I was reflecting that, by now, modesty, a sense of the ridiculous, and even respect for the office one holds seem to have disappeared.
The list of examples is endless, but I intend to focus exclusively on the most blatant ones from the past fifteen days.
The Israeli Ambassador to the UN had the nerve to accuse Spain of maintaining colonial enclaves in Morocco and occupying land that does not belong to it.
This coming from the mouthpiece of a state that reclaimed lands from two thousand years ago by militarily occupying them and expelling or subjugating those who had lived there until yesterday, and that, disregarding international recognition, colonizes regions that no one recognizes as belonging to it, such as the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank, while retaining control over what are officially called “Occupied Territories”!
The Russian Ambassador to Tokyo, responding to the outrage caused there by Putin’s visit to the Kuril Islands, explained to the Japanese Foreign Minister that they are an integral part of the Russian Federation.
Technically, he is right. The only problem is that this statement automatically condemns the so-called “Special Military Operation” that the Russians have been conducting for four and a half years. Because Donbas and Crimea are integral parts of Ukraine, whose territorial integrity Russia had, moreover, undertaken by treaty to defend in exchange for Kyiv’s dismantling of its nuclear arsenal. Instead, they invaded. Those lands chose for themselves in 1991 not to be Russian, whereas the Kuril Islands were occupied in 1945, taking advantage of the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—which, incidentally, Stalin had endorsed—and they had not asked to come under Moscow’s rule.
Then there are the Americans, who on the one hand support Morocco in its attempt to conquer Ceuta (conquer it, not “reconquer” it, because it has been Spanish for several centuries before Morocco was even conceived as such), while on the other hand criticizing Europeans for being too open to immigration.
On that point, we might even agree—but who are they to lecture us?
On anti-imperialism? Shall we go through the history of the United States from the very beginning?
Or on migrants? They are a nation of immigrants that exterminated the native peoples and that, through successive waves of immigration, has increased its population by sixty million people over the last quarter of a century—an increase equivalent to a quarter of its population.
These are merely the most ridiculous examples from the past couple of weeks. Although we are talking about three powers—Israel, Russia, and the United States—that have a great deal in common, above all their hostility toward Europeans and their actions against them, it would be naïve to think that this is exclusively their preserve.
Compounded by the thoughtless immediacy of the web, which demands instant messages, and by an increasingly superficial and approximate general education, we find ourselves confronted with an infodemic in which no one seems concerned that their bad faith and hypocrisy should at least be backed up by a logical and coherent system of thought.
That is why all these people are genuine buffoons, yet within this very same system of communication, hardly anyone seems to notice.
It is a sign of the times. We would be wrong to conclude that everything is going to hell, because everything always produces equal and opposite side effects, and these do not manifest themselves only in fake news, but also in the regained possibility of circulating politically incorrect messages.
That said, I cannot help feeling a certain compassion for today’s political spokespeople, considering the depths to which they have sunk: woefully deficient, if not entirely lacking, in knowledge, modesty, and elegance.