Category: VIEWS

The battle of Stalingrad claimed two million victims. Does that make it a genocide? Obviously not, since genocide is the deliberate elimination of a national, ethnic or religious group, or an entire people, and not a bloodbath that is more atrocious or on a larger scale than others. There were three genocides in the twentieth century, those of the Armenians, the Jews and the Tutsis, to which neither the 7 October massacre nor the bombardment and siege of Gaza can be compared.

It is just a hypothesis that the general prevailing moroseness will call crazy, absurd and totally unrealistic, but let us still imagine it. Let us imagine that, after discreet consultations with the United States and the European Union or some of its members, the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, revives the Arab peace initiative launched in 2002 by his father’s predecessor.

With two worlds facing each other, it looks like the Cold War, but it is much more worrying than the Cold War was. On one side, Europe, the United States, New Zealand, Australia, South Korea and Japan: the Democracies, on the other, China, Russia and whole swathes of Asia, Africa and Latin America – all that part of the world (the ‘Global South’, as it is so falsely called) that sees the time as ripe to take historic revenge by hastening the end of five centuries of Western hegemony.

For Poland, Europe and the world, this is a huge relief. With this very clear victory for the opposition, the Poles have escaped the constant erosion of the rule of law, press freedom and women’s rights that the outgoing majority had imposed on them. The European Union, for its part, is seeing the end of the dangers that the assertion of a Hungarian-Polish-Slovak coalition would have posed for its functioning, its decision-making and the clarity of its support for Ukraine.

Some are already saying this is Israel paying the price for the colonisation. It is the growing injustice in which the Palestinians live, they explain, that has led to this mass killing, because such an outburst of hatred would not have been possible if all hope of peace had not died.