It was Juan Goytisolo who popularized the expression in these same pages in 1999, in an article that denounced the hypocrisy of those who criticized NATO’s intervention to stop the ongoing genocide in Kosovo, but were blind to the crimes of Serbian ethnonationalism. Goytisolo was not in favor of the bombing, for reasons that he hinted at in the first phase of the article: “Due to personal circumstances, no one can detest aerial bombing more than I do, even those that, as the Allied high command claims, cause a minimum from Collateral damage”. His mother, Julia Gay, died on March 17, 1938 in Barcelona under an Italian bomb dropped by Mussolini’s aircraft in the service of Franco.
Unfortunately, the writer from Barcelona is no longer with us, but it would have been interesting to count on his moral rigor and sharp pen to judge the attitude of these same leftists now, when once again voices are being raised against NATO’s attitude in the face of such a threat. It would be like the one put forward by Vladimir Putin on Ukraine, which is supported by the 14,000 deaths caused since 2014, when Russian forces occupied Crimea and their pawns in the Donbas basin lit the fire of an uncivil war.
Are his words from then valid for the current circumstances, when NATO has limited itself to reinforcing its eastern flank and rejecting any injunction from the Kremlin to submit to its dictates? keep in mind that they kept their lips sealed during the modern-weaponized medieval siege of Sarajevo for three and a half years: their front-line pacifist proclamations put executioners and victims, besiegers and besieged, in the same bag. What kind of virus has crept into the political reasoning of that sunken left —baptized, rightly so, by the Albanian writer Bashkim Shehu—, a left that parades with columbine innocence or hateful hypocrisy to the cry of peace, peace?
The one in Kosovo was the only war waged by the Alliance without the legal cover of the United Nations. If open war over a Russian invasion were to break out now, nothing would be as legal and just as the Ukrainians defending themselves. It would also be nice if their allies and friends would help them if they asked for it. The only illegal and unjust war is the one that Putin has been waging in Ukraine since 2014. And yet, a certain left continues to consider the Alliance as the dangerous armed wing of US interests and not as the only protective umbrella they have. Europeans to protect themselves against very certain and proven threats.
For a certain left, still sunk in the well of its prejudices and clichés, the use of military force in any case, even in self-defense against a war of aggression, continues to be a taboo.
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