Asking a few questions

A very unusual year: where are we heading to?

Victor Angelo

 

The Russian Armed Forces are currently firing thousands of shells a day at Ukraine. My friend Zulmiro, who is, and always has been, a primary communist militant, is not bothered by this volume of daily destruction. For him, every Ukrainian is a Nazi. Although he cannot explain the concept of Nazism in the year 2022, the accusation, imprecise as it is, justifies everything and tidies up the matter. It is impossible to argue with him, despite many decades of friendship. In view of this, and moving to a more general level, I ask how it will be possible to launch a process of negotiations between the Ukrainian leadership and Zulmiro's idols in the Holy of Holies, the Kremlin? That is one of the big questions of the moment. There is talk of diplomacy, but that, what does it mean?

Meanwhile, the Russian gamble continues to be on force, terror, and violation of the international order. Vladimir Putin and his men want the annihilation of the Ukrainian state and the surrender of its leaders. To achieve this, they will continue to machine gun and wipe out Ukraine. Systematically and intensely, with total inhumanity and a great sense of urgency, to weaken the Ukrainians' capacity for resistance and legitimate defence to the utmost before the promised arms arrive from Western countries.

Many do not want to look seriously at the question of self-defence, preferring, on our side, the comfortable ambiguity proper to nations well established in life. On the one hand, we help the victim and, on the other, we try not to harass the aggressor beyond the limits that could jeopardise our peace of mind. We keep repeating that we are not at war with the Putin regime, a half-truth which certainly makes him laugh with irony. He is at war with us, and he knows that the wars of today can be fought with missiles and cannons, as in the case of Ukraine, or with power cuts, cyber sabotage, disinformation, financing of extremist groups, and much more.

Self-defence raises a strategic question: either we ally ourselves with the aggressed, the weaker, or tomorrow it will be our turn. We may be on the verge of the decisive moment: to support with a new kind of intensity or just with minimal costs?

Looking further ahead, I would say that it has been decades since the international situation reached such a dangerous point as now. On top of a pandemic that has paralysed the world, we now have a combination of very serious conflicts and tensions. In Ukraine, Yemen, around Iran, in and around Burkina Faso, Libya, Myanmar, in addition to the never-ending crises in Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Congo (DRC) and others.

In the most developed countries, people are coming out of the peak of the health crisis with a very acute consumerist fever. The issue of global warming, and the accelerated destruction of nature, has disappeared from the radar of citizens and the speeches of politicians. Even Greta Thunberg, who had mobilised global attention in the period before the pandemic, can not make herself heard.

Then came war, thanks to the imperialist and dictatorial madness of Vladimir Putin. I am sorry to say to the analysts who talk about these things that this is not a geostrategic issue. Putin wants to be the Tsar Peter the Great of our times, when he may end up being seen as the little Hitler of 2022.

Meanwhile, the tension between the US and China has entered a far more dangerous phase. And the impoverishment of the most vulnerable countries, something that has disappeared from the fat print of newspapers, is accelerating. In Sri Lanka, the Sahel countries, Central America, Haiti, and Pakistan, to name but a few. And the economies of the richest nations are increasingly living off the debt of future generations, amidst inflation that shows the mismatches between production, imports, and consumption patterns. Meanwhile, multilateral organisations continue to lose strength and image.

We are at a crossroads of critical uncertainties and serious risks. Where are we heading to? And where are the visionary leaders capable of proposing common-sense paths?

(Automatic translation of the opinion piece I published in the Diário de Notícias, the old and prestigious Lisbon newspaper. Edition dated 18 June 2022)