Felts Director,
I was surprised to hear our prime minister talk about oikophobia at the Global Citizen Awards ceremony in New York. It is perhaps a difficult concept to understand, a term that is unknown to most, but I believe that Giorgia Meloni is right: we Westerners hate and despise ourselves. And this is a symptom of decline. What do you think?
Francesco Donato
Dear Francesco,
Westerners’ contempt for themselves is not so much a symptom of decline as a cause of decline. And the Prime Minister explained it effectively: contempt must be contrasted with love for our roots, that is, patriotism, which, far from being a dirty word, as I also explained in my book Fascisti della parole, consists in love for what we have been and what we are, that is, in self-consciousness. It will be this awareness that will lift us out of the obscurantism into which we have ended up due to extremist ideologies, which fear the end of the world and of civilization at the hands of Western man, who appears to be the most monstrous and brutal individual on the planet, guilty of any crime, guilty simply for existing.
In the West, i.e. both in the United States and in Europe, even in school and academic environments, or rather especially in these, as well as through the use of the media, attempts are made to inculcate in citizens the dishonor of being what they are, it is taught to learners to deny themselves, to despise themselves, to consider themselves guilty as Westerners. A sort of Western masochism has established itself, sponsored by the left, which boasts cultural and intellectual hegemony. A confused left, in an identity crisis, disoriented, which tries to recover vitality by embracing increasingly radical battles: feminism has transformed into a war on the male, anti-racism into racism towards Westerners, considered inferior by virtue of crimes and vices that are attributed to Western civilization, in particular imperialism, colonialism, slavery. But these activities were not invented by Westerners, they were not their exclusive prerogative, although this is what progressives want to persuade us of at all costs.
The West is not the cradle nor the home of persecution, of the exploitation of man by man, of inequalities, of discrimination, of gender violence. And we should stop, as Meloni underlined in New York, hating ourselves and our homeland, that is, our community.
The West is the birthplace and home of all the arts, of law, of freedom, of democracy, of humanism, of the Risorgimento, of the Enlightenment, of architecture, of medicine, of science. Everything that has contributed to the well-being of peoples and prosperity has arisen in this part of the world. All the others copy and envy what we are and what we have built.