Between merciful and aggressive xenophobia
At a dinner with progressive friends, he turned to geopolitics. The author of the issue said that he feared the future Chinese hegemony and that he preferred American imperialism to Chinese with a cultural argument: “In the end, the United States is closer to us, the Yankees have to do with our values and lifestyle.” No one said anything, no one felt that that statement was xenophobic and no one saw it necessary to objectify the debate with data if we had to talk about better or worse imperialism. The participants of the dinner understood the framework well: ours and the other. In this logic, the problem is not what is good or bad, but rather mistrust and rejection of foreign culture.
In comparative politics we are trying to foresee the future by learning the first time, which does not mean that it cannot be mistaken, but often the only elements we have when it comes to making political assessments are the facts we have had so far.
If we look at the last few decades, China has not attacked anyone, but the United States has a long list of wars and military attacks ranging from the violation of international law to the point of not only military but also economic. China, however, can be put very little heed in international politics: it is a prudent and cooperative player who respects the law.
"When the ‘others’ become powerful and their geopolitical manifestations show sovereignty, economic strength and defence capacity, the miserable xenophobes become aggressive"
Anti-Beijing mention is made of sovereignty struggles and pollution over the islands of the Chinese Sea. But, on the one hand, China is not the country that has occupied the most islands and it is the last of the five countries in the arena that has torn up the islands. However, this conflict has not provoked any military intervention and has continued to extend economic cooperation with its enemies, who have denied any military intervention. China, for its part, is currently the first renewable energy producer and is implementing a plan to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060 with the aim of making the amount of emissions as natural as it can be absorbed.
However, xenophobia is blind to empirical data. There is nothing more than looking at the Western media: how many criticisms and laughs have been made about COVID-19 measures, medicines and vaccines in different countries! How many half-truths and false news to fuel cultural stigmatization! And why the pandemic has left the largest number of deaths in the world.
The reality is that the main thinking of the West, liberal and recent against cultural discrimination, is nothing more than the disguised construction of xenophobia. Thanks to the neoliberal hegemony of thought, the perception of xenophobia has been individualized, that is, showing xenophobic attitudes towards individual people is unacceptable, but when the individual scales to the collective, they begin to explain xenophobia and evaporate their control.
The emergence of non-xenophobic attitudes towards different cultures, provided that they are vulnerable or weak minorities, fosters the development of compassionate xenophobes who feel morally dominant by their values of tolerance. However, when the other cultures (others) seize them and their geopolitical manifestations show sovereignty, economic strength and defensive capacity, the merciful xenophobes become aggressive, taking all the xenophobic cultural stigmatizations for a walk. That is why the Western media are genuine machines of xenophobic headlines and ratings, among other things, when they talk about China, Russia, Iran or any sovereign country in Latin America.
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