Friday, March 29

the end of a civilization

It’s like the free bar of the excesses, the debauchery of the outrages, without any shame to be shown. After two years of pandemic, a war breaks out in Europe with harsh realities and grim prospects. With additions. Civilization is transforming right now. And not without warning and not exactly for the better. Lucidity is needed to see it, without being deceived; hold on tight to the supports that each one has and refill every morning the temple that often empties during the day.

He warned, but perhaps not to this extent. Like any empire, like the Roman one, we know of the agonizing decadence that is coming to an end in degeneration. Realism would be essential to curb the trend, but previously a society has been formatted in which ethical values ​​have been largely removed to replace them with selfishness and with it the exaltation of money regardless of whose expense it is achieved. . A society manipulated because it allows itself to be manipulated, and in which powerful directors of this drama do not stop acting, not even seeing the shipwreck and the victims it casts.

Very hard days for those who make an effort to use reason. But, in effect, every sunrise is tried again. On this Friday, the news by way of pithing rapier, barely noticed, announced that Facebook and Instagram will temporarily allow calls to violence against Russians. Even calling for the death of Putin and the invaders of Ukraine. With vomitive ambiguity, they point out that they have changed “their policy of inciting hatred towards both Russian soldiers and Russians in the context of the invasion.” Towards the Russians. In addition they authorize the praises to the Ukrainian Nazi Battalion of the Azov. Facebook touches the 3,000 million users in the world. Instagram is around 1,500 million and 2,000 million WhatsApp jungle whose owner is also Mark Zuckerberg. The presence of this character in so many destabilizing maneuvers continues to be striking. Let us remember the fine to which Facebook was sentenced for manipulating the accounts of 50 million users to design Donald Trump’s political message and which was also linked to the context of the Cambridge Analytica operation in the British Brexit.

There is no need to encourage indiscriminate racist hatred. Children of Russian parents are being insulted even in Spain, where they are probably living their entire short lives. Some children try to hide their origin to go unnoticed, according to their teachers. But of course it doesn’t help anything to promote arbitrariness of the caliber of suspending Tchaikovsky concerts (in Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom, they have done it) or the Bolshoi Ballet at the Royal Theater in Madrid. If something can temper the beasts of any place, it is culture. And of course Putin is Russian, but he is not the Russian people or the Russian culture.

Spain, by the way, opens its first ultra-right government. In Castilla y León, as it was seen coming. President Mañueco (PP) did a good job of removing the focus from the corruption processes in which he is immersed, but achieving a majority that would allow him to get rid of Ciudadanos did a poor job. He has changed them for Vox, and has given them the presidency of Parliament, the vice-presidency of the Executive and three councils. The first thing in the government agreement is to deactivate the Law on gender violence and tie immigrants short. Historical memory in question. The democratic, to the garbage.

The president of the EPP and former president of the European Council, Donald Tusk, disapproves of the Spanish pact with the extreme right. He says that Pablo Casado gave him guarantees that there would be no such alliance, but Alberto Núñez Feijóo, even more lukewarm than his deposed predecessor, has said that he does not see any problem. The support media of the extreme right in Spain, either. Several European countries establish a cordon sanitaire to the extreme right. Here, quite the opposite. And so we pay for it. Franco’s fascism never left the institutions and the anti-democratic hearts of a large group of Spaniards. And they have returned to place their heirs in decision-making positions without causing them the slightest problem.

Now that civilization is sinking, Spain adds that gap. The war on Ukraine has the tragic and unacceptable face of victims and destruction, and at the same time triggers the economic debacle. A struggle marked by testosterone (in its worst meaning) although there are women in the ranks of warmongering. On the one hand, Putin’s authoritarianism and the war he has unleashed; on the other, the punitive measures of the US and the EU that millions of citizens will suffer, while a few get rich. It is already an economic nuclear bomb with effects on the system we had, yes. This one, yes. The shock wave spreads across multiple sectors. Price increase or product shortage. Energy, transportation, fertilizers, food products. It’s what wars have. It is always better to prevent and, in any case, to negotiate and, of course, to press, trying not to cause so many victims.

That Europe in which they did not know how to find valid interlocutors from outside, which has become the world’s museum, is still touched. It cannot turn off the tap on Russian gas – as the US does so comfortably since it does not destabilize them at all – because several European countries, Germany in particular, need it. Although other ways are tried, it is difficult for them to discard it. And Germany still has a lot of power. Lowering the heating, as High Commissioner Josep Borrell has said, is an excessive request when considering the benefits and power of electricity companies in Spain. This too comes from afar. From when González and Aznar dismantled the energy assets of the State and the leader of the PP finished it off by selling Endesa to Berlusconi. It also comes from various iron contracts that have been signed with the companies, from their prices, from their salaries, from their refusal to reduce them.

Borrell has largely ruined the neat French garden that he saw as a simile for Europe in ultra-nationalist contrast to the jungle of the rest of the world. It would be more like one of those high hedge mazes with no exits. But you have to get out of it. Of war and how much it causes and encourages it. Even the conservative parties in the EU see the extreme right as a problem. In media Spain, no. They dare to say in a gathering that they do not know what the drama of the pact is in Castilla y León, from a presumed moderate right, and to whitewash it by equating Vox with United We Can. European memory knows that it was the Nazi and fascist extreme right that caused World War II. In Spain we had it in the government and that somewhat clouds the view.

The tyrant Vladimir Putin is supported by pre-Flood ultra-religious oligarchs and large sectors of the world political ultra-right. The Spanish of course. And they also know it in Europe and half the world. The wars are various as at this point he knows or it is convenient for any citizen to know. Faced with great professionals who are demonstrating the essential work of journalism, we observe some deviations to which we must be alert. Sometimes they are simple confusion of criteria, other times they are not, but in these critical and painful moments it is important to be alert. Contextualizing how war begins and develops, or trying to reason about the danger of escalation, is seen as being “pro-Russian”, support for Putin and even “charge from Putin”. Is there someone who cashes envelopes from someone? It is to be feared that yes, then. Pacifism is defended by journalists from the left, they say, and Human Rights are now from the left, apparently. It’s bleak. But this also needs to be rationalized. All the citizens.

I don’t know if what is now in precipitous disintegration can be called a civilization, but nothing will ever be the same again. The fall of the Empire is not really either, because it is precisely empires that are now fighting over all of us cornered. And not just the most ostensible: add, in your own way, China and Saudi Arabia. And not only political, economic and power empires without a doubt. The scariest thing is that they do it without the slightest dissimulation or scruple, broken untouchable limits. They know in which society they work, how to proceed and who guides them. And their companies are not, as the poem said, of love or solidarity. What happens can be the beginning of an Era, barbarism or sanity.

When something ends, something begins too, hopefully. Except nuclear deflagration. On The time Machine, the novel published in 1895 by the British HG Wells, made into a film in 1960, the author foresaw the dystopia of the planet in which the Earth had derived. The evil and intelligent Mordocks lived underground, feeding on the hunts of the graceful and dazed Eloi, who hardly knew what was happening and what affected them. Be careful, because sometimes it gives the impression that this is already happening.



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