Earlier this year I spent a few days in an Alpine village that
Nietzsche
often visited.
There the philosopher sharpened his
ideas about power, war and peace.
I re-read his little book
The Twilight of the Idols.
According to him,
war was the area where human beings reach their best expression.
The warrior, libertarian and sovereign, risks his life, which he despises by exalting.
Nietzsche rejects the well-intentioned pacifist.
He is only capable of making peace who has distinguished himself in war.
The philosopher glimpses the possibility of lasting peace when the best warriors decide to lay down their arms in the name of something higher.
Today the idea seems utopian to me
.
The evolution of modern societies has made war not a heroic combat but a
dirty war.
With our asymmetric wars,
“anything goes” and there is no distinction between the righteous and the sinners.
Whoever kills with a drone can do it from a great distance from a screen.
On the ground, faced with a child carrying a bomb, if a soldier does not kill him he is a fool, and if he kills him he is a monster.
Of every 10 war victims, 9 are civilians.
If a nuclear war has not broken out it is because of fear of total destruction.
This is the war and “armed peace” that Nietzsche abhorred.
If evolution has relegated Nietzsche's “noble war” to a museum, the same has happened with his concept of the “will to power.”
Today those who promote war do so out of petty appetites.
In Nietzsche the will to power is a great project born of effort and renunciation.
It is a desire to improve.
Today
in the geopolitical field, banal appetites hide behind big declarations.
Those who earn money or privileges hide there.
They are not heroes but thieves or robbers.
The words have become worn out and have led to an exchange of insults with devalued labels: “human rights,” “terrorist,” and “genocide.”
They have lost value, just like currency in conflict zones.
Who wants war?
In the United States, a country that is no longer “indispensable” but is still “inevitable,”
the military-industrial complex is the main beneficiary of wars where others die and they sell.
In the Middle East, the leaders involved (Israel and Hamas) provoke and then prolong a bloody war to stay in power.
The same thing happens in Iran and its satellites.
China threatens, incites and provides weapons
while pretending to abstain and blame third parties.
In Russia, a corrupt regime maintains itself with a war of expansion that it calls defensive.
It kills inside and outside its borders, retail and wholesale.
Only international organizations like the UN fight for peace, which
are reduced to painful irrelevance.
We are about to enter a new reactionary era with armed conflicts everywhere and a return to autocracy.
232 years ago, with the French Revolution, the world entered a new historical era, marked by popular sovereignty, a favorite of the founders of new republics on the American continent.
In 1792 the European autocracies opposed to the revolution were defeated in the battle of Valmy, near Paris, and
the floodgates were opened to the spread of democratic and republican ideas.
On the night of that defeat, the great German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe announced: “Here, and today, a new era of Universal History begins, and you will always be able to say that you were present.”
With a less precise date, in these days of varied and overlapping wars throughout the planet,
another new era begins,
which we receive with less exaltation than Goethe and with much greater apprehension:
the return to the despotic arbitrariness practiced centuries ago in the Roman Empire.
Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jin Ping, Narendra Modi, Victor Orban, the ayatollahs, and many more leaders
- even in Latin America - use democracy (most of it captured by tricks or distorted by populism)
to install autocracies.
In some cases,
declared despots such as Saudi Prince Mohamed Bin Salman or North Korean leader Kim Jon Un
even ignore their appearance.
In one way or another, everyone uses war or its threat to stay in power.
This new era of universal history is a great restoration, and it is petty.
Let's hope it doesn't last long or cause irreparable damage to the planet.
Meanwhile,
how could the war in the Middle East escalate into a major regional war or a global one (if connected to Ukraine)?
It depends on the behavior of Israel and Iran and the upcoming political chaos in the US.
If the Western world comes to define Iran as the epicenter of all conflicts in the region, it will align with the Israeli government in a major attack on the Persian country.
What would come next no one knows.
It is the geopolitical version of the “tragedy of the commons.”
Each actor plays for himself, and the ensemble is destroyed.
The author of this column is a sociologist, professor and researcher at New York University.