How is the leader barometer?
We are in a terrible leadership crisis. Everywhere we go, leaders fail to address the core issues.
What problems?
Inequality and the environment. The rulers report it, talk and talk, but do nothing or make it worse.
Do we have leaders?
Even those who have the opportunity and potential to make positive change fail, encounter obstacles, and are defeated or corrupted along the way. Changing the world in times like these is very difficult, and that’s what leadership is all about.
Do leaders emerge from adversity?
Those we remember, because we admire them or because we vilify them, those who transformed situations, have emerged in moments of crisis. The crisis is what allows the leader to put his vision into practice.
Well now they should emerge from it in dojo.
The problem with crises is that all sorts of potential leaders emerge. During the decade of the 1930s, the Great Depression gave rise to the leadership of Adolf Hitler and Imperial Japan which invaded China.
Smoked leaders
They took advantage of the crisis to implement an agenda that was imperial, genocidal, racist, aggressive. But Roosevelt started a social protection program.
What characteristics should we focus on to choose a good leader?
In their actions, but we live in a world that focuses on personality and rhetoric.
An example.
Now we are seeing a tragic panorama in the Middle East and we have the United States and Europe talking about peace; result: no peace because of continued support for war. It’s a failure, what’s happening.
Do we have past examples to aspire to?
I usually show the mistakes that should not be repeated.
it serves me
Sad examples: When the Japanese leadership decided to attack Pearl Harbor, what did they not see coming? The leaders in Japan did not understand their limitations, that was their mistake. I will now tell you about the Vietnam War.
Because?
It reminds me a lot of what is happening now. We had an American president, Lyndon Johnson, who was very popular for his domestic policies in 1960, but who committed himself to making the Vietnam War a great war and it ended fatally.
Millions of Vietnamese dead.
And American families torn apart. Lyndon Johnson leaves office and dies soon after. These are stories that tell us about caution, and I hope we can learn something from them, there is no need to repeat the same mistakes, let’s avoid this type of tragedy.
Well now the world is rearming.
We are in a state of collective madness; knowing what we know about how the world is, knowing the real problems, that the force that drives us continues to be conflict makes me despair.
What do your young students say?
That they have no enmity with the young people of other countries, on the contrary; but the leaders continue to think with nationalistic patterns and are able to get into a war at times like the present.
Why do they do it?
I would say they are short sighted and selfish, they have a lack of consideration for future generations. I would point out as the main problem of our society this incompatibility between power structures and the disposition to do good.
Take a risk with a leader who can make a difference.
I’ll give her an example, and I don’t want her to be interpreted as a hero, but I’ll mention Greta Thunberg.
Why do you choose her?
Because climate change should be at the center of the agenda of every political program of all leaders. I find it depressing that they leave it in the hands of children.
They let them speak at the UN and applaud.
Hopefully these young leaders will be heard and endorsed en masse; if not, we will continue to be at the mercy of economic interests, among them that of the big armies.
What does history teach about leadership?
Genuine leaders are honest and tell the truth even when it’s hard. Sadly, many have an unsettled fate, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X. But they continue to inspire us.
Why do the rulers want war and the vast majority of citizens, peace?
He doesn’t know how many times I go, that’s it. This gap is intolerable. One votes for the lesser evil, which remains evil.
The best lesson the past has taught him.
Leave a good legacy, and that everyone: small acts, gestures of kindness, of conscience.
