September 11, 2021: the triumph of the Taliban and a West in a state of confusion
Twenty years that weigh like a century
Planes. The very high towers. The dust. The firefighters. The dead weight leaps into the void. The endless lists of victims. Bush with megaphone on the rubble. We are all Americans. War in Aghanistan. We are a little less American. Iraq. The export of democracy. We have never been Americans. The Arab Springs. Libya. Syria. The disengagement. Withdrawal. The Taliban back in power.
This sadly circular story is our present.
We may not have been born on September 11, 2001 but certainly that day continues to haunt us. We had just closed our accounts with the most sinister totalitarianism in history, which in the name of boasted progress had dedicated itself to the systematic annihilation of civil society, when the third millennialist and anti-modern religion of the century was trying to reopen the conflict. Twenty years later, Islamic fundamentalism has shown an impact force that is, after all, lower than expected but a resistance and a greater capacity to regenerate than the obscurantist ideologies that preceded it.
If the end of history (not the end) is liberal democracy, the path is today more than ever undermined by the holy alliance of non-democracies, a concept that realism rejects but that experience and intuition advise not to underestimate. : Shiite Iran, Sunni Afghanistan protected by Islamabad and Communist China extend along a single corridor. Accomplice Biden and his desperate retirement, 11 September 2021 will not be the day of gloomy but proud remembrance of a tragedy not only in America but that of the celebration of the Taliban triumph in Kabul. The story is not over but the others are writing it.
It is paradoxical but, if there is a constant in Western politics of the last century, this is the surprise factor. The European powers did not see the Sarajevo shooting and the ensuing conflict coming, which no one wanted and which lost everyone, not just the official losers. They did not notice the Bolshevik coup which they could easily have suffocated, if only they had acted in concert instead of relying on the ambitions of the white generals. They did not understand the advent of fascism, which they cajoled and lulled until it was too late. They woke with a start when the Wehrmacht entered Poland, and say that Hitler had warned. They negotiated the seizure of half of Europe by Stalinism from a position of weakness. Even the end of the Cold War caught the bewildered democracies, almost incredulous, in the face of a victory obtained more for abandonment of the adversary than for their own merits.
With celebrations still underway, it was Al-Qaeda who surprised us in the backyard, where we felt safer. The reaction that followed showed that the strength was still with us but not the conviction. We fought for principles that, after all, we began to no longer feel ours. The pride in the achievements was transformed, through a subtle action of internal corrosion, into a sense of irredeemable guilt. Up to today's drifts of cancel culture and woke neo-puritanism, the latest incarnations in chronological order of the anti-capitalist and anti-liberal ideology.
The escape from Afghanistan, strategically marginal but morally devastating, is basically nothing more than the theatrical representation of this progressive loss of self-awareness, of the abandonment – at times unconscious, often completely voluntary – of the principles and talents that have made the most advanced expression of human civilization of the West. It was not a terrorist atomic bomb but a virus that arrived who knows how from the Communist East to complete the work, emptying our cities and confining us behind increasingly impenetrable physical and psychological walls. Twenty years that weigh like a century.
It is at least since the publication of Spengler's highly valued essay (1918) that speculation has been made about the decline of the West. Decay is inherent in existence. Yet even those who oppose the universalization of Western values - centrality of the person, individual freedom and responsibility, the rule of law, autonomy of economic initiative – are forced to take them as points of reference, even if only in order to deny them. This is the great frustration of the proponents of the so-called "alternative models" – despots, ideologues or mere propagandists – engaged in a constant work of demolishing the foundations of liberal democracies but unable to reformulate the presuppositions in order to make any replacement attractive.
On the contrary, when the opponents of the West decide to leave behind misery and underdevelopment they must necessarily refer to its evolutionary scheme (China which denies collectivism and adopts the capitalist economic system is the paradigmatic example), while the relations of power within every regime (even the most authoritarian) they can only measure themselves in terms of a constant tension between a repressive state power and an incipient civil society. The reason is simple: the West and its principles are not simply an option among others, as the moral relativists of the right and left would have us believe, but a heritage of humanity, not a petal among many in the daisy of political and institutional possibilities but the essential framework for their accomplished realization. There is no need to imagine a world without the West to realize this, it is enough to observe the catastrophic results produced by those who throughout history have tried to do without it.
So how do you explain this strange feeling of defeat? How did we go from proclaiming that freedom is either for everyone or it won't be for anyone to decide that, after all, the plight of Afghan women or the sterilization of Muslim women in Xinjiang is none of our business? It is not an academic debate because the fallout from this conceptual rendering inevitably reverberates on our daily life: is it not perhaps the renunciation of the defense of principles that we consider universal the announcement of the compression of rights and freedoms within our own societies? We're in it, it seems to me.
The decline of the West is a false problem, in any case not one that we could solve if it really arises. What we should deal with urgently instead is the emptiness of Western politics (not of Western civilization), simultaneously the cause and consequence of the unawareness of public opinions now unaccustomed to contextualization, confrontation, critical thinking, judgment. We, children of reason, have diluted it in a nominalism without purpose, in a demented relativism, confusing it with the indistinct magma of the only politically correct thought. The specificity of the West, its uniqueness, is lost in a frantic retreat from itself, which has nothing tactical, because there is no objective, only confusion. Try asking yourself if the Normandy landings would be possible today. The answer makes your wrists tremble.
It is impossible to understand where we are going if we do not know where we come from. Language is revealing. We accuse the Taliban of bringing Afghanistan back to the Middle Ages, without realizing that it is the Middle Ages – since the end of the 12th century – the cradle of modern civilization, that we would be nothing and would count for nothing without the liberation from feudal lordship, the spirit of early capitalism , the urban nuclei that become a political subject, the secularization of the sacred city. Exactly the opposite of the closed society of the fundamentalists. But since we ignore it or are ashamed of it, we prefer to try to "convince" the cutthroats to be "inclusive". All caricatured, cartoonish, childish.
The reality, twenty years after the most criminal terrorist act in history, is out there. America has not suffered any other attacks, and certainly this should be counted as a success. However, the battlefield moved to Europe, 124 attacks between 2014 and 2020 (including Paris in 2015 and Brussels in 2016) and a growing radicalization of immigrants and refugees. It is the environmental jihadism that Gilles Kepel recently wrote about in Le Monde . A few years before the flight from Kabul, Assad's entrenchment in power in Syria had already sent a worrying signal to the United States: American military hegemony could be thwarted by the intervention of hostile powers. The war on terror , in fact, ended at that moment in Washington. The long withdrawal from the front, which culminated in the defeat of image last month, does not declare the end of the American-led world order but certainly a downsizing of the US role on the international stage. This is not good news for anyone, not even for anti-Americans.
It is too early to ring the death knell, the economic, military and – despite everything – moral resources of the West are enormous and we have passed far more difficult tests. But what is rapidly changing is the perception of our specificity, the one that has made us universal, from the twelfth century to today. It is not a question of imposing our principles, which in many cases continue to spread mainly thanks to the strength of example. However, it is a question of defending them and defense can never be a passive attitude: it implies activity, initiative, movement, the ability to reason, to convince and – if necessary – to fight.
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This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/11-settembre-2021-il-trionfo-dei-talebani-e-un-occidente-in-stato-confusionale/ on Sat, 11 Sep 2021 03:53:00 +0000.