THE WAR IN UKRAINE AND THE CRISIS OF ENLIGHTENMENT THOUGHT Regarding the 1.7 million Ukrainian dead.

THE WAR IN UKRAINE AND THE CRISIS OF ENLIGHTENMENT THOUGHT

Regarding the 1.7 million Ukrainian dead.

Notes from the ground

Dr. Lenin Torres Antonio(9)

In late modern times, the debate over the social compatibility of the neoliberal capitalist economic model has intensified, promoting a view of the State as a mere observer of the autonomous functioning of the free market. Europe, in particular, believed it had managed to consolidate and demonstrate this compatibility between the capitalist economy and the welfare state, introducing not only the idea of ​​a social state, but also that of a social market. Proudly, the European Community showed the world that it was possible to live under the individualistic rules of capitalism while guaranteeing the well-being of its citizens, thus differentiating itself from the United States.

However, just a few days ago, German Prime Minister Friedrich Merz declared that “the German welfare state is no longer financially viable” and that the social model needs to be rethought. Paradoxically, between 2022 and 2024, Germany has allocated €55 billion in support for Ukraine to sustain its war against Russia. Similarly, French Prime Minister François Bayrou announced that he will submit his government to a vote of confidence in the National Assembly to defend his fiscal and budgetary adjustment plan, equivalent to €44 billion in public spending cuts. However, like Germany, France has spent millions of euros supporting Ukraine, demonstrating that upholding the fictions of the Enlightenment faith is more important than guaranteeing pensions and other social benefits for its own citizens.

In Ukraine, the conflict is being presented as a struggle between two models for organizing public life: the enlightened model—democratic, based on freedoms, dignity, and human rights—which is evidently in its terminal phase, and the dictatorial model. The West insists it must win this war because “the social and democratic model is in danger, and the world will be in the hands of barbarians if Russia wins.” This narrative is false. What is really at stake is the predominance of economic and financial interests between the vacuous and neocolonial right of the West, led by the United States and its henchmen: England, France, and Germany, versus the totalitarian states of Eurasia, primarily Putin's Russia and Xi Jinping's China. This is not a Manichean struggle, as the West tries to make us believe with its perverse narrative of freedom and democracy. Michel Foucault put it clearly: “War is the continuation of politics by other means, but politics is also the continuation of war by other means” (Foucault, 1976).

If the 20th century was the time of the fall of ideologies, symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall, the 21st century is the time of the death of reason and civility.

In Europe, not only is a senseless war being waged, but also a battle against the paradoxes of faith in the human condition. The fictions of the Enlightenment are dying at the same time as the bodies shattered by missiles, drones, and the explosions of the new weapons of mass destruction. Democracy reveals its fictitious essence, and the government of the people is replaced by the government of elites and enlightened dogmas, which crumble to the beat of the drones of murderous drones.

In the name of these paradoxes, what arguments do we have left to justify this war, except to accept madness and fiction as primary faculties of the human being? A flag and a few pieces of land have cost 1,700,000 dead Ukrainians and thousands more Russians. Thus, Kant's idea that "Enlightenment is man's emergence from his minority, which is the inability to use his understanding without the guidance of another" (Kant, 1784/2004) is shattered.

Therefore, we must see that in Ukraine not only is an absurd, senseless, deadly war being waged, which will leave severe trauma in Europe and all of humanity, but also the burial of the civilized and enlightened vision with which we described the human being. The fall of ideologies in the last century was the prelude to the fall of enlightened thought that we are experiencing today. Without realizing it, we are witnessing the most atrocious civilizational regression of humanity. What took us more than two thousand years to build is vanishing in the absurd war in Ukraine, driven by a barbaric Western leader who, with one hand armed with all kinds of weapons, attacks and threatens those who do not submit to his dictates to "restore America's greatness," and with the other, initiates a tariff war to sustain the commercial and financial dominance of the United States.

The world is experiencing a terrifying amnesia. It forgets that it was necessary to go through a long path of suffering, death, and ruthless wars to reach some kind of agreement for rational and peaceful coexistence. A civilization nurtured by the thought of Plato, German idealism, and the Enlightenment—essentially French and English—came to believe it had achieved a conceptual framework capable of being translated into transnational institutions of law and civility. This was the case at the end of World War II, when organizations such as the United Nations (UN) and the International Criminal Court in The Hague were created with the purpose of preventing the repetition of atrocities like those of that war and the Jewish genocide, and of resolving conflicts between nations through law and dialogue.

We forget the human feat of repressing our drives and instincts in favor of strengthening the social bond, privileging reason, dialogue, and community spirit to walk together with tolerance. We forget what the Austrian-Jewish scholar Sigmund Freud affirmed: "Civilization is built on the renunciation of drives" (Freud, 1930). This statement reinforces the idea that the social bond weakens when violence is privileged, and that love and peace are preferable to war.

However, in these late modern times, everything constructed by civilization has been displaced. In its place, an attachment to force and power emerges. Thus, we see how the military boot is today the most laureate and impotent. In the cradle of civilization—Europe—an inhuman war is being waged, justified by false Russian phantasms that the Western empire, in its struggle against a multipolar world, internalizes to confront other military constructs like Russia and China.

Adorno and Horkheimer were right when they warned that "reason has become an instrument of power, a technique for dominating nature and humanity" (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1944), which explains the perversion of Enlightenment thought in current geopolitics.

In his work Totem and Taboo, Freud poses some revealing questions: How primitive are we civilized people? Or, how civilized are primitives? In our current times, it seems the answer is that civilized man is more primitive than those he calls "savages" or "indigenous people." Ruled by violent and selfish impulses, he perversely conceals a sophisticated framework he has called "civilization," which he achieves through the constant satisfaction of his most primal appetites: his morbid desire for perversity, his pernicious impulse to subjugate others, and his death drive, which turns both into deadly enemies.

Gone is the world of fiction and faith, transformed into laws, norms, codes, manners, and even civilizing letters. A writing style re-emerges that recalls the purgatory of Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy and Raskolnikov's infernal internal struggle in Crime and Punishment by the Russian genius Fyodor Dostoevsky, among other texts that allude to violence and the poor spiritual life of modern man.

And now, to whom do we turn our reference? If what we believed was best turned out to be worst, is it better to return to the rule of primal forces, to biology, where the strongest survives and rules? Or do we believe that there are human beings genetically destined to rule?

First, we stopped believing in the faith embodied in the Bible; then, in reason codified in laws and norms; and now, in our communal nature, and even in our social condition.

I don't know if it will be possible to reconstruct the conceptual framework that took us more than two thousand years and that allowed us to make the fiction of being quintessentially sociable beings a reality. Furthermore, I don't know if we can ever believe in that fiction of rationality again, have faith in our social nature, and once again boast of being thinking animals.

I don't know if the wound inflicted on our rationality is terminal, and if we still retain the strength and intelligence necessary to believe again, like Voltaire's Candide, that "we live in the best of all possible worlds" (8).

(1) Through media coverage, we were led to believe that the greatest genocidal suffering humanity has ever experienced was the Holocaust, and Hitler as the personification of evil on Earth. However, buried in that narrative lie the thousands of human beings killed in the wars in Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria. Added to this are the victims of the military coups in Latin America and the Caribbean—Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile, Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Haiti—financed, organized, and promoted by United States intelligence agencies.

This is without counting the deaths from the wars provoked by neocolonial Europe in Africa, as well as those recently caused by the Israeli aggression against Iran's sovereignty. It is even estimated that more than 1,700,000 Ukrainians and thousands of young Russians have died to date in the war in Ukraine. This is how the Western narrative has operated: by skewing history, they have created a world tailored to maintain the system of exploitation and subjugation.

(2) https://oyeveracruz.com.mx/columna.php?id=42555 The Civilizational Regression.

(3) https://www.entornopolitico.com/columna/69328/lenin-torres-antonio/ Trump, the Gravedigger of the Enlightenment.

(4) Foucault, M. (1976). Defending Society. Fondo de Cultura Económica.

(5) Kant, I. (2004). What is the Enlightenment? (J. Gaos, Trans.). Alianza Editorial. (Original work published in 1784)

(6) Adorno, T. W., & Horkheimer, M. (1944). Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trotta.

(7) Freud, S. (1930). The Discontents of Culture. Amorrortu Editores.

(8) Voltaire. (2005). Candide or Optimism (J. Pujol, Trans.). Ediciones Cátedra. (Original work published in 1759)

(9) B.S. in Philosophy, Faculty of Philosophy, UV, M.S. in Psychoanalytic Theory, Institute of Psychological Research of the UV; Advanced Studies-Research Proficiency from the doctoral program "Psychoanalytic Foundations and Developments," Faculty of Philosophy, Complutense University of Madrid, Spain; Advanced Studies-Research Proficiency from the doctoral program "Problems of Philosophical Thinking," Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Philosophy, Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain; PhD in Education, Popular Autonomous University of Veracruz (UPAV). Diplomas: "Public Finance" and "Strategic Political Analysis," Institute of Public Administration of Veracruz.

August 2025.