… We can do better. Better than climate change and out-of-control pandemics. Better than a wave of power transfers unconstitutional in a context of growing populism around the world. Better than a cascade of human rights violations, better than brazen massacre of people in their homes and places of life, in hospitals, schools and refugee camps. We must do better than a world constantly on the brink of collapse, a socio-ecological house of cards. We owe it to ourselves and to others, to our children and their children… (Dal ‘Human Development Report 2024‘, UNDP).
In the meantime we rearm as hasn’t happened for a long time. Without any kind of inhibitions, we are once again talking about wars as the only strategy for resolving international and local conflicts. The root of all evil, the forgetfulness, seems to have taken power in the cultural and political imagination of the people. Without the memory of the rubble and the irreversible disfigurement of human faces everything becomes possible again.
Words, an expression of thought and the vision of the world that accompanies it, are transformed into weapons of total destruction. Hiroshima e Nagasaki they have gradually lost, with the passing of years and witnesses, the ability to be a symbolic bulwark against human brutality. Perhaps nothing has been learned from the suffering of the innocent and the forces of absolute evil return to seduce the spirits long emptied and expropriated by commodification of the capitalist system. Exit the dead end into which the world fell is the title of the report.
Read Also
EU Council, agreement between 27 countries on the use of profits from Russian assets to rearm Kiev. Plan for “strengthened military-civilian preparation” confirmed
Human development, for its analyses, takes three aspects into consideration. Life expectancy, education and per capita income of citizens. These factors, combined together and related, provide elements of understanding in the context of integral human development. Nine of the ten countries where human development is weakest are located inSub-Saharan Africa. These are Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Mali, Chad, Niger, the Central African Republic, South Sudan and Somalia. The only non-African country is Yemen.
The PNUD report reminds us that countries with populist governments have a higher GDP rate weaker of other countries. The Niger, a country in which I have had the privilege of residing for the past 13 years, continues, according to the report’s index, to remain faithfully among the last places on the planet. We have gradually become accustomed to looking at reality from below which is a place of truth as it reveals the type of world we find ourselves inhabiting.
A polarized worldunequal and dangerous – reads the subtitle of the cited report. Polarized in the sense that it finds itself divided internally and externally between wealthy minorities and the excluded, marginalized or simply ‘ballast’ masses of the global system of apartheid. Polarization is the fruit and root of the gradual disappearance of the poor and not of poverty. The inequalities they also and above all express themselves through borders, which are perhaps their most eloquent metaphor. Economic, political, cultural, religious and symbolic frontiers. A piece of paper and a visa can radically change a person’s identity and future. Detentions, deportations and forced repatriations are one of the expressions more loving of human inequalities.
Read Also
Euro-rearmament soars: military spending will reach 290 billion in 2025 (+35%)
A dangerous world, the report recalls. Dangerous how, for whom and for how much… We live, not from today, in this continuous strategy of ‘terror’, hostages of fears, threats, epidemics, wars, famines and monsters that every era invents. It will therefore not take long for the don Chisciotte of the situation that, with the faithful squire who tried in vain to make him mend his ways, was fighting against windmills like enemies to be defeated. Instead, let’s make our words our own Rosa Luxemburg who said: ‘I feel at home everywhere in this vast world, whether there are clouds, birds and tears’.