We are the next ones

When the beheading of babies provokes indifference, it is a sign of the moral degradation of a society. When, in the 21st century, and with thousands of history books, documentaries, stories and films available to the public, there are adults who still defend the indefensible, it's something to think about. Beyond the cruelty of the attacks and the number of victims, what should really be at the centre of public and political debate is the drift of a Western civilisation that is as comfortable as it is cowed. It is unusual and incomprehensible that European countries continue to produce waves of illiterates who defend communism, the butcher Che Guevara, Venezuela and who feel nostalgia for the Berlin Wall and a regime that only produced corruption, ruin, misery and a hundred million dead. 

When a totally free European adult is unable to make the difference between freedom and tyranny, between justice and dictatorship, between principles and impositions, it is our duty to take responsibility for the decay of our educational system and the absence of a moral compass. Politicians represent the perfect excuse to drown our ethical shortcomings because, in the first and last instance, it is the citizen who chooses, votes, allows and demands, or not, a minimum of quality and honesty. When integrity and principles are conspicuous by their absence, we can hope for a minimum of dignity, something that does not, of its own accord, return us to the status of beasts. But that, decency and dignity do not exist among us, no longer, nor are they to be expected. 

When the European Union, which is nothing more than the result of the will of a few countries to prosper in peace ends up selling its name and reputation out of fear and laziness, it finds itself with the enemy within, the society divided, ruined and disoriented. When some try, at best, to compare Israel and the bloodthirsty terrorists, and at worst, defend the latter, the discourse means renouncing everything for which so much was fought and so much blood was shed. Freedom is the most expensive resource because it is scarcer than any raw material, and because defending it implies the use of unlimited resources, but, above all, deep convictions, which is exactly what is lacking in the West. 

Everything has already been invented, but there are many who still haven't got it. There are those who are still convinced that Israel stole land and has been oppressing the original owners ever since. There are those who defend hatred and the right to kill Jews, who justify the persecution and stigmatisation of the Jew. There are those who speak of defending women without being upset by the enslavement to which more than 600 million women are subjected. 

There are those who talk of progress and justice while voting for socialists and communists, who are the same with more or less showers and better or worse clothing. There are those who deny Israel's right to exist, who do not believe it is a democratic country and those who, in a supreme demonstration of ignorance, call those who suffered the Holocaust genocidal. 

More shameful is the position of the enlightened Europeans, those who do know history, those who have studied the ravages of the hammer and sickle, those who know that there is nothing good to be gained from Marx's intellectual indigence and who, in spite of everything, are well ensconced in their material abundance and bend their backs because they have succumbed to fear. Fear of being insulted in the street, fear of being called fascists or Nazis, fear of an attack, fear that ends up convincing them that they have to negotiate, pay and close their eyes to the excesses of the scum of humanity, terrorists, rapists and murderers of men, women and children. 

Europe today is like the Roman Empire before it fell, with the barbarians at the gates, tired of working and defending our way of life in exchange for a few bucks. Those barbarians who do not eat pork or drink alcohol, at least not officially, who consider that anyone who does not convert to Islam should be executed, who do everything in the name of a God whose prophet did not yet exist when there were already Jews in Palestine, are the ones who collect our subsidies, who accuse us of racism after committing a crime, who try to import their traditions and impose them by force or with the acquiescence of traitors. They are the victors and we have lost because we do not respect ourselves, we do not take pride in our past, in what we have built, and because we have forgotten that we have to fight to keep the best we have. 

The political left is Evil in every sense. We know it, we have learned it, but we have decided to forget, until one day, the raped and the beheaded will not be called Sara, Erez or Gal, but Maria, Rocio and Fernando. 

We are cowards, we vote wrong, we don't defend our friends, we surrender without putting up a fight and we are shocked by Jenni Hermoso. We have everything, technology, money and freedom, but we prefer the darkness, the comfort of silence or the noise of exalted minorities. We only have the guts to insult the television or burn the shirt of a rival football club, and we think we are modern, and that our lives are worth living as long as there is cold beer, a beach, a dreadful television programme and a small allowance at the end of the month. 

In the end, little happens to us for what we deserve. Israel fights for its survival every day, since time immemorial, when there weren't even homelands or borders. They know they cannot lose because they would disappear. We have not yet learned that, after the Jews, we will be next. This cannot happen here, the idiots repeat, just as it could not happen on 11 March, just as the traitor in Moncloa could not arrive and stay, just as a guy like Hitler could not come to power in Germany in the 1930s, the most cultured country in the world at that time. 

By the time we learn that we are the modern Jews, it will be too late.

Pedro Lasuén, journalist and writer, is the author of the novels "Tal vez" and "Quizás" (Ed. Mascarón de Proa), in whose fiction he pours his knowledge of the world of mafias and secret services.