On neutrality: 'best to back no one at all'

Backing Russia or NATO online could land you in prison

Loudly backing Russia or NATO doesn't cost money. It costs something else. That is the thesis that opens a hundred-reply exchange where the opening warning is as simple as it is uncomfortable: anyone who takes a side in someone else's conflict gets recorded, and what is an opinion today is a file tomorrow. The starting point says nothing about tanks or front lines. It talks about lists.

The historical reference thrown onto the table is that of the sides in World War II, where everyone had identified their own before the dance began. The conclusion drawn: best to back no one at all. Neither Moscow nor Brussels. Because whoever takes the plunge gets marked.

What happens if the third one breaks out and you've already picked a side

The scenario sketched out has two doors. If the conflict stays far away and the Atlanticist side wins, whoever backed Pilingui ends up singled out. If the conflict reaches Spain, things change register: prison, a re-education camp or something worse, in the harshest formulation circulating. Neutrality thus appears not as cowardice, but as a survival calculation.

Against that logic stands the classic sarracena argument, the one from the poem that begins with the silences and ends with no one left to defend you. It is immoral to be neutral, sums up one of the most repeated voices. The problem is that the poem works just as well in both directions: it can also be recited from Moscow.

The record nobody sees and the convent donation

The most concrete example that appears is not geopolitical. It is domestic and old. An acquaintance recounts that a friend's grandparents were shot in the Civil War because they gave a monthly donation to a convent. The donation book was kept at the convent. They were taken one by one. That friend's father, decades later, never leaves his name anywhere, not even for a ticket raffle. The antiestéticar of being on a list is not forum paranoia: it is family memory.

That is the point where the debate stops being abstract. The question is not whether anyone is going to review the messages on an internet forum. The question is whether the logic of lists, which already worked once, could work again. And there the answers split between those who believe we're all already on file and those who think that gives far too much weight to a few stray opinions.

Neutrality is not the same as pacifism

The most productive confusion in the exchange is conceptual. It is argued that neutrality and pacifism are different things: a neutral country can have a nuclear arsenal and a powerful army to defend itself. Switzerland is the example repeated. Spain, it is recalled, stayed out of both world wars and profited economically from it, besides avoiding millions of deaths.

The counterargument has its own logic: if nobody ever intervenes, the invader wins by attrition. The answer to that is that states are not people and have no internationalist duties. The government's duty, it is held, is for the conflict to affect its citizens as little as possible. No more, no less.

The calculation nobody makes: what the free side costs

There is one point running through the whole exchange that almost nobody develops: the asymmetric cost of holding opinions. Whoever backs NATO does so under the umbrella of a power structure that, if things go wrong, has embassies, lawyers and passports. Whoever backs Russia does so from the other side of the counter. The full breakdown of that asymmetry, with the scenarios being weighed, yields a surprising result.

The most repeated anecdote is that of the citizen who has six gas bottles connected in parallel and an evacuation plan to Mars overtaking Musk's rocket on the right. It's a joke, but it is also the recognition that nobody has a real plan. Neither those who take sides, nor those who don't.

The uncomfortable conclusion: the neutral is on the list too

The close of the exchange resolves nothing, and that is the honest part. Those who defend active neutrality hold that being neutral is not being indifferent: it is standing in solidarity with the victims on both sides without joining either. Those who defend alignment say that position is a comfortable one and that, when the moment comes, there will be no one left to defend the neutral.

The prediction that can be made from the available data is limited: if the conflict escalates, the first to be singled out will be those who made the most noise, not those who stayed silent. If it doesn't escalate, all this will have been dinner-table talk. The difference between one scenario and the other is decided by no one offering opinions here. And that, probably, is the only thing everyone is clear about.