Dear Europeans,<\/p>\n
Just as there is a Far East, in the more or less arbitrary geographical taxonomies of the Earth, there should also be a Far West. Just as a certain orientalism seems to condense on the peaks of Tibet, it is possible that there is a South American Tibet (among the high summits of the Andes) where the West can be idealized in an exaggerated manner. At least, that is how I would like to justify the fact that a Colombian\u2014someone born in one of the most remote peripheries of the West\u2014dares to address Europe as if it were not a foreign land but, on the contrary, the only cultural and political reference to which we can still turn our gaze, our aspiration, and our hope.<\/p>\n
When the United States gives up on empathy (according to Elon Musk, the West\u2019s gravest flaw is precisely empathy) and devotes itself to antipathy; when that country insists on rejecting sub-Americans because of the color of their skin, their poverty, their language, or their tattoos; when even there, attempts are made to impose on universities (that great invention of the West) what they should and should not teach; when the greatest power of the West defines itself as \u201cAmerica First\u201d (appropriating even the demonym, from the Gulf of Mexico to the very name \u201cAmerica,\u201d as if those who live between Mexico and Argentina did not belong to that same continent); when all this happens, it is evident that this nameless country, the United States, can no longer serve as the reference point for what was once called the West. In that country, under the abuse of the word \u201cfreedom,\u201d the most fundamental freedoms and the most essential human rights are being eroded.<\/p>\n
Perhaps one of the greatest influences in Western culture, and in its spread (for better or worse) to other parts of the world, is the Catholic religion (that \u201cheresy of Judaism\u201d). What that newly converted Catholic named James David Vance seems to profoundly ignore is the etymological and profound meaning of the word \u201ccatholic\u201d (from the Greek katholik\u00f3s), which means precisely \u201cuniversal.\u201d For a universal religion, it makes no sense that one region or certain citizens come first and others second. That is why the Church, which is not foolish, has sent a very clear message to the North American empire with its last two popes: one Argentine (from the deep South) and another North American, but resident and naturalized in a country with a majority indigenous or mixed-race population, Peru. That Pope Leo XIV, in his first address, spoke only in Italian, Latin, and Spanish, is a clear sign to a country that, from day one of the new government, ordered the prohibition of Spanish on all official pages of the United States.<\/p>\n
Among the fundamental events that contributed to the independence of the Hispanic American countries, the first translation and publication of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen by an American is often cited\u2014Antonio Nari\u00f1o, in Bogot\u00e1, in 1793. This declaration, approved by the French Assembly, did not state anywhere that these rights applied only to the French. These rights, in that sense, were born from a universalist, Catholic tradition that did not prioritize ethnicity, nationality, or place on a map. Therefore, its translation in New Granada contributed years later to the birth of the idea\u2014and brief reality\u2014of a Gran Colombia, a sort of European Union avant la lettre in South America, a union of countries\u2014as broad as possible\u2014that would never wage war against each other.<\/p>\n
There is a South American poet, perhaps the greatest writer ever to have existed in the Far West, who was accused by furious nativists of being too European: the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges. I hold the tenacious superstition that great poets are seers\u2014that is, that even unwittingly, they possess a prophetic gift. The last words, the farewells of a poet when he realizes that life is nearing its end, intensify this curious inclination to announce the future. Prophecy, more than a magical act, is a desideratum, a \u201cmaybe,\u201d a wish spoken like a spell, that is, with a precise combination of words that might have a propitiatory effect. No one understands the importance of words better than poets. Words are important because, in a mysterious yet real way, they foreshadow and construct reality.<\/p>\n
Based on this, I would like to quote the poetic prose that Jorge Luis Borges placed on the last page of his final book of poetry, Los conjurados<\/em> (The Conspirators<\/em>), which bears\u2014emphasizing its importance\u2014the same title as the book. I do not think it unreasonable to suggest that this poem be read as a testament. The text, at first, is dedicated to Switzerland (the country where Borges lived as a youth and where he died on June 14, 1986, thirty-nine years ago), but ultimately, I believe, it refers to the idea of Europe\u2014what Europe began to build in April 1951 with the Treaty of Paris, which included France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. It is this idea (which would lead to the European Union) that Ukraine now hopes to join, without having to ask permission from Russia. Borges wrote in his testament:<\/p>\n In the heart of Europe, they are conspiring. I have changed only one thing from the original text: the date (in the original text, it was 1291 and referred to Switzerland). What follows is taken from other writings by Borges:<\/p>\n They were those blind wanderers who sang in verse of Achilles\u2019 wrath and the labors and journeys of Ulysses, whose names merged into one: Homer. Thus far, Borges \u2013 not as he appears literally in The Conspirators<\/em>, but as a personal reimagining of his thought. Some ideas of Europe aspire to be universal, applicable to all human beings, and this should not be, for you Europeans, a cause for shame. The European Union is the least imperfect cultural and political creation that has ever existed in the history of the world. From the Far West, we look to you with admiration and hope. You must not betray us.<\/p>\n With warm regards.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dear Europeans, Just as there is a Far East, in the more or less arbitrary geographical taxonomies of the Earth, there should also be a Far West. Just as a certain orientalism seems to condense on the peaks of Tibet, it is possible that there is a South American Tibet (among the high summits of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4448,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"iawp_total_views":23,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-senza-categoria"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4398"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4398\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4616,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4398\/revisions\/4616"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/em>The event dates back to 1951.
\n<\/em>They are men of different bloodlines, who profess different religions and speak different languages.
\n<\/em>They have made the strange decision to be reasonable.
\n<\/em>They have decided to forget their differences and emphasize their similarities.<\/em><\/p>\n
\n<\/em>They were that wanderer who recounted in verse the Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise.
\n<\/em>They were a maimed soldier and a hidalgo who dreamed of being Don Quixote and, in the end, was.
\n<\/em>They were that playwright and theatre impresario of London who never set out to write a masterpiece, and whose posthumous glory would have astonished him.
\n<\/em>They were the panic god of a Jewish philosopher who sculpted crystals with his hands.
\n<\/em>They were Bruno burned at the stake and Galileo forced to recant truths proven by Copernicus and Kepler.
\n<\/em>They were Polo, Columbus, and Magellan, who finally completed the astonishing sphere of the globe.
\n<\/em>They were Pascal and the calculus, Voltaire and perfect prose, Descartes and the method later refined by Kant and Schopenhauer.
\n<\/em>They were Pasteur\u2019s microbiology and vaccines, Ram\u00f3n y Cajal\u2019s neurons, Madame Curie\u2019s invisible rays.
\n<\/em>They were relativity and Einstein and nuclear energy.
\n<\/em>They were the blue of Fra Angelico and the severed heads of Artemisia Gentileschi.
\n<\/em>They were Socrates, Plato, Pythagoras, and Aristotle, who taught Hume, Smith, and Russell how to think.
\n<\/em>They were the Encyclopedia of D\u2019Alembert and Diderot and the brilliant minds of Condorcet and Madame de Sta\u00ebl.
\n<\/em>In the heart of Europe, a tower of reason and firm faith is rising.
\n<\/em>The countries are now twenty-seven. The next must be Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova.
\n<\/em>Tomorrow, it will be the entire planet.
\n<\/em>Perhaps what I am saying is not true; maybe it is prophetic.<\/em><\/p>\n