The days when there was talk of the then possible agreement between PSOE and Junts and the solo registration of the amnesty law in Congress reminded me of the title of an essay by Pierre Bayard: How to talk about the books we don’t have read (Empúries/Anagram). The urgency of opposing positions, without an analysis of the text, seemed typical of the protagonist of the comedy Arsènic per compassionió, who was writing his theater review on the way to the premiere. After the investiture vote, I will be left wondering what arguments the future leader of the opposition would have used to criticize the revalidation of Sánchez if there had been no Catalan secessionism.
This question remains a milk cow that is milked to save creative energy. It is in line with these times of rampant consumption of content, in which solid arguments, restraint, respect and listening are not expected. The opposite is always wrong, you can never learn anything from the other. That “you don’t give me lessons about…” is already a hit in the castist political rhetoric.
Bayard, in one of the chapters of the aforementioned title, analyzes the practice of forming opinions about books simply by references from third parties, stressing that it is often considered to be enough to know what others have written about them. This same tactic has been enthusiastically used by parties such as PP and Vox.
Thanks to the influencer of political thought who is at the head of the tax dumping community, we discovered that the agreement that had not yet been reached was the beginning of a dictatorship “that they have snuck into us through the back door”. Affirmation of an elected position with all the guarantees, everything is said in passing, in a program in prime time and with all the tools at his disposal of the Rule of Law (national and European) to stop a so serious This is the other dictatorship, that of the rebequeria.
I can imagine what a citizen of Belarus, Iran, Hungary or some occupied Ukrainian region would think if they heard these statements which, far from being naive or spontaneous, seek to invalidate language. It is what has the absolutism of the superlative, which cancels any nuance. Victor Klemperer already wrote: they are speeches that distill arsenic in tiny doses and are ingested almost inadvertently, but “after a while they exert their lethal effect”. What will be next, the worst of the worst?
In the same vein, González Pons, with (or in spite of) his experience in the Eurochamber, had the good fortune to describe the demonstrations against the amnesty as “Spanish Maidan”. In the midst of the illegitimate invasion of Ukraine, the public is largely aware of what happened in Kyiv during the wave of protests in 2013-2014, which ended with snipers firing on protesters advocating greater integration with Europe and the end of the corruption of the pro-Russian Yanukovych. Perhaps González Pons kept the other name given to the Euromaidan and which appears in the first paragraph of Wikipedia: Revoliútsia hidnosti, “revolution of dignity”. Maybe he liked the appellation without more and pulled terminological appropriationism, why should he try harder?
The party with the most votes in the last election has had a great opportunity to articulate solid arguments, propose convincing solutions and alternatives. It has lacked cunning, there has been plenty of viscerality. The sessions this Wednesday and Thursday should be (when I write this I am already convinced that they are not) the privileged space for the exchange of ideas, from where to give an example even of a value in danger of extinction: it is called concord.
Not to mention another gesture that the PP could have taken, abstention, in order to avoid the implementation of the dreaded dictatorship, as well as a new season of barren crossfire between those who are more processional against anti-secessionism. Here both parties fought for Moncloa. Therefore, the lack of interest was neither there nor expected.
But if there is a dictatorship that worries me particularly now, it is that of mediocrity. It seems that we will have to entrust ourselves to the notion that Philippe Sands mentions in The Last Colony (Anagrama, 2023), “the intelligence of a future day”. That is, to hope that others who have yet to come will read the situations better and know how to approach them in accordance with the circumstances.
