West against Europe (the reverse canon)

The inculture of cancellation advances, a symptom of the brain death of a civilization that has come at the terminus. It is a “will to helplessness” that pervades the whole of society, a psychiatric self-harm that every day marks new negative goals.

In Portland, USA, the city hall excludes poor white citizens from municipal subsidies. An incredible self-racism that cuts the cultural thread started in Athens: isonomy, the equality before the law.

In France, the cradle of “rights”, the main student union, controlled by what remains of the Socialist Party, holds meetings from which white boys are excluded. The hatred of oneself, of one's origins and roots, is a degenerative disease from which then Cardinal Ratzinger, close to becoming Pope Benedict XVI, alerted in 2004:

"There is here a self-hatred of the West that is strange and that can only be considered as something pathological. The West tries, in a laudable way, to open up full of understanding of external values, but no longer loves himself. Of its history now sees only what is deplorable and destructive, while it is no longer able to perceive what it is big and pure.”

Europe needs a new acceptance of itself if it wants to really survive. Multiculturalism, which comes continuously and with passion encouraged and favored, it is sometimes above all abandonment and denial of what is proper, escape from one's own things. However, multiculturalism cannot exist without common foundations, without points of orientation offered by own values. In the 2000s, various voices were raised to analyze, warn and counter this phenomenon.

A sort of crisis literature or culture has been formed, similar to the one that the powerful voices of Oswald Spengler, Paul Valéry, Stefan Zweig and the conservative revolution expressed a century ago, unfortunately without the intellectual consistency of those prophets. However, there is no shortage of items to look at carefully to understand what happens and trace the antibodies to oppose the self-destructive pandemic. One is that of Eugenio Capozzi, a Neapolitan scholar, former author of the fundamental “Politically correct. History of an ideology” [1].

The title of Capozzi's most recent effort, however, seems to us to fall into an initial misunderstanding: the self-destruction of the West. The misunderstanding lies in the word “West”. On this, we disagree; the crisis certainly hits the entire sphere of influence of our civilization, but the fatal mistake, in our opinion, is insist on a concept, that of the West - that is, Europe (Western!) plus the North America - spurious, false, misleading.

The algebraic sum of Europe and America is not the West. If anything, it is the uncritical acceptance of American domination, built on the double intervention in Europe in the two world wars, with the consequent loss of economic, political, military and cultural autonomy of Europe vis-à-vis the United States.

The very deep cultural and civil crisis, the rejection of the principles of the European “logos”, the absence of intentions and projects, are the result of that submission, that oblivion of history and escape from the responsibilities that Europe has seized after the World War I and it is became a mass phenomenon at the end of the second.

The germs of self-destruction are European, but the virus was spread from America. It is from this awareness that we need to start, if we want to carry out a serious analysis, sow the seed of rebirth, and “plant trees for another generation”.

Our thesis is that the West is the reverse canon of Europe. In classical music, the reverse canon is a composition that unites one or more imitations to a melody that progressively overlap and go in the opposite direction.

This is America compared to the Europe that generated it and which abandons, rejecting the culture of origin. Europe and the West do not coincide at all. Benedict XVI himself confirmed this in the historic Regensburg speech, extreme, unheard cry of love for Europe, claiming the civilization born of the encounter of the Gospel with Greek philosophy through Rome and the Holy Roman Empire.

The notion of “West” is quite recent and had geopolitical and strategic intentions, not cultural or civil. It dates back in particular to Arnold Toynbee, a historian of civilizations but above all a man of the British Empire’s establishments, theorist of that “anglosphere” that does coincide not at all with Europe. Giuliano Marchesini writes:

“The cultural foundation of the West is different from that of Europe. If Europe is the land of the Logos, the West is the land that is rebel against the Logos: from the Anglican schism onwards, this is the characteristic figure of the Anglosphere.”

Oswald Spengler himself, whose thesis is that every civilization, like living beings, is born, develops, decays and finally dies, uses the term West specifically in a German meaning: “abendland”, land of the evening, a hendiadys if combined with sunset (untergang). He put before the eyes of Europeans - recipients of his message - the idea of ​​decadence, unthinkable a century ago. They hadn't believed the philosophers (Nietzsche, Schopenhauer), not they would have believed the engineer who became the morphologist of history. It is, he wrote:

“Of follow the destiny of a civilization, and in particular of the only civilization whose fulfillment is today in action on this planet, the Euro-American civilization, in the stages not yet undertaken”.

He still saw in America the extension of Europe, even though he understood that the era of Europe was over and that the stage of “civilization” would have been Americanism. Contrasted to civilization (Kultur), ascending phase in which spiritual and moral values that give meaning to existence and mark art, politics, economics, literature, predominate is “civilisation” (Zivilisation). In it, the principle of quality is replaces the quantity: to craftsmanship, technique; the standardization of tastes and customs overwhelms the differences; to the city and the countryside organized on a human scale they replace megalopolises, extreme forms of indifferentism, termite mounds with no humanity left; societies are leveled, hedonism and money are the only recognized values.

This is the photographic portrait of America, the negation of Europe, as the insane rush to get rid of the thought, customs, science, the entire legacy of the Old Continent demonstrates. It has the right, it has been carrying the seeds since the journey of the first “pilgrim” in the 17th century, who fled from the Old Continent in hatred of it. In the last half century, America has been hit by immense migratory waves, coming from the South and East of world, which forever changed the demographic, ethnic, and spiritual map cultural of the big country. Its constantly boiling pot (melting pot) keeps as the only common reference points the search for individual “success” through money, combined with a very particular idea of ​​equality-indifference that disconcerted Tocqueville in the 19th century.

It is their vision of the world, the thread that - for a while longer - will prevent its collapse: let them live as they see fit, but stop imposing on Europe and the world the American way of life. Obviously, the opposite concept also applies: let Europe stop being imposed the agenda, principles, values, policies and everyday life by a civilization from which it is divided by an ocean. Europe and the West do not coincide, indeed the second exists to deny the first.

The West devours Europe. America only knows how to celebrate itself (Walt Whitman, from Leaves of Grass: “I celebrate myself, and sing myself / And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you”). For the American, his model is superior to regardless, indisputable and universal: complexity is foreign to him, he ignores the reasons of others with the annoyed spirit of the child who does not accept limits or corrections. In this sense, it is the specular negation of Europe, truly its inverse canon. All this cannot make us ignore that the arsenal of poisons that is collapsing on us is of European ancestry. The swarm of termites that dug from the inside started from here; the American grasshoppers spread it desertifying the land.

A certain union between the United States and Europe - a peninsula extending to the west of the giant to which it fiercely opposed for three millennia - made sense until 1989: the Soviet danger was immense and had conquered half of Europe. With the real twentieth-century communism imploded, there is no longer any reason - politically and spiritually - for the so-called Atlanticism, the servile prison (as well as the political religion of the elites) of which we are the hostage. Through the Atlanticist misunderstanding, the US maintains dominance and prevents us from growing, reflecting on ourselves and looking to East, starting with those parts of Europe that are the Slavic world and Russia, a binary giant with a body in Asia but the brain and heart in Europe. This corresponds to a long-term geopolitical interest of the US but not to our historical vocation.

The fact is that all the ideas, tics, fashions, visions that are at the basis of the ongoing self-destruction come from the West / USA. They must be rejected as strangers, foreigners, enemies. We have admitted the “biological” paternity of some of them, but without America, its power of influence, its political, historical and cultural imposition, Europe perhaps would have developed antibodies to absorb its effects.

We are talking about the “cultures of suspicion”. Psychoanalysis. Marxism that became mass culture through the Frankfurt School. Spiritual indifference. Relativism. Narcissism. Liberism that replaced liberalism. Figurative art and music separated from the relationship with man. The “deconstruction”, that is the methodical dismantling of all the founding principles of the European soul, the radical separation between the public sphere and the religious dimension. They are poisoned fruits of Europe, but they would not have become common sense, mass culture, widespread power without the active consent of the United States.

What has overwhelmed us in the last century - with particular vehemence for fifty years now and with the accelerated motion of the Third Millennium – comes from European sack flour, but the mill, the miller and the baker are American.

There are many examples: one concerns psychoanalysis and the equivocal sciences of the unconscious. They were born in a Europe of German language and Jewish ancestry, but only became world phenomena after Sigmund Freud's triumphal trip to America. Marxism was born in the same humus, then distanced itself from the Soviet experience, became “Western” through the abyss-therapy of the Frankfurt School. Adorno, Marcuse, Horkheimer, Fromm and others sterilize its collectivist results in economics and place it on the side of the struggle against authority and tradition. Against the father, the family, against God, the transmission of cultural heritage, in the name of “imagination” and the prohibition against prohibition.

The Frankfurter, also of Jewish origin (tenacious identity of the wanderer!), initially supported by the International Communist, emigrated to the US after the coming of Hitler. It will be from the chairs of American universities that they will spread the new verb, the negative logos of critical theory.

From those pulpits a class struggle will arise, no longer centered on the proletariat - a conservative class that aspires to become bourgeois, according to Adorno's scornful judgment - but on the so-called oppressed minorities. War of the sexes, therefore, with the feminism of equality defeated by anti-masculine radicalism; war of “genres”, through the sexual revolution and the slow emergence of gender theory; ethnic struggle, to dismantle, through the sense of guilt (Hegel's unhappy conscience) European civilization as white, patriarchal and ultimately “hetero-patriarchal”, assuming the patronage of homosexual movements.

The European art of the avant-garde of the first part of the twentieth century had already dethroned man. The US has definitively cleared all forms of abstractionism, invented the cultural industry and imposed with the power of their multinational companies, musical forms extraneous to the European tradition, based on harmony, melody and beauty.

For half a century and more, the rhythm, the din, imitation of metropolitan life and the typical sounds of foreign cultures, dominated. A cultural war on everything that smacks of Europe. American is the pacifism that arose in the universities of the 1960s. American is the alternative culture of drugs and artificial paradises. Even the trivialization of divorce and the spread of practices such as abortion (a real feminist para religious totem) is of American ancestry.

The greatest victory is having convinced people, through the enthronement of science and especially technology, that human behavior is not a mixture of nature and culture, but an imposition of the dominant groups. Hence the story of sexual orientation opposite to the biological-natural sex, the idea of ​​motherhood as a patriarchal obligation and not as an unavoidable biological fact. The rest was done by the consumer society: nothing must be definitive, everything is revocable, “liquid”, transient, subject to the choices of the moment.

Since equality is an indisputable dogma, with the individualistic exception of the wallet, it cannot be judged, evaluated, preferred: it would be an imposition and an offense. This has led to mass victimization, the child of the language of political correctness which banishes all distinctions and prohibits the debate of ideas. Truth is Equality plus Equivalence, which, exchanged with scientific accuracy, cannot be discussed any more than the Pythagorean theorem or the sphericity of the planets can be denied. The opposite of civilization made up of dialogue, research, reflection, refutation.

The victim of the reverse canon is Socrates, founder of European ethics and the method of comparison. American is the theory of intersectionality, or the re-establishment of all the new ideological strands. Intersectionality is a term introduced by the African American sociologist Kimberlé Crenshaw to describe the superimposition of different social identities and various forms of discrimination, oppression and domination.

The theory suggests that various biological, social and cultural categories, sex / gender, race and ethnicity, social class, disabilities, sexual orientation, species (!!!), interact on multiple levels and therefore they must be examined in a perspective that aims to understand and then eliminate injustice and inequality.

Intersectionality becomes the justification of what Capozzi defines “diversitarian identitarianism”, that is the obsessive and rancorous claim of a particular aspect of one's essence, personality or condition that one needs to protect from the rest of society, reduced to an algebraic and provisional sum of minorities disunited on everything, except in the claims.

Multiculturalism becomes the only, unsuccessful way out of a society fragmented into an incalculable number of segments, incandescent lapilli erupted at random from the incandescent crater of a volcano.

All this and the rest that will come - the workshop never stops - is not Europe, but the West, a concept that is opposed to the East, unlike Europe which was brought to integrate into diversity, such as the pax romana by plow and sword. Europe will save itself, or can try to do so, if it gets rid of the straitjacket of the West, regaining its specificity and cultural sovereignty, a prerequisite for the recovery of economic, political and military independence. Its peoples must cut the Gordian knot that America has tightened to subjugate it; must heal from the stiff neck that prevents it from looking in other directions.

Towards itself, first of all, since the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe are no less European than the others, towards Russia from which the beyond the Atlantic giant wants to separate us for reasons that are not ours and the Mediterranean world with which we have shared millennia of historical events.

We like to conclude with the flyleaf of Western Self-Destruction, in which we have replaced the West with Europe:

“The new humanism invoked more and more often by many exponents of the European political and cultural elites in reality betray not the recovery, but the rejection of that conception of man as a rational and free animal which underlies individual rights, liberalism, democracy and which was built in encounter between Greek, Roman, Jewish, Celtic Germanic cultures, through the Christian revolution and modernity. The cult of power, scientism and ideologies have corroded European humanism to the point of dissolving it in a radical, transhuman and posthuman relativism. A relativism that leaves the globalized world devoid of a common ethical fabric and that can only be fought by a conscious reconnection of European civilization to its origins.”

Exactly. What's that to do with the West?

[1] Italian only: https://www.amazon.it/Politicamente-corretto-unideologia-Eugenio-Capozzi/dp/8831742507

**************************************

Original article of Roberto Pecchioli:

https://www.maurizioblondet.it/occidente-contro-europa-il-canone-inverso/

Translation of Costantino Ceoldo.