An enormous confusion is produced by the inability of the HIM to act in Ukraine and other conflicts that devastate the world, when its objective is to maintain international peace and security, as well as the protection of Human Rights. Added to this are the infamous statements of its senior managers maintaining that Hamas is a “resistance movement”, thus justifying the aberrant terrorist attacks against Israel on October 7, sowing doubts about the neutral essence of the institution, today occupied by rogue states. and thousands of left-wing officials allied with extremist Islam by mandate of the “progressive international”, as is the case of the UNRWA headquarters in Palestine, used as refuges for Hamas, where dozens of its officials participated in the massacre of Israeli civilians. We must add to this disturbing news, the absurdity of the misguided North American foreign policy in Latin America, especially in Venezuela, contributing to creating uncertainty about the democratic future of the region.
But before we continue, let’s review some ideas about uncertainty. I will begin by quoting Werner Heisenberg, Nobel Prize winner in Physics, who in 1932 stated the so-called uncertainty principle, according to which it is impossible to precisely measure the value of the position and momentum of a particle. For his part, Stephen Hawking, in his theory of time, says: “Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is just a hypothesis. Although the results of experiments often agree with the theory, we can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict it.”
If in Physics things are not absolute, on the contrary, they are uncertain, they are even more so on the human scale, since our small and sometimes colossal daily uncertainties have become a disturbing way of life. In the absence of certainty, people feed on illusions, like lobsters, who are attracted to a lure and do not see the net trap, the trap that consists of a cylinder that narrows in the shape of an inverted funnel, so that when the lobster is introduced towards the bait, it falls into a tank from which it cannot leave, remaining there for days, until it is collected, stored and later distributed “alive” to the restaurants.
Regarding the locusts, their naivety is the cause of their irremediable fate, as is ours, since we take the bait of the irresponsibility of Western politicians. Hence, astonished, without provoking any international reaction, we read the news in which the Iranian fundamentalist regime, following its theocratic dictate of subjugating the infidels of the West, continues to nourish the terrorist organizations of Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthis, while accelerates the enrichment of uranium for its ballistic missiles aimed at Israel, a country it has sworn to erase from the map. Let us add to this the entry of thousands of jihadists diluted in the avalanche of emigrants who daily penetrate the borders of Europe and who will swell the terrorist networks nestled in the heart of their cities where they sow terror, sheltered in the shadow of the political correctness of the EU rulers, protective NGOs and far-left political organizations allied with Islam. In this account of events in real time, we cannot ignore the exponential increase in the massacres of Christians in Africa and the Middle East, without this awakening any reaction in the West, not even from the Vatican. Not to mention the impunity with which Putin relives the Stalinist horror, poisoning the dissidents one by one while he advances his new hegemonic ideal, overwhelming Ukraine and threatening Europe.
Returning to the theme of uncertainty, journalist Guy Sorman is right when he says that the future is not written: “Politics and history obey unwritten and unpredictable laws and, consequently, ungovernable and uncontrollable. (…) The British Karl Popper advised us against predicting the future, since it, by definition, does not exist. How can we predict something that does not exist? In the field of economics, Friedrich Hayek affirms that the economy obeys so many variables that no one is able to control them, and, consequently, no one is able to foresee the future order. (Guy Sorman, The future is not written, 01/09/2024). However, in January 2018, I published an article titled “The Uncertainty of Locusts” that I am revisiting today, in which I delved into the wave of uncertainty that at that time plunged us into perplexity and insecurity. Regarding the latter, news that at that time had gone unnoticed in the midst of so many superficialities and global calamities was still significant to me. It was the inauguration of the bronze bust of Putin, adorned with a Roman emperor’s toga, erected north of Saint Petersburg in 2015. An AFP dispatch reported on the ceremony in which the statue was unveiled and the words of opening: “The image of a Roman emperor is that of wisdom and this corresponds to the historical role of Vladimir Putin who managed to unite Russia and Crimea.” Russia forcibly annexed this Ukrainian peninsula to its territory in March 2014. Without being motivated by any pretense of geopolitical analysis and only to react to this symbolic omen, I wrote about its plan to restore Soviet influence through the creation of the “Eurasian Project , having countries like Iran and China as allies, to confront the spiritual hegemony of the West”, as its ideologue Alexander Dugin, promoter of “the supremacy of Eurasia over a decadent West”, had been expressing it. The Russian army’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, caused Europe and NATO to wake up bewildered from their nap, this time with the ferocious dinosaur growling at the foot of the bed.
In recent days, NATO announced the carrying out of defensive maneuvers, declaring the need to prepare for an imminent war, while opinions in the USA and other EU countries clash over whether they will continue to support this war on behalf of the West. The Ukrainians cannot face the Russian military machine alone, nor maintain their Maginot line of trenches any longer, nor reverse the exhaustion of their people on the brink of collapse, nor will they be able to recover the Crimea. The withdrawal of its troops from the Avdiïvka front this week is significant. The promises to register it as a member of the EU as soon as possible suffer delays induced by the cynicism and double-facedness of European politicians. The European Union lacks statesmen and has been led by anodyne politicians who forgot the maxim of Flavius Vegetius (IV century): If you want peace, prepare for war, “If you wish to preserve peace, prepare for war.” For historian Emmanuel Todd, World War III has already begun: “This war has become existential for the United States: Both Russia and the United States cannot escape or withdraw from the conflict. That is why we are now in an endless war, in a confrontation whose outcome must be the collapse of one or the other.” I think that if Russia reached kyiv it would be a catastrophe, a total war.
But uncertainty is present with emphasis in Latin America, where the perversion and corruption of the drug cartels prevails in political institutions, re-editing aberrant dictatorships in Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua, operated by Cuba in its unpunished subversive expansion against the democracies for 66 years, just 90 miles (144 km) from the USA. The dramatic Venezuelan crisis is the reflection of a destructive political psychopathy in which 29 million people subsist in the most complete uncertainty, unable to exercise their citizen rights, without means of communication to express themselves, being hostages of local and international criminal organizations. 8 million people have fled from that splendid country, the largest migration crisis in the world. “Venezuela is at the mercy of a game of dice, of a fate that may or may not reach its destination” (El Nacional, 01/17/2018).
In the midst of an uncertain fate for the inhabitants of this planet, there are those who worry about the lobsters they are going to eat for lunch. By decree, the Swiss government prohibits cooks from submerging live lobsters in boiling water, because lobsters experience pain when boiled. “Crustaceans must be stunned beforehand with electrical shocks or mechanical destruction of the brain, before being thrown into boiling water,” the law says. It is likely that this awareness is due to the story Consider the Lobster (2006) by American journalist David Foster Wallace: “Even covering the pot and moving away from it, you can hear the lobster’s squealing, tapping, and squeaking against the walls. Or the creature’s paws clawing at the pot trying to get out. In other words, the lobster has a lot of you and me if we were thrown into boiling water.”
Thanks to the Swiss, there is now a certainty for lobsters to end their cruel uncertainty before being cooked, there will undoubtedly be hope for us humans to put an end to ours before we are swallowed up by totalitarian ogres.
The philosopher Fernando Savater, who due to his critical position against the “progressive” left has just been expelled from the newspaper El País, Spain, in an article titled Uncertainty, stated: “The Heisenberg uncertainty principle, in quantum physics, says that the position and speed of an elementary particle cannot be known at the same time. Similarly, the wise man fails to know the conjunction of his historical situation and the accelerated vertigo of his discoveries. And perhaps none of us can determine together where we are and where we are going in this beautiful and atrocious world.”
