WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY News Journal Update - (en) Italy, UCADI FA #180 - NEW PARADIGMS (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 As we all, or almost all, know, Thomask Kuhn, in his fundamental work

"The structure of scientific revolutions"[1]subjected to strong revision
the idea that science works to innovate, when instead what it normally
does is to consolidate knowledge already known. ---- What instead forces
science to turn towards new paths is the paradigm shift, that is, when
the beliefs, motivations and explanations that gave rise to a specific
interpretative course are no longer able to support the changed
conditions of reality . ---- The long monopolar period ends leaving
behind the same blood trail as its beginning. A characteristic of our
time is the speed with which events follow one another. And, if in the
pre-modern world the duration of empires was measured in centuries, now
we have moved on to decades.
In the great talk about multipolarism, one thing is often silent. The
transition from one phase to another, the paradigm shift, is never a
painless process.
After all, it is absolutely difficult to understand, being inside it,
the characteristics of an era. We can see them, when things are going
well, only when that phase is completely over. But what we can say, at
present, is that we are certainly on a path of structural changes whose
horizon is still absolutely unknown.
Some questions, however, seem to emerge in the systematic chaos[2]in
which we have been immersed for a long time now.

1. War as a solution to internal and external problems and as normality

It is good to be clear, it is not that conflicts were lacking in the
period 1945-1989, but, with their usual crudeness and violence, they
were in a sort of "other" world[3], which did not affect the West, in
particularly Europe. In short, as had already happened in the nineteenth
century, a kind of optical illusion mistook for "peace" what was an
"externalization" of war. However, within European countries,
particularly in Italy, the word still remained taboo. The wounds of the
second conflict, of the massacres, of the partisan war are too close.
Leaving aside the low intensity war fought in Italy with the sound of
bombs (the so-called "strategy of tension") there was however a
repulsion and an anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist spirit which was
not the repudiation of violence or "love for peace", but a feeling that
is difficult to explain today and which coincided with a passionate
reading of the art. 11 of the Constitution. Certainly, in a climate that
was certainly not pacified, the ruling classes refrained from
celebrating or taking part in any war around the world. The stuffy news
programs, which at the time seemed unbearable to us, when seen from a
distance seem to be something completely different. Those that remain in
mind, at most, are the Italian troops in Lebanon in the peacekeeping
mission in 1982.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall everything changes. Just 2 years
later, Italy also embarked on that dress rehearsal of the unipolar
world. Iraq raised and armed by the USA (for which it fought a useless
and very bloody war in 1980) had dared to carry out autonomous action,
invading a country shaped like a petrol station.
Result: a disproportionate war with hundreds of thousands of civilian
and military deaths, a modern country destroyed and set back centuries,
and the usual narrative of the "new Hitler" that the press will now
embeddeb to use at every subsequent stage. The war returned through the
window as "normality" with all its load of brazen propaganda,
unthinkable until a few years earlier. Pandora's box had opened and it
worked. The peace demonstrations, which in those years still brought
many people to the streets, were in reality the last testimony of a
world that was about to disappear. Mocked, derided, accused of cowardice
and betrayal. The words of the twenty years of fascism, cleaned up and
made "democratic", returned to the hands of a "new" generation of
journalists rotten to the core, information stars and well-paid lovers
safe from the thrill and risk of others. If anything, when these
demonstrations had exceeded the alert level, as in 2001, a very
ferocious repression (which in the 1970s would have given rise to a
civil war) would have been sufficient to shatter them.
The affirmation of unipolarity, exactly as in totalitarian regimes,
needed masses always excited to defend the Western and capitalist "way
of life": "democracy, freedom, elections, being able to say what you
want" (except questioning the economic system) against the bad guy who
wanted to prevent us from choosing which credit card to use. A true
"totalitarian-liberal" thought was solidified which, to tell the truth,
turned the Enlightenment on its head, transforming it into fanaticism.
We had to choose enemies who were suited to the task but who did not
intimidate us too much. Like Saddam Hussein, Milosevic, the Taliban. Oh
God, the total US inability to deal with the guerrillas still put them
and still puts them in serious difficulty. But in some cases, rather
than wars, they were one-way massacres with or without the approval of
the UN. For example, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, according to the
principles of that strange thing called "international law", would have
been a war crime. But who puts under investigation those who set
themselves up as judges and policemen? In that context, the actual
massacres of civilians were downgraded to "collateral effects", nameless
deaths of "potential terrorists" from childhood. It is true that even in
Vietnam the 3 million Vietnamese dead never had a face. In the empire of
good only those who are good have a family.

2. end of the first half

But American unipolarity is marking time. Over the course of these
decades of the glorification of the "best of all possible worlds", other
heads have risen to demand their place at the table, or, to take it
away. It is no longer a matter of third world nations to be intimidated,
dictatorships to be condemned. Countries with billions of people,
equipped with powerful armies, nuclear weapons and high-performance
economic systems play the same game inaugurated at the end of the 1970s:
globalization and liberalism. With the addition of political structures
that are authoritarian but attentive to cohesion, ferocious but capable
of restoring national dignity (Russia) or of lifting a billion people
out of poverty (China), or of starting to get rid of the Western breath
(India). With the election of Trump we enter another phase.
Globalization was fine as long as, so to speak, the rest of the world
was good. With the appearance of new actors. Big actors. Things change.
We say "enough". The problem is that "enough" is now completely out of
time. The extra-Western "players" are now well grown and not treatable
like the second-rate "bad guys" "punished" by the guardians of freedom
in the world. The unipolar path, which now finds itself blocked by the
presence, above all, of China, has however continued its journey trying
to fit into Russia with the enclave of Ukraine. At this point, however,
the adversary has proven not to be a twentieth-century by-product, but a
nuclear power, poised between East and West. That war, which has been
ongoing for almost 2 years, has practically demonstrated that history is
not only over, but has clearly started to move forward again. In the
meantime, however, the USA has achieved at least some results:
extinguishing any ambitions of the European Union,
now truly the American "cobbler", using the enormous increase in weapons
production as military Keynesianism (which, it seems, has worked). But
Russia has instead demonstrated that there is a camp opposed to the West
capable of applying for world hegemony. And it is on this point that the
future clash will take place.

3. New paradigms

These changes in scenario impose structural changes and these in turn
lead to changes in the culture itself. 30 years of "just" wars
("international police actions" "special operations") have deconstructed
sensitivity, our sensitivity, so the dead, in their thousands, no longer
seem to interest us. If you consider that the bodies of at least 30,000
human beings lie in the Mediterranean Sea, who will never have a name, a
burial, as if they had never existed, in substantial general,
institutional and human indifference. If you think that in Iraq, in
Syria, in Yemen, in Afghanistan, the deaths number in the millions,
while the media organize 24-hour broadcasts on the life of 1 (one!)
terminally ill child, what will the other part of the world think?? For
the war in Ukraine the unified media counted bomb after bomb, making the
story of every single civilian death (but remaining silent on the
hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian military deaths) while for the
massacre or, rather "almost" genocide that the State of Israel is
committing in Gaza the dead are faceless, nameless and without history.
But, there is more: in the case of the massacre of the Palestinians, the
mainstream press, that is, the entire press, not only gives completely
unbalanced information, but inserts a very high level of propaganda into
the news it provides. Not only does he communicate, but he tries to
convince and train. The bourgeois press has always been like this, let's
be clear, but this time there is something more significant. "We are on
one side, war is no longer a taboo and we are willing to do anything to
defend our world. Our values." At the same time, so-called soft power
has made giant strides, every action, every thought, even the apparently
most "revolutionary" one, is immediately subsumed, in real time, by the
immense media and cybernetic machine that grinds out trillions of
information in a continuous stream. There is no Specter to direct
everything, there is absolutely no need. And the most advanced battles
are all fought on the edge of the superstructure completely detached
from the economic system, as if this were a state of nature. In this
context the old analyzes risk being blunt weapons. In post-postmodernity
(i.e. in neomodernity) the society of the spectacle is able to accustom
everyone to indifference and acceptance (the famous "resilience" not
"resistance") while still pushing the cart of a finished "American
dream" ( assuming there ever was) for at least 30 years. But never
before have inequalities appeared gigantic as in this period. Probably
the West, whatever it is or has been, is passing the buck. How this can
happen will be known to posterity.

[1]T.Kuhn, The structure of scientific revolutions, Einaudi, 2009 (1st
ed. Or. 1962) It should be kept in mind that Kuhn would not have agreed
with our use of his study for uses outside the scientific world.
However, his hypotheses at the time have found so much use in helping us
understand the world around us that we consider this use not irreverent
or impracticable, on the contrary.
[2]https://www.lacittafutura.it/esteri/il-mondo-nell-abisso-del-caos-sistemico
[3]The Korean War in which the loss of approximately 3 million human
lives is estimated is today completely forgotten. See G. Breccia, Korea.
The forgotten war, Il Mulino, 2019.

Andrea Bellucci

https://www.ucadi.org/2023/12/20/nuovi-paradigmi/
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