The relationship between reality and the stories that try to explain it is not easy. It never has been. Plato tried to clarify it 2,600 years ago. The allegory of the cave chains us to a cave from where we can only see the shadows of reality. Knowledge is always beyond, beyond reach. This limitation conditions progress, our conception of the world. It’s a remora. It slows us down but doesn’t stop us. It causes tragedies, but we recover from them. The survival of the species, after all, is a chain of deaths and resurrections. We die in Ukraine, but we will be able to revive in an enlarged Europe. It all depends on luck, circumstances, individual leadership and collective will, that is, chance, circumstances and vision.
When our sight fails we can only drift with the current, not fight it to stay on course. We get carried away by the propaganda and, little by little, passivity takes us away from our ideas. We tolerate what we should not tolerate, we accept as normal what is illogical.
The Italian Prime Minister, for example, warns about ethnic replacement in a society that, unable to reproduce, needs immigration to maintain its standard of living.
Europe and the US barely raised their voices this week after seeing the Arab springs die for good with the imprisonment of Raixid Gannuixi, leader of Ennahda, the main political party in Tunisia. Accused of “conspiracy against the security of the State”, this veteran Islamist joins the twenty judges, journalists and businessmen in prison to criticize the authoritarianism of the president. Western countries, which in 2011 encouraged the democratic awakening of Arab societies, now love repression more because it “stabilizes”. They let themselves be carried along by the current of what they call the conjuncture.
India, Indonesia, Brazil, Turkey, Nigeria and South Africa, however, resist it. They seek their own knowledge. They do not support Europe or the United States in the war in Ukraine. They don’t think it’s just a struggle between good and evil, between freedom and tyranny. They distrust this Manichaeism. They prefer to stay away. They do not want to be dragged down by the inertia of the great powers. Without the ability to influence global affairs, they need to have their hands free to adapt to this post-colonial and multipolar world.
When the vice president of the United States, Kamala Harris, condemns Russia for the aggression in Ukraine and tells them that “no one is safe in a world in which a country with imperialist ambitions can do whatever it wants”, they remember Iraq in 2003, the lies the White House spread about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction to justify the invasion. They know very well that Russia has started a barbarity in Ukraine, but they do not forget that Saudi Arabia, with the support of the USA, has committed another one in Yemen, a war that has caused nearly 400,000 deaths.
When the EU presents itself as the supranational organization that most respects human dignity and the rule of law, the countries of the Global South do not forget the recent colonial past of the states that form it, the wars in the Balkans, the Caucasus and Ukraine , Islamic-inspired terrorism, rooted in inequality and the marginalization of immigrant populations in the “paradise of democracyâ€.
War exposes the limits of solidarity, the falsity of aid, the selfishness of all participants. We seemed to have forgotten it, but Polish, Hungarian and Czech farmers have brought us back to life. They boycott Ukrainian grain because it is cheaper and ruins their economies. They would still maintain the blockade if the EU had not compensated them with one hundred million euros.
Money, the exploitation of foreign resources, the preservation of the status quo. Perhaps these have not been the forces that have always moved the world?
It’s hard for us to see. It’s hard for us to get on the bad side of history and the media doesn’t help us because they don’t weigh in. On the contrary, they argue and line up. The bad guy is always the other and we deal with the lie we receive. It blinds us but it is therapeutic.
We complain about Russian propaganda about Ukraine without seeing how Fox News, America’s leading conservative outlet, is encouraging the fallacy of voter fraud in the 2020 election.
We complain, rightly, about the autocracies in Moscow and Beijing, but without understanding that the United States and its allies encouraged the growth of China without defending the labor rights of the Chinese or anticipating the punishment that industrial relocation would inflict on the classes western averages. They also expanded NATO without solving the Russia dilemma and manipulated 9/11 to dominate the Middle East and North Africa.
The West sees the world of shadows, threats it conjures up while standing as the last defender of universal values, but it refuses to admit the atrocities of the wars it causes, the support for dictatorships, the mistreatment of immigrants, protectionism and CO2 emissions that make life more difficult for billions of people.
To get outside and really see, Western leaders must be as humble as the most ignorant student and as empathetic as the best of teachers. Someday someone will be born who can do it.
