Hugo Dionísio
Only when European peoples identify their real enemy and perceive it as a serious, real, and vital threat will it be possible to put an end to this madness.
There is something deeply paradoxical about the current state of Western democracies. On the one hand, the leaders of the European Union, NATO, and the United States propagate, with almost obsessive insistence, narratives of existential threat: Russia as an expansionist empire about to invade the territory of the Atlantic Alliance; Europe as vulnerable and unprepared, urgently called upon to multiply its military spending; the conflict in Ukraine as a prelude to a broader confrontation; and also terrorism, that ever-present entity that constantly wakes us up, more to send our resources overseas so it doesn't come to bother us later.
On the other hand, these same narratives - despite their catastrophic tone - do not produce an impetus for mobilization, do not generate mass movements fighting for peace, and do not drive populations to demand concrete and structural changes in foreign policy. On the contrary, they apparently generate a kind of "structural apathy", an attitude we might call "amorphous" or even "zombie-like" in the face of the real and growing risk of open war with the Russian Federation. The greater the propagated fear and perceived risk, the greater the apathy in the response, individual or collective, to such a state of affairs. Perhaps due to irresponsibility, due to the state of political infancy into which Western peoples have been thrown, due to laziness or amorphism provoked by continuous shocks of terror, instability, and alarm, the truth is that the state of alert seems non-existent. Not even as a survival instinct.
If we want to understand how the decision of the European Union and its member states is internally constituted, leading us down a militaristic and bellicose path with easily predictable and perceptible catastrophic contours, it is essential to understand a subtle and dangerous mechanism, grounded in a narrative calibrated to generate fear, but not awareness; alarm, but not action. A narrative that, while aiming to legitimize astronomical arms spending and pornographic profits for the expanding NATO military-industrial complex, subliminally conveys that the solution to the problem depends on politicians and generals, never on the populations.
Indeed, the intended result is an operational democratic deactivation, which, while informing people of the risk, simultaneously distances them from participating in and influencing the solution, and especially from feeling capable of changing this reality.
In this sense, the security narratives propagated by the EU, NATO, and the USA are not designed to raise the populations' state of consciousness, but to block it. If the state of consciousness were truly elevated - if people internalized the practical implications of what they are told - they would draw practical and organizational consequences that could threaten the established power and, even more so, the political decisions made without them and against their most relevant interests.
The fact is that when people become activated, as is well known, we know where processes begin, but it is never possible to know where they will end. How media-exposed contradictions can be capitalized upon by peace movements and movements for improving living conditions, which make mass struggle their privileged field of action, leading to results often diametrically opposed to those intended by the ruling class, constitutes one of the effects to be avoided by an autocratic leadership structure subservient to oligarchic interests.
The entire argumentative construction that leads to the final decision to steer the EU towards war with the Russian Federation and the arms frenzy that this goal presupposes has been prepared to disarm populations of their democratic rights to intervene in this decision-making process. The fact that all blame is placed on the Russian Federation surrounded by NATO bases, yet still presented as being in unbridled expansion, aims to create the idea that evil stems from an external agent destabilizing our peace, creating the feeling that there is nothing to be done, because nothing can be done - except accepting and legitimizing the bellicose drift - to challenge and transform an inaccessible power.
The first dominant narrative presents Vladimir Putin's Russia as an expanding imperial power, determined to rebuild a Eurasian empire - sometimes the Orthodox Tsarist Empire and other times the Soviet communist "Empire" - and about to attack or invade NATO territory, a meeting for which Western leaders have even managed to set a date: 2029 ! This narrative serves as the foundation for nearly all rearmament and military alliance policies of recent years.
However, a minimally attentive analysis of the facts allows us to dismantle all the assumptions on which it rests. After four years of war in Ukraine, and the constant media assertion that Russia has demonstrated limited military capability, unable to decisively and quickly conquer Ukrainian territory, being forced into massive conscription and suffering significant losses in equipment and personnel, or even resorting to mercenaries and prisoners to hold the front lines, at the same time, the idea has also been conveyed that this same Russia, exhausted and under unprecedented economic sanctions, could launch an attack against NATO - an alliance that brings together the world's largest economies and the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet. Lacking empirical and historical support, such an assessment of reality suffers from a profound bias, turning it into an intricate ideological construction.
The political function of this narrative is clear, aiming to justify the existence and continuous expansion of NATO by creating an external enemy that unifies the Western bloc and legitimizes the increasing militarization of European politics. But this must be done without demoralizing the army hired to attack the Russian Federation - the Ukrainian army under the command of the Kiev regime. Hence, the choice for a dual argumentative layer that is only seemingly contradictory: 1. The Russian Federation is a weak, incompetent power incapable of conquering Ukraine, which helps create the idea that it is a defeatable enemy, well within the reach of Kiev's forces, thus justifying the Western strategy rooted in using it as a proxy and the constant shipments of billions of euros; 2. The Russian Federation is governed by a mad dictator and an aggressive, backward people who could invade us at any moment, taking advantage of its great industrial capacity - an argument that feeds fear and justifies the need for militarization.
The repeated switching from one argument to the other, usually separately, using well-educated commentators who never push for peace, but only for the elimination of danger, namely through force or isolation and containment, works as a process of indoctrination, in which the democratic element is never mentioned, except to attack the Russian Federation as a terrible dictatorship. The anchoring of such discourses in broad and comprehensive communication strategies, based on conferences, books, and dedicated programs, aims to swell the compliant army, just as with a contradictory teacher, where only a minority of more attentive students catch the contradiction, but together they do not constitute sufficient force to fatally expose it.
A second narrative present in the media argues that Europe is militarily unprepared to face Russia and is therefore forced to drastically increase its arms spending. This narrative gained strength, especially after the start of the Special Military Operation in Ukraine in 2022, culminating in what Germany called the *Zeitenwende* - a " turning of an era" that justified the creation of a special fund of 100 billion euros for the Armed Forces. After participating in the Minsk agreements and Merkel admitting that those agreements were only aimed at " buying time" to arm Ukraine and prepare the EU for the clash, we can well say that this "turning of an era" was not only longed for but provoked.
And here emerges another flagrant contradiction: the discourse of "unpreparedness" arises precisely when European military spending had already reached historic levels, and when NATO's defense budgets already collectively exceeded Russia's by a factor of more than ten times. Even at the European level, in 2022, the annual budget of EU countries exceeded the Russian Federation's investment by a factor of 5 to 6 times. Thus, the theory of "unpreparedness" does not represent an objective description of reality; rather, it clearly constitutes a market opportunity, expressed, for example, in how VW, submerged in an unprecedented economic crisis caused by China's relentless competitive capacity in electric cars, took the cue to transform car factories into tank factories.
By channeling public funds - taxpayers' money - to the military-industrial complex, to the detriment of investments in health, education, energy transition, or poverty reduction (the EU has never eradicated extreme poverty), the "brutal profits" this war generates are not a byproduct of it; rather, they are, in many cases, the primary and initial objective.
The unpreparedness narrative works as a wealth transfer machine from the public to the private sector, from public services of relevant social interest that provide essential social needs to the arms industries, and from populations to shareholders. All this happens under the veil of "collective security," a concept that seems fair but, in practice, serves to shield such financial transfers from any democratic scrutiny. Not for a moment did national parliaments discuss the matter deeply, not for a moment were populations called upon to express themselves regarding such decisions. Instead, all this happened outside of electoral acts and referendums, never appearing in the programs of parties that represent these interests and that, therefore, benefit from privileged treatment in the corporate media and, consequently, benefit from the richest and most effective propaganda campaigns and instruments.
If the narratives outlined above were merely rhetoric, we could limit ourselves to denouncing them as propaganda. But the problem is that they are accompanied by concrete actions that, far from reducing the risk of confrontation, dangerously increase it. We could even say that since World War II, we have never been so close to a direct confrontation with a military power like the Russian Federation. And despite all this, no government has asked populations whether they want such a war or whether they want to negotiate peace with the Russian Federation.
NATO, the EU, and the USA support Ukraine in ways that go far beyond "humanitarian aid" or "defense of a sovereign country." They provide attack drones, sophisticated aircraft (now Sweden's Gripen aircraft), long-range artillery systems, real-time intelligence, satellite data, and their guidance systems (GPS). They enable deep Ukrainian strikes into Russian territory - bombings against energy infrastructure, military bases, ammunition depots, and even targets in civilian areas.
These actions change the nature of the conflict and allow us, little by little, to identify the true nature of the ongoing conflict. What began, deceptively, as a Ukrainian defensive war is progressively transforming into a power projection war, in which NATO countries, without declaring war, actively participate in the offensive against Russia. Gradually, by taking the war inside the Russian Federation, NATO reveals its initial intended objective. While many were attacked for already in 2014 being able to identify in EuroMaidan a NATO movement against the Russian Federation, it is in 2026 that this evidence begins to materialize in practice, yet still under a cloak of dissimulation: that such power projection inside the Russian Federation constitutes a legitimate response by Kiev to the Russian Federation's attacks on its territory.
The problem is that, despite the amorphism on this side, since 1991, since the fall of the USSR, the Russian people have received numerous warnings about the West's real intentions regarding their country. First came "Yeltsinism," which destroyed the state and economic social fabric of the USSR, leaving millions in extreme poverty, something they had not known for a long time; then came Chechnya through Islamic terrorism, the destruction of Yugoslavia and NATO's eastward expansion, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine at the beginning of the 21st century, the provocation through Georgia in South Ossetia, and then, indeed, the EuroMaidan, with a coup d'état aimed at turning the board in favor of Russophobic forces.
In other words, the Russian people are awake to the problem, and this alertness and willingness to defend their interests, but also for peace, contrast sharply with the state of Western peoples, who are merely dragged into this reality, not really knowing whether they are prepared to defend their interests. This activation of the Russian people and the pressure they can exert on the Kremlin, or even the need for a more vehement response from Moscow, raises a troubling question: if Russia retaliates against infrastructure, factories, or bases in NATO countries that provide it with that data and those systems, would it not be acting in legitimate self-defense ? And would such an attack not drag NATO into a direct, potentially nuclear, confrontation?
This is where we reach the core of the paradox. If the threat narratives are so alarmist, why don't they generate mobilization ? If the EU population "buys" the idea that Russia is an imminent danger, why don't they demand concrete measures for peace, de-escalation, or at least civil preparedness?
The answer may lie in the nature of the fear that is produced. It is not a concrete, tangible fear that mobilizes for action, as when a community faces a flood or a fire, or in the case of many Russians, Iranians, or Cubans who are highly mobilized to defend their world. It is, rather, an abstract, chronic, media-driven fear: the "Russian threat" as a diffuse entity, "nuclear war" as a distant, almost cinematic scenario, as something that happens only in a distant media and communication space, which so often mixes with fiction and suffers from a deep credibility crisis. Cognitive psychology has long identified that abstract fear paralyzes more than it mobilizes. When the threat is invisible, immeasurable, and managed by "experts," the natural human response is resignation, not resistance.
This fear works as a kind of anesthetic, keeping people in a constant state of anxiety, but without any direction (like "dizzy cockroaches"). They consume news about the war like someone consuming a thriller - with tension, but also with the certainty that, in the end, "someone will solve it." That someone is the politicians, the generals, the diplomats. The population is a spectator, not a protagonist. And this constitutes a significant "democratic" flaw. In a system that calls itself democratic, the people cannot be alienated from participating in decisions about such an impactful event as an apocalyptic war.
And here lies the central mechanism of popular demobilization. The narratives are constructed to subliminally convey that security is a technical-military problem, not a political-popular one. The message is: "There is danger, but we (the decision-makers) are managing it. Your role is to vote every four years, pay your taxes, and, if necessary, accept cuts in public services to finance defense." And, as such, they flood our news broadcasts with generals, military commentators, military analysts, soldiers who have dishonored their uniform, and frustrated civilians who wished they had been soldiers. All talking about a world where the people have no entry and where we have no voice.
This is a process of tacit delegation of responsibility that turns democracy into a spectacle where civic participation is reduced to the minimal expression of electoral preferences, never to active intervention in policy definition. That is reserved for the lobbying that the rich pay for and for the direct phone lines of ministers and CEOs. Those who question the militaristic logic are labeled "pro-Putin," "denialist," or "isolationist" - labels that function as mechanisms of social exclusion, delegitimizing any substantive and minimally consequential debate.
There is also a factor of historical amnesia. Current generations in Europe - especially those born after the Cold War - have no bodily experience of war, not even of its close rumble. World War II is archaeology; the Cold War, a historical curiosity. War has become a media concept, an image on the screen, and not an experience of destruction, extremism, and loss that reveals the worst in human beings. This facilitates its trivialization, but not only that. It also facilitates its dramatization, in the sense that it becomes something almost glamorous and exceptional, where men reveal their courage and women their skill.
While YouTube inundates us with ads for "military workout," "military-style gear and clothing," the media talks about "escalation," "deterrence," "readiness" as if talking about economic indicators - with technical distance, without horror. Just as they talk about the genocide in Gaza, or famine in Africa. All terror is normalized and cinematographed as if it were part of Hollywood, where Von Der Leyen and Kaja Kallas are the lead actresses in a tragicomedy written by Zelensky, directed by Macron, and financed by Friedrich Merz, through a European pyramid-scheme fundraising operation!
Popular demobilization, as we see it, is therefore not an accident. It is structural to the functioning of militarized systems. When we look at what is happening to us and all the hatred easily spewed by political leaders and ordinary people against immigrants or enemies, we understand why a Nazi Holocaust was possible and why a genocide in Gaza and Lebanon is possible.
The promised profits of the military-industrial complex depend on budgetary decisions made in closed-door rooms, purposely not subject to popular pressure. Hence, they appear to us as fait accompli. And what simpler and more distant way for them to appear than through television monologues that tell us "the European Union has decided," "Von Der Leyen said," "the largest EU countries have promised" If it comes from above, then there's nothing to be done, thinks the common mortal, victim of a pyramid-built system that crushes them through a summit as autocratic as it is unreachable. The fact is that the EU also functions as a mystification, as something outside, too far away. It's like financial speculation: the more it destroys our lives, the harder it is to understand how it does it. European bureaucracy is complex enough to operate the same distancing process.
And this contingency of life reveals an insurmountable reality of the system we live in: the war economy, the offensive economy, needs passive citizens, not active citizens. It needs news consumers, not movement organizers. It needs voters who choose between pre-approved options, not citizens who set their own agendas.
Perhaps here lies the great difference that allows us to unravel the relative positions of each of the contenders and reveal who is truly the aggrieved and who is, in fact, the aggressor. While the Western population is amorphous, situationist, resentful but intellectually disarmed, repressed and ideologically defeated, incapable of shouting and expressing revolt against a situation that crushes the world they knew and took for granted, only occasionally vociferating against people as weak or weaker than themselves, who suffer the same bitterness, such as immigrants, trade unionists, or other minorities, the majority of the Russian population is activated, aware of the danger surrounding them, and mobilized in a limitless effort to overcome what they consider an attack on their sovereignty and independence.
After all, who is being dragged into what ? To understand the militarization of NATO, we first need to understand what such an ideology is made of. The ideology underlying EU rearmament dresses itself in the same cloaks that Goebbels wore!
Only when European peoples identify their real enemy and perceive it as a serious, real, and vital threat will it be possible to put an end to this madness!
Let us hope it is not too late!