Will the West wake up?

It is contrary to human feeling to celebrate a war, but it is no less true that it leaves lessons and marks them with iron. He does it, unfortunately, on pains that could be avoided and others suffer that do not overcome them.

– “Certainly men who are very greedy to declare war first do what they should do in the end, upsetting the order of reason, because they start with execution and force, which must be the last and after having done it very well thought and considered: and when some disaster befalls them they take refuge in reason”, comments Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War (Madrid, 1889).

It is difficult for me to unravel, therefore, the meaning of what was declared jointly by Vladimir Putin and Xi-Jinping on February 4, as a proem to the Dantesque war that he unleashes on Ukraine. They say “strongly defend the results of World War II and the existing post-war world order…. [y] resist attempts to deny, distort and falsify history”. At the same time, as if denying what was affirmed, they announce that international relations will enter a New Era, which calls for “the transformation of the architecture of world governance and order.”

If we stick to what they adjust in the Beijing document or Pact that they sign, namely, the commitment to “avoid… deny responsibility for the atrocities committed by the Nazi aggressors, the militarist invaders and their accomplices, in order to stain and tarnish the honor of the victorious countries” – among others, China and Russia itself – it is poorly understood what hours later, one of them, Putin, carried out, namely, putting force over ethical and practical reason. Unless the underlying message of both is something else, given the omission of any reference to the Holocaust within it. Do they perhaps leave the reason of Humanity as a second order element for this New Era?

If so, Thucydides is right. Geopolitical achievement is being privileged: – “They oppose attempts by external forces to undermine security and stability in their common adjacent regions”, says the agreement between Russia and China; which once again becomes an oxymoron, given the other commitment that they place between the lines: “Defend the authority of the United Nations and justice in international relations.”

The certain norm that bequeaths the aforementioned conflagration of the 20th century and that crystallizes as the limit of the power of the States, is that of universal respect for the dignity of the human person. She has been buried for the future. Both powers – in the hour prior to the act of aggression carried out by one of them – have established, I must repeat, a different creed that they will defend “in a New Era”.

Is Ukraine, then, the baptism or turning point, 30 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain until the outbreak of the universal pandemic of Chinese origin?

“The modern journey comes to an end”, is the title that identifies my most recent book. And apparently Ukraine is the experiment, but also the opportunity of the delayed amendments since 1989. Will Western society have time for it?

The real and not virtual occurrence of war, we must admit, takes it out of its self-absorption and lethargy, of its indolence and triviality, which has even led it to deny itself as a civilization.

During the three decades traveled, he has only dealt with destroying their genetic codes. He expresses shame at the Judeo-Christian and Greco-Latin extraction of his culture. He demands to dispose of human life, freely, at the beginning and at its end; to forge other identities that detach it from the humiliating heterosexuality inscribed on Genesis; prostrate the syncretism of races to which it is a tributary; and return to its people an object and part of Nature, renouncing its lordship in order to preserve and increase it.

Westerners are surprised, however, with the unprecedented, not of the war against Ukraine but of its regressive eighteenth-century modality, in full digital planetary drift and artificial intelligence.

The Ukrainians have awakened the Western Europeans and North Americans, but not the Venezuelans. They close their year 2021 with 11,081 deaths as a result of violence while the world community asks them, mediated by Putin’s Russia, to resolve their wrongs in peace through elections; and that the victims of the dictatorship do not become very demanding.

The West leaves its Metaverse, in short, its virtual alienation and isolation to condemn what is also its sin of omission, the return of armed warfare in a time of revelry and deconstruction during which it has demolished its icons, burned its temples , and memory has been revised to demand accountability from the dead, in the name of freedom. It has wasted the thirty years that have come since the “epochal” rupture that lowered the curtain with COVID-19, causing some 5,000,000 victims without mourners on the planet, except for the cold record of John Hopkins University.

Meanwhile, those who are tearing their hair out over the massacre in Ukraine are careful not to ask the Chinese – Russia’s partners and with a view to the New Era – to repair Humanity for the cross-border damage it has inflicted on them with the “scientific” risk » from Wuhan. And Jinping and Putin say, with tombstone coldness, that “they oppose the politicization of this issue… it is a matter of science,” they argue.

The UN General Assembly, faced with the paralysis of the Security Council over the issue of the war against Ukraine, has also abandoned its apathy. 141 out of 193 of its member states have condemned the breach of peace. Only that. And the International Court of Justice intimidated Russia, risking its authority and in terms that dilute the seriousness of the event, the suspension of its “military operations.” Both parties are required to “guarantee that they will not aggravate their dispute.” They do not go further, but they do away with the ethical reason that requires discerning between victims and perpetrators. They all make your blood run cold.

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