If I’d given Trump’s speech in Warsaw about the Western civilization, I would have given it a totally different spin.

Sir, Martin Wolf writes: “Development is a moral cause” “A clash of civilisations or community?” July 12.

Absolutely! And so it is immoral to promote risk aversion when knowing, as we should know, that risk-taking is the oxygen of development. If I were Trump the following would be my speech with relation to Western civilization:

“The fundamental question of our time is whether the west has the will to survive. Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost?” Do we have the willpower to stop regulators who tell our banks not to finance our young’s future, as that’s too risky, and instead earn their returns on equity by refinancing their parents’ past and present as that’s safer? Where did we lose that which made us sang in our churches “God make us willing”? And when did we give up on the citizen, risk weighting them 100%, so as to place all our trusts in governments, risk weighing our sovereigns 0%?”

Sir, Martin Wolf once told me I had an obsession against the risk weighted bank capital requirements of the Basel Committee. I confess. I do. But he himself now displays having fallen victim to that obsession a la mode that is to be against Donald Trump, as if getting rid of Trump would normalize our world.

It is so much an obsession that he like many argues that Trump’s abandonment of the wishy-washy, photo-ops, green profiteering lobbied Paris agreements, will de facto be what causes the extinction of our planet, as we know it. Its crazy!

Wolf explains “plutopopulism”, the possible source of a “clash of civilisations”, as the natural consequence of high inequality. There I agree! But the recent high inequality that is registered, for instance in the USA, is the direct consequence of QEs and alike kicking the crisis can down the road, while maintaining regulatory distortions that favor the Sovereign, the AAA-risktocracy and the ownership of houses. And on that Wolf keeps mum!

And clashes of civilization, worse than global, domestic ones, will be the result if we do not prepare in time to hinder that breakdown of social cohesion that will result from a growing structural unemployment. Sir, we need, urgently, worthy and decent unemployments. How? A Universal Basic Income seems to be a logical start.

At the end of last decade I shared much the concerns of Martin Wolf, seemingly not any longer. Why? When Wolf writes: “the west contains far too small a proportion of humanity to lay any moral claim to global management”, I am saddened. Our morality is not to be dictated by majorities.

I am born in Venezuela, educated in Sweden, worked in Venezuela, live in Washington and have Canadian grandchildren. I feel globalized and sure I cannot be defined either as a reactionary or as a chauvinist by my way or life. But, to hold as Wolf does, that “Terrorism is just a nuisance” that “could poison relations with 1.6bn Muslims worldwide”, makes it absolutely clear to me that, for better or for worse, I will never be as globalized as Martin Wolf. When and why did he so completely jump off the Western Judean-Christian civilization?

Yes, “Nazism was an existential threat”, within the Western Judean-Christian civilization. Thank God it was defeated, with the Western Judean-Christian civilization’s forces and convictions. 

@PerKurowski

If we are to avoid Nazi mentalities to take over, citizens need to be able to express their deeper inner concerns

Sir, I refer to Richard Milne’s “Rise of populists poses dilemma for Nordic mainstream” February 14.

As a son of a polish citizen who had to suffer concentration camps for almost five years, I am as far away as can be with sympathizing with Nazis. And of course I see with disgust anyone “pictured with Nazi memorabilia or uttering racist comments”. But Sir, that does not determined them to be, in any way, “uniquely awful”.

To argue so just opens the door to the exercise of dangerous political hypocrisy while closing the door on the possibilities of citizens to express their usually not at all bad meaning, deep concerns.

For a citizen, in a fairly small society like Sweden to be worrying about immigrants does not make him a bad citizen… it makes him just a citizen worrying about immigrants. Is that so hard to understand or is that what some do not want to be understood?

Sir, the repression of citizens’ feeling and worries, is precisely the best fertilizer for movements that can be taken over by Nazi type mentalities. Healthy societies need to be able to discuss, to ventilate, everything that bothers them, not only what’s political correct to discuss. 

A personal PS: My mother was Swedish. 93 years old, she passed away last Friday. On Thursday night, two not at all Swedish looking immigrants, vociferating in a totally foreign language, transported her home. I have rarely met a person more open to treat all without any kind of distinctions than my mother, but had she not the right not to feel totally at ease?

@PerKurowski