The Oppressive West

Timothy Birdnow

Here is an essay translated from Italian by the great physicist Carlo Rovelli.

I don't agree with it all by any means, but I agree with some of it and he makes excellent points.

one of the most famous living Italian physicists.
This is how he feels about the War in Ukraine..

Few times have I felt like this period, so far away from everything I read in the newspapers and see on television regarding the war happening now in Eastern Europe.
Few times I have felt so at odds with the dominant discourse.
Maybe it was since my restless adolescence that I didn't feel so hurt and offended by the public discourse around me.

I asked my self why. Deep down, I often disagree with the political and ideological choices of the countries where I live, but this is normal there are many of us and we have different opinions, different world readings.
So why do I feel so upset, hurt, scared, as I read all the newspapers, and I hear the constant rhetoric about war on the television?
I understood that today.
I understood it when I think back to the period of my early adolescence, when many years ago the youth of many countries around the world began to rebel against a state of things that seemed wrong to them.

It wasn’t social injustice, it wasn’t the people massacred by Napalm like the Vietnamese, it wasn’@TAG adolescence from half a century ago and it triggered the revolts of many kids and girls from back then: the hypocrisy of the world.
It's been many years since then. The world seems infinitely more complex to me, difficult to decipher, difficult to judge, than it seemed to me then. I lost the illusion that everything can be clean and honest in the world long ago.
But the explosion of hypocrisy of the West in this last year is unparalleled.

Suddenly, the West, all together in a choir, began to sing like the bearer of values, the boulevard of freedom, the protector of weak peoples, the guarantor of legality, the guardian of the sanctity of human life, the only hope rather for a world of peace and justice. This chant, how good and fair the West is and how bad autocratic states are, is a chorus repeated in unison and endlessly by every newspaper article, every television comment, every editorial.
Putin’s fierce evil is repeated, flaunted, repeated, declared endlessly. With every bomb that’s dropped on Ukraine, it tells us how much Ukraine is bad and we are good.

I would be glad to join the chorus if every time we condemn the fact that a military power has attacked a sovereign country with futile pretexts the West would add "And I, the West, therefore, strive in the future never to do anything like that again.” and as I did in Afghanistan, Iraq, in Libya, Grenada, Cuba, and so many other countries. We did, but now that the Russians are doing it we realize how painful it is and we won't do it again. "

I would be happy to join the chorus, if every time we condemn the completely condemnable fact, that Moscow bombs civilians in Kiev as a reason that Kiev bombed the Donbass if the West would add "And I am the West so I commit not to never doing anything like that again in future, like I did when I bombed Belgrade, killing thousands of people, innocent women and children, adducing that Belgrade bombed Kosovo as a reason”.

I would be happy to join the chorus, if the West would add "And I am the West, therefore I pledge myself never to do anything like that again in the future, as I did when I bombed Libya, invaded Iraq, destabilized governments around the world, from the Middle East East to South America, Chile to Algeria, Egypt to Palestine every time a people voted for a government not favorable to Western interests, overthrowing democratically elected governments like in Algeria, Egypt or Palestine, instead supporting dictatorships like in Saudi Arabia I know the reason is convenient, even if the Saudis continue to slaughter Yemenis”.

I would be happy to join the choir that moves for the poor Ukrainians if this choir would also move for the Yemenis, Syrians, Afghans and everyone else with slightly different skin tone, instead of leaving everyone else out and to rot.

And maybe I would disagree, but not so disgusted, if I just heard "we are the strongest, we want to dominate the world with gun violence, to defend our wealth, and we will dominate it. "
At least there would be no hypocrisy.
We now arrive at excesses that shout surrealism.

Our newspapers talk about the "imperial" logic of China and China. Russia . when china has virtually no soldier outside of internationally recognized chinese borders and Russia has soldiers only few kilometers from its border.
Americans have one hundred thousand soldiers in Europe, they have military bases in Central America, South America, Africa, Saudi Arabia, the Pacific, Japan, Korea, and on the go, basically everywhere in the world.

People are afraid to use an atomic bomb.
Is the West the only one to have used the atomic bomb to assert with extreme violence its unconditional dominance, even in a war already won, no one else has done it. China is reportedly aggressive. But he didn’t fight a single war since Korea and Vietnam, while the West had ongoing wars around the world.
Who is the empire?

I love the West, but for the cultural wealth it has given to the whole world, not for having become masters thanks to slavery, exterminating entire continents, plundering everything and continuing to do so, not for this rampant violence and hypocrisy Isia continuing the horrors of the past.
The problem of the world is not who should be in charge, what political system do we all have to adopt uniformly. The problem with the world is how to live together, tolerate each other, respect each other, collaborate.

The world has billions of inhabitants. The majority of them are from out of the West. There are some in China, India, Russia , Brazil, the rest of South America, Africa, Asia. I am the majority of humanity. They no longer have sympathy for the West. They are running out of them. They do not participate in sanctions against Russia , many refused even to vote for condemning Russia at the UN, despite the fact that Russia was obviously condemnable.
Not because they are bad, because they love violence, or they have poor motives, but because they see the rampant hypocrisy of the West, which fills the world with its armies, feels free to slaughter, and then makes a candid soul if another one behaves to bad.

The world, in its vast majority, would like that the common problems of humanity, global warming, pandemics, poverty, to be faced jointly, with joint decisions. He wishes the United Nations cared more. The West blocks this collaboration, they feel they have the right to rule, because they have their guns, violence from them.

Now the West is restless because China is getting rich, so it teases, provokes and accuses her of everything impeachable even if there are any.
The West seeks conflict with China. He would like to humiliate her militarily before she grows too much and that becomes impossible. The western ruling class is heading for WW3. Ukraine's problems could be solved as the West wanted to solve Yugoslavia in the end: a civil war that has been dragging on for a long time, with external military interventions, that led to a separation in different parts. But the West doesn't want a solution, it wants to hurt Russia. ... He can't do anything but repeat.

On television they show happy faces at western leaders meetings, happy about their aircraft carriers, their atomic bombs, their countless weapons, trillions of euros used to make weapons, with which they could solve the worlds problems or, instead they are used to reinforce a violent predominion on the world.
And all this colored with nice words: democracy, freedom, respect for nations, peace, respect for international legality, respect for the law.
Behind, like zombies, all the journalists and journalists to repeat. Whitewashed tombs. On a blood trail of millions of deaths tortured over the past decades by our bombs.
From Hiroshima in Kabul.
And they will continue.

Translated from Italian

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 09:52 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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