These were the words of the song by Michel Pagliaro and Jimmy James in 1987, and these could be the words of the countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) today vis-à-vis their number one enemy: Vladimir Putin. Supporting the cowboy policy of the American president, Joe Biden — who withdrew from the presidential race in November on Sunday —, which the United States is using to supply weapons to Israel, the leaders of the NATO countries are pushing their war machine to the limit to help the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky. In this way, they claim to ensure that Ukraine maintains its sovereignty, in addition to saving democracy.
So this war seems to us to be just and good! But let us not be naive: for most Russians, this war is also just and good. Western analysts may say that Putin is a dictator and that he exercises repression, but this cannot explain the support that his people give him despite the thousands of soldiers killed in combat. Just like their president, the Russian people also support a return to the great and powerful Russia of yesteryear.
While in the West, we proudly speak of the right of peoples to self-determination, we forget that almost everywhere in the world, and right here in Canada, we have not hesitated to plunder this right that we suddenly claim is sacred and fundamental for Ukraine. Let us open our eyes. All this is just a pretext to make us accept the indefensible, namely the massacre of thousands of soldiers and civilians who pay with their lives for what is basically just a latent economic war between Russia and the West.
Isn’t it time to consider other solutions than stupidly supplying weapons to a country that has already suffered too much? Already, several young Ukrainians are refusing to enlist. We can understand them: after more than two years of war that have led nowhere, they aspire to peace. Zelensky may demand unwavering solidarity with his nation and parade around the world to defend it, but he no longer responds to the wishes of a population tired of being constantly pushed into deadly combat against its Russian brothers.
Normally, democracy is not exercised by indefinite support for a war, but by the will of the people. Now, why should the people have to accept being massacred in the name of ideals relayed by the West or by Russia? It is all well and good to say that the Russian population is struggling with the worst of dictators, it is not by supplying weapons to Ukraine that we will be able to get rid of them. This method can only strengthen Putin in his expansionist convictions as well as fuel the repression that he exercises on his people.
Save democracy?
Joe Biden, for his part, boasts of wanting to save democracy by supporting Volodymyr Zelensky. One might ask him if this is also how he thinks he will save democracy in the Middle East, that is, by supporting a contested leader like Benjamin Netanyahu, whose response to the Hamas attacks on October 7 has already killed more than 39,000 Gazans. Are Netanyahu and Zelensky not, after all, just puppets of nationalist ideals that the powerful manipulate in the name of their economic interests?
In reality, there is no democratic ideal at stake in this war. Is it not time to awaken the humanism that lies dormant in us, to say no to such murderous policies, by asking loudly and clearly all NATO leaders to put an end to this mad power struggle between East and West? We know that this kind of war that drags on will end, as always, in negotiations. We might as well do them right away and thus avoid the unnecessary deaths of an entire youth and thousands of civilians.
The belligerents only have to sit down seriously at a negotiating table while saying they are ready to make, on both sides, inevitable and major concessions. But do they want to? I don’t think so. Intoxicated by their economic interests and by their pride in the face of the power of the Russian army, they prefer to continue to enrich their war machine. Let us listen again to Michel Pagliaro, who has the last word: “We sell weapons through diplomatic channels. The more we kill, the more money we make. It’s 200 billion dollars a year that the human race pays to kill each other.”