Europe has many faults, but the main one is that it has self-destructed

If you doubt the thaumaturgic properties of a raffishly and forcibly administered therapeutic product, then you are an anti-scientific and anti-Western conspiracyist.

If you doubt that Ukraine is the bastion of democracy and that Russia is led by a madman who wants to come with tanks to Lisbon, then you are an anti-Western Putinian.

If you doubt that Israel is by definition a poor victim, unjustly tormented by jealous, anti-Semitic Palestinian tormentors, then you are pro-terrorist and anti-Western.

Now, the term “Western” is quite ambiguous, since today it basically includes everything that falls under the influence of the U.S. and its bungalows around the world. What I would like to make clear here is that if by anti-Western those token intellectuals mean anti-European, they are very much mistaken.

Except for the payroll intellectuals and those who think they know what is going on in the world because they read Repubblica-Corriere, for the consciously dissenting this is a historical phase of severe cultural distress.

It is so because anyone who is not a cultural parvenu knows what an extraordinary richness, multiplicity and depth of European culture there is, and is rightly proud of it.

Granted, of course, that there is no longer any room for the arrogance of those who believed a century ago that there was only one culture in the world worthy of the name, the European culture, and that everything else was barbarism, it remains true that the culture that takes its start in 6th-century B.C. Greece and branches out for two and a half millennia into the array of sciences, arts, and knowledge in Europe and beyond is an incredible heritage that imposes humility on any intellect.

Those who have even felt the spiritual worlds emanating from Plato, Aristotle, Thomas, Dante, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Monteverdi, Michelangelo, Cervantes, Purcell, Shakespeare, Bach, Mozart, Wagner, Mahler, Debussy, van Gogh, Dostoevsky, Thomas Mann, Niels Bohr, etc. etc. etc, those who have had even a small part of this experience cannot but suffer terribly to see all this devoured, perverted and destroyed by the historical accident of the U.S. hegemony of the past 70 years.

Europe has many faults but the main one is that it destroyed itself a century ago, giving way to that enriched parvenu of the American nephew, who led it, step by step, to become an ugly copy of itself, expendable as a stand-in.

And our suffering is to know that we are now on the wrong side of history, just as wrong as we were a century ago, but today also a loser; and to feel that the impending collapse will bring with it under the rubble even that unique heritage.

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Translation by Costantino Ceoldo