(Translation using deepl) Are there "good" and "bad" refugees? Some like us, some others? On this question of humanity Europe's credibility and world geopolitics could be at stake, explains the Slovenian philosopher.

After the Russian attack on Ukraine, I felt new shame to be a Slovenian citizen. The Slovenian Government immediately declared readiness to receive thousands of Ukrainian refugees fleeing the Russian occupation...very good, but while Afghanistan fell to the Taliban, this same government announced that Slovenia was not ready to receive refugees from there - the justification given that instead of fleeing, people should stay and fight the taliban with guns. In the same genre of ideas, a few months ago, while thousands of Asian (note: refers to wider continent in French) refugees attempted to enter Poland from Belarus, the Slovenian government offered military aid to Poland, affirming that Europe was under attack there.

There therefore appear to be two kinds of refugees: "ours" (Europeans), that is to say "real refugees", and those of the 3rd world who do not deserve our hospitality. The Slovenian government published a tweet on 25 February making clear this distinction: "The Ukrainian refufees come from a cultural, religious and historical environment completely different to those of Afghan refugees". After the outcry caused by this tweet, it was quickly removed, but the genie of the obscene truth had escaped the lamp in a short instant.

The race for geopolitical influence

I don't mention this for moralist reasons, but because I think such a "defence of Europe" would be catastrophic for Western Europe in the global race for geopolitical influence that has begun. Our media currently focuses on the conflict between the "liberal" Western sphere and the Russian "Eurasian" sphere, each accusing the other of constituting a threat: the West encourages "revolutions of colour" in the East and encircles Russia with the expansion of NATO; Russia tries brutaly to re-establish its control over the ex-Soviet domain, and no-one knows when they will stop. Putin has already clearly indiciated that he would not just be happy watching if Bosnia-Herzegovina were to get closer to NATO (which would probably suggest he'd support the separation of the Serbian and Bosnian regions). All this forms part of a geopolitical game more vast - let's simply remember the Russian military presence in Syria that saved the regime of Assad.

What the West largely ignores, is the third far more important group of countries that, for the most part, do nothing more than observe the conflict: the Third World, from Latin America to the Middle East, from Africa to South East Asia (even China is not ready to fully support Russia, as long as they have their own plans). On the 25th February, in a message addressed to the leader of North Korea Kim Jong Un, the Chinese president Zi Jinping declared that China were ready to work with the Korean party, to progressively develop relations of friendship and cooperation between China and DPRK, in a "new situation" - a coded reference to the war in Ukraine. It is worrying that China could use the "new situation" to "liberate" Taiwan.

Radicalisation

It is why it is not enough to repeat things that are obvious to us. It is true that Putin's language tells all. On 25th February 2022, Putin called to the Ukrainian military to take control of the country and remove president Zelensky, affirming that it would be "easier for us to come to an agreement" than with "this band of drug addicts and Neonazis" that have "taken the Ukrainian people hostage". Note also the way Russia immediately militarises all the sanctions: while the states of the West envisaged excluding Russia from SWIFT, Russia responded that this were equivalent to an act of war - as if Russia had not just started a full-scale war! Another chilling example is when the 24th February, the day of the Ukrainian invasion, Putin warned: those "who would try, from the outside, to intefere with us should know that Russia's response would be immediate and would lead to consequences you have never before known". Let's try to take this declaration seriously: "intefering from the outside" could mean many things, including the usual shipments of defensive military equipment to Ukraine; "consequences greater than any of you have faced in your history"? European countries have faced two world wars with millions dead, so a "greater" consequence can only be nuclear destruction. It is this very radicalisation (not just rhetoric) that should worry us: most of us expected Russia to occupy the two "republics" controlled by Russian separatists or, in the worst case scenario, all of the Donbass, no one really expected the total invasion of Ukraine.

Those who support Russia or at least show a certain "understanding" for its actions form a strange group of partners. Perhaps saddest of all is that a substantial number of people in the liberal left may have thought the crises was but a bluff, as both sides knew they could not afford all out war - their message was "Go softly, don't lose your nerves, and nothing will happen". Unfortunately, you have to admit that Biden was right when, 10 days ago, he said Putin had taken the decision to invade. After the Russian aggression, some on the "left" prefer to blame the West - the story is well known: NATO slowly strangled and destabilised Russian, by encircling it militarily, by encouraging revolutions of colour, by ignoring its totally reasonable fears; remember that Russia has twice been attacked by the West in the past century... there is of course some truth to this, but to say this would be like justifying Hitler by placing fault on the Treaty of Versailles that destroyed the German economy. It also signifies that the great powers would have the right to control their own spheres of influence, sacrificing the autonomy of small countries on the altar of global stability. Putin has affirmed multiple times that he was forced to intervene militarily as he had no other choice. If we follow his line of reasoning, it is true, but nilitary intervention can only be seen as Putin's TINA ("There Is No Alternative) if one initially accepts his global vision of politics as a fight of the great powers to defend and expand their spheres of influence.

Who is the fascist?

How about Putin's accusations of "Ukrainian fascism"? (It is bizzare to call Zelensky a neo-Nazi when he is precisely a Jew who lost many ancestors to the Holocaust...) It would be better to turn the question back to Putin: all those with illusions abotu Putin should note that he has made Ivan Ilyin his official bedside philosopher. Ilyin is a Russian political theologian who, after being expelled from the Soviet Union in the early 1920s on the famous "steamer of philosophers," argued against Bolshevism and Western liberalism for his own version of Russian fascism: the state conceived as an organic community ruled by a paternal monarch. For Ilyin, the social system is thus like a body, in which each of us has his place, and freedom means knowing one's place. Thus, for Ilyin, democracy is a ritual: "We vote only to affirm our collective support for our leader. The leader is not legitimized by our votes or chosen by our votes." Isn't this how Russian elections have worked de facto in recent decades? No wonder Ilyin's works are now massively reprinted in Russia, and free copies distributed to state apparatchiks and military conscripts. Aleksander Dugin, Putin's court philosopher, follows in Ilyin's footsteps, simply adding a postmodern touch of historicist relativism:

"Postmodernity shows that every so-called truth is a matter of belief. So we believe in what we do, we believe in what we say. And this is the only way to define truth. So we have our specific Russian truth and you have to accept it. If the United States does not want to start a war, then you have to recognize that the United States is no longer a single master. And [with] the situation in Syria and Ukraine, Russia is saying, "No, you are not the boss anymore." It's the question of who rules the world. Only war could really decide that." (Aleksander Dugin, in the BBC News documentary, "The Russians who fear a nuclear war with the West," watch it on youtube.)

But our immediate problem is this: what about the people of Syria and Ukraine? Can they also choose their truth/belief or are they just the playground of the great "masters of the world" and their struggle? The idea that every "culture" has its own truth is what makes Putin so popular among the new populist right - no wonder his military intervention in Ukraine was welcomed by Trump and others as the act of a "genius"... So when Putin talks about "denazification," let's just remember that this is the same Putin who supported Marine le Pen in France, the Northern League in Italy, and other current neo-fascist movements.

Remove from us all forms of neo-colonialism

But there is nothing surprising in all this: forget the "Russian truth", it is only a convenient myth to justify his power. What Putin is doing is to copy Western imperialist expansionism with delay. So, to really counter him, we should build bridges to Third World countries, many of which have a long list of fully justified grievances against Western colonization and exploitation. It is not enough to "defend Europe": our real task is to convince the Third World countries that, in the face of our global problems, we can offer them a better choice than Russia or China. And the only way to do this is to change ourselves beyond post-colonial political correctness, to ruthlessly root out all forms of neo-colonialism, even those masked as humanitarian aid.