On the 16th, our admired humorist JL Martín published a cartoon in La Vanguardia that has the category of an editorial, where a couple of people asked a young man who had set up a tent protesting the war in Gaza : “The protest camp for the invasion of Ukraine, where have they installed it?”.
It seems that for a certain extreme left the more than 200,000 deaths (according to some sources) in Ukraine caused by the Russians do not count. Those two gentlemen could also have asked about the protests over the wars in Burkina Faso, Somalia, Sudan, Burma, Nigeria, Yemen and Syria, with many hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, women and children. But there is no camp protesting about it. Does this make any sense? Are the dead different from one war or another? No, the dead are all the same, with their illusions, their right to live, the right to be educated, to have a family, to enjoy life, to have children and grandchildren, and to die in peace.
All this is truncated by a bullet, a bomb or a missile, manufactured, perhaps, far away from where they cause so much pain.
War conflicts are big business for some, the arms manufacturers, and a big drama for many more. How many would win if the wars ended! All. Isn’t it time the wars stopped, that countries stopped killing each other? Or would it be necessary for aggressive extraterrestrials to arrive with the intention of exterminating us and occupying our planet, so that human beings stop fighting each other and prepare together to defend ourselves?
We have some enemies that are not extraterrestrials, but they can be lethal and I will not tire of repeating them: climate change, drought, floods, epidemics, malnutrition and hunger, extreme poverty and other serious problems that we must solve, all of humanity working together, not killing each other in wars that are a shame for everyone.