2023 was a year of war. Its last days are marked by this progress of barbarism: for Russia, Iran or Hamas, the natural condition of their political existence is violence. Their goal is to establish a new world order, on this path any sacrifices are acceptable. Hate and resentment fuel the desire to continue their wars.

2023 has only confirmed the classic connection between modern wars and ideologies that seduce and rule the conscience. The pogrom provoked by Iran through Hamas is a borderline case that illustrates the survival of anti-Semitism in its brutality. The ultimate goal of the act of October 7, 2023 was to once again confirm the will to destroy the entire Jewish people. As for the partisan blindness of those who caused civilian suffering in Gaza while ignoring the horror in which they were complicit, this is another sign of our times. American universities, through their institutional voices, have become laboratories where the ingredients of this new anti-Semitism are created. The demons of the 20th century do not really sleep: radical progressivism gives them, in the name of global social justice, a new intellectual respectability.

In Ukraine, Russian aggression does not stop, and the prospects for the future are dominated by the same spectacle of devastation and crime. Overwhelmed by tyranny and seduced by primitive nationalism, the Russian nation, in its majority, chooses to support a regime whose goal is to restore an empire that never died.

The attacks of these days, as well as the statements of Russian officials, also clarify the status of a possible peace that Russia would be willing to conclude. Such a peace would mean not only the dismemberment of Ukraine, but also the evacuation of the Western presence from the Central and Eastern European space. For the Russian Federation, our countries are a vital space, which it claims in the name of security guarantees. An internal empire needs an external empire, as in Soviet times.

The war that Russia is waging in Ukraine, in this reading fueled by official paranoia, is a war to defend borders threatened by the onslaught of the global West. The Kremlin despotism is going to arrange a new election Potemkiniad. The lifetime presidency of Vladimir Putin is a carefully prepared reality. Military mobilization corresponds to this new totalitarianism. Russia is a huge barracks, over which the image of a respected father towers. Stalinization is an expression of this tragic collective drift.

Russian peace under the conditions dictated by Moscow’s arbitrariness would be tantamount to accepting a new Soviet yoke. Imperialism is a political pathology with which the Russian nation seems to identify in massive proportions. Criminal actions in Ukraine are a transcription of the vision of the world accepted by the entire nation. Silence and cowardice are suffocating Russia: aggression is the only way to be a state led by Putin.

We have a duty to confront the treacherous voices that preach shameful peace with reason and patriotism. The existence of freedom in Central and Eastern Europe is possible only if Russia is in debt. In its terrible consequences, peace can be more terrible than war itself. Resistance means to show the courage of duration.

2023 was a year of war, and its lesson is as clear as possible. Peaces created by barbarism are not peaces, but only rewards for the aggressor. _

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