I was already in a slightly dark mood with the Koldo case, when Mrs. Von der Leyen appears and ends up turning me into a real mess. A group of those who believe that nothing changes for the better, that history does not progress towards a bright place and that the only thing that progresses – technology – only serves to make us addicted to the screens we live in a virtual world even stupider than the real one. We’ve never had so much information at our fingertips, it’s true, but it seems that the only thing we know how to do with it is thrive in the ruqueria. Eliot’s poem explains it better: “Where is the wisdom that we have lost with knowledge? Where is the knowledge that we have lost with the information?”.
But what he said. First, the alleged abuses of that Koldo, his hard-working promoter, ex-minister Ábalos, and the bitter feeling of déjà-vu they convey. As if we were dusting off old photographs of Roldán and the Gürtel; or when the old king would return from his hunting trips and mumble I don’t know what about repentance and forgiveness. Always the same: men with a dry expression and ages when one is already responsible for one’s face conspiring with the reservations of seafood restaurants, investing in apartments on the coast and corrupting a little more any idea of ??public service.
They are the usual individuals. Those who, as Alejandro Nieto said when analyzing corruption in Spain, do not move in the official State described in the Constitution, with majestic and harmonious powers in which everything is designed for the defense of citizens and general interests , but in another semi-clandestine and murky State, which is where public life really takes place. In fact, they might even feel a little sorry for me; condemned to being overweight, to a constant intake of barnacles and sea goat and to tell themselves that their best times are yet to pass.
At the same time, the president of the European Commission, the circumspect Mrs. Von der Leyen – who sometimes looks so much like Vera Miles from Psycho and The Man Who Killed Liberty Valance – recommends to the Europeans an intense rearmament campaign so that the what’s coming is a crueler and harsher war than the one Putin started in Ukraine, and Biden and NATO are fueling it, while others are putting the dead in it. You see: Arms control has become a cold war dinner party and the right thing to do is invest in military drones, the old tanks of life and put tax money to work for in combat
This is what is left of the illusions of the late 1980s after the fall of the Wall, when the largest open-air prisons in history were opened in Eastern Europe and some not-so-clairvoyant political scientist ( God to create political scientists so that astrologers would not have such a bad reputation) proclaimed the end of history. I assure you that many of us unwary share the mistake: almost all of us who lived in that foreign country that is the past and believed that something had improved man since the days of Cheops.
The worst part is that Von der Leyen is very likely right and would do well to remind us how the world works, because today there is no indication that further steps towards peace, democracy and rights are to be taken humans, rather the opposite. Thinkers and states that were once liberal and secular submit to the most brutal manifestations of religion and nationalism and societies that we once thought were tolerant succumb to the irresistible charm of authoritarian democracy. The president says it loud and clear: the vision of perpetual peace is just a mirage that distracts us from what really matters: meeting the challenges of the future with large-caliber ammunition, because the Russian tanks advancing west on the roads of Ukraine they look dangerously like the panzers that eighty years ago spread death in the opposite direction.
If these are the forecasts, in the end it is not surprising that Israelis and Palestinians continue to kill each other with the fury generated by the most toxic aspects of the sinister monotheisms born in their territories; nor that Putin can win in Ukraine; nor that people like Trump see their followers grow because the old liberals are dead or have nothing to offer. Not even hope.
You will agree with me that there are weeks when it is better not to get up.
