FOR A RATIONAL POLICY
If there is one thing I enjoyed reading about European history, it was Roger Martin du Gard's monumental work ‘The Thibaults’. How the different members of that family saw the future and how they believed it could be faced. A work vindicated by Albert Camus who brought it to fame.
One of the main characters, the young Jacques, devotes himself to progressive, positive thinking in order to fight against misery and ignorance. On the eve of the First World War, Jacques and his friends discuss political developments in European countries and prepare to spread their ideas of peace and progress.
?In the chapters relating to 1914, he writes: ‘I know that capital is deeply divided, and capitalist antagonisms will be accentuated. All the more reason to think that before allowing itself to be dispossessed, capital will play all its cards. And one of the cards it is counting on most is war, which will suddenly give it back all the ground that the social conquests have caused it to lose. War will enable it to disunite and destroy the workers’ ’Violence is a weapon of tyrants. It will never bring the peoples true liberation. I am certain that no progress can be made by despicable means. To exalt violence and hatred in order to establish the reign of justice and fraternity is nonsense, it is to betray the justice and fraternity that we want to reign in the world’.
?It was not their ideas that won the day. Many European countries, France among the first, moved from preparing their war machines to mobilisation and combat. More than a hundred years have passed. Europe, which after the Second World War lived under a balance imposed by the victors, at least managed to keep the war away from its territory. But when the balance was broken by the destruction of the Soviet Union, Europe, dominated by the United States, began to take steps to transform the old balance into something new which, created under the auspices of NATO, is the European Union that today bows down the nations that make it up. I recall that Spain could not join the European Economic Community unless it first accepted NATO membership.
?And now we see that the old and defunct patriotism of the nations is turning into a new European patriotism in which the feelings of the people are manipulated under the umbrella of ‘European values’. And in the face of the increasing failure that citizens perceive in their daily lives, citizens are asking questions.? There are two types of patriotism. One is made up of all the hatreds, all the prejudices, all the coarse antipathies that peoples, brutalised by governments interested in disuniting them, harbour against each other. There is another which, on the contrary, is made up of all the truths, of all the rights that peoples have in common. Unfortunately, it seems that what is taking hold is more like the former.
?And unlike the 60s, 70s and 80s, with young people against their governments, armed with the music of the counterculture and the slogans of ‘Make love not war’, in 2025 there is nothing like it. Songs like John Lennon's ‘Imagine’ from 1971, or John Denver's ‘Let us Begin’ from 1986 have been some of my favourite anthems, and I want to remember a few verses from Let us Begin.
For the first time in my life I feel like a prisoner, slave to the powers that be. And I fear for my children, as I fear for the future I see. Tell me how we can continue to fight against each other.
What does it take for a people to learn. If our song is not sung as a chorus, we will surely burn.?What do we make weapons for. Why keep feeding the war machine. We take it out of the mouths of our babies. We take it out of the hands of the poor.?Tell me, what do we make weapons for?
Have we forgotten all the lives that were given, all the vows that were made saying never again, never again. Now for the first time this could be the last time. If peace is our vision Let us begin, let us begin
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