Last Tuesday, February 7, the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov felt compelled to respond to the statement made by the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy of the European Union (EU) Josep Borrell, about two countries that the Russian Foreign Minister had visited during his tour of Africa. In his opening speech at the European External Action Service conference on information manipulation and foreign interference, Borrell stated that the Russian Foreign Minister’s tour of Mali and Eritrea was possible because these countries were “easy for them, but others are not so easy”. This statement presents a strong colonialist, discriminatory and racist overtone that neither Borrell nor European “diplomacy” can hide.
Given the decided opinion of the former Spanish Foreign Minister, Lavrov pointed out that these statements reflect “neocolonial instincts that will not go extinct and that clearly prevent” the West from understanding the realities of the modern world. He also suggested to European countries to be “more modest.”
It is worth asking if this was a slip or a misinterpretation of Borrell’s words. The categorical answer is ‘No’. Such opinions comprise a combination of colonial arrogance and imperial arrogance mixed with a high dose of structural ignorance and mental idiocy. Without a doubt, a very explosive mix.
Let’s review some pearls emanating from the atrophied neurons of the “socialist” Borrell in order to – although I am not a Catholic – avoid the condemnation of violating the 8th. Commandment that says I must not “bear false witness or lie”.
In November 2018, when he was still Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Spanish government, Borrell assured in a forum organized by the Complutense University that the “higher level of political integration” of the United States was due to the fact that “they have very little history behind them”, consisting only of “killing four Indians”. The United States government fell silent, giving tacit approval to the statement.
Later, on November 12, 2021, trying to be original, Borrell attempted to outline a foreign and security policy proposal for Europe in an article entitled “A strategic compass for Europe”. He wrote that “the EU politics’ sphere of influence is shrinking and our liberal values are increasingly challenged. In the ‘battle of the narratives’, the idea that universal values are really just Western constructs has been gaining ground. The old assumption that economic prosperity would always lead to democratic development has been refuted.”
These words sound like a hymn of defeat and failure of their own evaluative precepts. Perhaps this explains their recurrence to violence, war, sanctions and blockades as instruments to impose their “liberal values” through any means.
More recently and already in the framework of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine, Borrell’s uneducated and disoriented slime has acquired the character of a waterfall, now threatening the entire world. On August 26 of last year, in the final session of the conferences of the summer courses of the Menéndez Pelayo International University in Madrid, he stated: “The war is at a decisive moment and the one who takes the initiative at this moment is no longer Russia, Russia has already lost the war.”
Six months later, with more than 120,000 km² of territory recaptured by Russia (almost 20% of Ukraine’s total area), 165,052 deaths among Ukrainian soldiers, NATO instructors and soldiers, and mercenaries, 234,000 wounded, 302 planes, 212 helicopters 2,750 drones, 6,320 tanks and armored vehicles 7,360 artillery systems and 497 Ukrainian anti-aircraft systems destroyed (according to figures given by themselves, which must be much more) it is not credible that Russia has lost the war.
In the continuation of his cheap rhetoric, on October 14 during the inauguration of the pilot course of the new European Diplomatic Academy at the College of Europe in Bruges, Belgium, Borrell compared the European Union to a “garden” while considering that “Most of the rest of the world is a jungle.” This earned him the nickname “gardener” with which he has been known ever since. Trying to explain his racist temper, Borrell said that “The jungle has a strong capacity for growth and the wall will never be high enough to protect the garden ” in words that were even rejected by many decent Europeans that the half-turned-ghost keeps hidden.
On December 1, in the middle of a meeting attended by Latin American parliamentarians, Borrell launched an unprecedented speech in about the colonization and conquest of America. The event occurred during the European-Latin American Parliamentary Assembly (Eurolat), a multilateral organization made up of 150 parliamentarians from both regions. The Spanish “diplomat” resorted to the example of the “discoverers and conquerors” as an expression of success of the objectives set by the European monarchies of that time.
He asserted: “To navigate in this storm, neither the routes nor the maps of the past are of use to us. Like the discoverers and conquerors, we have to invent a New World,” the senior official asserted, defending colonization as a paradigm in his speech. With these words, Borrell was demanding the repetition of the European barbarism that meant the murder of 56 million inhabitants of these lands. It must also be remembered that in the fifteenth century, Spain alone robbed up to 9,550 tons of gold and silver from America. This is what Borrell intends to copy, but since Europe cannot do it now with arms and the cross, they would like to do it with their companies, their banks, their sanctions and blockades. Borrell claims genocide, plunder and looting by the same monarchy that still rules his country today.
A few days later, and as if there was no doubt that none of the previous demonstrations had been a coincidence or even an outburst, on December 6, when delivering a speech at the Jacques Delors Institute in Paris, the head of EU diplomacy, Borrel said: “…The more destruction Ukraine suffers, the greater its chances of joining the EU”, establishing in this way, a diabolical formula that is limited to more war, more blood, more destruction and more dead Ukrainians so that the country can enter the European conglomerate, even though Russia had beforehand not rejected such a possibility. It is the EU itself that has prevented Ukraine’s entry due to its high levels of corruption, administrative disorder and functional inefficiency.
But Borrell does not give up. He insists as if he wanted to make his behavior and racist behavior clear, on December 9 of last year, desperate because of growing support for Russia on the part of the majority of African countries that have not bowed to the Western security measures against Moscow. “I have seen on the television screens those young Africans in the streets of Bamako [the capital of Mali] with signs that said ‘Thank you, Putin, you have saved Donbass and now you are going to save us’”, to later affirm that “those people do not know where Donbass is or who Putin is”. On this occasion, it was the spokeswoman for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Maria Zajárova, who replied: “Josep, don’t measure people by yourself. The degradation of the collective West does not mean that the same processes occur in other nations.” Nothing to add to that.
Recently, on January 20, 2023, in a speech delivered in Madrid, where he was awarded the New Economy Forum 2022 prize, Borrell recalled the experiences of Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler as invaders of Russia. In his opinion, both examples are illustrative of how that country is capable of fighting “until the end”, going through “almost losing and then recovering”, and is even “accustomed” to such things. “They did it with Napoleon, they did it with Hitler,” he said. Borrell considers it “absurd” to think that Russia has lost in the conflict with Ukraine “or that its military is incompetent.” It seems that he forgot that he himself, – on August 26, -as we said before – affirmed that Russia had already lost the war. It’s impossible to be so incongruous and goofy.
Two days later, on January 22, in an interview published in El Diario de España, Borrell affirmed: “We have, in a few months, eliminated the energy dependence on Russia that we had built for years.” The problem with this statement is that only a few days after, the Corporation of Strategic Petroleum Reserves of his country Spain, reported that the volume of gas purchased from Russia increased by around 55% last year compared to 2021. In a report published by The Objective, signed by Antonio Martos in September of last year, it was stated that Spain had disbursed 750 million Euros to import liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Russia, surpassing countries such as France (600 million) and Belgium (392 million).
Already on that date it was announced that the European Union (EU) had imported 54% of the total gas exported by Russia, which meant “a total value of 85,000 million euros – close to the 102,000 million that it paid in all 2021” according to the Martos report. We assume that Borrell’s multiple occupations did not allow him to read this report from last September when he gave the interview in January of this year.
Finally, and to “put the lid on the knob” as the Cubans say, at a conference on the fight against disinformation that was held in Brussels on Tuesday, February 7, Borrell presented a “brilliant idea” that should be studied in the schools of social communication and journalism of the universities. He said that by banning the work of the Russian media “we are not attacking freedom of expression, but protecting it.” Alfredo Jalife-Rahme would say “super sic”.
Being an idiot is not a crime and I think it is not even a sin according to the Catholic precepts that Borrell professes. But it is extremely dangerous that a person with such a limited culture, who also possesses a clear racist and colonialist attitude and behavior, could fall under the leadership of the foreign and security policy of so “civilized” Europe. “The fish dies through the mouth,” affirms the popular saying. If it were true, Borrell would be in hell a long time ago.