As we finish commemorating Europe’s first suicide attempt during the modern era (there were others before, from the Hundred Years War to the Napoleonic wars, to the Thirty Years War), it is time to remember that this first World War could and should have been avoided; that it had been handled in a crazy and stupid way by military and political leaders imbued with power and insensitive to the misfortunes of their people. Moreover, it can be characterized as a gigantic suicide attempt by European civilization, in which millions of men, women, children, full of talent and genius qualities, villages, towns, cities, artworks were lost. And Europe survived this suicidal madness only to subsequently prepare, through the greatest stupidity, the conditions for a second suicide attempt that was even more appalling, in the number of victims, as it was in moral damage.
How then can we celebrate leaders who were so bad in managing the pre-war period, the war and the post-war period? In fact, this commemoration should have been the occasion for an important self-reflection on human nature, its suicidal capacity, and in particular that of European people.
In 1910, Europeans had everything to make the Europe of the 20th century be the happiest, most peaceful, most powerful, and the most creative of all the centuries. But we ruined it by surrendering to the deadly cycle of protectionism, nationalism, populism, militarism and imperialism.
Having not learned the lesson of this first suicide attempt, from which he came out reeling, Europeans restarted again 20 years later, again leading its colonies, and the rest of the world, into hell. And the rest of the world had to save Europeans once again: without the strength of the allies, Western Europe could have still been under totalitarian rule today.
And today? can we not see that everything is getting ready to start again? that we are, on a global scale, in the same suicidal madness?
Of course, we Europeans believe that we are safe from this madness. It does not seem like we are ready to kill each other anymore. Our generals are no longer in a position to send, without blinking an eye, six thousand men to die every day on a stagnant battlefront. Our policies are no longer driven by military impulses.
However, judging by the few lessons that we seem to have learned from this barbaric century and our indifference toward billions of people who suffer and die of hunger, and those who try to leave their hell. We believe, albeit naively, that we are capable of isolating ourselves from the rest of the world. Furthermore, seeing our selfishness, to see how we Europeans begin to divide, to fall back on ourselves, we will only succeed in becoming the prey to all the desires from those to whom we have not reached out. Of those to whom we have not been able to demonstrate that we have understood that we Europeans, more than all of us still, we have an interest in being altruistic.
We will survive only if we develop, each of us, beginning with those who are entrusted with the task of leading us, an ethical vision of the world. That is, if we are capable of contemplating our actions and their consequences within a moral framework, distinguishing good from evil, while prioritizing the dignity of every man, woman and child. In a very real sense, the same context and principles for which many millions of people have come to die in Europe for a century.
j@attali.com