Lévi-Strauss explained that the Western error on evolution was to consider it only in relation to its own parameters. Not by chance, until well into the last century, the West wanted to see in its superiority of techniques and technologies of war, a cultural all-round superiority. Giving himself the ideologies for which God, nature or historical dialectic, would have invested his own culture of the task of redeeming and civilizing cultures considered inferior, has in fact found the way to justify massacres, depredations and submissions, making use of one's exceedingly efficient capacity to bring death and destruction.
It follows that the degree of evolution of a culture has been for the West directly proportional to its war capacity. So the Spaniards, in the name of Christianity, almost exterminated the Aztecs. Thus the Western powers, in the name of civilization, have subdued colonized populations and territories of half the world. So the same powers have intervened militarily, in the name of democracy, wherever their interests are likely to be damaged.
While trying to stay away from trivializing Defou and exaggerated demonizations, with respect to the ability to bring peace, what degree of evolution would Western culture have?
The West, towards the rest of the world, has always tried to disguise, even a little awkwardly, a de facto domineering attitude. Self-proclaimed "sheriff of the world", he has arbitrarily imposed his own rules, for example by establishing who could use nuclear energy and who not, lowering the crest only in front of Asian powers of significant caliber. He has waged war against countries accused of possessing those weapons of mass destruction that he himself has often used: in Iraq, the Americans are still looking for them... With the formation of national states, peoples who have always been nomads have found themselves everywhere foreigners and peoples that are not strong enough militarily, like the Kurds, have seen the territories inhabited among several States dismember. At the end of the Second World War, the winning powers, under the auspices of the UN and Zionist pressure, have even decided the creation ex novo of the State of Israel in Palestine, geographical region for centuries inhabited by predominantly Arab population. Rejected the alternatives of the creation of a federal state with two governments or two separate states, the arguments (in my most modest opinion, almost absurd) in support of the creation of a single Israeli state were historical (Israeli kingdoms were present in Palestine in pre -romana), religious (in relation to the biblical Promised Land) and "compensatory" (for the suffering suffered due to more diasporas and the Holocaust). Result? From 1947 to today, the State of Israel and the State of Palestine (constituted de facto but not recognized by half the world, including Italy) are in constant state of war. If it were not the reality, it would seem the plot of a film by Kubrick... In an omelette made, today the only solution goes from mutual recognition to the effort of to live peacefully. There is no other way out.
Obviously, this "policy" to arbitrarily dispose of peoples and territories, protracted for centuries, has consequences.
Instinctively, the foreigner and the different is wary. However, the longevity of the Roman Empire was due precisely to the ability to absorb and enhance non-Latin cultures with which it gradually came into contact. For example, the Romans militarily subjugated the Greeks, but these in turn conquered them culturally, in part they "Greekized" them. The fictionalized version of the end of the Western Empire is that the barbarian Odoacre ousted Romulus Augustulus and sanctioned the birth of a barbarian kingdom. However it was a political fact that formalized the slow and gradual mutation of the Roman to Roman-barbarian Empire. The migratory pressure of the barbarian populations on the borders, was in part due to the collapse of the Empire to the extent that it contributed to exacerbating the exhausting economic crisis that long ago gripped the Empire. But to defend the borders in the last century of life of the Empire, they were just legions of barbarians. The Ostrogothic Kingdom of Italy, inherited a political situation not unlike that which characterized the last decades of the Empire: Roman administrative structures and barbarian army (for the Romans in fact changed only the name). The long periods of prosperity in Rome were mainly due to the strategy of using subjugated populations, including them in their political, administrative and military structures. Emblematic was that most emperors were not born in Urbe: who in Africa, who in Asia minor, who in Thrace, who in Gaul. It was the demonstration that anyone in the Empire could aspire to prestigious roles regardless of the birthplace. This was the greatness of Rome. The crumbling of the empire began just when it was no longer able to include and began to raise walls.
Trump, the current president of the United States of America, a power born from the succession of waves of migration (including thousands of Italians), would like to raise a wall on the border with Mexico: when we say historia magistra vitae....
Since it exists, man migrates. There is no news. And the reason is always the same even if sublimated: find more easily the resources for the proper sustenance and the "social" core of belonging, to aspire to better living conditions. We have referred to how Western powers have heavily interfered with the development of non-Western cultures and territories, helping to create the conditions for which the physiological migration phenomenon became an emergent fact. Nevertheless, in Italy and in the rest of Europe, a battlefield of a certain policy, it is the fury against this phenomenon, as if its contrast was the panacea of ??every evil. Recurring slogan becomes Immigrants, stay at home. In other words, is believed to be able to continue to make the world what it wants, to dispose of other people's resources at will without paying duty.
An aphorism, attributed to Agostino d'Ippona, recites errare humanum est, perseverare autem diabolicum. Well, the internet is full of embarrassing examples of collusion between governments, corporations and wars on the African continent. If you feel like it, here you can get an idea. A figure is emblematic: in 2016, the world war industry has officially turnover approximately $ 1,700 billion. Let's say a banality: and if suddenly there were no more wars?
The West continues to have great responsibilities towards the African and Middle Eastern peoples battered by war and famine. The problem is that certain positions on immigration are daughters of a malaise that has the same causes as the situations from which those who migrate flees: profit at all costs, unfortunately in spite of human rights, which causes wealth for the few and poverty and exploitation for many. If in Pachino the cherry is left to rot on the plants because the wholesale price is so low that it is not convenient to collect it and then, in the same Pachino, supermarkets sell cherry imported from Cameroon, there is a problem? If in the Congo the multinationals buy the coltan, mined in children's mines for a piece of bread, to probably produce the same computer from which I'm writing, by groups of guerrillas who illegally manage the trade, is there a problem?
So those children of the Congo, as soon as they are grown enough to be able to cross the desert and be tortured and raped in Libya, try to embark, with the probable risk of drowning, to set foot in the mythical Europe, hoping for a better life of the one left in Africa. In Pachino and surroundings will be made to work, obviously underpaid and in black, in the greenhouses of that cherry that will remain to rot on the plants. Sicilian agricultural workers, who would unwillingly accept similar conditions of work and retribution, at that point will take it upon the immigrants and blame them for the lack of work.
Faced with such a complex reality, with what intellectual honesty can you reduce everything to a stay in your home? When all European countries clearly admit their responsibilities and will they really roll up their sleeves to take measures to stop this haemorrhaging of courageous young forces and minds from the African continent and the Middle East? Raising walls, history teaches it, it's useless. What is needed is the improvement of the living conditions of the countries from which migrants come.
Sometimes I happen to talk to some of these young immigrants. What leaves me positively surprised is the answer I often receive to the question about what they see in their future: study and learn in Europe, to return sooner or later to their country and help change things. Is this the right path?