Elena Basile explores how the West is often guilty of manipulating public perception to justify conflicts, citing examples of contradictory Western policies ranging from the deportation of immigrants in England to complicity in violence in the Middle East. She highlights public indifference to serious human rights violations and criticizes the penchant for military intervention in Ukraine, questioning the morality and consequences of Western actions. Basile condemns war rhetoric, considering it a propaganda ecosystem that not only justifies aggressive actions but also pushes young Europeans towards direct conflict, drawing parallels with the pre-war atmosphere of World War I. In the Italian context, she points out the hypocrisy of sanction policies against Russia and the problematic impact on Italian businesses, concluding with a call for more autonomous and less U.S.-influenced policies.
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by Elena Basile
As Domenico Gallo writes in a superb article, public opinion now endorses crimes that would have been unthinkable in Europe just a few decades ago. The confirmed news of 500,000 Ukrainian deaths since the war began has been ignored. A failed country that applies martial law and sends its youth to the front through forced recruitment to serve U.S. interests should be the banner of liberal Western values?
The so-called enlightened thinkers overlook contradictions. Sunak, the prime minister of a country that was once a symbol of liberalism, issues a directive for the deportation to Rwanda of illegal immigrants landing on English shores. We are regressing to the time before 1807 when the slave trade was abolished. The West is complicit in the genocide of women and children in Gaza and the West Bank, the famine orchestrated by Israel, and only students rise up, facing arrests and discrimination from a press that shamelessly labels them as antisemites. The president of a democratic European country paves the way for the deployment of French, and hopefully European and NATO, troops in Ukraine for a direct confrontation with a nuclear power. Are young French people willing to die to reject Ukraine’s neutrality? A journalist, a correspondent in Brussels for many years for a renowned newspaper, always inclined to explain Europe to Italy, never Italy to Europe, a journalist I knew well as an ambassador and who once displayed appreciated logic in analyzing relations between Europe and Moscow, now steps up to defend Macron’s initiative. We must close ranks at such a delicate moment in European history and before elections, the real dividing line should be between those who choose war with Russia and the others, the bad ones, the peacemakers, the defeatists. It feels like the eve of World War I. But are these watchdogs truly unaware of their responsibilities, having no children or grandchildren to protect?
As always in history, the conflict is justified by lies, Russian aggression, the violation of international law, the imperial threat to the liberal order and to Europe itself. The West creates the world it then fights. Since May 2022, Hypatia and many other analysts have predicted Ukraine’s defeat, the failure of a U.S. neoconservative policy that has applied the same destructive pattern, destabilizing entire regions of the world since the unipolar era. The coup in Maidan Square, for which there is objective evidence, and the documented NATO escalation have led us to conflict. We have created the aggressor by turning Kiev into an anti-Russia. And now they want to drag our young people into a war to fight the reality they themselves created? “We must respond to the violation of international law,” says President Mattarella, with no substantial difference from Meloni and Schlein. Did we ever supply arms to Baghdad or Kabul against the U.S. invaders? And the assault on Libya should have determined the rightful supply of arms and intelligence to the country attacked by China and Russia?
George Orwell said that freedom is the right to say that two plus two makes four. From this, all other freedoms follow. But the voice of rationality is dying, drowned out by the egocentric and predatory vision of the West, which considers international law a set of false rules to defend its own geostrategic interests.
A meeting is convened at the Farnesina with Confindustria. The propaganda echoes. In front of astonished Italian businessmen who fear for their businesses in Russia, they stutter the catechism: defense of international law and freedom. In reality, Italy has been participating in a real economic war against Russia since 2014, which since 2022 has had the declared aim (by Draghi, by Letta, by Meloni) of bringing Moscow to its knees, dealing a blow to its economy, and provoking Putin’s downfall. The sanctions, harmless to Sweden and Poland, have been lethal for Germany and Italy. Could retaliations not have been anticipated? Minister Tajani really comes down from the clouds? The table should now magically defend Italian businesses that are at the mercy of Moscow. And how? By having the courage, like Turkey, to dissociate from NATO’s criminal policy? After the illegal seizure of 300 billion Russian rubles, the Anglo-Americans, unconcerned with the fate of the euro, would like to convince us to use them for financial aid to Ukraine. In this climate, Tajani calls the Russian ambassador to the Farnesina. To say what? How inept we are at defending the interests of Italy and all of Europe?
Il Fatto Quotidiano, 7 May 2024
