italian version

 

Trump’s Visit to China as Seen by the Chinese

 

 

 

Pubblicato da  In dies Info 18 maggio  2026

 

 

 

 
 

Giovanni De Sio Cesari                                                        

www.giovannidesio.it

 

 

A question is often raised regarding the attitudes of the political right and left in international politics. People wonder whether there has been a kind of reversal whereby the left supports fanatically religious, traditionalist movements that subordinate women, condemn homosexuals, and so on—positions completely contrary to its own ideology—while the right, which in some ways is less distant from such ideologies, instead fights against them. For example, in the tragic events of the Middle East, the left is in fact pro-Palestinian and pro-Iranian, even though these hold views as far removed from left-wing ideology as one could imagine, whereas the right seems to support, more or less openly, the American intervention and the war undertaken by Netanyahu.

This can be considered only one example: we may think of the support given to migrants from African and Middle Eastern countries, who bring with them civilizations and traditionalist, anti-progressive ideologies that are therefore contrary to the left. There would be many such cases.

We must therefore ask whether such a reversal truly exists and, if so, what its causes might be. To examine the issue, it seems necessary first to clarify what we mean today by right and left, concepts that are certainly neither simple nor straightforward.

In the past, we had a communist (extreme) left and a democratic left. Communism definitively came to an end about forty years ago; however, deep traces of its anti-capitalist and therefore anti-American ideology still remain here and there. Democratic socialism, which found its greatest expression in the Scandinavian countries, instead remains one of the two fundamental political forces, together with the democratic right, competing for power in elections in Italy and in the West in general.

We can also speak of two completely opposite aspects of the right: fascism and the democratic right. Fascism effectively ended about eighty years ago, and even those who in some way refer back to it are fully aware that it is impossible to return to those regimes. What remains, therefore, is a democratic right alternating in power with a democratic left.

Yet even this distinction is becoming increasingly vague.

The difference would be that the right tends more toward economic liberalism, considered the most effective means for economic development, whereas the left believes that free-market liberalism must be corrected through state intervention to guarantee all citizens assistance and a minimum acceptable standard of living. In practice, the left is more favorable to state intervention and the right to less intervention. The difference proclaimed during election campaigns often becomes barely perceptible in the actual governance of public affairs, because in reality the state can intervene only within its means, taking into account revenues and expenditures, public debt, budget constraints, international pressures, currency fluctuations, and, particularly in Italy’s case, the European Union. The budgetary measures—that is, the sums the government can actually use—amount in our country to around 20 billion euros, roughly only 2% of state expenditures, with which very little can really be done to influence the economy.

The difference lies more in rhetoric than in actual economic measures.

All this therefore leads to identifying right and left mainly as ideologies: the left promotes gay pride, feminism, rights, and democratic values; the right promotes family values, law and order, security, and generally traditional values.

From this perspective, Hamas, the ayatollahs, and, more generally, the Middle Eastern and African world are indeed as far removed as imaginable from left-wing ideology, while they might in some way support right-wing ideology.

But in reality there is a reversal of attitudes.

In fact, the right strongly opposes them, above all because it appeals to the national cultural tradition. Western traditionalists (let us call them that), whether Christian or not, accept religious freedom, which was the first and most important freedom of democracy. Moreover, the position of women has always been very different from the Islamic one (we have the Virgin Mary and female saints).

We could therefore say that our ancestors from distant times might perhaps have been favorable to a theocratic regime (which also existed among us), but modern conservatives certainly are not.

In the West we are not opposed to Islam as such, but rather to those who are defined as fundamentalists.

It is more difficult to understand the attitude of the left.

In general, the left denounces far more the fact that in the West, and in Italy, we are still backward according to aspects of the contemporary ideology identified with the left, while it criticizes much less the culture of Islamic and African countries.

For example, although there is theoretical support for the Iranian dissidents massacred some months ago—around forty thousand people—it is never said that Hamas actually holds the same positions. Terrible, for instance, is the condition of women in Gaza, forced to bear a disproportionate number of children and then raise them without resources, in conditions of absolute hardship: no one in the West speaks about this.

Personally, I believe this attitude essentially derives from a residual element of the ideology of the extreme post-communist left, which continues to see capitalism—identified with the Western system and above all with the United States—as the cause of all the evil in the world.

There persists the idea, contradicted by historical reality, that Western capitalism and the world of business are what make the Middle East and Africa poor and underdeveloped, and therefore, in the end, all blame always and in any case falls upon the West.

In reality, China and India have currently made enormous progress, greater than that achieved by any other nations in world history. But this progress is linked to the fact that they adopted Western economic models, albeit adapted into different cultural forms, as is natural. The Middle East and Africa, by contrast, have not succeeded in adopting these models and therefore remain behind. Nevertheless, the idea is widespread that their backwardness depends on the West, something interpreted in religious terms in the Middle East. There, jihad (holy war) is invoked by believers against unbelievers, a struggle that will end in the victory Allah grants to His faithful when He deems them worthy. It therefore seems that the religious fanatics of Hamas and Iran think essentially the same thing as the Western left, though the former express it in religious terms and the latter in secular ones.

It seems to me that people fail to realize that the backwardness of the Middle East depends precisely on the prevalence of fanatical religious conceptions, which provoke conflicts and endless wars among the various factions: moderates and fundamentalists, Shiites and Sunnis, and fundamentally even the struggle against Israel is viewed as a religious matter.

It should also be noted that one part—still small for the moment—of the Arab world, namely the Emirates, while professing a very rigid and intolerant religious creed, nevertheless appears to be opening itself to the modern world and managing to achieve a high degree of modernity (one need only think of Dubai).

All this demonstrates that it is therefore neither religion nor traditional ideology in themselves that prevent the development of those countries, but rather the idea that the West—the “Great Satan” and the “Little Satans,” as they still repeat—is the enemy to be destroyed, and therefore not the socio-economic model to imitate and adopt, as the Chinese and Indians have done.