Conservative party campaigns set out principles that do not arise so much from reflection as from inertia. They expose customs and convictions that, on many occasions, are illogical, impossible to fulfill without blind faith. They fight for the memory of the past rather than the awareness of the future. Its voters submit to the pride of the herd, the mentality of a country, a correct way of doing things.
Progressive party campaigns are not much different. Its principles are more theoretical, some of them have not even passed the test of reality, but they are applied with a conviction similar to that of the believer. Their hope is to consolidate the progress that society has made on its own.
One and the other, on the left and the right, believe that it’s no use influencing an idea if you don’t get to the feelings. So say the manuals of the good candidate. But then, with his heart in his mouth, he always condemns himself. No one is forgiven. There is no possible redemption, that is, the possibility of understanding.
Monsters hide in times of placid politics, but what would they be capable of if someone brought them to light? They would commit a genocide, like in Rwanda, at the stroke of a machete. Sometimes all it takes is a radio station and a fiery voice.
When life leaves us alone, we lose interest in the rhetoric of revolution, but we regain it when this same life does not let us live.
Inequality ignites extremes and burns bridges. Maybe that’s why no bridge has ever crossed the Amazon. It would require a colossal undertaking and decades of collective effort, a purpose impossible to accomplish without humility, technology, and joy. In short, an absurdity. No one wears joy and humility in the corridors of power and optimism only makes sense as the opium of the people. Better to put up fences and patrol the borders, live in castles with drawbridges.
The guardians of power, as well as those who aspire to defeat them, believe that nations are eternal, impossible to forget, and also believe that everything repairs itself. However, history shows that everything is forgotten and that nothing is ever fully repaired.
This is how we repeat tragedies. We think they are new because we have forgotten the old ones.
I witnessed the carnage in Chechnya in the early nineties. They were the same that Leo Tolstoy had left written 150 years earlier to Hadji Murat. Likewise, a year ago, I was witness to the massacres in Ukraine, a repetition of those that had been portrayed a hundred years earlier by Isaac Babel in Cavalleria Roja and very similar to those that Joseph Kessel narrated during the First World War and that later, in the Second, Curzio Malaparte picked up Kaputt.
More serious than the scandal of the slaughter is the repetition of the slaughter, and that is why there is oblivion, so that everything is new and less painful.
Without forgetting it is impossible to understand the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, the rise of the extreme right in Western Europe or the meeting that NATO held this week in Vilnius. The new Europe, our Europe, of which Israel is also a part, was born almost 80 years ago from an unprecedented defeat, the worst in its history, a physical, intellectual and spiritual defeat at the hands of madness Nazi and Soviet, of the incendiary bombs on German cities. American liberation brought peace, but not emancipation. Even today, as was seen in Vilnius, Europe drags its smallness and tutelage. He is not able to beat Russia.
Since the end of the Second World War, our Europeanism and our nationalism, our vocation as engineers in the Amazon and our fixation on drawbridges, have been determined by American protection. In exchange for the peace dividend we have sacrificed our independence. The only countries that then liberated themselves were Serbia and the USSR. NATO, the victor of the Second World War, bombed Serbia in 1999 and today faces Russia on the battlefields of Ukraine.
So deep are the currents that take us to tomorrow and so superficial are the campaigns that try to dominate them.
Candidates, and also those who become presidents, put up decorations instead of walls. Any political gesture, from a slap in the face in Ukraine to the demonization of immigration, is accompanied by an unbearable media comedy.
Europe needs immigrants as much as it needs the victory of Ukraine, and it needs better redistribution of wealth as much as it needs emancipation from the US to assume its own security. Its future lies in these rivers much more than in those of the climate crisis and artificial intelligence.
No European ruler, however, dares to cross them because campaigns, after all, are not designed to win, but not to lose.
To cross the Amazon you need to be brave, honest and visionary. You must also be prepared to sacrifice everything, even your life, as migrants do in the Mediterranean. They remind us what we have forgotten, why it is worth living and, perhaps, voting.
