Ursula von der Leyen: “For the first time, the EU will finance the purchase and delivery of weapons and equipment to a country under attack”
by Glauco D’Agostino
“We have a war.” Pacifists and arms makers had breathed a sigh of relief with the Russian intervention in Ukraine. The former, because they risked losing their role after the anti-Islamic drunkenness; the latter, for the noble reasons of safeguarding employment in their factories. Sorry, I forgot arms traffickers, not to be confused with the manufacturers, as their relationships are quite different from those with a government’s approval.
Thus, pacifists and warmongers achieved the harmony we have always hoped for in the name of brotherhood. Not only, but in Italy, home of national unity governments, right and left-wing parties, once irreducibly opposed, rediscover serenity, which is a value in the COVID’s gloomy times. The only exception is the small Marco Rizzo’s Communist Party, which sided with Putin. All other parties deem the current Tsar in the Kremlin as a fascist, indeed a Hitler-like Nazi. But Putin claims to enter Ukraine to fight neo-Nazism, which is a danger to Ukrainians: a big problem for the left parties. And a propaganda landscape pouring sadly into media information and the political analyses of the wise men.
In Italy, too, one of the best-known oligarchs and a well-known Putin’s friend strongly sided with the sanctions against the oligarchs, whether or not he is aware of endorsing a political-economic behaviour that could become a practice to extend to other oligarchs for social claims. It could appeal to pacifists or class-struggle theorists. It’s a correct Machiavelli-inspired strategy but a problem for poor Prime Minister Mario Draghi, who, while notoriously dealing with currencies, has difficulty with the political Byzantinisms.
Mario has a fierce parliamentary opposition at his heels. Of course, opposition aligns on the Ukraine matter, as it is not so naïve. Its leader is studying as Prime Minister because polls give her a winner in next year’s political elections. Thus, while left-wing political forces charge her affected by Putin’s populism, she displaced them, taking sides against Putin and saving her relationship with the government and, above all, with the United States. And then, she is President of the European Conservatives and Reformists Party, whose largest unit in the European Parliament is the Polish Law and Justice group of Jarosław Kaczyński. The latter is the brother of the Polish President who died in a plane crash in Russia. Do you know what I mean?
For its part, the European Union, NATO’s political wing, has no doubts. Its Christian Democratic President Ursula von der Leyen, in her Saxon resolve, was explicit a few hours ago and finally admits: “For the first time, the EU will finance the purchase and delivery of weapons and equipment to a country under attack. We are also strengthening our sanctions against the Kremlin.” Socialist Josep Borrell Fontelles, a well-known champion of pluralism under real socialism standards, added: “We will block the Russian media in the European Union.” The supporters of freedom of information postulated by the fathers of liberal democracy agree, of course. To impose the right of the information oligarchy. Otherwise, what right would it be?
