The infamous epilogue of the West

JAVIER GARCIA

We are accustomed to contemplating the tragedies of the world, to witnessing tremendous injustices and brutal suffering on the news at lunchtime. The endless series of conflicts and massacres that the US planetary hegemony has given us since the end of the Second World War, and especially since the fall of the Soviet Union, has developed in us a kind of self-defense callus. One cannot spend the day thinking about bombings, destroyed bodies or torturers because life is also and, despite everything, beautiful and preserving joy must be one of our main endeavors.

But this is becoming very difficult for anyone who follows what is happening in Gaza with even a minimum of attention. We believed ourselves cured of fears and we thought that the worst of the human being had reached rock bottom. But the images we see every day confirm that this is not yet the case. What could be worse than bombing children, than forever cutting off the innocence of their hearts and eyes. What is more inhumane than ending the lives of thousands? (more than 10.000 so far, according to Euromed) and surround those who remain in horror, forcing them to live under bombs in improvised tents, without water or food and at the risk of disease.

What else can be done next, but destroy the universities, libraries, schools, mosques, hospitals, infrastructures, turning the Gaza Strip into a wasteland in which the Israeli promoters are already announcing “the dream of having a house on the beach.”

Forcing its 2,3 million inhabitants - the vast majority refugees who had already been expelled from their original lands - to abandon their homes again, pushing them towards the border with Egypt, while intentionally starving them to death (about 90% have already been displaced).

Furthermore, arrest them and publicly humiliate them, making them parade through the streets in their underwear. To surgeons, to nurses, to teachers, none of them, from what has been learned later, with any relationship with Hamas or violence.

And all, let us not forget, with the approval of the West. Firstly, from the American hegemon that sends the bombs and clearly encourages them, no matter how much its leaders publicly ask for moderation. But also from his cohort of European followers and other parties, who only in recent days have finally timidly dared to vote for the ceasefire at the UN, but continue without taking any other effective measure that could contribute to stopping this colossal tragedy.

The genocide that we witnessed live in Gaza is the infamous epilogue of the decline of Western dominance over the world, its most illustrative image. It is the absolute collapse of all the values ​​that the West once proclaimed. No one who supports what is happening by action or omission, no one who, having been able to do something to prevent it, has not done so, will be able to talk about human rights again after this without their face falling with shame.

It doesn't take too much thought to realize that the Western model is failing everywhere. It makes waters in the ecological salvation of the planet, in the solution of injustices or poverty, in respecting the freedom of expression of those who think differently, in peaceful coexistence, in the search for any type of shared prosperity between nations or communities. people

But it also pours water into the most basic values ​​by which human beings have become worthy of that name since the beginning of time: humanism, compassion, kindness, solidarity, care for others, empathy. .

When Gazan journalist Kholoud Faqawi described how the books of Camus, Shakespeare and Kafka trembled on their shelves under the bombing., did nothing other than express in a magnificent metaphor how the Western world of justice, human rights and freedom was collapsing. How the century of enlightenment was brutally extinguished, while the Israeli planes also left their city without light.

As Kholoud says, the equation has become clearer than before: we, the dead, outside the barbed wire-sealed coffin, and they, the living. The garden and the jungle that Borrell described so well. No, there is no escape for those who live in the jungle, there is, of course, no common project that encompasses them. The Western model has made it clear that it is a closed and exclusive system: the idea is not to cultivate a global garden, but to reinforce the walls that separate it and create more ghettos. A planetary Gaza, in the words of Rafael Poch.

The bad thing is that the rest of the world has realized them a long time ago and the massacre in the Palestinian strip has accelerated the conviction and indignation of millions of human beings who take to the streets everywhere to say enough is enough.

Given the impotence to which they are leading us, we are left to think that the abysses of moral baseness to which we are reaching are the last death rattle of a model that is collapsing. The final culmination of a system of savage domination.

And we are also certain that we do not want that bloody garden. Life is somewhere else. It is time to go out and defend it and claim it.

Javier García is a journalist. He has been head of correspondents in the Middle and Far East, Latin America, Europe and Africa, as well as a special envoy to different war conflicts. Currently, he is a professor of Journalism at Renmin University in Beijing. His last book is China, threat or hope.