“The decadence of the West does not exist. It is the West as a reality and even as a concept what has ceased to exist.

The economic imperialism that the United States tries to convert into a political one is not new; they do it by withdrawing from International treaties and systematically violating the fundamental rights meant for all and by despising the States’ sovereignty that they condemn as hostile to their politics.

Maquiavelo’s Prince as a referee and as a source of Law was constant in the History of Humanity. It was the conduct of the Eastern satraps, of Western emperors and of all those who did not consider communities to be the authentic base of sovereignty that these communities gave to some people temporarily to act in society’s benefit. Politics were born in Athens when Pericles was Greece’s soul. Participation was the system’s key for its citizens. Rome morally decayed when it abandoned its republican institutions to reinforce the Imperator’s power and to be more efficient at conquering the Globe.

Like the actual lobby of the U.S. president, they divided the world into the American Globe and the Globe of the rest of the territories (Orbis romanus et Orbis terrarum). It is not strange that the theocratic conception of power into which the admirable Christian message succumbed –not only after Constantine’s Edict 313 A.D., but also after Charlemagne’s crowning on Christmas of 800 A.D.– degraded the mind’s conquests, reflected in the Law to imitate the theocratic politics of the Caliphates to expand Islam with arguable efficiency. Again, their conception of the world was the archetype of the policy of Washington’s hawks: they conceived the world as being divided into dhar al Islam y dhar al Harb, which means “subdued world” and “world for conquest.”

It is obvious that the concept of globalization is as antique as strength’s reason trying to subdue the reason’s strength. If poor is the one who covets too much, barbarian is the one who does not have the notion of temperance, from Mongolian barbarians or the Tartar incursions to the empires that followed the absurd theory of Kings’ Divine Right, disseminated by theologists without conscience that turned the Prince’s realism in Political Science, Nicola Maquiavelo, into something good: the ends justifies the means.

The concept of globalization, then, is not new. It responds to the epoch’s conception of the world and the reach of its strength supported by the moment’s technologies to take over more raw materials and more craziness in its race towards the system’s disintegration, due to the citizens’ dis-agony.

In the Catholic King’s old Hospital in Santiago de Compostela, they discovered a room with a door frame that said, “Room of the disagonized,” referring to those who had no more strength to fight.

But the people don’t suffer eternally. The hegemonic power –which is how a certain conception of the actual globalization was designated, along with the Romans, Muslims, Slavs, Germanics, Francs, Spaniards, Turks, Anglos and North Americans– will be succeeded by a real convulsion whose signs are being deciphered by the most capable investigators on the field of the actual empire’s obsessions. All this in front of the deafening silence of its citizens sedated, once more, by panis et circensis (bread and circus). When it wasn’t the result of the alienating concept of an extraterritorial reward, it was even more lacerating when it wasn’t supported on justice, on love and on the happiness of knowing they were being responsible people with solidarity with one another. To love just for the sake of it, to welcome without asking, to not judge without listening, to give oneself without expecting something in exchange, for the sole pleasure of sharing, of filling each other with the richness of experience and of knowing that one is a person, a part of Humanity, soil that walks and the Cosmos that expands towards plenitude.

The biggest traditions’ authentic wise people, as avatars that they have been in this world, coincide in the fundamental: the sense of living is man’s plenitude of knowing he is the universe in a drop of mist. That’s from where being ourselves comes, from not letting the instant go away, doing what we are doing, from the conscience of knowing that we know nothing, up to the supreme wisdom of being able to express with our words or with our silence, “Don’t hurry, Sancho my friend, I know who I am.”

Hence the imperialism that billions of beings suffer in this tormented planet does not add anything new other than what comes from technological advance. The obsession for the power of having over the conscience of being announces itself as a blast because it has reached the point of no-return: when the sense of living has been lost and it is understood that there is nothing else to lose, many people in very different places of the world become bombs that walk and throw themselves into the devastating effect of terror as an explosive expression of their protest.

Then, it isn’t the disastrous imperialism of the satraps that chokes millions of beings with hunger, sickness, war, rejection, solitude and uprooting what constitutes the key to this roof visualized by the new Samson that incarnates de subdued people. It is the new concept of empire as a diffused magma of power whose core is everywhere and whose circumference does not scrutinize any specific point.

For those who bet for another alternative globalization with solidarity, the generating light of a new and more humane, more just and more harmonious dawn starts to emerge with the richness of converting time into space that we define with our presence.

 

*Professor of Political Thought and Director of the CCS

  Translated by Carlos Miguélez