The world is not a cake to be shared, so radical speeches, efforts to polarize citizens, and the search for conflict and confrontation are out of place.
In November 1918, after thousands of deaths and widespread devastation in Europe, France, and Great Britain decided to accept the plan proposed by US President Woodrow Wilson, which pressed Germany to surrender unconditionally to the Axis Allies.
The Great War was ending, the one that had promised to end all wars and had shown the new capacity for destruction and opened the door to endless regional crises.
The end of the First World War ushered in an international system of new alliances and counterweights. The reconstruction of Europe was not easy, nationalist sentiment grew in Germany, which with the right rhetoric would become the greatest threat to the new international order that emerged with the League of Nations.
With the passing of the years and the harshness of the Great Depression, the world did not find the desired economic or political stability, much less social. The interwar period was the prelude to a deep international crisis that would trigger World War II.
Some lessons were appearing, that the world let pass; not only then, but also later. The wounds left by the wars of the first half of the 20th century were falsely closed; and, they intensified as the leadership of the United States made it the hegemon par excellence. In the bipolar system, the counterweights were generated from the block of non-aligned countries, those that ensured neutrality in the dispute between the Soviet Union and the United States for military, economic and geopolitical power.
Faced with the promise of the American dream, the countries of what was then called the Third World (today developing) succumbed to the US presence and its intervention in national or regional affairs.
More than a hundred years after the end of the Great War, with a widely polarized world, the actors of the international world seem not to be clear about the lessons inherited and in force for a year.
Nationalism is not the same as patriotism, nationalism unleashes the demons of the past, the statement is also accompanied by a criticism towards those neopopulist discourses in which one’s own interests are put before and the most important thing that a Nation has, its values, is overlooked.
The discourses transmitted by the new ideologies polarize, offend and manipulate society, submerging it in obscurantism. History does not forgive and less does it forget, history teaches.
Wars are never justified, no matter who or how they are started. We have not learned the most important lesson; the path is always peace. Although it may seem like it, the world is not a cake to be shared, so today more than ever radical speeches, efforts to polarize citizens, and the constant search for conflict and confrontation are out of place.
Wars only serve the purposes of those who generate them, project them, and achieve them.
