Ukraine Poem by Marcel Aouizerate

Ukraine



Has it come to the point where we must ask ourselves: 'Who is ready to die for Ukraine? '. In this age of industrial scale killings, we already know our answer might be, somewhere down a reluctant descend into chaos, our hand forced by civilian ordeals and mass graves: 'We are'.

It didn't need to be that way but such black and white questions do arrive at the end of a process of iterated and consistent failures. We create our institutions and we pay our politicians never to face those dilemmas. And we failed. Russia would not play such a strong hand, and would not have gone as far as it did, if Europe had been politically unified, militarily strong and energy independent.

We - and I mean we, the persons who vote today, not our grandfathers and grandmothers, not our sons and daughters - have failed nationally at supporting a federal Europe because we think that we can still be the nation we once were.

We have failed at integrating European armies under a consistent foreign policy at Europe's borders because we think such policy will somehow take care of itself or, even worse, that someone else will take care of it.

We have failed at integrating Europe's energy policy in order to achieve energy independence at the lowest cost possible. We looked the other way as the myopic cost-calculations and the farsighted environmental constraints took over the here and the now of an energy policy previously fit for a world of pragmatic violence.

We left power to European bureaucrats, and we sent, more often than not, the worst of them to take care of our affairs, as if it was some acceptable game to appoint ghosts and then blame the bunch of them for lack of substance.

We let off the hook national politicians scoring formulaïc personal points on European detestation whereas we should be exposing repeatedly their past, present and future incapacity to solve French economic problems in the context of a purely national framework (yes far right and far left, I am talking about you) .
We are failing at being Europeans.

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