I am the typical baby boomer, I was born after the Second World War and I grew up hearing my parents and the world talk about the Third World War and the threatening atomic bomb. I must say that despite seeing the devastation that I knew in my childhood in Hiroshima or Nagasaki and also worrying about dozens of movies about Nazi horror, the war in the Pacific or the concentration camps, my childhood was almost peaceful. It was very clear to me, yes, that since then humans were capable of ending human life on this planet.
Small, but already able to understand well, I had to live through the scandal over the missiles in Cuba. Knowing about the Soviet presence on that Caribbean island and fully understanding that things could get very ugly for humanity at any time. However, time passed and with everything and the nuclear threat, between Vietnam, the fall of the Berlin Wall and Chernobyl, well, more or less we calmed down. Yes, humans, she thought, are very crazy and violent and self-destructive, but some sanity still reigned on this planet. Ouch dammit! But this 21st century arrived and once again everything changed again…for the worse.
The Covid-19 pandemic arrived and occurred in the midst of another dangerous disease that had already spread in many countries around the world: the threatening populism.
The war between Russia and Ukraine comes to complicate everything even more. And I have a feeling that things will end as badly (complete with the active participation of the United States and the European Union) as they ended in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran or Libya. Once again, we sapiens are going to do what we like the most: play with fire. When a war begins, everyone loses their minds, the crazy way of acting appears in the rulers, especially when they are leaders who feel charismatic, authoritarian and tyrannical. Things don’t look good at all.
I am not a historian, but what I have read I dare to say that most wars usually start with minor incidents that complicate relations between nations. And yes, these conflicts are rarely limited or self-limited. Conflicts are born, grow and frequently get out of control even of their mere protagonists. It seems to me that we are in one of those.
Ambition, hunger for power and of course ineptitude play a huge role in all of this. Let’s not forget that winning a war implies the annihilation of the other and the narcissistic autocrats who want this take advantage of that latent aggression (which humans have such a hard time controlling). Ukraine, Russia, the United States, the European Union and the rest of the world will come out (if they come out) of this conflict more impoverished and hurt than before them.
For the good of humanity, I hope that this Third World War never happens, that this is not “the charm” and that we return to that delicate balance that a second cold war would imply. If only.
psychologist
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Psychologist, driver, writer, commentator for Grupo Formula.