Between the commotion caused by Rubiales’s kiss and the aerial assassination ordered by Putin, we have not paid much attention to other issues this week, details such as the other nine people killed on the Russian plane, such as the report on the massacres of migrants that Saudi Saudi Arabia carries out on its borders, such as the invitation to Argentina to join – along with Saudi Arabia – the Brics, the anti-Western bloc led by China and Russia.
In case anyone hasn’t been paying close attention, Rubiales is the president of the Spanish Football Federation, today under enormous pressure to resign for kissing one of the players who won the World Cup last Sunday on the mouth. The victim of the aerial assassination was Yevgeny Prigozhin – the Russian mercenary boss who led a mutiny against Vladimir Putin in June – whose plane was shot down on Wednesday.
The contrast between the two events is revealing because of the difference it demonstrates between the values ??of democratic and authoritarian countries. In Spain there is a clamor to punish an offense against the dignity of women; In Russia, where the dignity of women is passed through the balls, not only is murder not punished, it is State policy.
In democracies, the highest value is the defense of the life of the individual; In authoritarianisms, everything, life itself, is subordinated to the perpetuation in the power of the leader. Today in Argentina there is a debate on whether to accept the invitation to join the Brics. It is a question that should interest us all since it sums up the global battle that is being waged between those who defend democracy and those who hate it.
The choice that Argentines have to make is between remaining faithful to the democratic current for which so many have fought for so many years or changing course and joining a club of countries like Russia and Saudi Arabia, which represent mafia tsarism or the hereditary monarchy. . That is to say, XXI century democracy or Middle Age tyranny.
More data, for those who have not just been clear. The Prigozhin case, chronicle of a death foretold, comes to us in the context of a Russian regime that murders political enemies, or even perfectly innocents, without blinking an eye. With all that has been written about Prigozhin’s death, it strikes me how little has been said about the carelessness with which the lives of the other nine people on the plane were sacrificed, including a flight attendant named Kristina Raspopova, a typical girl of our times who amused herself uploading photos of herself on the networks assuming suggestive poses in a bikini. In other words, the value of life? Zero when what is at stake is Putin’s power.
It is as if Donald Trump, whose power is also at stake, imitates his Russian idol and liquidates his political enemies or the prosecutors who persecute him. Only Trump can’t because he has the misfortune to live in a democracy where the law applies to everyone equally, including President Biden’s son. Can you imagine something similar in Russia, or in Saudi Arabia?
Let’s move on to the oil monarchy of the desert, the one that also murders Putin-style. Look, first, at how the governments of European countries suffer to find the response to the wave of undocumented immigrants that arrives on their shores from Africa, Asia and the Middle East. What if to rescue them at sea, what if to host them in hotels, what if they deport them, what if –in a curious British case– send them all to Rwanda. And now look at a detailed report published this week by the human rights organization Human Rights Watch.
The Saudis, we read, do not complicate their lives. They kill them all. According to the report, the Saudi Arabian border guard systematically fires machine guns at Ethiopian migrants and asylum seekers. Hundreds, “possibly thousands”, have been killed in recent years, all unarmed, including women and children.
Groucho Marx famously said: “I would never belong to a club that would admit someone like me as a member.” The question now is whether Argentina wants to belong to a club that admits murderers and tyrants as members. Better to do us all a favor, define yourself as a country that aspires to democratic decency and decline the invitation. And perhaps Leo Messi, as a national and international hero, will lead the way by resigning from his post as Saudi Arabia’s tourism ambassador.
