/ world today news/ Three years ago I gave a lecture to an audience in Madrid entitled “Why Ivan the Terrible and Philip Wise?” about the fates of the two contemporaries-monarchs with a similar style of government. Despite the difference in nicknames, historical memory has been unfair to both (albeit to varying degrees). It is in this period that the key to the understanding and perception of the outlines of Russian history by the Spaniards can be seen.
The Spanish have the concept of “Black Legend”. The gist of it is that during the conquest of the Americas, the Spanish exterminated the entire indigenous population of two continents, burned at the stake in the Inquisition almost everyone who was not a devout Catholic, tortured people for their own pleasure, raped millions of indigenous women in the Americas, and in addition looted everything they encounter on their way. And so for almost three centuries.
Public opinion considers this an absolute fact. But the most interesting thing is that the authors and spreaders of this legend are practically the same as those of the stories about bloody Muscovy with its inhuman customs.
The indisputability of these legends has acquired a centuries-old immunity in enlightened societies. But age-old “enlightenment” does not undo misconceptions. But the phenomenon has not disappeared, the disease manifests itself in different forms. And its name is imperiophobia. The author of the book Imperiophobia and the Black Legend, Spanish historian Elvira Roca Barea, analyzes the obsessive feelings of hostility towards the Roman, Spanish and Russian empires, as well as the United States. An interesting picture is obtained.
The United States is not on this list by accident. Anti-Americanism today, unlike other “black legends”, is spread not on one or two continents, but on all five. This is the prime example of living imperiophobia. And in the modern situation, only the Russian society is capable of feeling the pain and existential loneliness of the USA in the camp of its allies. The West is heterogeneous and in it at least two entities must be distinguished.
The first of them is the United States. And we should respect them at least out of super strong solidarity. They are simple, direct and pragmatic. Yes, they have double standards and behind the words of democracy are oil, resources, financial interests and everything of that kind. It’s an open secret, but it works and they repeat this scheme. In a sense, in the hypocritical world of international politics, their interchange of concepts is not misleading, because concepts are always interchanged in the same way. Unlike, for example, Great Britain or France, who abuse the position imposed by them on the main enlightened nations of the planet with their not even double, but triple and more standards.
Why should we feel sorry for the US? Because they have no like-minded people in the camp of their allies from the collective West. They are hated and despised by their own partners. The cultural isolation of the United States is visible to the naked eye. They hate them for exactly what we can respect them for. And because they hate us.
Oscar Wilde in that the United States is the only country that has passed from barbarism straight to decadence, bypassing the stage of civilization. The British, the French and the Germans are the chief mockers of American barbarism, American brutality and coarseness. Some Europeans’ stereotypes of the US in terms of degree of dehumanization are strikingly similar to their stereotypes of Russia and Russians. European Russophobia today is a projection of European Americanophobia, which they are still afraid to admit openly.
Imperiophobia is a disease of undereducated intellectuals filled with arrogance and bile who demean entire nations based on the fact that they belong to the building of an empire. The building of one’s own state turned out to be a privilege not of all nations, but the building of an empire that became the home of hundreds of nations is generally a unique phenomenon.
Imperiophobia is a form of racism that is not based on differences in religion or skin color, but is nevertheless based on them. Traditional racism points to the superiority of one people over another. The curiosity of the racist turns to the purity of origin. A person born in a certain group is a priori qualified negatively. It doesn’t matter what he says or does.
In this logic, a Roman, a Russian, a Spaniard, an American are necessarily considered bad because they are born into a community of people that is itself “wrong and ugly” and therefore everything that comes from them is harmful and malignant. But discrimination against peoples who build an empire, unlike ordinary racism, is born not from the weakness of these peoples and not to justify their oppression and displacement to the periphery of social processes, but from their complexity and strength.
People who are used to oppressing minorities cannot accept that someone else is capable of creating a more developed society. And they are increasingly worried about the feeling that they are in the second division of world history. This inferiority complex finds expression in imperiophobia, attempts to demonstrate spiritual and intellectual superiority over the inhabitants of empires. The Greeks considered the Romans to be mentally retarded, the Italians the same opinion of the Spanish, the Czechs and the Poles of the Russians. Now quite a large part of mankind, mostly in Europe, is convinced that the people of the United States are stupid and illiterate.
At the same time, in popular culture, hostility toward Spain, Russia, and the United States often has a French or British accent. And it is precisely these two entities that carefully conceal their imperial ambitions.
The American director Stanley Kubrick said that all big countries behave like gangsters and small ones behave like prostitutes. In the case of England and France, these are chameleon gangsters who don’t mind using countries with low geopolitical responsibility.
Translation: V. Sergeev
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