The New Dark Age

!9 January 2024 — Valdai Discussion

Ivan Angulo , Evgeny Tipailov

The creation of closed technological state and corporate clubs, the development and implementation of new measures to limit access to digital technologies, as well as restraining competing cultural and civilizational communities and states in the development of their own digital technologies has in fact already become a reality of international interaction.

The tasks of seizing someone else’s land and enslaving the peoples living there, which during the so-called “Age of Great Discoveries” was conducted by Western (then still exclusively European) civilization required legal, ethical and moral justification.

One of the first attempts to understand the right of Europeans to conquer and enslave the natives was made by Juan Ginés Sepúlveda, the historiographer of Charles V and Philip II.

Sepúlveda portrayed the natives as savages and barbarians in order, citing Aristotle, to deprive them of all basic rights. At the very beginning of the conquest of the New World, the argument was put forward that the Indians made human sacrifices and, accordingly, were idolaters, cannibals and criminals. A very common reference was to Aristotle and his “Politics” that barbarian peoples are “slaves by nature.”

This interpretation of Aristotle’s non-humane argument is based, however, on a certain idea of ​​humanity, namely, on the idea of ​​the higher humanity of some, and, accordingly, the lesser humanity of others.

However, there was another approach developed by Christian theologians. St. Augustine said that the Aborigines are people and therefore have an immortal soul. The final statement of this principle is associated with Francisco de Vitoria, who in his “Lectures” rejects the aforementioned argument of the classical Greek philosopher as pagan and concludes that “peoples, although barbaric, are nevertheless human.” De Vitoria, thus, equates non-Christians with Christians in international legal terms, but… for some reason, Western thought always requires this “but”.

Contrary to apparent logic, de Vitoria does not declare the great Spanish Conquest to be unjust. On the contrary, he uses the “just war” argument to achieve exactly the opposite result.

According to de Vitoria, if barbarians violate the laws of hospitality, oppose free missions, free trade and free propaganda, then they violate the corresponding jus gentium right of the Spaniards. Then, if peaceful exhortations do not bring any benefit, this is a reason for a “just war”, which in turn serves as a justification for the annexation, occupation and subjugation of the American peoples. Not to mention the right of the Spaniards to intervene to protect Indians who had already converted to Christianity.

Despite well-known progress in the understanding of humanism, such moral dilemmas have not departed the modern Western world. At the same time, as a result of immigration processes resulting from decolonisation, the issue of equality of representatives of different peoples is no longer solely a problem of justifying new conquests and maintaining dependence, since in the current historical moment, these problems are resolved by other, mainly economic instruments.

Now, among other things, this is a practical question of the possibility of coexistence of representatives of different nations within the framework of one state or supranational entity. There have been attempts to solve this problem through the implementation of multiculturalism as a policy, however, as Kenan Malik’s article “The Failure of Multiculturalism” in Foreign Affairs convincingly shows and as we see in Thilo Sarrazin’s book “Germany: Self-Destruction”, it was not successful.

In a sense, these findings only confirm the correctness of the assessment of James Blaut, who stated in his article “The Theory of Cultural Racism” that cultural racism has replaced the biological concept of the “white race” and is a theory of cultural rather than racial superiority.

In his work, Blaut traced the evolution of ideas of racism, noting, among other things, religious racism. At the same time, for our part, we note that, as before, there is some “humanisation” in the development of this phenomenon. It is difficult to say how meaningful this process is, but throughout history, Western civilization, in defining its approach to the concept of a “human being,” seems to simultaneously follow two different directions.

On the one hand, there is a consistent declaration of the equality and dignity of every human individual, regardless of origin and other characteristics. On the other hand, we see the existential need to assert the superiority and the rights of the first nations, albeit among “equals”.

Blaut explains the theory of “modernisation”, designed to replace the now irrelevant theories of religious or biological racism with cultural racism, which is based on the idea that “non-Europeans” are inferior to Europeans not racially, but culturally. This is supposedly predetermined by the very course of history and cultural evolution, and this is the reason for the poverty of “non-Europeans” who are “obliged to follow, under European patronage and ‘tutelage’,” the European path as the only way to overcome backwardness.

It is also interesting that in all these discussions, few European thinkers pay attention to the true source of European prosperity – the centuries-old exploitation of the peoples oppressed by Europeans. For example, the American sociologist and political scientist Samuel Huntinton spoke about this without hesitation and with unequivocal frankness in his book “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order”: “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”

All theories of superiority, one way or another, were designed to ensure the ethical and ideological primacy of the Western world within the framework of colonial and neo-colonial policies. A kind of “agreement of accession” to the financial and political infrastructure of the hegemon of the Western world, based on a rigid hierarchy, expressed in the subordination of national interests to the interests of the Western approach to globalisation, is used at the present stage as a practical tool for ensuring this “agreement”.

Today, the Western world does not have enough cultural racism to justify its exclusivity. The economic successes of the countries of the Global South, accomplished quite independently in the last 20-30 years, call into question the Europeans’ claim to any advantage in history and culture that predetermines their economic wealth, which requires the West to formulate new theoretical structures to justify its superiority.

Political racism

At the November 2023 APEC summit in San Francisco, US President Joe Biden was again asked if he had changed his mind about whether Chinese President Xi Jinping was a dictator. Biden responded:

“He’s a dictator in the sense that he’s a guy who runs a country that is a communist country that’s based on a form of government totally different than ours.”

This statement, of course, caused a diplomatic uproar. However, in our opinion, it has not received enough attention, since such recognition is exclusively symptomatic in the context of the genesis of a new form of racism, used to justify the superiority of the Western world.

Winston Churchill’s famous statement that “democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried” has long been made by the so-called collective West as an absolute and ideological postulate.

First, it assumes that there is only one acceptable form of government – a democratic republic. Moreover, it is acceptable only in the form of the political regime recognized by the West – liberal democracy. Both are the fruit of Western political thought, the institutions of which were formed during a long European historical process that absorbed mainly the Catholic and Protestant religious heritage and Western philosophy.

Second, only the collective West itself, expressed both by specific representatives of a given large space and by various collective associations, such as the G7, the European Union, NATO, etc., is an authoritative arbiter which is allowed to judge the compliance of certain states or specific processes to be named “ideal”.

This is exactly what President Biden meant, perhaps being a little too candid about what was on his mind. Any political regime that differs from “ours”, by definition, does not meet the criteria for an equal, and is accordingly backward.

Such an attitude can be characterized as “political racism”, i.e. a belief or ideology based on the idea that a political system, characteristic of certain civilizational and cultural communities, is superior to other systems both in terms of efficiency and in a value sense, being more fair, progressive, etc.

This construction allows us to shift the focus of attention from the West as the “white race” or “dominant culture”, appealing, it would seem, to the values of democracy declared as universal. These values, however, are strictly subordinated to the interests of the same cultural and civilizational community. At the same time, the United States appears as a kind of reincarnation of the Holy See of the Middle Ages, acting as an arbiter and the main driving force of the new imperium, ideologically based not on religion, but on the supposedly universal values of liberal democracy. These values, as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban recently noted, may in fact turn out to be US national interests.

From a practical point of view, political racism is not a belief about the superiority of some individuals over others, due to biological or cultural-historical factors, as before, but about the superiority of some communities over others on political grounds.

Not just any specific people are designated as unequal, but, for example, all citizens of a certain state. You don’t have to look far for examples. Any sanctions and restrictions by Western powers that directly affect citizens of the Russian Federation are clear examples of discrimination based on political racism.

For example, in accordance with Article 3i of the Council Regulation of the European Union No. 833/2014, the purchase, import, transfer (directly or indirectly) into the European Union of goods that bring significant income to the Russian Federation and are listed in Annex XXI to Council Regulation of the European Union No. 833/2014 are prohibited, if such goods are produced in Russia or exported from Russia. At the same time, Annex XXI to Council Regulation of the European Union No. 833/2014 contains a wide list of goods for personal use, including laptops (code 8471) and mobile phones (code 8517). In fact, these measures represent a ban on the possession of certain things by Russian citizens. Such a measure could well be imagined within the framework of the apartheid regime that reigned recently in South Africa or in the United States. Perhaps the European bureaucrats were afraid of themselves, since the decision of the Council of the European Union No. 2023/2874, adopted within the framework of the 12th package of sanctions, introduced certain exemptions for personal items. It’s not entirely clear, however, what to do if the same phone or laptop is, for example, a corporate one. At the same time, the vector of thought of the European legislator remains unchanged.

Or take, for example, the current Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the opinion expressed by the colourful American publicist and political commentator Ben Shapiro on X. Shapiro said, addressing, presumably, a Western audience: “Not everyone thinks like you do. Hamas does not share your values or even your general outlook on a worthy life.”

Is the reverse also true? Do only those who think like you (i.e. the Western audience) understand the value of life? This logic lies at the basis of the justifications for Israel’s actions today. Within the framework of political racism, the bearer of the “correct” values seems to be a little more human than the one who does not share them. This is where monstrous doublethink arises in assessments of war crimes by one and the other side of the conflict.