In the age of communication, unthinkable in past centuries, we have immediate news, today’s technology allows us to be informed immediately about what is happening in the world, missiles, bombings on our screens.
We witness the destruction and cruelty of the images of war, our society does not seem to be shaken, and it becomes a preoccupying instance of social normality, in which we do not feel the need to be informed about what is happening in the world.
social normality, in which we are not able to truly dialogue.
There is no doubt that violence has left no region of the world where it has not been expressed and wars, as a political expression, are the ultimate expression of this, although there are some war conflicts, such as the “forgotten wars”, which do not make headlines because they leave few dead or, above all, because they do not affect the agendas of the great world powers.
Wars are intimately linked to human history and are the continuation of the politics of countries by other means…, it is a real political instrument, a continuation of political relations in conflict.
Wars involve not only warlike conflict between contenders, but a very broad spectrum of a series of aggressions of all kinds and encompassing all aspects of the life of a nation.
all aspects of the life of a group, ethnic group, social class, people, nation or country.
The real drama of the victims of war is the loss of identity, work, social status and the inability to recover who they were before the war.
The wars of this century have no start or end date, no formal declaration of a “State of War” and They are characterised by the fact that they are multiform in the course of the conflict,
But they cannot be explained without a marked responsibility on the part of the major powers.
Today’s world is structured differently than at the beginning of the millennium, which had a unipolar structure with the US as the only superpower. Today we have multiple poles of power, with the US competing with China and Russia.
Russia is a rival in the political-military sphere and is in fact a superpower in this field, having taken the decision to invade Ukraine, knowing that it cannot be attacked on its own territory without putting humanity in a situation where it would be a threat to the world’s security.
without putting humanity in a situation of massive nuclear destruction. We are therefore witnessing a time of global power struggles, between the shift or not of its hegemonic centre, from the West to the East.
On Tuesday Putin announced the suspension of the nuclear arms treaty signed with the United States, but he made it clear that this is not an “abandonment” of the agreement, but rather a freezing of it.
but a freeze, arguing that Russia “must be prepared to conduct nuclear tests if the United States conducts them first”.
While it is true that the global narratives, whether news or discursive, of the three current issues: feminism, climate risk and animalism, which stand out as global discourses in all latitudes above local contingencies, veiled intentionality of exclusion of internationalist looks against wars and growing armament is evident in these.
This invisibility is intentional on the part of the media and the intellectuals and professionals dedicated to this issue.
Universalist humanism, which is also expressed internationally, has not ceased to raise its voice for peace, denouncing the risk of atomic bombs and organising collectives to raise awareness of the importance of peace and disarmament. An example of this is the successive Marches for Peace and Nonviolence that this movement, through its organisation “World without Wars”, has been organising worldwide since 2010, covering the 5 continents and all the cultures of the planet.
Moreover, they are an active part of the International Campaign for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons (for which they were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize). ICAN’s anti-nuclear activists and other peace initiatives have, as of 2017, succeeded in getting virtually every country to sign the treaty. And despite 185 signatures and the treaty entering into force in January 2021, it still awaits ratification by eight countries: the United States, China, Iran, Israel, Egypt, India, Pakistan and North Korea.
Currently, the world still has 13,400 nuclear weapons. While some countries continue to pursue their nuclear potential, others are working to expand their arsenals.
This raises questions that we should ask ourselves: What is wrong with us, that we do not speak out against the horror of any war? Are we humans asleep? Are these humanists and other activists who are asking her to speak out against the war?
Are humanists and other activists speaking out against war just “isolated attempts” that are impossible to unite globally? Have we lost faith that the dissenting voice in the face of barbarism will be heard?
Have we stopped believing in people’s influence on decisions, or have we become so dehumanised that we fail to see the pain of the other? And finally: Have we naturalised wars, treating them as just another natural disaster, one that we are powerless to deal with, like earthquakes, hurricanes or tidal waves?
When we are faced with this animal (anti-human) response to wars, where it is all about annihilation between sides, any justification, however elaborate, is out of place and should not be acceptable to anyone.
Nobodies should not be acceptable to anyone. When the media incites us to take sides (echoing the justifications of the side it adheres to), it is because we have similar value systems to those who wage war and run the arms business. This is how the human being is being turned into a thing, an instrument for material profit, for political gain, an economic good and a tool of the power of the elites. Our existence and life itself is taken as a mere commodity in every sense of the word. We need reflection and committed action by society at all levels to put an end to wars worldwide and to all forms of violence until we are disgusted by it.
Collaborators: Juan Guillermo Ossa Lagarrigue; M. Angélica Alvear Montecinos; Sandra Arriola Oporto; Cesar Anguita Sanhueza and Guillermo Garcés Parada. Political Opinion Commission.
