Western culture has generated so many fictions about its own demise (in novels, films, comics, songs) that the time seems approaching to bring reality closer to fictions. Perhaps the difficulties we now have in remembering the days of the COVID pandemic in detail have to do with their strange resemblance to so many stories of mass contagion that we had previously disseminated for many years: the memories of the days of strict confinement, and of the subsequent months of preventive measures, are confusing, imprecise, and fleeting. It all began with alarms that seemed exaggerated to us, with images of Chinese markets where bats were sold, with the refusal to wear masks that we ended up using universally. Masks, by the way, were a source of wealth for many: the usual smart ones marketed them illegally and illicitly, making a killing at the expense of the collective catastrophe. But many also marketed masks completely legally, in a thousand different colors, patterns, and models. The pandemic didn't make us better, but it did once again demonstrate capitalism's relentless ability to transform literally everything into market products, governed by the law of supply and demand.
Will the same happen with kits What survival measures are the EU now recommending? We must assume that the European authorities would avoid causing such a massive alarm among the population if it weren't for a good reason: for example, to justify the rearmament operation of the member states. Fear makes us docile and makes us accept the decisions of our governments as if they were the result of a fate against which we can do nothing. Or as a lesser evil, as it tries to make Pedro Sánchez with his muted statements about accepting "decisions that won't excite us."
The prospect of locking oneself at home with a pantry full of pasta and preserves, and with large bags in case it's necessary to collect corpses, appeals to an imaginary that we all already have in our heads and that makes some smile and others generate anxiety and depression. For its part, the rearmament policy may be perfectly understandable, but this doesn't exclude the fact that it's the worst possible path for the EU: a headlong flight to try to disguise its irrelevance, in a geopolitical context that has left Europe on the periphery of everything. When it has its army, if it ever does, the EU will still be inferior to the other powers. Perhaps what European leaders are seeking is to arm their own. kit of political survival in a world that suddenly no longer counts on them.
