AND
The Kalam people of New Guinea considers cassowaries as humans. Although they are similar to ostriches, for the Papuans these birds are their equals. Killing a cassowary is equivalent to committing murder, and the murderer becomes impure and dangerous to the community. I think about cassowaries every time some fascist comes up with his rant about races, superior and inferior nations, “subhuman migrants,” “shitty lefties” who deserve to die at the hands of the police, and all forms of dehumanizing by comparing human beings to animals or objects. There are cultures that not only consider humans equal, but even include some animals, the forests and the plants that feed them. This means that our current collision path against humanity is not common, but rather has a history. The human is not a factual fact but a way of legitimizing domination and, on the excluded side of the “inhuman”, it is a demand, a claim for dignity.
The West is the story of various groups of people who think they are essential within the rest that is disposable. They found the idea that what is human is a restrictive and exclusive trait of their group. The Greeks considered those who did not speak their language barbarians and maintained that they were babbling people destined for slavery. It is an idea that legitimizes all forms of domination, first in Europe and then in the United States. The others are a contagion. It can be about criminality, about different cultures, and even about what is considered “ugly,” as the president of the United States recently said to a group of deported Venezuelans.
They are parasites that suck the blood of the common, decent, hard-working man and that, in addition, claim a place that they have not earned, they reproduce at terrifying speeds, and their subhumanity is passed from generation to generation. As are “the poor” for the extreme right in today’s Mexico. With poverty racialized, those targeted carry their natural disadvantage in their skin color that justifies treating them as things. Unlike the Kalam, the arrogant “Westerners” have called impure, not the one who murders an equal, but the one they consider their inferior and who deserves to die or be enslaved.
But let’s see what the “West” has been that Trumpists, Vox supporters in Spain, NATO, and even a Latin American breed that hopes that the “first world” will come to them, even with bombs, fill their mouths. A recent book by Georgios Varouxakis, called simply westtraces the history of the racist concept from its Greek beginning. First, it included everything north of Europe, including Peter the Great’s Russia. But after the victory of the Russians over Napoleon, the terrified West became something that forever excluded Russia.
What happened from western Germany and southern Italy was “oriental”, “Muslim”, “Cossack”. “Ottoman”, “Turkish” or “barbarian”. But here racism became exclusivist: those from southern Europe, Spain and Italy included, were no longer really the West, because they were Catholic. Then, in Britain itself, the Irish were not “Western” either. It was not Christian Europe, because the Orthodox from the “East” were outside, including the Greeks themselves. They were not French or German either because, among themselves, they competed to be the center of humanity. But it was the positivists of France, Augustus Comte specifically, who placed their homeland at the center from where universality emerged, with a nod to the empire of Charlemagne, supposed successor to the Rome of the Caesars. Germany remained with its profound “kultur,” resisting that universalism that it despised for being just “a civilization,” that is, superficial. The United States enters there, not only because they claim to be heirs of European migrants, but because they are very Christian, white, and “superior,” that is, because they carry with them racism to which they add their supposed technological supremacy. They despise Catholic Europeans, and put themselves at the forefront of that imaginary of fluctuating and fickle racism called “the West.”
Thus, the slaveholders of the southern United States are convinced that they were placed by God on this earth to exploit the inferiors and appropriate their resources. The lazy and ignorant “black” is replaced with the criminal, drug-addicted, and naturally violent African-American after emancipation. We Latin Americans are considered subhumans with superhuman powers to “undermine their way of life,” engender chaos, and overdoses. We do not deserve natural resources because we misuse them. We are, at the same time, authoritarian and indolent. Contagious and disposable.
The human that emerged after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs spoke of our vulnerability to our own technology. Now mega millionaires talk about doing without the human with artificial intelligence. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the imagination expanded that we all had something irreducible: our own dignity. We lived in nations that, at least on paper, all had an equal right to self-determination. All of that is breaking down these days. The president of the United States says that the limit of his global power is “his own morality.” Like a slaver he carries out lynchings to the delight of his digital followers. These rituals of degradation, such as parading a constitutional president in handcuffs and blindfolded, are the old street spectacles of hanging an African American, not for having raped a woman, but for having a “rapist nature.” The same can be said of the language of the extreme right, its insults, nicknames, daily threats. They are Confederate lynchers. These days it seems that we have reached the hour of cruelty. And, to stop thinking further, I imagine a magnificent blue cassowary, with its crest, crouching.
