually the same people who mockingly claim that Yalta no longer exists, failing to understand how it has evolved while still resting on the same pillars and even retaining the same structures.
This sacred truth, however, can itself lead to serious misjudgment and prove misleading.
In the capital-communist symbiosis, the most effective, intelligent, and pervasive role is played by finance and by the historical leadership of this hermaphroditic entity, located more in London and New York than in the strongholds of crudity—useful to them and dependent on them—situated in the East and South of the planet.
But this should not lead to an inverted reading, whereby the crude and incapable subordinate becomes a true—or even superior—opponent of its master.
Before descending into the absurdity of identifying in the subcultures of backward, envious, and resentful capitalists—whether in Moscow, Caracas, or Pyongyang—genuine or even virtuous opposition to the West, even to the point of cheering for these ramshackle groups, it had been established that the USA, capitalism, and high finance are more dangerous than the triple-nostriled horror supposedly opposed to them.
True. Precisely because they represent a successful communism rather than a failed capitalism—unlike those underdeveloped systems that oppose them by shouting while depending on them entirely and regularly serving them.
This should not have been interpreted in the reductive way that later took hold, but quite the opposite
One should not cheer for the refuse of civilization and endemic failures, pretending they are better than a dominant system; rather, one should learn from other models that proved superior—and therefore more appealing and successful in comparison—in order to propose positive alternatives. Why turn into hooligans of garbage dumps? That is what they are, and that is what they show themselves to be every day.
It is not true that anything is better than what dominates—and reality, not theories or winks, tells us so.
There is an almost infallible litmus test:
the sentiment of peoples. They may be ignorant (are they really?), but they feel and understand things.
If discontent in the Western world is widespread but not as extreme as elsewhere, it should be grasped in order to offer positive and serene solutions—not to oppose it with the deformed alternatives of its supposed enemies.
One may say that things are told by mainstream media that—at least in theory—should demonize real or presumed challengers, but no one can invent or cultivate, much less sustain over time, the mass reactions to “anti-Western” tyrannies that some imagine in order to exorcise the fall of masks and continue living in self-deception.
If one simply remains—or returns—to being normal, common sense suggests that the supposed alternatives to the West are not only objectively worse, but, by contrast, they provide absolute strength to the dominant system. That system cannot be changed in the name or model of such failures—however aggressive and overbearing they may be—because they are so unappealing and inspire such repulsion.
The dominant system must be confronted by moving toward something better, not by defending in bad faith what is clearly worse
The latter was the logic of communists from the 1920s to the 1980s: the logic of falsehood.
With one notable difference: back then they had faith and a will to power, albeit delegated and infused with envy and resentment. Today, those who have contracted it are left only with delegation, envy, and resentment.
The alternatives to the so-called West have all failed or are failing in the general sentiment of those who live within them. This is not hard to see; it is no mystery.
If one wants to propose an alternative, that is certainly not where to look.
Nor should one swing to the opposite extreme, whereby—given the horror of these alternatives—no alternatives should be created and the dominant model should instead be exalted by default.
We have often said that capitalism is more insidious than communism.
Perhaps—but their spiritual and cultural unity makes it difficult for me to see them as truly alternative. And even if it were so, this conclusion is intellectualistic and contradicted by human experience;
one need only observe how peoples react
to communist systems or those run by communists.
People fled from East to West, not the other way around. In Berlin, communism had to erect a wall to prevent its population from draining away. Within a few years, one-fifth of East Germans—nearly three million—had fled West.
Maduro’s Venezuela has done worse: over eight million out of a population of thirty-two—one in four.
The Soviet system held up slightly better thanks to Moscow’s privileges over its satellites, but it still collapsed on its own, and the disastrous implosion was held together with difficulty by Clinton’s band-aids.
That collapse revealed such resentment toward Russian imperialism in the areas that had experienced it that even Russian-speaking Ukrainians chose—against American pressure—to break away from Moscow. Those who wished to remain tied to it were a strong minority in Crimea (45%) and a small portion in Donbass (19%).
It was not Western or American maneuvers—indeed, those often went in the opposite direction—but popular sentiment that rejected Moscow.
Later, in 2014, there was no CIA coup in Kyiv but a popular uprising against the ongoing dismantling of the nation to sell it off to the Kremlin, which had shed its mask years earlier. From that day on, elections were massive and clear. The national will has always been transparent.
If all the peoples neighboring Russia seek the unfortunately illusory shield of NATO, it is not because they have been bought, but because they fear and detest their overbearing neighbor.
The same, not so differently, occurs in other tyrannies
even if they are economically better organized and more cultured. Take, for example, the Iranian one.
I understand that some sympathize with it because it stands in opposition to the Israeli system—at least as a reaction to the blatant slaughter of Palestinians and Lebanese, which has provoked widespread indignation, perhaps now tempered by a growing anti-Islamic sentiment.
I do not expect everyone to know or understand the role the Iranian system has played against Arab causes and nationalisms, how ignobly imperialistic it has been, how long it cooperated and was associated with Tel Aviv, and how much it contributed to paving the way for Greater Israel.
One may not know, not understand, or may refuse to admit it.
One may choose to ignore it. I do not, but I admit that it is possible. From there, however, to sympathizing with that tyranny or claiming that its infamous face is a Western fabrication—that is quite another matter.
If, in a highly repressive regime, every act of protest risks one’s life—whether cut down by police forces or hanged by the thousands in prisons—and after forty-seven years of terror there are still people who continue desperately to risk their lives and endure torture, one cannot indulge in delusions by claiming that they have all been bought or are enemy agents.
Do you recall anything similar elsewhere—say, in Iraq or in Fascist Italy?
There is no argument to be had: the level of exasperation is at its peak.
One may shrug it off or criticize, from our comfortable and well-fed nothingness, their political directions; but to ignore that this is a tyranny against which thousands upon thousands of people risk their lives because they can no longer endure it is neither acceptable nor decent. Nor does it help in outlining political lines that are not psychotic and/or servile.
As long as the “alternatives” to Western capitalism are these, it will appear to most as a paradise—or at worst, a purgatory outside of hell.
Creating better, happier alternatives, rooted in our culture and history, is both possible and necessary
Parading the filth of others as antagonistic models and lying to ourselves and to others in order to deny the reality that condemns them is not acceptable for anyone who respects themselves and is intellectually honest.
Binary antagonism and the exaltation of every form of underdeveloped brutality serve only to uphold the power we know: it is a perverse, indirect, and indecorous way of serving it while denying its real and possible alternatives.
To do so like Guareschi’s “trinariciuti” is the height of absurdity! (1)
It also proves that there is nothing left to say or seriously oppose.
In short, it is the religion of impotence.
And the anger of frustration that often accompanies it is merely a poor illusion of Viagra.
(1) Giovanni Guareschi, the author of Don Camillo, drew gullible communists with three nostrils to indicate they were bovines.