Questions and Meditations

2 The new predators

The Second World War had barely ended that a number of other devastating conflicts were fired on all the continents = massacres, partitions, interfaith wars, fratricides and genocides were sprouting like a virulence, while humanity itself set to wildly and inexplicably proliferate. The colonial powers now weakened, faced with the untamable resilience of those peoples they had presumed to conquer with their supposedly superior civilizing values, had to renounce their ill-acquired empires and withdraw, not without imprinting their marks and signatures in the soils and the bloods – rules and laws and narrow hypocritical morals and arbitrary borders drawn hastily so as to distribute among themselves future access to natural riches and resources. A new world order was seeking to impose itself, with the wealthiest and best equipped nations taking on the role of gendarmes – with an eye on profit – and competing in cunning so as, using lesser nations as pawns, to consolidate their respective control over the mineral and fossil sources required for their own maintenance and development. It is in times of war that scientific research is best funded, its main mission the discovery and perfecting of new means of augmenting one’s autonomy and survival capacities on the one hand and, on the other, of increasing one’s attacking and destructing or retaliating power. Thus, the perfecting of the power to neutralize and to harm made spectacular progress, along with the enabling means of secret communication. But in times of peace, the cost of the manufacture and industry of all the new ever more sophisticated weapons and instruments becomes prohibitive and they must be turned into profitable ventures, selling to the highest bidder – or the most deserving, depending on the political perspective. *

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