Some fifteen hundred years ago the barbarians, without cultural or legal background, without the slightest moral restraint and making violence their way of life, put an end to the refined and rich Roman Empire. Five hundred years of an unprecedented revolution in the history of humanity, which turned human beings into citizens and subjects of rights, they were struck off the face of the earth for their inability to find mechanisms to continue progressing and prospering. The ruin of the empire or its exhaustion allowed a few hundred thousand barbarians who had never read Xenophon or Julius Caesar to put an end to the greatest power in the world at that time, questioning the foundations of the Empire until the Enlightenment, a thousand years later. .
Europe has been a battlefield since the time of Julius Caesar to the present day, if we exclude the years from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the invasion of Ukraine, barely thirty years. The collective drama of the Second World War convinced Western European leaders that democracy and political, economic and cultural union would be sufficient bastions to guarantee peace, but we forgot that in a world that is much more globalized than ever, the largest part of the population lives in authoritarian regimes in which terror is the way to impose the law and that they are aware that their survival depends on the defeat of the free world. And what is more serious, that the fighting forces of these regimes are on our borders.
The ultimate cause of the war in Ukraine is not the expansion of NATO towards the Russian borders, but From liberal democracy to the Slavic world, supposedly incapable of following Western models. What successive Russian governments in history have feared the most has been their people’s yearning for freedom; they have dedicated violence and terror to their physical and political extermination; and to the intellectual, the conviction that the Slavic world is only prepared to be ruled by Genghis Khan or Attila more than by a weak democratically elected government by sick societies that value material well-being more than intellectual or personal.
In these months we have analyzed the possibilities of Ukrainian victory or defeat, the West’s ability to resist the Russian gas embargo, the strength of the European Union or NATO in the face of aggression, the collusion of some European countries with the invasion by his own agenda and even the possible political and geostrategic compromises that a Trump president could have agreed with Putin or Xi Jinping to divide up the world, skirting the wishes of an important part of the population, but in this tactical analysis it escapes us basically.
This week we heard that the chairman of luchoil, the largest oil group in Russia, that is to say the most important economic man in Russia, has committed suicide; and he is not the first either in Russia or in its political orbit where weapons are jammed only when it comes to subverting a legal action or the political opposition. We have seen on the news that a twenty-three-year-old young Russian journalist critical of the war in Ukraine was found dead in a suitcase. And neither is she the first. Putin represents the same evil and thirst for terror as Nazism or Stalinism. Violence from power is justified to maintain a form of power that consists of the enrichment and luxurious life of the ruling class and the misery of the rest, burying the French Revolution and the social changes of the 20th century in Europe.
China is not much different; citizens imprisoned or disappeared for not wanting to be vaccinated, organized kidnapping of entire cities. A government that makes social engineering its way of life, which without a doubt would have been the dream of Mengele and that Orwell or Ray Bradbury masterfully described, will turn communist and authoritarian China into the world’s greatest economic power in a couple of decades, which has not happened in human history since the establishment of liberal social democracy.
The free world faces, once again, two military powers with which there is nothing to share because they are our antithesis. They represent everything that cost us so much to leave behind and that took the lives of millions of people in wars and repressions and famines caused by Dantesque from which no one survived to eliminate their story. The “Double Homo Sapiens» of the 21st century should be incompatible with this way of life directed by an elite that bases its elitism on the total absence of empathy.
The world we live in is not big enough for the cohabitation of the two political systems, and the Russians and Chinese have known this for many years. We cannot forget that the USSR, since the beginning of the 20th century, and China since 1949, have organized all the wars, violent acts, subversive guerrillas that have occurred on the planet, with the sole purpose of eliminating Western democracy and subjugating that world. who once ruled the world by his moral and intellectual superiority.
The war in the Ukraine has shown us two conclusions that we sometimes questioned: that freedom is a desire to which all human beings aspire, except those who make the absence of freedom of others their own freedom; and that it is the individual, with his unlimited capacity for innovation and creativity, who generates economic, technological, and cultural progress. The authoritarianism of Putin or Xin JinpingIt has not made its peoples better, but infinitely worse and weaker, and this is a great part of its danger.
With our help, Ukraine can reverse the military situation, but before Moscow agrees to a full withdrawal from Ukraine, we would see the recruitment of millions of soldiers, the forced mobilization of arms factories, the calling in of China, Iran, Venezuela, Argentina , Algeria and all its acolytes, to send their troops to the front; and if necessary, Moscow will resort to nuclear war before giving in, before being defeated.
For every step we take to help Ukraine, the totalitarians will take two, in a battle to see who surrenders first, but Europe has much more to lose since we citizens believe that the freedoms we enjoy are indestructible, and that we can survive in an island of freedom in a world dominated by totalitarianism, and also to safeguard our way of life. Unfortunately it is a great fallacy. War in Europe and Asia is inevitable, unless someone occupies the White House and decides to look the other way and make a pact with totalitarianism to divide up the world, sacrificing freedom, and we all accept it as a lesser evil.
what is at stake in Taiwan it is whether it is part of China or not, but whether the Taiwanese are free or not; what is at stake in Ukraine is exactly the same, their freedom and their right to be what they are Europeans. If we want to continue living in the world of freedoms born from the defeat of Nazism and Communism, we will be forced to face each other on the battlefield because Russia is not going to give in. Thinking of a dialogue or solution with Putin or Xi Jinping would be like trying to negotiate the Jewish cause in Europe in 1940 with Heydrich and Himmleruseless, dangerous and demoralizing.
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