By SAMUEL KILSZTAJN*
The banner of democracy, held high by the West, has always been used as a mere instrument of domination.
The French Revolution, for a Westerner, is something very distant, even for adults. For young people, even the American Empire is antediluvian (although it has existed for only a century). But when you ask an Easterner what he thinks of the French Revolution, the answer is “It is still too early to talk about it.”
The French Revolution put an end to the absolute monarchy just over two hundred years ago, and the reaction of the aristocracy of continental Europe led Napoleon Bonaparte to export the revolution. Even within French society, the revolution took steps forward and steps back, brilliantly traced by the pen of Honoré de Balzac in The Human Comedy.
In England, however, the end of the absolute monarchy preceded the French Revolution by more than a century. Under the leadership of Oliver Cromwell, King Charles I of England was tried and beheaded in 1649. After the Restoration in 1660 and the Revolution of 1688, the monarchy was constitutionally subject to the English Parliament, which held real power. The subjection of the pragmatic English monarchy to parliament, a monarchy that has lasted to this day, neutralized any possible mourning for the execution of Charles I, unlike the executions of Louis XVI in the French Revolution and of Tsar Nicholas II in the Russian Revolution.
Until the Industrial Revolution in the second half of the 1812th century, the East was far from Europe, largely ruled by the Russian, Ottoman, Indian and Chinese empires. Alexander I defeated Napoleon's army in XNUMX, keeping the Russian Empire resistant to the liberal conquests that dominated England and Continental Europe. India was subjected to England in the early XNUMXth century and China during the Opium Wars in the middle of the same century. The Ottoman Empire only collapsed in the early XNUMXth century, after the First World War.
The Russians, in particular, after confronting Napoleon, the Western world during the 1917 Revolution and Hitler during World War II, continue to be challenged by the West’s seduction of Ukraine. The Western world also sought to modernize the Shiites of Iran, who rose up in 1978. Then, to combat the Persians, it decided to arm Iraq, which spiraled out of control and ended up being invaded. At its whim, the West subverts Eastern cultures and then recklessly withdraws, abandoning the “modernized” natives to their fate, as it did recently in Afghanistan.
India only gained its independence through civil disobedience in the mid-1911th century. The Chinese Empire, after Western intervention in the mid-1949th century, collapsed in XNUMX. Chiang Kai Shek Westernized the country, but was defeated by Mao Zedong in XNUMX. India and China are now preparing to take revenge on the West—which they thought had destroyed their ancient cultures—using the West’s own tools: the commodity world (without this thing called labor rights).
The progress of these countries in their project can be felt in the controversial reactions of the United States to protect its market, reactions that, however, affect its own economy. Caesar, Kaiser, Czar, the history of humanity has already seen the collapse of many powerful empires. The symptom of the decadence of the United States can be seen in the rise of an emotional politician, a grotesque braggart who shouts to the wind, with a posture very unsuitable for a statesman.
Freedom, equality, fraternity has always been, at most, a motto with validity restricted to populations of European origin (neighboring Algeria and distant New Caledonia are examples of this). With the Industrial Revolution, the savagery of the Europeans, which had already manifested itself in their previous conquest of the American, African and Oceanic continents, extended to Asia, from the Near East to the Far East. The greed of Westerners led them to want to embrace the world, or rather, to bring the world to its knees at their feet.
The banner of democracy, which the West has held high, has always been used as a mere instrument of domination. More recently, during the Cold War, the West fomented bloody dictatorships in Latin America. It fought tooth, nail and napalm to “guarantee democracy” in Southeast Asia, but to this day it has not the slightest interest in supporting the advancement of democracy in the Middle Eastern countries that are subservient to it, preferring to deal with autocratic regimes and monarchies.
The West dominated the East, but the French Revolution never reached Russia, Islam, India and China. The shrewd and treacherous Westerners consider their culture to be synonymous with civilization – they value free will, individuality and their own "identity" – and they fail to understand the culture and values of Eastern societies, which they consider folkloric, esoteric and barbaric. From a Western perspective, China produces automatons, India marginalizes lower castes, Islam produces fundamentalists and Russia brings together a bunch of alcoholics.
The West, in its altruistic missionary stance, as if it had no hidden interests to defend, is always ready to help the East, to prevent deadly factions from annihilating each other. Just as an example, it is impossible to even imagine any of the Eastern empires invading the West to interfere in the disagreements between Catholics and Protestants during the Reformation, or to separate the English, French and Germans in their historical quarrels.
But don't worry, because Westerners know better and, with the best of intentions, are committed to sacrificing their noble citizens to safeguard the world, to bring humanist values and democracy to rid humanity of the android manufacturers, elitists, bloodthirsty and drunkards who infest the planet. To their credit, Westerners, on their resumes and on their chests, display the medals they have earned for having transformed fireworks into firearms, saved the souls of the lethargic original inhabitants of the Americas and Oceania and provided work for those vagrant sub-Saharan Africans.
Although the crisis of Western civilization is evident in academic circles, which are critical of colonialism, we reproduce the colonialist stance by clinging to the Western paradigm of thought as if it were universal, with manifest contempt for ancient Eastern thought. By all indications, we will have to deal with questions about free will, anthropocentrism, gender, etc. in a world that is completely unintelligible to a Westerner. What do China and Islam think of Spinoza?
In other words, the West is blind and beyond repair. If you find this article catastrophic, then don't watch the interview with Jose Arbex Junior, which borders on black humor. Oh, I was forgetting about the climate crisis and artificial intelligence. It's just that modernity makes me uncomfortable. But if you're really interested, check out Eleonora Albano.
By the way: for the Chinese, living interesting moments is a curse, a plague.
*Samuel Kilsztajn is a full professor of political economy at PUC-SP. Author of, among other books, From scientific socialism to utopian socialism. [amz.run/7C8V].
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