"The West no longer exists". The West no longer exists, Pankaj Mishra told us on Monday, September 21, in a conference at the Palau Macaya. Without mincing words, in the heart of old Europe, the Indian thinker and author ofThe World After Gaza: A Brief History (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2025) told us, looking us in the eye, what we are incapable of telling ourselves. It was a hyperbole intended to provoke, but we must pay attention to the arguments given.
Coming from the geopolitical zone called to lead a new idea of the world—Asia, of the new emerging forces, with China and India co-leading, with a necessary understanding with Russia—his statement recognized the key role of the West as a peacemaker in the second half of the 20th century. But that enlightened idea, which saved the world from the barbarism of the great wars, is exhausted by self-immolation, destroying the very values that forged it as the driving force of the world after the evil wrought by the Second World War: the idea of democracy, a secular society, the rule of law, and, in the best of cases, guarantees.
We have gone from living surrounded by the barbarians we domesticated to producing the worst expression of monstrosity—both rhetorically, with political leaders who are an embarrassment to the enlightened spirit embodied by figures like Franklin D. Roosevelt and Paul—unprecedented throughout the 80-year history of the United Nations. With unprecedented cruelty, Israel's dehumanizing action against a mostly innocent population is, according to Mishra, the ultimate expression of white superiority that attacks with the ferocity of someone fully aware of evil. It is the result of a mentality that is either psychotic or agonizing, it is not clear, but it is implicitly endorsed by a Germany feeling guilty for the original sin of the Nazi Holocaust and by the explicit support of its older brother and bully, the United States, which in turn practices other forms of isolating island savagery by expelling journalists and politicians.
What is happening to the West, which in 80 years has gone from guaranteeing a sovereign state to a persecuted people like the Jews to participating in the evil that Israel today inflicts on its neighbors? Are these the last barks of a dying beast that will only die by killing?
There is a symbolic world that, if not dying, at least no longer shines. The images of the final days of political leaders at the New York headquarters of the United Nations—majestic and ancient at the same time; gigantic and at the same time incapable of influence—have amplified in us a sense of shame. As expected, on the one hand, due to the insulting attitude of leaders who despise the old West and the very institution that convened it, but, on the other, due to a "home of all peoples" that was once the beacon of the world and that today is difficult to feel as ours, with an ineffective grandiloquence where not even the escalators work.
As Mishra says, the destruction of an entire people in the heart of the Mediterranean—Gaza—by a political actor created by the West is a real-time destruction of the 80-year history of the Charter of Human Rights, an illustrated charter that today seems more like a charter. The values that the West guaranteed have proven unsustainable. Democracy is not a permanent conquest, nor has secularism been a guarantee of progress without return. The law is today the favorite threshold for the authoritarian fantasy that never completely disappeared from the consciousness of a blog that had previously starred in multiple empires. The welfare state, which began with social security and ended with the door open to newcomers, is the object of the most ferocious attacks (and a guarantee of electoral success) from the extreme right both in Europe and in the two great pillars of the democratic tradition: England and the United States.
It's not that that idea, indisputable for decades—the progress of humanity—cannot be guaranteed. The reactionary impulse that pervades the First World highlights the circular nature of history, which has countless paths but not a straight line. The gap in the West is evident, as demonstrated by Netanyahu with his confrontational attitude and by Trump with his remarks in the headquarters of a building that their counterparts 80 years ago—Roosevelt and the patron Rockefeller—offered to the world with the will to morally command the new era of humanist reason, which was beginning with a war.
The lucid Mishra also recalls this when he speaks of the "Americanization of the Jewish cause," which, today we can affirm, is also Zionist. The world is moving, and the great blog that we once agreed to call the West is today a string of discordant identities. Perhaps it's time to believe in associations of a different scope, closer and that don't make us feel uncomfortable in our differences. In a virtual world like today's, geographical borders are no longer the only ones, nor the most divisive. What we can avoid is continuing to commit this collective hara-kiri for the sake of a reason we no longer share with all members.
