Dario Fabbri – The Cultural Element in Geopolitics
We imagine—this is always our bias—that deep down, if they were free, they would want to be like us, come on, of course they would. Life here is wonderful, we are free—and thank God, that’s actually true… So why don’t they live like us? Either someone is stopping them, or they haven’t figured it out. But the idea that they haven’t figured it out, the Russians, is a bit strange, […] because the Russians aren’t exactly unsophisticated people; in terms of education level, they often surpass us, and their self-perception is extremely high. Is it really possible they don’t understand the rules of Western-style liberal democracy? It sounds a bit odd. So we might say, well then, it must be this Putin regime that prevents them from being like us. We truly believe this; in fact, you often hear people say: “Sure, if Putin fell, the war in Ukraine would end.” Very amusing, yet some people mean it seriously. Or: “If Putin fell, his main opponent would create a Russia in our image and likeness.” No, not a chance: but we really believe it. It never crosses our minds that—though it may be painful—others might not want to live like us. And they’re not mistaken: they do so consciously. And they represent the vast majority of humanity. It’s not a minority: we are. If we were to count the actual Westerners in the world—obviously a rough estimate, because the dividing line is never really clear—well, how many would that be? Five hundred million? Six hundred million? The world has over seven billion people. Are they all fools? All backward? All incapable of shaping their lives because of some villain at the top? […]
They don’t punish their regime when it’s oppressive—because democracy as we understand it is something they’ve never known, they don’t long for it; in fact, they see it as colonial, they consider it something that belongs solely to us: the moment it arrived in their country, it would mean it was imposed by the West, which to them is not just a state of mind, it’s a real place. […]
What don’t they forgive their regimes for, then? Being humiliated abroad. That, they do not forgive. […] They live off glory. […] they live off the feeling of having a great empire, of being a great power, of being respected and feared by others—I mean, just imagine such a thing in our part of the world: impossible, completely unimaginable. And this is also what Americans, Iranians, Turks, Chinese live off of… All the great powers on the planet feed on this stuff, mind you; as obscene as it may seem to us, this is what moves the world.
Russians make revolutions when their governments—all dictatorial, as they’ve never known one that wasn’t—[…]lose wars, when they get humiliated abroad, when they are no longer feared, when they are no longer respected. If we had to translate the sense of glory empires possess into more digestible terms: they want to be in the history books. That’s what they want. Toothless, starving, with rifles strapped to their ankles, with no rights, but in the history books. That’s what human beings have always lived off of. Always. Even here, exactly where we are speaking now, until not so long ago.
And that doesn’t mean the others are backward just because we’ve moved past that: we live in luxury, we live in a bubble, and real history, the brutal kind, will return here too, but we are convinced it won’t, we are convinced that the process is going in the opposite direction.
[…] The others make up the overwhelming majority of the planet; and they are not fools. Do they live worse than we do? Much worse. Do we live better? Much better: we have more rights, we are wealthier, we lead lives of higher quality… (ed. eheh…) But they wouldn’t trade places. Which is not exactly a minor detail. And above all, hear this—and for us this is outrageous—they don’t care about our opinion. […] The Chinese couldn’t care less about what we think. […] Nor do the Americans, without going too far. The Turks even less. To the Turks, the whole world is Turkish. […] In their wanderings across the planet, they adopted Islam, which was not originally the religion of the Turks […]: why did they adopt it? Because it has a universalist core, it serves the needs of the empire: it’s a young, maximalist, universalist religion; they make it their own, and then they create the Ottoman Empire, converting—always by the sword—others to Islam, for instance in the Balkans, in Bosnia and Albania, and beyond.
For a people like that, how long could their Westernized pretense last, the one theoretically introduced by Atatürk after World War I? Not long, and indeed it didn’t last long: just through the Cold War, when, out of fear of the Russians, longtime enemies of the Turks, they clung to NATO, that is, to the United States. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the Turks stopped pretending to be Westernized: there was no need anymore…
But once again, we had convinced ourselves: “There they are, even the Turks have understood! We’re the beacon of humanity, and the Turks have seen the light.” And when things no longer add up, we blame the villain of the moment, Erdoğan in this case; because if Erdoğan weren’t around, the Turks would be a great Luxembourg… […] That’s not the case; they don’t even think about it.
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There’s nothing more amusing than the expression “international community”, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard it, it’s absolutely mind-blowing, like “governance.” […] The international community is always and only us, there’s no one else in it, it’s always the West, but the term is applied universally. Especially in this historical phase, it refers to the U.S., or otherwise just the West in its various forms.
[…] In fact, if you read many of our media, you’ll find expressions like: “Russia is isolated in the world.” I imagine you’ve heard that, though I don’t know who among you has the perversion of still reading newspapers, but for those who persist… […] Then we go and look at the vote in the UN General Assembly, where a motion condemning Russia’s aggression against Ukraine states: “We condemn the aggression.” You must vote for, against, or abstain. And we discover […] that if you add up the populations of the countries that did not condemn the Russian invasion—or even voted in favor of it—you get more or less the majority of humanity. Just India and China alone, which abstained twice at the UN on condemning the invasion, account for nearly three billion people. Hard to feel isolated with three billion people. […] Almost all of these countries, including China, have no sympathy for Russia; they don’t consider the invasion justified—either they’re completely indifferent, or they can’t possibly justify it, being countries that themselves suffered colonialism—but what fires them up is precisely that point of opposition to the West: between Russia and the West, they choose Russia, even though it’s clearly and entirely in the wrong in this case. […]
If we then consider that among the countries that reluctantly voted to condemn the invasion was Brazil, […] which otherwise, being economically fragile, would have ended up in trouble with the United States, but then, as soon as it casts its vote, says: “The fault lies with Zelenskyy, who’s putting on a show.”
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And here comes yet another typically Western objection: “Well, yes, but the governments that voted aren’t democratic.” So they wouldn’t represent the will of their people. […] What about India, then? India is the largest democracy in the world—that’s how the Americans define it, mind you. […] Not only that: the idea that only democratic governments represent popular consent is, as I said, one of our biases. […] In Italy, liberal democracy, excluding Giolitti, arrives in 1946. Human beings have existed on this peninsula for millennia: if we convince ourselves that consent only belongs to democracies, […] then it would mean that all those millions upon millions who lived for millennia here never had any say in anything whatsoever. […] And we sometimes forget what kind of memory the Western countries have left across the planet, to the point that, in a clearly aggressive war, where one side is unequivocally in the wrong and the other has been attacked, the non-Western world votes on principle against the West.
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Turning your gaze toward others means exactly this: putting yourself even minimally on the line, letting go of prejudices, that is, ceasing to be a tourist and possibly becoming a traveler; and that’s very hard, because as mentioned, from a real journey sometimes you don’t even come back. […] From tourism, you always return, except in truly unlucky cases: the worst that can happen is your luggage gets lost. On a journey, you might lose yourself, and that’s a bit different. But once in a lifetime, just to try, a journey… One, just one is enough. You can travel once, maybe twice in your life, at most; unless it’s your profession, a true journey, you only take once.
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Real young people, in countries where they truly exist, where they are the majority, are not wise at all. Here—perhaps it’s for the better—they actually are: they fight for rights, for the future… But the future is the antithesis of youth: real young people never think about the future; a real young person lives only in the present, death does not exist for a real young person. The future is a concept directly linked to death: I think about the future because I know that sooner or later—sooner rather than later—I’m going to die. Thus I imagine what comes after me: “What will I leave behind?” A young person can’t even begin to conceive of this unless they’ve clearly absorbed attitudes of the elderly. And that often happens in a society where the minority of the minority adopts the attitudes of the majority. Our young people take on the attitudes of the majority, that is, they act like the elderly. So they are wiser, they are older; and indeed, they fight for just causes, but ones that historically haven’t belonged to young people: rights, the future, the environment… Young people?! Real young people, that is, where they are the majority, fight for things we would never expect. They are aggressive and violent, imagine that. Like all young people.
In Iran, young people are the majority. If we let them have their way—and clearly they would deserve it, it would be their decision—they wouldn’t create a society like ours. They would create a maximalist one, not minimalist like ours. It wouldn’t be future-oriented, but entirely focused on the present, likely on force, not rights. Because they are young. […] The 1979 revolution, the Islamic revolution, the current obscene regime of Iran, was created by very young people; they were all high school and university students. It has always been like this.
We, from the West, where young people are the minority of the minority, have an idea of youth that doesn’t exist in the rest of the world, because we don’t really have young people. […] They have an attitude that is not youth-like, certainly wiser, more noble, but not youthful. And this too is something we struggle to understand. […] to transcend our epistemological categories, that is, our methods, our way of viewing things. These categories are ours alone, yet we attribute them to the rest of the world: naturally, the math doesn’t add up, and we throw tantrums: «How is it possible? We should try again.» Or else we start blaming someone: there’s always, as mentioned, the villain; then come the conspiracies…