The Brave New World

Every year 1.2 million people die from road accidents worldwide (data from 2018), about 700 thousand die from AIDS (data from 2019), 435 thousand from malaria (data from 2017), die every day, 4500 humans with tuberculosis!

  In a world with more than 8 billion souls, comparing the numbers mentioned above with the "insignificant" 17450 deaths caused until today, March 24, in about three and a half months, by Covid-19, it seems pathetic and despicable.

  It seems, but it is not.

 Covid-19 has probably changed our world forever. With an effect superior to that of the bloody second world war or the dread of the nuclear catastrophe, indicated by the Hiroshima holocaust. An unknown virus, not controllable by our knowledge, exponentially transmissible, stopped the world and exposed the contradictions of the global community.

 A small microscopic being, which gets into the bowels of human cells, killing without warning and without distinguishing race, religion or gender, has achieved this prodigy.  After its recent arrival in our contact, nothing will be with before, in the institutions of the whole world and in the heads of billions of humans.

 1 - The world leadership

 Many generations, including mine, have lived under the aegis of American leadership. Whether it was the role of the police, good or bad, that of oppressor or liberator, but often that of the first fireman to arrive when a catastrophe brought pain and suffering.

 Trump's "America First" has exacerbated what it has been revenging since the last Democratic administrations. An autistic and absurd movement that denies its original vocation. First with a shift to prioritize the world beyond the Pacific and now with pure and tough patriot isolationism.

 Altruistic America, home to “all” emigrants, ideal mosaic of human difference, arrogant and naive, but present when there was no one else to help, was in a comatose state for a long time. He may have died with the arrival of Covid-19.

  So, probably, “The Longest Day”, “Saving Private Ryan” and even “Apolo 13”, will become fiction films for our grandchildren. However, for now without rival, a new China, for the first time with an imperial vocation, runs to fill the void.

 2 - International organizations

 The postwar international organizations - post 1945, strongly driven by the United States of America, seemed to be the embryo of a space for harmonious cooperation by the world's leadership.

 UN, WHO, UNESCO, or even the WTO, which was only born at the end of the last century, has gradually lost its importance. Because they did not reform themselves, adapting to the evolution of the world, and also because their main mentor and financier, the United States,dropped them intentionally.

 These realities will end up having to be recreated and, perhaps, in a new “Permanent Council” that leads them, some of the empires of the 19th and 20th centuries, such as those that played a role in Great Britain, France and the United States, will no longer be essential partners. United. But it is very likely that China and Russia are in the first row, perhaps accompanied by Turkey, Mexico, Japan. A partial anticipation of Georges Friedman's premonition in our forecast for the planet's evolution over the next 100 years. With goodwill perhaps there will be a place at the corner of the table for an EU, or what will still resist it.

 3- The European Union

 The European Union was the most creative and successful political project of the second half of the 20th century. In the post-cold war it took great steps forward, led by great statesmen, such as Delors, Mitterrand and Koll. After the generation change, with a politically defensible, but extemporaneous, enlargement was taken over by bureaucracy, mediocrity and a stark lack of strategic vision. It has become a technocratic space, where there has been no evidence, for almost a quarter of a century, of advances in fundamental areas: in foreign and defense policy, in the policy of effective economic and social harmonization, in the policy of deepening democratic instruments of participation and decision.

All this made the citizens, previously enthusiastic allies of the project, turn their backs on them and position themselves in a space that goes from indifference to rejection.

 This EU was almost chaotic in the chaos of the last financial crisis of post 2008 and is being a cluttered and dizzy existence in the fight against the current pandemic.  It is with disgust and with great shame that, as a disappointed European, I watch what two decades ago would have seemed to me like a vision from a horror film.

 In Italy and Spain, they arrive, cheerful, flag in hand - just missing the revolutionary songs - technicians jointly sent by the Russian, Chinese and Cuban “democracies”!

 Unbelievable. Mitterrand, Knoll, Delors and Thatcher have everything to pinch themselves in disbelief in the hereafter. Where is the European Union's strategic disaster platoon? There is no such thing as there is no European consultation on anything that is really important for our collective future.

 This fiasco may be decreeing the day of the dead of a beautiful and dreamy project, unique, of progress and social justice. The test of the nine will be in a while, when observing what will be the institutional reaction of Europe to the economic and social debacle, after containing the public health crisis. If not, by 2025, it may have already been replaced by the unions of the Scandinavian and Baltic countries, by the union of the Mediterranean countries, by the Franco / Germanic union, by the renewed Benelux!

 4 - The “new world”

 This crisis has shown the world without the hypocrisy of the makeup of the powerful who rule it, or rule it.

It has shown imperial giants like Great Britain or the United States, or also gigantic promises, like Brazil, led by intellectual dwarves. Some at the level of the most ridiculous intellectual destitution. Elected!

  Europe, the cradle of democracy and the welfare state, has been showing signs of succumbing to the efficiency of “modern and pragmatic dictatorships”!

 He has “exchanged” the tragic death of men for the life of fish, dolphins, birds in the submerged forests of Lake Zhangdou alongside the martyred Whuan, places that, until weeks ago, were suffocating in polluted seas and atmospheres, empty of life! Cities that haven't seen the blue sky in years!

 It has shown families whose members hardly saw each other, nor did they have a joint meal for years and now they rediscover the pleasure of talking, of supporting themselves in their problems, of living life as it should be lived!

 It has shown that you can do without shopping malls, without consumption in catadupa and unnecessary and that a big problem of everyday life would be easily solved by the rudimentary tool that we never wanted to have at home! 

 Perhaps this crisis and the suffering unfairly associated with it in a discretionary way, shows that the self-destructive path we follow leads us to artificial simulations of happiness.

 I am hopeful that most will understand and that the world where my youngest descendants will live resembles, at least, the one where I was a child and grew up.