THE WEST AND THE REST

Foreword

What history do we know? Perhaps only the one we were taught in school through textbooks written according to the same didactic criteria. That is to say, a solely (or vastly predominant) European history.

This Eurocentric narrative, integrated with the narrative of the United States (conquerors of the world who succeeded the European conquerors) gives rise to a distorted image not only of Europe but of the entire West.

The time has come to know history in its entirety by remembering that the function of history is: to know the past so as to understand the present and plan the future while avoiding (as far as possible) committing the mistakes and horrors of the past.

Historical knowledge can also provide the ability, willingness and humility to put ourselves in others' shoes and to understand their reasons. We cannot expect the entire world (8 billion people) to reason with the same mental schemes as that 10% of the world's population who go by the name of Westerners.

Even if the West owns 90% of the global resources, it cannot afford such an act of arrogance, bullying, pride and hypocrisy.

Limiting world history knowledge is limiting our world view

The purpose of having history taught as a part of general education is to provide context for the modern world and promote understanding of different cultures. Unfortunately, the way that history education is set up makes it nearly impossible to get a comprehensive look at non-western or non-Eurocentric ideas, especially in the context of modern events.

The general lack of focus on non-Western cultures excludes from history Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and other regions. In our current political climate, understanding other cultures is vital to combating misconceptions that can lead to xenophobia and racism.

The almost complete disregard for education on non-western cultures is unacceptable. This isn’t to say that European and American history isn’t important. All history is important to be able to make well-informed judgments on current events and to understand the reason current events are happening. Instead, we spend a disproportionate amount of time learning only about western civilizations, while other history is shoved away.

Most importantly, however, we need to be aware of the skewed view of the world we get simply by taking high school classes. Reading books, doing further research, and talking to people from all different cultures is invaluable in today’s world. Recently, building walls and keeping others out has instead been valued over understanding others and their situations. Education is the only way to fight the ignorance that divides us from different cultures.

The religious, philosophical, cultural and political arrogance of the West

The West has the illusion of being at the centre of the world and that everything revolves around it. It thinks that other cultures exist, but its culture is better and superior, forgetting that each civilization and population brings a contribution. The West must not throw itself away but must realize that it is one among many. It is mere arrogance thinking that the West is the first, the only, the true one who has understood which political, economic and religious system it must convince others to adopt. That is a proof of mental obtuseness.

Enough with this idea that the West (with 1 billion people) is the first, the best and all the others (the Rest = 7 billion people) are worthless!

Philosopher Zimmer (one of the greatest scholars of Indian thought) author of “History of the philosophies of India” discusses religions and philosophical currents: Jainism, Yoga, Brahmanism, Buddhism, Tantrism. Zimmer maintains “In India they were already very old and very wise when the Greek thinkers (who in our schools are considered as the initiators of Western thought) in the 6th century BC uttered their first cries.

We assert that our Western civilization was born with the Greeks. That the Greeks learned nothing from anyone. That they were born from the foam of the sea already perfect and formed. Instead, they learned a lot especially from Egypt: the great Greek mathematicians Thales and Pythagoras went to Egypt to learn and to rinse their clothes in the Nile”.

We are Eurocentric, Western-centric and we do wrong because we have blinkers. We do not learn other people's thoughts, art, literature, and philosophy.

Our philosophers say that the Indians may have thought, but philosophy is only Western. But, as detailed in “A comparative history of world philosophy” in Indian philosophy often centuries, if not millennia before, there were the same schools that then arrived in Europe: rationalism, empiricism, critique with thoughts that are proposed again.

We instead think we are unique, unrepeatable and superior: this is our great original sin. Also because it is what leads us to be colonialists. We go and indoctrinate others believing we are better and superior.

The travellers of the past (Marco Polo, Matteo Ricci) did not have this arrogance: they went, observed and enjoyed what they saw and learned.

China

Moving from India to China, how many people know that China, with more than four thousand years of recorded history, is the world's oldest continuous civilization? That China, from approximately 600 to 1500 CE, was the largest, strongest, and most populated country in Europe and Asia?

China has been technologically superior to Europe since ancient times. Some of China's many inventions, spread largely through the Arabs, have been used in Europe for centuries and millennia. Paper, movable type, the compass, steel, and gunpowder are Chinese inventions.

When Columbus arrived in America in 1492, his flagship, the Santa Maria, was 26 meters long and 8 meters wide. From 1405 to 1433, a Chinese fleet commanded by Admiral Zeng He, consisting of over 200 large ships (some exceeding 100 meters in length and 25 meters in width), with 20-30,000 men on board, reached Java, the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea and the eastern coast of Africa up to present-day Kenya. Unlike the subsequent bloody conquests of the Europeans (Cortes, Pizarro, etc.) Zeng He, despite having warships and a large army, did not massacre the locals but established friendly contacts and agreements with a mutual exchange of gifts.

How about the Middle East?

1. The Palestinian Genocide

In Israel, dehumanizing rhetoric against Palestinians is the order of the day. Ministers and public figures justify the killing of women and children, the destruction of entire cities, and the blockade of food and humanitarian aid in Gaza. Yoav Gallant, who was Defense Minister until his resignation from the government in 2024, said: "We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly." Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, did pit the "children of light" against "barbarism" and the "law of the jungle."

One day, in books about genocide, some history manuals, some documentaries, these (and many other) shameful and unacceptable words will hopefully be reported. They will be noted as inhuman, transcribed with horror.

Some will ask: how was it possible? Others will ask: but while all this was happening, were they allowed to speak? And act?

The public phrases, sometimes pronounced in Hebrew, sometimes in English, almost always spread by the international media demonstrates clearly what is often obscured: war as a language of dehumanization.

These sentences have been spoken, written, published. None have caused resignations. None have led to an international investigation.

2. Palestinians: without empathy and voice

Western media, with rare exceptions, dehumanize Palestinians, reducing them to “faceless zombies” and denying them empathy and voice. Cultural colonialism manifests itself in the double standard that legitimizes Israeli violence and silences the Palestinian tragedy.

The result is a truncated narrative, devoid of justice and truth, in which the Palestinian tragedy is deprived of its human, historical and political meaning.

Their deaths are anonymous, decontextualized, presented as an inevitable consequence of the war, devoid of any symbolic or human value. The images that are transmitted are equally eloquent: indistinct faces, piles of rubble, bodies wrapped in sheets. No story, no context. The Palestinians thus become non-people, ghosts without identity, represented as a shapeless mass that lives in disorder, anger, misery.

The Western press continues to be the vehicle of a colonialism that no longer needs soldiers or borders, but that operates through the selection of the human. Only what resembles us is human.

Sooner or later, we will have to deal with this responsibility. Not only to give back a voice and face to those who today are deprived of them, but to reaffirm the very meaning of journalism: seeking the truth, recounting complexity, giving dignity to every human life, without distinction.

How about Africa?

Ibrahim Traoré, the young president of Burkina Faso, is trying to overturn the future, and the destiny, of his country and many other African states. For this reason, he has become very charismatic and extremely popular in much of the Global South (the Rest) and, for the same reason, he is so fearful to the West and the colonial powers.

Ibrahim Traoré has decided to break the historical balance, cutting the bridges of the exploitation carried out for centuries by France and the United States on African resources, with the aim of giving hope to a population that has remained without a voice for too long.
Traoré has declared that he is absolutely inspired by Thomas Sankara, barbarically killed in 1987 in a coup d'état orchestrated by the CIA and France. The president is committed to redistributing all resources towards the poorest population, with the aim of fighting economic and social inequalities.

He is encouraging the cultivation of every food product, in clear contrast to the colonial period in which Burkina Faso was made to produce only cotton for export; schools of all levels have been made free; medicines have controlled prices; he is recovering many territories that for years were inaccessible because they were controlled by terrorists; he has promoted policies that seek to reduce the influence of foreign multinationals on the mining sector, in particular in gold extraction, which represents a crucial resource for Burkina Faso, and has also been followed by other countries, Niger and Mali first and foremost.

But this point, needless to say, immediately irritated the West.

On April 3 2025, American General Michael Langley (US Africa Commander), during a hearing in the US Senate, accused Ibrahim Traoré of misappropriating the country's gold reserves.

Thanks to this purely instrumental motivation, it cannot be ruled out that the United States and France are preparing the ground to plan the elimination of Traoré, as they have already done in the past with Sankara, or the military invasion of Burkina Faso, similar to what has already been implemented in Libya or Iraq.

Considerations

In total Western silence, massive demonstrations in the South of the world are cheering and praising Traoré. Billions of people around the globe are perfectly aware of the total hypocrisy of those who claim to be morally superior to others: as always, excuses are made, such as the famous export of democracy, to be legitimized to attack a poor country, plunder it of its natural reserves and import all natural resources at ridiculous prices, from coltan to gold, from diamonds to gas...

Instead, with those who have been stealing the land from the Palestinians for decades, killing them without mercy, they pretend nothing is happening, not to see and not to hear the desperate cries of innocent children.

In the horrid contemporary context, we badly need true heroes and champions of justice and we must support and defend them, accused and denigrated by those who have enormous interests in always keeping everything intact and unjust.

Conclusion

The practice of viewing the world from a European or generally Western perspective with an implied belief in the pre-eminence of Western culture may also describes a view centred on the history or eminence of white people and explains why Western nations have engaged in various sorts of racism, war-mongering, and imperialistic exploitation.

Politicians who privilege Western perspectives are doing the opposite of what should be tried to get students to do in classrooms. To be successful in learning about history, its crucial students understand world history, contested and rival narratives, thus enabling them to move beyond outdated labels such as “Western civilisation”.

Only the historical thinking concepts provide a framework for historical inquiry and critical thinking. Students need to do more than just recite what happened in the past. Students need to be able to ask why things are historically significant to certain people at certain times. They need to understand the past from their position in the world, as well as different perspectives in relation to their own cultural identities.

The west won the cold war, but cannot and should not impose its distinct values on other world civilisations. Samuel Huntington, in an elaboration of his "Clash of Civilisations" essay published in 1993, argues that the west can only flourish in a more hostile world by abandoning its universal aspirations.

Non-westerners do not hesitate to point to the gaps between western principle and practice. Hypocrisy and double standards are the price of universalist pretensions. Democracy is promoted, but not if it brings Islamic fundamentalists to power; non-proliferation is preached for Iran, but not for Israel; free trade is the elixir of economic growth, but not for agriculture; human rights are an issue with China, but not with Saudi Arabia.

A Eurocentric history is not able to provide the fundamental elements for understanding historical change, and moreover it contrasts in its short-sightedness with the global dimension of problems.

It is therefore a question of creating a true Copernican revolution, which removes Europe from the centre of the world and is able to provide a global vision of history through the identification of some universally valid interpretative keys both in time and space.
The USA is sadly famous for studying its 200-year history in detail and ignoring that of the rest of the world. On the opposite side, China teaches both its own history and European/Asian/American/African history. The Chinese public school world history curriculum lasts 6 years starting from the first year of secondary school. It is amazing the historical knowledge of the Chinese on Europe.