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WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT ‘THE WEST’  
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Alessandro Portelli
April 1, 2025
Il Manifesto Global
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_ 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. _

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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
[execution of 355 civilian and political prisoners in Rome by German
occupation troops in 1944] 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 [link removed] on 2025-03-25

_Il manifesto was founded in 1969 on the idea that truth and
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advocate inalienable human, civil and cultural rights in an age of
globalization that too often runs roughshod over democracy._

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