Cultural collapse, Chinese-like systems, worn leadership: the symptoms of the decline of the West
It is very likely that the decline of the West began a little before March 2020, when the outbreak of the epidemic on a global scale led to an incredible metamorphosis of our political systems and the imposition of rules unthinkable for modern democracies. of liberal tradition. It is equally true that the signs of cultural decay were already all present in some ideological tics born of a false progressivism and justified by the sluggish tendency to politically correct. Phenomena such as Friday for future promoted by activist Greta Thunberg, the gruesome cancel culture , lexical paranoia about pronouns with the use of asterisks and schwa were already the indicator of profound changes taking place; mutations that, however, have not enriched society, on the contrary they have weakened a certain intellectual dynamism, forcing the whole mainstream system to cling to rearguard positions, to have the fear of going off the rails and, finally, to conform to empty, insipid and anachronistic.
In this intellectual mess, the pandemic wave coming from Asia has broken down, sweeping away the residual antibodies and producing macroscopic damage. We have known the home confinement, the prohibition to go beyond the perimeter of one's own municipality, the curfew, the informing, the pass. All stuff incompatible with constitutional rights but metabolized from the first moment by the majority of the population. On the other hand, fear is a powerful weapon capable of incognizing the human being and polarizing the conflict. Now, after two years of living dangerously, in the spasmodic search for the scapegoat of the moment, it is not surprising that the whole Western bloc has found itself displaced, as well as in a position of absolute weakness, in front of the expansionist aims of the Kremlin. It had already happened in the summer during the hasty and ruinous withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan which revived the Taliban and characterized the early stages of the Biden administration in a very negative way.
However, once one has departed from the fundamental principles, which have put the individual rights on the sidelines, it becomes very problematic to present oneself on the international scene in a position of strength with worn leadership, now lacking in authority and credibility. It is enough to review a series of episodes to notice the lost ground, the civil conquests thrown to the wind, the involution of an enviable, even if imperfect, model that has curled up on itself. For example, the Canadian government's displaced reaction to the protest of truckers against health obligations and passes is indicative of a worrying distortion of the normal democratic dialectic. Getting to use Chinese-like tracking systems and blocking the bank accounts of rioters means crossing a frontier hitherto unknown to the Western world. Yet, the social credit system is gaining ground, with Italy being the vanguard of this absurd laboratory, of this social experiment as per the apt definition of the Washington Post .
Moreover, precisely in our country, at the beginning of the emergency, a rather controversial and never clarified episode occurred: the Russian military convoys that paraded along the deserted roads of the peninsula to reach Bergamo. The operation called "From Russia with love", officially dictated by humanitarian reasons and conducted in the territory of a country adhering to the Atlantic alliance, went virtually unnoticed. Moreover, the Italian one has remained an isolated case because no other nation has allowed the entry of Russian military personnel within its borders, not even China. At that time Conte was in the government but, apparently, the submissive attitude, also dictated by the dependence on Russian gas supplies, has not changed as recalled by an editorial in the Wall Street Journal who was not very kind to Prime Minister Mario. Dragons.
Perhaps, with these premises, it is also possible to understand the reason why Italy has a harder time abandoning all the pandemic paraphernalia by entrenching itself in this strenuous defense of the pass that could become ordinary from an exceptional instrument. In this regard, the words of Walter Ricciardi, adviser to Minister Speranza, sound rather sinister, who told La Stampa that " we are experiencing an epochal change and will never return to the situation as before ". Even more disturbing is the next step in which Ricciardi takes it out on those who " pollute, rob nature, travel excessively ". He concluded by warning us that health is linked to environmental balance, so only by respecting it will we protect ourselves from other pandemics. Well, it is a pity that air travel or the ozone hole have little to do with the origin of the pandemic.
But anyhow, it almost seems to be the involuntary protagonists of a famous 2003 film, "Good Bye, Lenin!" , in which, to avoid the trauma, an attempt is made to hide from the protagonist, who has just awakened from a comatose state, the fact that, in the meantime, the Berlin Wall has collapsed and the GDR no longer exists. We find ourselves in an analogous situation: we want to continue to pretend that we need restrictions, unraveling of the constitutional order, impositions à la Trudeau. Ricciardi also cited an essay by the French philosopher, Edgar Morin, entitled “Let's change road” , which proposes to slow down the unbridled race for technological and economic development, always in the name of this Greta-style environmentalism. A bizarre thesis for those who have made themselves a champion of science as the only tool for social development. In short, a beautiful contradiction in line with the times: progressives at home and reactionaries away. Meanwhile, with a now liquefied democracy, the eternal Green Pass , the arrows of the various virologists who still do not give up at the end of the pandemic, the ecological transition ready to impose itself as a new dogma and the Russian army at the gates of Europe, more than change direction, someone might want to change air and country.
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This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL https://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/sfascio-culturale-sistemi-simil-cinesi-leadership-logore-i-sintomi-del-declino-delloccidente/ on Sat, 26 Feb 2022 03:50:00 +0000.