Sylvie Brunel, writer, geographer, Liberation, France: “For five centuries, the world has lived under the domination of Europe, which imposed its ‘universal’ values, democracy, human rights, human equality, right to development. Today the world looks at the decline of the West and claims the right to rewrite history of subordination to the West. Through violence (colonization, slave trade), Europe has imposed its supposedly universal values to prove its supremacy, but begot only beggars and outcasts.
The homeless are beggars, single-parent families, all those who struggle to find their place in an individualistic and materialistic world. Outcasts are foreigners, old people, condemned to loneliness. What is civilization in which one finds his place only as if he is in the prime of life, physically attractive, fit, well off, and male?
Africans consider it unacceptable the way we treat the elderly. Muslims make fun of our criticism of polygamy, but our men make polygamy a norm de facto. Asians are stunned by how the individual can put greed above the interests of the group. There is more solidarity between slum dwellers than between developed states, drowning in bureaucracy. Inequality has exploded. The work has been devalued against the omnipotence of money and return on capital.
Barbarism is bursting from us when we fight against those who practice neither our language nor our religion, conduct ‘just’ wars, which cause only chaos and violence, wars for oil and access to the sources of energy in Africa. The West, sure of its success, is everywhere, with impunity trampling on the value of those people whom supposedly it came to civilize. How dare we say that one civilization is superior to others if it is built on arrogance, xenophobia, conquest, domination and exclusion?”
Western civilization, as the most egoistically advanced and developed, has conquered the whole world and imposed its own values. But the rest of the world is not a good example to follow. It is time for the development of a new civilization: universal and integrated, when all nations, while remaining in their own cultures, for the sake of survival unite above all the differences in order to be similar to Nature.