chapotraphouse

Modernity is the product of nascent capitalism and develops in close association with the worldwide expansion of the latter. The specific logic of the fundamental laws that govern the expansion of capitalism leads to a growing inequality and asymmetry on a global level. The societies at the peripheries are trapped in the impossibility of catching up with and becoming like the societies of the centers, today the triad of the United States, Europe, and Japan. In turn, this distortion affects modernity, as it exists in the capitalist world, so that it assumes a truncated form in the periphery. The culture of capitalism is formed and develops by internalizing the requirements of this asymmetric reality. Universalist claims are systematically combined with culturalist arguments, in this case Eurocentric ones, which invalidate the possible significance of the former.

Even if one accepts the premise as true (which is already highly doubtful and based on incorrect and bigoted culturalist arguments that all Muslims, as some kind of global monolith, hate LGBT people), why would anyone care what Democrats have to say about LGBT rights when they are prepared to accept the genocide, the crime of all crimes? Any claim to a "universal gay identity or movement, universal LGBT rights, universal humanitarianism/egalitarianism, etc" is immediately undermined by Eurocentric narratives around outdated "culturalist" arguments (the idea that cultural invariants persist through and beyond changes in material conditions, and that these cultural invariants are the main drivers of history, not material conditions) which values the lives of those in the first world/"modern" world above everyone else, to the point that the genocide of hundreds of thousands is acceptable to maintain such an order. This is what people don't understand when they argue one must support Democrats, is that the entire moral framework has been undermined. How can there be any international solidarity in such a situation? Supporting a genocidal administration/presidential candidate because they promise to maintain your rights does not just lead to the death of those who are the victims of genocide, it leads to the death of contemporary humanity itself. By refusing call into question the order of the world, we enter extremely dangerous territory:

To the extent that modern media places the aspiration for a better fate than that which is reserved for them in the system within the reach of all peoples, frustration mounts each day, making this contrast the most explosive contradiction of our world. Those who stubbornly refuse to call into question the system that fosters this contrast and frustration are simply burying their heads in the sand. The world of "economists," who administer our societies as they go about the business of "managing the world economy," is part of this artificial world. For the problem is not one of management, but resides in the objective necessity for a reform of the world system; failing this, the only way out is through the worst barbarity, the genocide of entire peoples or a worldwide conflagration. I, therefore, charge Eurocentrism with an inability to see anything other than the lives of those who are comfortably installed in the modern world. Modern culture claims to be founded on humanist universalism. In fact, in its Eurocentric version, it negates any such universalism. Eurocentrism has brought with it the destruction of peoples and civilizations that have resisted its spread. In this sense, Nazism, far from being an aberration, always remains a latent possibility, for it is only the extreme formulation of the theses of Eurocentrism. If there ever were an impasse, it is that in which Eurocentrism encloses contemporary humanity.

• All quotes from Samir Amin's Eurocentrism, second edition.