There is a bloody war that has been sacrificing Ukraine for months. There is another, political and economic, that is waged at the global level of which we are a part, at least in its consequences. There is a third, which seems to cover everything, that of communications. We all lose in it.
Regarding the war in Ukraine, analysts direct our attention to military strategies, to the action of international politics, to the effects for the economy, to the new geopolitical realities. Many of them advocate realism and what that means in terms of power, managing balances and the real exercise of sovereignty. Some worry about the progress or the result of the operations, others about the outcome. There are those who only conceive an end of absolute winners and losers, and those who anticipate and encourage an end marked by conciliation as irremediable and desirable. There are those who are more interested in the effects on the current and future economic plane, while others are concerned about the new balances, about a new geopolitics, about a Russia more tempted to rapprochement with China or more consistent with a past historically linked with West.
Yehezkel Dror, a Hebrew University professor known as Israel’s Henry Kissinger, warns that realism has been largely missing from the West’s game plan. “This war, like most wars, will end without an outright winner,” he concludes, lamenting the absence of a true “rule-based order.” What currently exists is, in his opinion, “only a partially coordinated international system” insufficient to guarantee global security. When he states that “Russia is, and will continue to be, an important and indispensable partner on the world stage”, he does nothing but coincide precisely with Kissinger, who warns that inflicting a crushing defeat on Russian forces in Ukraine would have disastrous consequences for long-term stability. of Europe. In their view, European leaders should not lose sight of the longer-term relationship and should not risk pushing Russia into a permanent alliance with China.
The common issue is that of security, of each country, of each bloc, traditional or historical, or generated by the development of both their own power and, increasingly importantly, by that of alliances. In view of the strategists are the new threats, the possibility of deterrence, the construction of “a defense ecosystem” as the United States Department of Defense warns in a recent document.
The issue of security, however, depends more and more on another that touches society as a whole and each individual. It’s the communications. When the world is most in need of certainties, the world of communications becomes more difficult, dark and impassable every day. The struggle between democracy and authoritarianism is also that of information with truth and meaning and that of information as an instrument of control and domination. A world of manipulated information is increasingly conducive to authoritarianism. The daily storm of false information, interested, distorted, mediated, aimed at creating confusion or scandal, sowing false truths, false commitments, fears or illusions, distorted visions of reality, feeds an indefinite power, little controllable, protected simultaneously in the figuration and in the mask of impersonality.
The uncontrollable power of the networks has become the instrument to promote a dark climate in which more information is not better information, or more clarity, or more trust. An information system like this weakens true leadership and perverts it into the figure of influencers. Converted into a refuge for many, the world of networks feeds the enormous crisis of credibility that affects us today and sustains the abuses of power, both anonymous and diffuse and personalized and concrete. If any conclusion can be drawn from this climate of confusion fueled by the torrents of daily information, it is that in this war we all lose.
