“The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil.”
Genesis 3:22

Which interpretation?

Does this mean that the Western civilization is ‘better’?!?

Or does it simply mean that some people (mis)use every opportunity they identify?
Using the fact that language is imprecise, by definition.

“The people who are the biggest critics of Western civilization have never experienced anything else” is… anywhere between
an ‘exaggeration’, if we remain polite, and a blatant, inflammatory lie.
Just check what Putin’s propagandists have to say about the subject. To name but a single source…

Furthermore, having “never experienced anything else” prevents anybody from having the right to criticize the very thing they have experienced all their lives?!?
Putin would be very happy to hear that…
His subjects aren’t allowed to criticize what’s going on ‘under his watch’!

And yes, people who did experience the alternative … Not so fast.
Not all of them! Just check what just happened the other day in Bulgaria. 30% of those entitled showed up and voted – 57% to 41% – the Putin friendly presidential candidate. Iliana Iotova.

“Some of the West’s fiercest defenders were born somewhere else. Konstantin Kisin grew up in the Soviet Union, Ayaan Hirsi Ali in Somalia, Garry Kasparov in Baku, and Masih Alinejad in Iran. They know exactly what life looks like without free speech, free elections or the right to criticise the people in charge.
Meanwhile, the West’s loudest critics often have the most comfortable lives in history, tweeting “capitalism has failed” from a MacBook in a café in Brooklyn. They’ve never had to queue for bread or whisper their opinions.
When the people who escaped tyranny are warning you about something, it’s worth listening to them before the people who’ve never seen it.“

Which brings us to “capitalism has failed”.
Another apparently precise statement which hides more than it reveals.
Or reveals something hidden so deep that even the speaker doesn’t know it’s there?

Capitalism is a tool.
A way of doing business. A ‘psychological space’ where people trust each-other – to fulfill what has been promised – and where everybody is free to pursue their goal. So far as everybody else remains free do the same thing!
Whenever anything goes wrong in this space, when capitalism ‘no longer works as advertised’, it’s the people who have used the facility! Not capitalism per se…
Only a ‘naive’ carpenter blames the hammer when a finger gets hit. Instead of the nail.
Only a ‘naive’ customer blames the public toilet for being dirty, right? A toilet doesn’t soil itself…

A restaurant would have been a better ‘pretext’ than a toilet? In our attempt to demonstrate how language works?
A toilet re-focuses the attention of the reader?
Yep! You got it. That’s how it works.
The handy-people involved in the propaganda business use words to play your emotion.
Insert obvious truths in the message and use them to focus your attention. To divert it from the less palatable things they are going to sneak under your radar. Like “the people who are the biggest critics of the Western civilization have never experienced anything else“.

Proofreading the post we realized some of you might ask: ‘But Putin’s henchmen, you just mentioned them, are civilized people. Why do you disparage them?’
Civilized… yes! But do they currently behave as if belonging to the Western Civilization?!?
Which brings us to the next possible question: ‘Do we consider Kisin to be a Putin ‘enabler’?’
Not necessarily in an evil sense. But certainly an effective one. He might not understand what he’s doing but… it’s exactly his kind of messaging that enables Putin’s ideas to penetrate into the Western hive-mind.
‘Sows the doubt which opens the mind’.
If you paid any attention to what you’ve just read, you’d notice the open trap.
Being open minded is considered a good thing. By the people raised in the Western culture….
The problem with untrained open-mindedness being that that mind becomes a prey-in-waiting for ‘hackers’.