Thursday, March 28

Would you fight for your country?

In the Ukraine they went from one day to the next from listening to recipes on the radio on how to prepare kapusniak soup to how to make homemade Molotov cocktails. And the rest of the world to live, live, minute by minute, his invasion and his war. The war, a spectacle as repulsive as it is magnetic, gives an audience. Geographical proximity raises the Compartir. Fear, you know, paralyzes. Also not to change the channel. Although the news is repeated and only the count of days and victims seems to move. This war thing, well, it doesn’t have the ringlets of the series; Let’s see when the second season starts. And although the comments and conversations that it generates, too, are standardized and exhausted. Until we get bored, as happens with everything, among all these reactions I am left with a recurring question today: would you be willing to fight for your country? In Ukraine, we have been seeing it from day one, even before, when the invasion was still a delusion that no one wanted to believe but for which they were already preparing, many are doing so.

And you? Perhaps they have asked. Surely you have thought about it yourself. A few days ago they put it to the Americans in a survey in which only a slight majority, 55%, responded affirmatively. In the country with probably the most flags in the world, one planted in each garden, and where politicians end their speeches asking God to bless America, only half (and that by responding to the survey, which is not binding and one can come up…) would fight. Some commentators, especially from the most conservative media, saw in the data one more evidence of the country’s decline, as they call it, and of its existential and faith crisis, which is also how they defined it.

Seven years ago was the last time that the Gallup polling company did its global study on how many people in the world are willing to fight for their country. The mean was 61%. Morocco, with 94%, led the classification. Japan, scalded after World War II, with 11, closed it. In between, countries like Ukraine, where 62% already assured that they would do so, 3 points more than in Russia; or Finland, with a very revealing 74 due to the border and latent Russian threat. And in the final part of the table, Spain, with a 21. Do the math today, with the conversations, to see if the numbers add up… The case of Spain, however, is not exclusive, but of the geographical environment. In Portugal it goes up to 28 but in Italy it stays at 20.

Would you fight? Not doing so shows the decline of a country? Is it a legal or, at least, moral duty of citizens? The reality, as pointed out in 2015 by a study published in the Journal of Peace Research, is that as countries progress, the more progress is made in quality and life expectancy and the more opportunities there are, the less willing the population is to sacrifice. We appreciate human life more, not just our skin, and also increase the moral values ​​that protect it and make its destruction less admissible. And that also encourages peace to be increasingly solid and lasting in the world. Decadence, therefore, or splendor? Is the existential crisis of a nation inversely proportional to the maturity of its citizens? The paradox is that this peace and this loss of will to defend one’s own country also leave the tyrants free. With that, perhaps, Putin was counting, to walk triumphantly through kyiv. Your calculations are failing you. And he can’t blame the polls. That he had invaded Japan. Or Spain.



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