If you want to understand how people really feel, don’t look at their words, look at their actions. Words: “I hate America” Actions: raising hundreds and thousands of dollars, dozens of lawyers, and sweeping protests across the country to stay in America. So why is it that people of foreign ethnicities, such as myself, choose to be here? Because western values of individual rights and democracy are objectively superior to anything else in the world. It is under these value systems that human beings thrive. This isn’t my opinion or bias, this is what evidence has shown over history in alignment with anthropology and human flourishing. This doesn’t mean that the west is perfect, nor are necessarily its policies and often times constituents are violated and/or wrongly deprived of the rights afforded to them, and the west has certainly made some disastrous impact out in the world historically. That said, the post-modernist worldview that espouses cultural relativism teaches the flawed notion that all cultural and structural practices and values are equal, and preference for one over the other is rooted in a superiority complex. Because of this belief, western academics & activists have often pushed for the survival of the most brutal, barbaric, and dangerous regimes in the world under guise of “defending their culture.” The only thing this has ever done is harmed the people living under them for the benefit of the out-of-touch western academics’ fantasy. Nobody’s culture is death. Everybody’s culture is life. There is a reason people will kill themselves to live in the value systems we enjoy here in the west, and if we care about people anywhere in the world, we we would spend more time supporting the rights of people wanting to globalize democratic values, rather than globalizing “the intifada.” Funny how nobody wants to be deported back to the intifada, isn’t it?
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