The silent masses, the people who suffer the consequences of the bad government, take to the streets and triumph. Sometimes this victory comes at the cost of hundreds of deaths, as in Iran, or at the cost of mass arrests, as we have seen in Russia and will soon see in China, where the authorities will not be able to get out of the quagmire they have gotten themselves into with the zero covid strategy. Other times, victory is pyrrhic, at the cost of a personal sacrifice that barely scratches the ivory tower that sustains power. It does not seem likely, for example, that Putin will withdraw from Ukraine no matter how much the Russians protest.
There are masses that do not have to go out into the streets because they live permanently in it, exposed to poverty, violence and tyranny. Their screams were confused a few weeks ago with the noise of the bullets that crossed the streets of Port-au-Prince, capital of the poorest country in America.
Poverty and tyranny underpin the fatalism to which billions of people are doomed. Their lives are hardly their own and can hardly be changed. Even in liberal democracies, 55% of those born into the lower classes will also die in them.
Protests in the first world are usually nice weekend walks. Filling the Plaza de Cibeles in Madrid was enough, in mid-November, to force a change in public health.
Four years ago, however, the yellow vests occupied the Champs Elysées in Paris for months and months and were defeated. The most emblematic avenue in France was reduced to a battlefield and the high cost of living that worried this social movement so much continued to grow amid the smoke from the barricades and burning cars.
The common denominator of almost all mass protests coincides with the decline of political leaders due to narcissistic saturation. The excesses of vanity and ambition are paid dearly in both democracies and autocracies. France does not need a Napoleon in the same way that China does not need an emperor, Russia a czar or Madrid a leader.
Democracies, still in strong decline, such as the United States, guarantee the peaceful transfer of power. This is their essence and the last thing they lose.
Autocracies, however, are more vulnerable the less autocratic they are. Xi and Putin have no choice but to suppress any threat however small, especially when they get it wrong, as now with covid and Ukraine, two crises that will drag on for the foreseeable future.
Putin starts wars that don't end. He did it in Georgia in 2008, in Donbas in 2014 and in Syria in 2015. The only thing that matters to him is force, the virility of the armed conflict. He believes that there is no more effective way to rule Russia. International cooperation interests him as little as dialogue with his own people.
Xi is quite like him and now that he has achieved president for life he will be even more like him. Nationalist pride has prevented him from rectifying, that is, from governing effectively.
The protests have managed to relax the confinements a bit, but it cannot go much further. If you lift social restrictions, the economy will return to cruising speed, but at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dead, maybe even millions. The people who now protest for the confinements will then do so for the dead and it will be even worse. The anger will be much greater and the repression will also have to be much greater.
Xi could buy the mRNA vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer-Biontech. They are much more effective than yours. He has plenty of money, but he lacks the humility to recognize the failure of his scientists. This arrogance, like that of Putin in the Ukraine, condemns his people.
Mortality is about to skyrocket in China. Hastily built hospitals won't stop her. The oldest Chinese, those who have turned 80, will be the first to die. Only 40% have two Sinovac vaccines and, even so, its effectiveness does not reach 60%. If they could put on those from Pfizer or Moderna, their protection would rise to almost 90%, but a State decision prevents them from doing so.
Xi and Putin, like the Iranian ayatollahs, cause serious economic and social harm to their people, but that is often the case in tyrannies.
The suffering of the people justifies the tyrants. They do everything to save the very ones they make suffer. They rule with the blood of those who do not understand, of those who easily change their minds because they have no criteria.
The enemy, the cause of your problems, is always outside. Even democratic leaders have become accustomed to blaming the other for their own mistakes.
But then, well looked at, that's how things have always been. It is the same that the world is bigger and more diverse today. The forces that move and paralyze him are the same as always. We don't want to be tyrants, but we wonder when another Caesar will come to save us.
Everything is rhetoric and relativity, even the triumphs of the silent masses.
