Western Idealism has Failed Completely: The 1960’s ideology has always just been a utopia, now people realize it is a failed project and react against the establishment. The successful author and chief editor of the Norwegian newspaper Resett, Helge Luraas, has been a public figure in Scandinavia for many years. Watch the show below.
In this interview he speaks about the failures of Western idealism and US “exceptionalism”, the idea that the West – or the USA – is to “rule them all” and that all nations should “become like us”.
This idea gained strength in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, fuelling an unprecedented high spirit among the neo-conservatives in the USA, forging a new US foreign policy of aggression against a number of states, for which the US has paid billions of dollars, only to see each project fail. The latest failure now in East Ghouta. President Trump recently commented on this, regarding Syria, and the attempt to withdraw from the conflict.
The failing US policies in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen etc. demonstrate that Western idealism does not correspond with reality on the ground. People from other culture do not want our wars, neither our values, and Europe is left as a faltering, weakened project.
Western Idealism has Failed Completely: Lurås states that: “The overall way of thinking in terms of foreign policy since the early 1990’s, is an idealism that is based on the belief that the West has the best model, a universal model and that the actions Western nations take is also the best way forward for other societies.
It becomes very difficult to criticize ourselves, in the West, since we view ourselves as “the best”. When the realities differ from the expectations, we get a cognitive dissonance.
The effect of that is largely that you have to disregard the empirical facts before your very eyes and continue to believe that the path you are on is the best one. It is built into our ideology and how we see the world and the paradigm that we live in, that is being produced in the academic institutions and also in the media.
We have a huge problem in terms of changing this attitude because it is so ingrained in our thinking.”
Western Idealism has Failed Completely: “During the Cold War, this urge to reform and make the Western system universal was kept in check by the realities of the power balance between the West and the Eastern block.
But when the Soviet Union fell apart, the West became hegemonic and could, for a time, put its own experiments and utopia into effect, with the subsequent interventions we had in Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya etc.
When these experiments did not fulfill the Western expectations, it now seems that the map doesn’t correspond to reality, but I think that has been the case all along. The utopia that many believed from the 1960’s onward has never been anything else but a utopia, but now this is becoming clear to more and more people and that is why we are seeing a reaction against the establishment.”
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The Herland Report offers Independent Cultural Analysis and believes in freedom of speech. Its editorial policy resides above the traditional Left vs Right paradigm which we believe has lost its relevance and ability to describe the current driving forces in Western politics. The Herland Report is founded by Hanne Nabintu Herland, a Scandinavian historian of comparative religions, bestselling author, commentator and TV producer, known from the media for sharp analysis and fearless speech. She was born and raised in Africa, has lived in Europe, South America, in the Middle East, and travelled extensively in Asia.
