The Vulgar Finale of

Western Civilization One (Europe) &

Western Civilization Two (the DisUnited States)
Some years ago, I came across a news article about China the source of
which I cannot remember or even verify (fake news?) but had flabbergasted
me so it remains in my mind for having served as a turning point regarding
my thinking about the People’s Republic of China.

The announcement, summarized, went like this: The pollution from the
factories in southern China were blocking the sun over Hong Kong that
could only be seen three or four days a month. A governmental delegation
from Hong Kong was assembled, and they headed off to China to chat with
the leaders of the province from which the dreadful air was floating into the
air waves. The response of the Chinese officials was clear-cut: “If you wish
to see the sun every day stop ordering all this “****.” “Eureka!”

Then on 3 July 2009, I was browsing in the English language department of

an Italian bookstore in the center of Firenze when my eye caught sight of
this book: When China Rules the World: The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and
the End of the Western World, “Eureka Two,” authored by Professor Martin
Jacques.

In April, 1983, in my apartment in La Florida, Caracas, when I was making

arrangements to escape from a lawless society probably on the road to
anarchy or perhaps revolution, I had to make choices among my personal
possessions choosing those to take with me to Italy and those I would gift to
Francisco, the son of my Spanish landlord.

I picked up a large tome, 856 pages, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy

Translated & Compiled by Professor Wing-Tsit Chan, that I immediately
thought was too weighty to take along with me and my meager possessions
—until I opened it to the first page where I had highlighted the very first
paragraph of the book that I had purchased from an elderly Englishman
who barely eked out a living selling English books in an uncontrolled,
uneducated Caracas, Venezuela: “If one word could characterize the entire
history of Chinese philosophy that word would be humanism—not the
humanism that denies or slights a Supreme Power, but one that professes
the unity of man and heaven.”

I’m reading Professor’s Wing-Tsit Chan’s scholarly masterpiece now for the
third time always highlighting gems of humanity. propriety, righteousness,
and wisdom. Professor Chan’s travail is erudite and profound, and one can
surmise that the study was his life’s ambition. (It reminds me of Howard
Zinn’s chef-d'oeuvre, A People’s History of the United States, that he told me
when I met with him in Rome in 2005, took twenty years of dedicated
research to bring to success: the book selling—last I heard—1,000,000
copies in the DisUnited States and another million of its translations into
Chinese, French, Italian, Spanish...and even others.) So for me re-reading
Professor Chan’s source book is well worth the effort, and I still find it
comforting and enjoyable even though it is not any easy read. Chinese
people are truly contrastive, and I remember Bertrand Russell, who visited
China in 1921 for a whole year, saying, I think in his The Conquest of
Happiness, that the Chinese people were the most civilized people he had
ever come to know.

I wish I knew enough “Western” philosophy to try to differentiate it with

my generalized knowledge of “Eastern (Chinese)” philosophy; so, the only
juxtaposition I can offer between the two is the unspecialized following:
What I know about Western philosophy is that it is more dogmatic,
aggressive, even authoritarian than Eastern (Chinese) philosophy.

I studied in New York in two Roman Catholic schools, a preparatory high

school and a Roman Catholic university and I can say, without hesitation,
that I was not taught how to think but what to think the eight years I passed
with them. Two of the happiest days of my life were the days I left both of
them for good especially because that in these Roman Catholic asylums five
priests unsuccessfully attempted to sexually abuse me, and now being no
more a part of them, I could begin to forget about having to actually run
away from two of these perverts all five of whom had Irish heritages just as
the forty-eighth president of the DisUnited States and his son Hunter. It
has taken me years to expunge all the Roman Catholic riffraff that had been
forced-fed me by this criminal organization, and today I can revel in my
personal victory over the necrophilic Roman Catholic church now on the
wan across the world for its bigotry and deplorable activities. Amen!

But what makes me agree with Professor Jacques and his prediction that
the Western World is suffering its closing days? And why should you, my
dear readers, agree with us? Professor Jacques is an academic who
possesses a noteworthy CV that lists the various English universities he
studied and taught in. His specialty is Economics- He has also lived in
China and is very savvy about the cultural and ethical practices of the
Chinese people. I envy him for that. Further, I respect very much the
opinions and observations he has enumerated about the People’s Republic
of China.

I, on the other hand, am not an academic, and I am terribly grateful I am

not. I admire both Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre who were, in the
twentieth century, perhaps the most influential of all philosophers of that
time period, but both of whom gave up on formal philosophical study
dedicating their lives to speaking common philosophical sense to their
followers. Both of them were awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature—not
Philosophy. Sartre refused his prize saying that he should not be rewarded
for doing what he thought was his duty and in conformity with his ability.
Russell in a BBC interview expressed the idea that philosophers should
concentrate more on mass psychology rather than hardline philosophy. We
all should be content that the both of them did.

My favorite Western philosophers are Sartre, Russell. Hume, Kant (the

Prussian Hume), Schopenhauer, and Wittgenstein. I try my best to follow
the study of mass psychology as recommended by Russell, and trying to
understand people has been my goal in life. My CV reads as follows: I was
born in Brooklyn, New York, on 7 October 1944; I lived in New York for
twenty-one years before I entered Fort Sill, Oklahoma for a year where I
graduated from the United States Army Artillery & Missile School; from
August 1967 to August 1968 I served as an artillery officer in the Fourth and
Americal Divisions in South Vietnam; when I returned home after my two
years of active duty, I left New York in disgust and moved to Hollywood
Hills, Florida (Miami) where I lived for about four years; then I went to
Gainesville, Florida where I studied for a master’s degree in English and
where I fell in love with a Venezuelan ophthalmologist studying cataract
surgery; and, on 1 May 1983 I began living in Italy in Momtecatini Terme
eventually moving to Calenzano, Italy where I am now a resident and have
been since 21 September 1985. I have not been present physically in the
DisUnited States since 31 December 1975 when I left for good the DUS,
and moved to Venezuela..

I feel lucky for what I have observed about human nature, academics never
coming close to what I have experienced. I claim I have lived in six cultures
and not for two-week vacations. I lived in the north of the United States for
twenty.one years; I lived in the west of the United States for one year; I lived
in the U S Army for two years; I lived in the south of the United States
(Miami and Gainesville) for four years each; I lived in Caracas, Venezuela for
almost eight years: and I have lived in Italy since 1 May 1983. I make no
claim at being an expert. I like people and wherever I have been I have
found people with whom I could enjoy myself, and I have been
sophisticated enough to avoid people who I concluded were unpleasant and
even hostile. I sincerely believe that there are more biophilic personalities
than necrophilic ones, and that what hateful people do might be considered
more riveting ”copy” for newspaper editors and Hollywood script writers.
But, more on this later in this essay.

One of Professor Jacques’ principal observations about China is that China

is a “civilization state” and not a “nation state.” And so, its people are more
cohesive because they have been unified more than any other Western
nation state and for a longer period than any one of them. And while
Western civilization chided other counties for not being as modern as they
are, today, at least in Italy, Italians are dumbfounded at the number of
products that bear the MADE IN CHINA brand identification in their
homes—often illegally identified with a DISTRIBUTED BY an Italian
company that imports from China without saying so.. The Chinese are
chauvinistic and even certainly racist. Go to GOOGLE and search
“Inventions of the Chinese, please?” and you will understand why the
Chinese are so proud of themselves.

My “careers” living in diverse societies have enabled me to have a myriad of

experiences that have been both pleasing and repulsive, very pleasing and
very repulsive. I am particularly outraged by the treatment of women I
beheld practiced by U S Army troops in Vietnam; by Venezuelan men in
Caracas; and now by Italian men in Italy. In Vietnam, I worked in tandem
with Australian troops and members of the South Korean Tiger Division.
Scuttlebutt had it said that when the South Korean soldiers were given
captured Chinese and Vietnamese nurses, they would rape/gang rape them
and then insert phosphorous flares into their vaginas setting them off to kill
them. I did not eyewitness this. Also, in Italy I have read that during the
Second World War both fascists and anti-fascists would stick into the
vaginas of the women soldiers they had raped/gang raped, hand-grenades
that were set off to kill them. I did not eyewitness this. I saw on the
Discovery History Channel a documentary about allied crimes against
humanity during the Second World War, and it reflected on studies made by
a German sociologist who estimates that, at least, 1,000,000 European
women were raped/gang raped by Russian, German, American, and English
troops especially during war victory celebrations.

While I was in Vietnam, I read 72 books which had been helicoptered to us

in the jungle with hot meals and mail from home. The American Red Cross
always sent us newspapers from home, skin magazines, bibles, history
books, novels, and even Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book. I went crazy reading
books that had not ever been even mentioned during my Roman Catholic
indoctrination. And the other soldiers never ever read one of these books
always being interested in Playboy and its centerfolds or hometown
newspapers and letters from home.

During my readings, I came by accident, upon mention of “the bell curve”

thinking that it was some kind of mathematical theorem and not a book
dealing with intelligence and class structures in American life. I erroneously
interpreted the idea as an ethical method of classifying the “good guys”
from the “bad guys” and all the rest in the middle. In the jungle with
American troops, I had a huge sampling to help me fact find and prove my
idea to myself that 15% of the soldiers I came in contact with were bonafide
killers, violent people, that 15% of them would not hurt a fly (like me!”; and
the rest, 70%, were actually couch potatoes who could care less about
anything, but could easily be persuaded to go to one or the other of the 15%
groupings. When the My Lai massacre was perpetrated, I automatically
thought of the 15% who could and would kill women and children, and the
70% standing there not knowing what to do, or afraid to go one way or the
other. I am convinced that there are many good people in this world, even
more than “bad” ones, but “bad” people are more interesting than good
ones, and “bad” people fit most religions’ idea that people must be saved by
them so that they can be sent to some Happy Hunting Ground usually for a
fee (“donation”). Journalists, too, prefer to write about what is brutal and
unpleasant because these sell more copies. Remember always that
Journalism is an exaggeration of an exaggeration! And Hollywood! Can you
think of something else besides Hollywood that has taught Americans to be
so stupid? (I can...American universities!)

Something very interesting happened to me in the fall of 1965 when I

returned to university for my last year before graduation and commission as
a second lieutenant, U S Army, in the Artillery Corps (MOS (Military
Occupational Specialty: Forward Observer, 1193). I had passed two summer
months at Fort Devens, Massachusetes, near Boston) suffering a limp wrist
basic training course that was supposed to be sufficient enough to save my
life in battle. It was a laugh, something for Boy Scouts, actually. The new
staff for the corps of cadets (Reserved Officer Training Corps)was being
formed, and I, to my utter amazement was selected to be the S-2 of the
corps, the intelligence officer! I couldn’t believe it and immediately thought
a mistake had been made. I never considered myself to be intelligent and
making me the S-2 had to be a mistake. I was assured it was not.

Well, that set me off to find out what was the meaning of military
intelligence, and I immediately came to understand it was not spy work—
for which I was grateful even before I came in contact with CIA agents in
Venezuela and Italy. (I had read that Vladimir Nabokov had written that
“spies get shot,” so I took his advice to heart!). My curiosity being so
intense, I went further on looking for books that would explain the
workings of military intelligence—what do trained military intelligence
officers do. And guess what book I tripped over when I was not even
twenty-one years old and still not commissioned as an officer? The Art of
War by Sun Tzu!!! Another “Eureka!”

It is just amazing how the brain works and what it keeps in storage for us.
General Sun Tzu was contrary to what I was learning in the Reserved
Officers’ Training Corps where I was taught that the Artillery is the king of
battle, Might is Right, Once you’ve got them by the balls their hearts and
minds will follow...and other such locker room ditties that I did not really
appreciate. Americans were always looking for a fight. A place to bomb
people so that they could make them buy Coca-Cola and Kentucky Fried
Chicken—or else.

General Sun Tzu had a different view about battles and wars. First, I
remembered, he advocated the avoidance of battle—unless absolutely
necessary. To go into battle was almost a sign of weakness for him, and
definitely not in keeping with the humane aspects of Chinese philosophy
especially expressed by Confucius and Mencius. War had to be staved off for
as long as possible through diplomacy and attempts at gathering intel about
one’s enemy so to outsmart him before war broke out, or to be well
prepared to demolish the enemy if it was deemed necessary. Crucial also to
his thinking was this: if the enemy had to be encountered in battle, when
the battle was won and over, the victorious soldiers were ordered not to
ransack the population they had just defeated, but to treat the people with
respect so that they would come to become friends respected by all.
Soldiers also would be ordered back home in order not to cause financial
stress on their own people’s financial interests by remaining in a country
that had to be paid for their presence. (Try telling that to some dumb Jesuit-
educated Irish-American Pentagon general who wants to conquer the world
for Vatican, Inc!)

In the late 1980s and early 1990s. I witnessed an amazing event in the city of
Prato, seven kilometers from my home, where I had been teaching English
to successful Pratese textile industry tycoons and maybe their spoilt brats.
Chinese immigrants started arriving in Prato from medieval provinces in
China, and they were honchoed by pugnacious Chinese bosses who were
going to teach them the rudiments of the textile industry, which they did,
and who would, in about twenty-five years, re-dimension an 800-year-old
Italian commercial enterprise to fit the needs of the Chinese! The racism
heaped upon the Chinese by the Italians reminded me of Mississippi and
Louisiana in the 1930s. (“We are not racists. We are Italian racists. We hate
everyone.”) The Chinese, mostly undocumented, were kept in bunk beds on
Sundays, their “day off,” playing cards and smoking waiting to re-begin their
grueling 16-hour shifts Monday morning.

Before long, Chinese peasants would join in on the textile bonanza, and a
Chinese bank had to open a mercantile establishment in the city of Prato
now probably the most-populated Chinese city in Europe! Today Italians
look for work in Chinese companies in Prato!

But the Chinese were out to spread their wings, and lickety-split they took
control of the centuries-old leather goods production companies, mostly
family affairs dotting the outskirts of the Florentine city of Firenze know all
over the world as “Florence.” The Chinese undercut labor costs and worked
even more efficiently than the sons and daughters of the leather companies’
owners who were more interested in going to discoteques, driving sleek cars
gifted to them by their parents, and shunning the word “university”
whenever it might have been mentioned. It was like taking candy from a
baby for the Chinese. (One “aristocratic” Florentine woman told me:
“Italian schools are ‘****’! I have to spend a fortune every year sending my
three kids to England to be educated!”)

Soon the Chinese were entering other businesses again undercutting to get
what they wanted. I will use a fictitious modus operandi to explain more
clearly the Chineses’ methods. Let us use a pencil for an example. An Italian
pencil producer would be approached by the Chinese who would offer to
produce pencils for him for €0.20 each. The Italian immediately saw an
enormous profit for himself because the cost of labor in Italy was (is!)
atrocious. And the taxes, too! So, quicker than you can say Jackie Robinson,
the Italian closed the production constituent of his company, and became a
distributor of pencils in Italy for his Chinese producers. Italians were put
out of work, Italian distributors raised the retail prices of their pencils, and
a what I call “subterranean inflation” was created adding to Italy’s already
dire economic woes.

To what extent the Chinese hold economic sway in Italy is top secret, but I
will bet the Italians themselves don’t know exactly what is going on. Ask an
Italian how many of the products in his or her home are made in China!
(Time for a re-read of The Art of War; or, how about a change of its title to
The Art of Twenty-First Century Economic War?)
When I was a boy in Brooklyn, New York I had a little transistor radio
imported from Japan recuperating from the devastation of World War Two
and the insane use of two atom bombs to “defeat” it. Japanese products
were called junk, and it was rumored that the Japanese had confederated a
city named USA so that Japanese merchants could stamp MADE IN USA
on their products set to be sold in the United States. Little by little the
Japanese were exercising their commercial muscles and soon SONY,
PANASONIC, TOYOTA and others came to be the favorites of the
Americans and not the American TVs and cars Americans themselves
called, and still call, “junk.” The Chinese are now in this same growth
technique—perhaps more powerfully so and with an uncanny finesse
beyond the imagination of everyone else—totally shunned by the snottiness
of the Harvard Business Review. Think of Lenovo and Hisense and others on
the way.

It always goes without saying—when it should go with saying—that the

twentieth century was the most violent, shocking period in the history of
Humanity. Almost 200,000,000 combatants and non-combatants were slain
to show off the megalomania of dictators and their consorts. That century is,
for most, an unattractive chapter in some history books and university
dissertations, and not a wake-up call that there is something seriously
wrong about how we ought to live together in peace and quiet and not
disrespect and chauvinism and racism—unfailing hate for others.

I believe that there are two compelling outlooks that dominate how we
“think” and how we interpret, superficially, what we conceive to be
happening and what is happening especially to us: Judaic-Christian
“Democratic” Capitalism and Marxism-Confucianism. The one we might say
violently struggles to accumulate wealth; and, the other challenges the
manner in which that abundance is accumulated at the expense of those
who toil to gather that lucre for their owners or his or her bosses. We can
call this fight off a group action between “the haves and the have-nots,”
always keeping in mind that more and more human beings are being born
and most of them cannot have nor have not anything. More and more
people are coming to understand that injustice is the order of the day, and
the number of necrophilic characters will eventually far outweigh those we
can say are biophilic. Bertrand Russell said we need to do three things, at
least, to survive and make a better world for all: We need a world
government (world order), a sane, just distribution of wealth, and a
population that can live in harmony with Nature. None of these, in my
opinion, are even talked about especially now when we have reached,
perhaps, the point of no return.

Let me return to the viciousness of war, please. In the infantry companies I

served as forward observer, medics carried 500-tablet bottles of Librium and
soldiers would pop them into the beer cans they were drinking. When a
medic would come to give me an inoculation I would ask him what it was
for, and his answer always was: “I don’t know.” Coming down the Ho Chi
Minh Trail was not only arms and other supplies for the Vietnamese fighting
against the American occupation of Vietnam, there came light illegal drugs
(marijuana) and heavy illegal drugs (heroin). Thousands of American
soldiers became addicted to heroin, and when they returned as addicts to
the United States demand and supply, as Milton Friedman would say,
created a scourge the American society has never recovered from still. (Kind
of like reminds you of the British drugging the Chinese with opium, no? Ah,
but you say “All is fair in love and war!” Really?)

I will bet you are interested in how our spiritual needs were cared for while
we were in Vietnam. If you were a dentist, lawyer, doctor, or chaplain in the
U S Army, you were immediately given the rank of captain. A Roman
Catholic chaplain, in fact, sat next to me, in the window seat, on our flight
from Travis Air force Base to Saigon, and when we reached Guam for a fuel
stopover, we landed on a runway that was flanked on both sides with rows
and rows of B-52s—considered the largest jet aircraft, manned by a ten-man
crew, at that time. The chaplain went crazy rushing from one side of the
front rows where officers were assigned, blessing, fanning crosses, through
the windows of our Boing 707, over as many B-52s he possibly could. I
didn’t know at the time, and I suspect he did not, too, that these gigantic
bombers would become the ones that dropped bombs on millions and
millions of North Vietnamese men, women, and children in order to save
them from the Godless perils of communism. The Fourth Division’s
chaplain commander, an Irish-American colonel, was famous for fanning
crosses over ammunition dumps, giving general absolution to grunts about
to go on combat assaults even if they were not Roman Catholic,, and raiding
men’s barracks in base camp tearing down the Playboy centerfolds they had
affixed to the walls of their quarters. I never saw a rabbi in Vietnam in a
captain’s uniform. (Kind of like reminds you of Montesquieu’s aphorism in
his Persian Letters, written in 1721: “No kingdom has ever had as many civil
wars as the kingdom of Jesus Christ.” No?) “Separation of Church and State,
what’s that,” said the chubby, Irish-American Roman Catholic cardinal of
New York.
Back to Vietnam, or “Nam” as it was slovenly referred to by most soldiers in
Vietnam. The Fourth Division’s base camp was located in Pleiku, in the
mosquito-infested Central Highlands. The camp was a mini city—a division
consisting of up to 25,000 soldiers. Here was located all that was necessary
for keeping the “war” going: maintenance facilities for tanks, artillery
pieces, jeeps, trucks—you name it. If something had to be fixed, it was sent
to Bravo Charlie or “the BC.” Admin offices, sick bays, a Roman Catholic
church, kitchens, and beer halls. Drunk soldiers in the evening were all over
the place, and brawls between them were normal—especially between white
supremacists from the south and Afro-Americans. At one point, Major
General Peers, commanding general of the Fourth Division, ordered a
lockup of all weapons in Bravo Charlie because there were so many gunshot
wound incidents. A New York Times article I once read, stated that 85% of the
soldiers in Vietnam served in a base camp. They were called “base camp
warriors” by the other 15% of us who actually had served on the battlefield.
The word “field” was dreaded by those in BC. Racist sergeants, mostly from
the south of the United States, blackmailed Afro-American soldiers with
field duty if they did not “tow the line.” Sometimes 30-35% of infantry
companies were populated by Afro-Americans. (I was in Bravo Charlie
when both Martin Luther King, Jr and Robert Kennedy were assassinated.
Southern non-commissioned officers, on both occasions, came up to me
smirking, “Lieutenant, we’re having a party tonight to celebrate the death of
that nigger bastard/that nigger lover, are you coming?” There were times I
was more afraid of the American soldiers than I was of those whom I was
supposed to be fighting against.) Some soldiers, so terrified of going to the
field, shot themselves in the calves of their legs, avoiding their bones, “The
Million Dollar Wound,” and were sent home for rehabilitation. Others
stopped taking their anti.malaria pills and wound up in mini pools filled
with huge chunks of ice to keep their 108°F fevers from cooking their
brains. Oh, you say, “war is Hell!”, especially if you have never been in one!

There is another “Eureka” volume that impressed me very much, and I wish
to share it with you. The study is the work of Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of
Human Destructiveness, first published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape
(1974), and on the back cover of my copy there is this dedication to the book
by the historian and writer, Lewis Mumford: “If any single book could bring
mankind to its senses, this book might qualify for that miracle...This book is
the product of one of the most alert, the most penetrating and the most
mature minds of our time.”

In it from pages 490-574, there is a brilliant psychoanalysis of Adolf Hitler:

Malignant Aggression, Adolf Hitler, A Clinical Case of Necrophilia that should
interest all individuals attempting to make of this world we live in a better
place.

The population of the world in 1974 was 3,990,000,000—just about half of

what it is now when Professor Fromm published his expertise. The
population of the world in 2050 is estimated to be close to 10.000.000.000.
That figure is the number scientists believe the world environment can still
support. There is hope.

Professor Fromm made a valiant effort to distinguish for us the difference

between a biophilic and a necrophilic personality. He “took apart Hitler” in
a truly outstanding manner, attempting to explain to us just how one
personality could reach the almost very bottom of the pit of human
degeneracy.

Personally, and in my most depressed moments thinking about human

nature, I can thank Professor Fromm, and Bertrand Russell, for insisting
that hope is rational and there is the possibility to change the course of
action we are now used to following. Yet, how many of us in the world are
ready, are actually aware of our plight, in order to pull ourselves out of this
horrible body politic of worsening?

At the beginning of his The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness Professor

Fromm eloquently disproves those who believe the human animal is born
instinctively monstrous. He reminds us of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s maxim
that “we are born free, but look around, we are all in chains.” We have made
a disarray for ourselves and almost everyone else with whom we come in
contact with. (Jean-Paul Sartre: “Hell is other people”). The human being
is a gross, fastidious complexity, and we are finding it—every day—more
difficult to live together in a dignified manner attempting to be, humane,
righteous, proper, and wise.

He also “divides” human nature into biophilic and necrophilic typecasts

helping us to distinguish between the two ways that we might do what we
ought to do. Necrophilic personalities can pose a danger for themselves and
others. If we can pinpoint their characteristics it might be possible to avoid
another Hitler or insidious religious or political leader who might bring us
closer to ruin. More importantly, by identifying the personality with
necrophilic tendencies—as the bell curve identifies for us social structures
that are positive and negative—we can also avoid entering relationships
with those who come to bear distress, disappointment, and unhappiness in
the lives we are trying to live in a biophilic manner, that is, a way that
encourages us to live in harmony with our surroundings, with people we
admire and respect, and with hope for the future of mankind.

End Part One

Authored by Anthony St. John

22 August 2022
Calenzano, Italy
anthony.st.john1944@gmail.com