Stop the invasion, promote politics
Brutality, atrocity, inhumanity, barbarism… entire dictionaries would not suffice to describe what we, powerless, stunned and anguished, are seeing these days on the plains and in the cities across Ukraine, in the heart of civilised Europe. How on earth did we manage –yes, in the first person plural– to reach this point in the 2020s of the 21st century, on the very brink of a third world war, nuclear this time, after the two world wars that also broke out here in the Europe of science and reason, the Europe of freedoms and human rights, the Christian Europe that guarantees dignity, human values and faith in humanity? Could it all be a mere lie? I am overwhelmed by sadness.
But I am adding my feeble voice as well as I can to the clamour of Ukraine and to the protests of the brave young people in Russian squares. On the edge of the abyss where we find ourselves, the most urgent thing is to stop this war by all reasonable means: diplomatic, political, economic –will we be willing to pay the price or will we prefer to secure our heating gas and our growth rates?–. By all rational means, and… I shudder to say it, but I’m going to say it: by military action, too, as far as is strictly necessary.
Aware that war is always a failure of humanity and a source of untold, unjust suffering, I am saying this. It would be more ethical and more courageous if all Russian squares were flooded with active, peaceful protests against their cruel government, if all Ukrainian roads were filled with columns of resistance fighters with their arms raised before the Russian tanks. But how could we ask them for such martyred heroism while we ourselves do not risk our lives alongside them on the front line? Ukraine has the right to stand up and be helped to put an end to this ferocious aggression. It is urgent. However, we must remember that armed resistance will never be enough, and that it must never exceed the criterion of our raison d’être: the Common Good of the Earth and of all humanity.
What is important does not end with what is urgent. And we cannot forget that this story does not begin with the intolerable Russian invasion of 24 February, but earlier, with the pro-Europe demonstrations in Maidan Square and the overthrow of Yanukovych in 2014, and with Putin’s paranoid fantasies, even earlier, with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 and the disorderly dismantling of its empire, earlier still, with the setting up of NATO and the ruthless cold war that followed, and much, much earlier, with the establishment –always violent– of all state borders, and with the ambition of all empires large or small. And with fear and greed ingrained in the genes and neurons of the genus Homo, which in the Sapiens species has reached levels of violence –and insanity– unknown in any other living species on Earth. We are heading towards total annihilation.
Do we still have a chance? Not through war. A defensive war can be justified, and I deeply regret that I am forced to think so. But it should be the last option and be limited as much as possible in terms of time and damage, and ultimately inspired not by hatred and an unquenchable thirst for power and revenge against the aggressor, but… by compassion and a desire to save oneself from oneself. A defensive war should therefore be preceded by all possible attempts at dialogue and political understanding. There will be no solution for Europe nor for the world if we think in tribal, imperial, colonial, state terms, one against the other, catastrophic for everyone. There will be no solution while we fail to regard, treat and organise ourselves as a fraternal community in the sisterly community of the living. War is a failure.
So let this inferno be brought to an end by all the ethical means at our disposal, but if we want to prevent the next inferno, which could be even more searing and planetary, let us promote great planetary politics, the only reasonable step in the 21st century, inspired by the Spirit of the brotherhood of all peoples without borders, the Spirit of life and its joy, its creative flame.
Aizarna (Basque Country), 8 March, 2022
(Translated by Sarah J. Turtle)