My generation grew up being told by older ones that the turning point in recent history was the fall of the Berlin Wall.

From their point of view, it was understandable.
They came from almost half a century in which the bipolar confrontation between the communist bloc led by the USSR and the capitalist bloc led by the US had defined the economic, domestic and foreign policy of hundreds of countries, as well as much of their cultural debate.

The fact that each of the two Superpowers embodied an ideological agenda, not merely a pursuit of tactical interests, made the clash even more all-encompassing.

Taking into account also the speed of the fall of communists regimes starting in 1989, which displaced even the Bush administration itself, we can understand the astonished reaction of Hobsbawm and the other theorists who labelled the 20th century as the ‘short century’: a century that began and ended together with the USSR, tied at its core to the existence of struggles to establish the so-called ‘classless society’.

In short, it was inevitable that the collapse of the Berlin Wall would appear as the end of a dream, or as the liberation from a nightmare, in any case as the defining event of an era.

Well: almost forty years later, looking at what we have become in the former Western bloc countries, we should perhaps revise that judgement.

1989 had not fundamentally changed our identity, our instincts and our collective moral assumptions.
What changed them, and unfortunately for the worse, was the invasion of Iraq.

An irreversible skin change

From that traumatic experience, Western public opinions believed to learn two lessons:

• Democracy is never exportable;
• Even if it were exportable, it would not be worth it, because democratic institutions are inherently lying and corrupt.

These two convictions have been worn like a second skin by North Americans and Western Europeans, gradually changing their sensitivity to current events and even to the past.

Both on the right and on the left, on campuses and on social media, across age groups, the two alleged lessons of the Iraqi war have gradually become common sense, with a pervasiveness that communist ideology had never even come close to having, on either side of the Iron Curtain.

Amnesia and suspicion

All it took, in short, was a fake chemical weapons vial to remove from the collective memory the triumphant exportation of democracy that Reagan’s policies had achieved just fifteen years earlier in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as (once the Soviet threat that forced the US to tolerate their regimes had vanished) in Chile, South Africa, Taiwan, South Korea and other pro-American nations.

Moreover, that fake chemical weapons vial was enough to reverse the burden of proof on the sincerity of Western institutions, which have since been considered deceivers by definition on any subject, from 9/11 to the Moon landing, from election results to the efficacy of vaccines.

Starting in the United States, and exploiting the lucky combination of the economic crisis and the spread of smartphones, right-wing populist parties then led their victorious rides against ‘the mainstream’, ‘ the deep state’, ‘the globalist elite’, ‘the legacy media’, ‘official science’, ‘caste’ and ‘the system’, while left-wing universities imprinted the transmission of knowledge on fanciful ‘decolonial’ and ‘intersectional’ mythologies.

Trump does not come from nowhere

Crushed on two fronts, the 20th-century Western mentality has effectively disintegrated.

Today, a Trump can govern the US like a business committee, ignoring any scruples about citizens’ freedom and peoples’ independence, because the man on the street (even when that street is 5th Avenue) basically believes that this is what the US has always been and that the old scruples about freedom were just a hypocritical cover.

Trump can invent at will new world government clubs (such as the ‘Core Five’) or local ones (such as the ‘Board of Peace’ on Palestine), whose members do not share a belief in a political system, but rather the mere ability to flaunt power and guarantee profit for their respective oligarchic circles.
And it can do so because deep down many Americans have now introjected the idea that political systems are indifferent and all equally oppressive.

European cynicism

In Europe, this phenomenon has not yet found a personal megalomaniac incarnation like Trump. However, for years it has been subtly distorting our judgement of international crises and the role we should play in them.
In short, we have become so convinced that freedom is just a farce that we no longer recognise a struggle for freedom even when it is right in front of us. And even when we recognise it, we still consider it sacrilege to meddle in it.

At the very gates of the European Union, Ukrainians are paying the price.
“Impossible,” we have been telling ourselves since 2014, “that these Ukrainians are really fighting and dying for freedom instead of tyranny. There must be a misunderstanding. It must be an ethnic conflict, an internal settling of scores between Slavs, the usual clash over disputed territory between language groups, a CIA plot.”

Even when the violence committed by the Russians in the occupied territories gave us a clearer idea of why the Ukrainians were defending themselves, we still remained refractory to any hypothesis, even a remote one, of direct intervention. We did not close the skies with our air force, we did not send troops to protect the cities far from the front line, we did not seize the oil tankers of the Russian ‘ghost fleet’, we did not provide missiles capable of challenging Russian bases. To the Ukrainians, we were only bankers, not allies.

After all, nothing else was to be expected in a post-Iraq society, where the principle of non-interference in the affairs of other countries has ceased to be one principle among many and has risen to the level of an absolute principle that single-handedly nullifies all others.

The tragedy ofIran has reminded us of this.

Unbalanced values

‘Impossible that these Iranian women are really protesting and dying to stop wearing a veil,’ we said to each other at the time of Mahsa Amini. “There must be a misunderstanding.”
Then came the protests because the currency was worthless, because Tehran lacked drinking water, against the corruption of the Pasdaran, against the suicidal choice to attack Israel.
In the streets people shouted ‘Long live the King’ and openly pleaded for intervention from abroad.
The regime responded by murdering 30,000 people in a few days.

On one plate of the scales, then, were all the principles of the old West: secularism, democracy, transparency, the fight against poverty, gender equality, the right to life, the humanity of punishment, the self-determination of peoples.
On the other plate was, isolated, the dogma of non-interference.

And the dogma of non-interference has won.

If the Iranians are helped against their torturers, it will be at the hands of Trump’s clique of businessmen, with the contemptuous disregard for the transition to democracy that that clique has already shown in Venezuela.
It is like watching a movie already written: Trump will intervene, the American public will be unenthusiastic and the European public will cry scandal, as it cried scandal after the bombing of uranium enrichment sites in 2025.
To be scandalised because an imperialist theocracy could not manufacture nuclear bombs: this is what the West, which once spoke of rights, disarmament and atomic non-proliferation, has been reduced to.

But that time is over.
It ended when distrust in democratic freedoms and their real desirability outside the West became a second skin for us, a given and an indicator of common sense.

It ended in 2003, when Saddam’s statue fell. That falling, although we did not know it yet, made much more noise than the Berlin Wall.