Rival Brothers: A Mimetic View of East West Relations

By Luca Luchesini

A personal view of East-West relationship built from real life experience and filtered via the interpretation tools of Mimetic theory of Rene Girard

• Language: English
• Publisher: Luca Luchesini
• Release date: Nov 9, 2013
• ISBN: 9781310734878

Luca Luchesini

I graduated in Telecom Networks Engineering from Politecnico di Milano in 1994 and have been working in multinational companies ever since. I started self-learning Mimetic theory in 2007 by reading all major works of Rene Girard. In 2011, I published a paper about West and Middle East relationship at the annual Girardian COV&R conference 2011 dedicated to “Order/Disorder in History and Politics”. You can reach me here: [e-mail]

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Rival Brothers: A Mimetic View of East - West Relationships

Luca Luchesini

Copyright 2013 by Luca Luchesini

Smashwords Edition

"I tell you with certainty, tax collectors and prostitutes will get into God's kingdom ahead of you!" (Matthew, 21, 31)

"To God Belong the East and the West" (Quran, Surah of the Cow, v. 115)

Introduction

When back in 2005 I accepted to become the Sales support director for Turkey, Egypt and the Gulf countries, I had in the first place some second thoughts out of fear for travelling in a region that was widely known to be politically unstable, diverse and irremediably hostile to the average Western visitor. The very same feeling was echoed by friends who were reacting to the news like if I had told them I had some benign cancer and asked invariably if I was taking any special precautions when I was down there in partibus infidelium. Five years on, I have it very clear that the biggest risk we are facing in the West is simply not realizing that to the South and East of the Mediterranean there is a large and diversified civilization to which we are actually tied by thousands of years of mutual exchanges, and whose people share our very same goals of fulfilment in life while facing the very same challenges of re-assessing their identity in a world that changes with amazing speed. Sure, political stability is far away, there are objective dangers (I was in the Islamabad Marriott Hotel just three days before the attacks that claimed more than 200 lives) and many issues are entangled beyond imagination. Yet if we have to go anywhere we can only start from removing the romantic myths that, albeit comforting, keep ourselves prisoners of our own (mis-)representations and leave us in search for the next scapegoat, be it Osama Bin Laden, the Jewish lobby or the immigrant living next door. The material herein contained has no claim of sociological, political, anthropological or even less theological or philosophical accuracy. Much if not all of it is likely to sound rather obvious to the expert eye. However, the target here is not to provide yet another brilliant idea, but rather a no-nonsense approach to the everyman when coming into contact with the other side of the Mediterranean over a beer or a cup of tea or, should one have the possibility, thoughts to be used in a television talk show, trying to popularize as much as possible the potent ideas of Rene Girard’s Mimetic Theory. Short, it is a small contribution to