The world is experiencing a real clash of civilizations. It does not, of course, correspond to political scientist Samuel P. Huntington that 1973’s prediction, in which he claimed that after the Cold War the planet would live a great confrontation between the modernity of the West and the religious fundamentalism of the Muslim world. The real confrontation is between fundamentalist’s pseudo religious visions that promote imperial ambition, racial and class discrimination and furious intolerance. In the other side, we can find those who support respect to the others, inclusiveness and solidarity.
This means, the side of hate, violence and ignorance, versus those betting on the construction of a global human community based in knowledge and the power of science.
With the White House’s empowerment of the racist and 21st century followers of Adolf Hitler within the American society, the whole world has taken a leap into the 13th century. While attacks on ethnic minorities are increasingly common in the United States, and fascist extremism in Europe is coming to the Mediterranean to try to sink – literally – a boat full of families fleeing violence from extremists in the Middle East. In North Korea the madness of a small tyrant brought the world to the brink of nuclear extermination.
In short, in this first part of the twenty-first century, what we have to live is a time of hatred. Times when the fundamentalists of all the signs harvest storms of violence after decades of sowing winds of intolerance, frustration and resentment.
Although the truly modern world is also here –renewable energies, the genetic elimination of many diseases, the exploration of outer space, respect to diversity, etc., social regression is perfectly represented in the fact that a character like Donald Trump is the Commander in Chief of the greatest military power in human history.
For most of us born in the second half of the twentieth century, political rhetoric and its echo in ideological propaganda sold us a planet in which the United States had gained it’s global leadership thanks to its fierce defense of freedom and democracy around the globe. And yet, China, with its model of fierce state capitalism and zero democracy, is already the largest economic power in the world, and from Moscow, the plutocracy headed by Vladimir Putin, an agent of K.G.B. seems to own the magic tricks to transform the belligerent President of the United States into a quiet puppet.
It should not surprise us, therefore, that confusion and disenchantment make up that giant wave of rejection of everything that smells to establishment and old order. That huge great tsunami is sweeping the old regimes in Venezuela, Brazil, a good part of Africa and several countries of Europe.
United States: Rebellion of the Losers
Of course, the case of the United States is the one that most affects those who live here and this continent, known by a majority of its inhabitants like America.
A wizard of media manipulation, President Trump had been able to build from his personal Twitter account, an imaginary country quite similar to the fantasy that was experienced at the end of World War II. Born rich in 1946, he is 71 years old, the childish president (capricious and short-tempered), illustrates quite well to an Anglo-Saxon segment that was morally never recognized the winning side of the Civil War of the ninth century. They are racist, and never in their lives will they accept that a “person of color” has lived in the White House. They dream of the Industrial America of the early twentieth century, in which, legend says, a worker could belong to the middle class when embedded in the gear of manufacturing machine. Creators and main beneficiaries of Globalization, they hate their results. And now, with Mr. Trump they’ll ready to fight to the death in order to move History backwards.
