Commentary
What we talk about when we talk about ‘the West’
We are not talking about geography (Dakar is much further west than Rome), but race: the West we are talking about substantially coincides with the white race.
On the evening of March 23, 1944, Obersturmbannführer Herbert Kappler went to his office. He went to the archives, retrieved records, went back to his desk, sat down and compiled a list of names. These were ordinary actions that generations of bureaucrats and public servants have done over and over again. With these ordinary actions, the Fosse Ardeatine massacre began.
Let’s not fool ourselves when we read plaques posted on walls that speak about “Nazi barbarism.” Barbarians do barbaric things, but to do the Fosse Ardeatine massacre it took the modern state, bureaucracy, offices, writing; to do the Shoah, it took trains, the chemical industry, even the first computers. It took the most civilized country in Europe, the country of Bach, Beethoven and Kant. These are all civilized massacres, European and Western to the core.
These days, the Ministry of Education and Merit is mandating that the students in all Italian schools should be taught that “only the West knows history.” As one professor said from the stage at a certain large demonstration in Piazza del Popolo: “In Europe we have Socrates, Spinoza, Hegel and Leopardi. Do the others have such things?” (Of course they do. Arguably there were a number of philosophers in China; the Sundiata is a great epic poem from Mali; and a few years ago, a valuable book by Francesco Gabrieli was entitled Arab Historians of the Crusades. But that itself is missing the point). Invoking a quote from Marc Bloch in a questionable manner (and, I suspect, with some poorly digested notions from Ernesto de Martino's Death and Ritual Lament thrown in), the guidelines drafted by the commission chaired by Ernesto Galli della Loggia explain this exceptionality of our culture by the fact that “Christianity is a religion of historians. It is in temporal duration, and therefore in history, that the great drama of Sin and Redemption takes place.” In other words, we have the merit that only we think of history as progress toward an end, from darkness to salvation.
Let’s try to look at that from a different point of view. This is precisely what the latest book by Amitav Ghosh is about, an Indian writer who is very knowledgeable about the culture of the West: in his Smoke and Ashes, published in 2023 – before the Valditara and Loggia guidelines – he explains quite convincingly how the prosperity of the West was built largely from the opium trade.
On page 47 we read: “This too was another Enlightenment concept that played a powerful part in moulding the Western self-image: ‘history’ in this view was fundamentally a narrative of progress, evolving towards certain transcendent ends ... a conception of time, and of history, as a narrative of ever-ascending Progress.” Thanks to this conception, Ghosh continues, the West was able to narrate its history as a progressive path of liberation and emancipation, in which “the concurrent histories of genocide and slavery that were unfolding in the same period were either obscured or presented as unfortunate deviations from this narrative,” and was thus able to legitimize its rule with the superiority of its own culture, leaving out how much of it was grounded in slavery, colonialism, and the drug trade (from the opium cultivation imposed by Britain on Indian peasants to its importation imposed on China through the nineteenth-century Opium Wars). These things are “relegated to irrelevance, simply because they did not fit the narrative of Progress.”
In fact, we have developed yet another technique of historical narrative: instead of forgetting the Fosse Ardeatine massacre and the Shoah, for example, we remember them obsessively and ritually, but we obscure the technology, the organization, the procedures, the mental framework that made them possible, and we discard these horrors by relegating them to the inhumanity of “barbarism” or the “Nazi scourge.” We are always the victims, never the perpetrators.
Thanks to this conception of history, the enlightened West was able to explain away the fact that much of humankind did not have the same progressive history by placing it outside of humanity proper. And after all, when we talk about the West, we are not talking about geography (Dakar is much further west than Rome), but race: the West we are talking about substantially coincides with the white race.
As the African-American critical thinker Henry Louis Gates reminds us, Hume thought Africans were not human in the same way as we are; according to Kant, there was a direct relationship between “stupidity” and “blackness” (“one more example,” Gates writes, “of the remarkable capacity of European philosophers to conceive of ‘humanity’ in ideal terms (white, male), yet despise, abhor, colonize, or exploit human beings who are not ‘ideal’”); and in 1813, Hegel reiterated the innate inferiority of Africans. Later, the Nazis stressed the innate inferiority of Latin-speaking peoples, and we in turn stressed the innate inferiority of the Slavs.
Now, I am well aware that “the others” also have their own horrors and crimes (to be clear: October 7 was a barbaric act; Gaza is a modern, technological, civilized massacre), and I am not at all ashamed to belong to this blessed West into which I happened to be born. But I would like this identity that belongs to me not to be expressed in terms of ethnocentrism and supremacism; I would like us, when we bask in the glories of the Categorical Imperative, Mozart and the Beatles, not to forget about the Belgian Congo, the Hereros and Debra Libanòs (and Gaza).
It's fine to remember Hegel as a glory of Europe and the West, but perhaps we could also remember that the culture that spawned Hegel (and that Hegel helped to form in turn) also produced Auschwitz. It’s true: “only the West” was able to imagine the Holocaust and bring it about. Let’s teach this, too, to Italian school children when we celebrate the grand commemorations.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/socrate-alle-ardeatine-ovvero-di-cosa-parliamo-dicendo-occidente on 2025-03-25