The campaigns of the conservative parties expose 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 comply with without blind faith. They fight for the memory of the past more than for the awareness of the future. Their constituents submit to the pride of the pack, the mentality of a country, of a correct way of doing things.
The campaigns of the progressive parties are not very different. Its principles are more theoretical, some 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 advances that society has achieved on its own.
Both of them, on the left and on the right, believe that it is useless to influence an idea if you do not reach the feelings. So say the manuals of the good candidate. But then, with his heart in his mouth, he always condemns himself. Nothing is forgiven to anyone. There is no possible redemption, that is, the possibility of understanding.
Monsters lurk in the days of mild politics, but what would they be capable of if someone were to bring them out into the open? They would go so far as to commit genocide, as in Rwanda, with machetes. Sometimes all you need is a radio station and a voice on.
When life leaves us alone, we lose interest in the rhetoric of the revolution, but we recover it when this same life does not let us live.
Inequality ignites extremes and burns bridges. Perhaps that is why no bridge has ever crossed the Amazon. It would require a colossal undertaking and decades of collective effort, a goal impossible to accomplish without humility, technology, and joy. In short, an absurdity. Nobody dresses in joy and humility on the catwalks of power and optimism only makes sense as opium for the people. Better to build 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 they also believe that everything is repaired by 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 1990s. They were the same ones that Leo Tolstoy had left written 150 years before in Hadji Murat. Likewise, a year ago, I witnessed the massacres in the Ukraine, a repetition of those that Isaac Bábel had depicted a hundred years earlier in Cavalry Army and also very similar to those that Joseph Kessel narrated during the First World War and that later, in the Second, Curzio Malaparte collected in Kaput t.
More serious than the scandal of the massacre is the repetition of the massacre, 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 NATO meeting 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 unparalleled defeat, the worst in its history, a physical, intellectual and spiritual defeat at the hands of Nazi and Soviet madness, 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. It is not capable of beating Russia.
Since the end of the Second World War, our Europeanism and our nationalism, our vocation as engineers in the Amazon and our obsession with drawbridges, have been determined by American protection. In exchange for the peace dividend we have sacrificed our independence. The only countries that liberated themselves then were Serbia and the USSR. NATO, the victor of World War II, bombed Serbia in 1999 and today faces Russia on the battlefields of Ukraine. That is how deep are the currents that carry us to tomorrow and that is how superficial the campaigns that try to dominate them.
Candidates, and also those who become presidents, put up scenery instead of walls. Any political gesture, from slapping Ukraine to demonizing immigration, is accompanied by unbearable media comedy.
Europe needs immigrants as much as Ukraine's victory, and it needs to better redistribute wealth as much as it needs to emancipate itself from the US to assume its own security. Its future is settled in these rivers much more than in those of the climate crisis and artificial intelligence. No European ruler, however, dares to cross them because the campaigns, after all, are not designed to win, but not to lose.
To cross the Amazon you have to be brave, honest and visionary. Furthermore, one must be willing to sacrifice everything, even life, as migrants do in the Mediterranean. They remind us of what we have forgotten, what is worth living for, and perhaps worth voting for.
