Elections in the United States: “people of bullies” | …

From Paris.

“The condition of a brutalized people is worse than the condition of a bully people.” 257 years separate this sentence written in 1763 by the French philosopher and creator of the Encyclopedia Denis Diderot at the end of 2020. What is happening in United States right now, breathe every word of that sentence. A brutalized people choose a despot and give up their freedom. Diderot’s pithy brevity masterfully portrays, beyond time, the dramatic involution of a society and culture that represented the most advanced of democratic modernity, far above the cynical European starch.

Donald Trump is boycotting his own country with the same philosophy with which Washington’s goons boycotted our democracies for a long period of the 20th century. His contract killers were called Pinochet, Videla, Duarte, Bordaberry or Stroessner and in the 1970s they spread a line of horrors that the collective memory keeps as acts of barbarism covered by impunity and force. From century to century, from Pinochet and Videla to Donald Trump, an empire-fueled fiction crumbles and a force emerges, powerful and whole, which has turned history upside down and set South America on the path to its own. sovereign resurrection and the exporter of crimes before the same extremes it has expanded. The victim of these crimes has their hands in control of their destiny. Chile, with the plebiscite for constitutional reform, has shed the legacy of authoritarianism, the breaking of the law and the contamination of the institutions with which Trump has governed and tries to stay in power. History is ours again and breathes the South.

The processes are simultaneous: Chile frees itself and frees us in the real and the symbolic of this hired killer past, of a Constitution conceived in Washington, while United States enters the temporal tunnel from which Chile has just emerged: the empire which exported deaths, torture and dictatorships made a lying and corrupt autocrat who trampled all laws and will leave a legacy much more entrenched than we suspect it: it ends with Donald Trump but has only just begun.

In 2020, Donald Trump added 5 million votes (68 million) to those he won in 2016. Emptied or corrupted institutions, a Republican party allied with the most nefarious thing that ever existed and oriented towards confrontation and cheating, the secret services and security agencies in the mud and a Supreme Court captive of Trumpism have been installed for several decades at the heart of this degraded democracy. As Chile rejected the legacy of dictatorship-culture that Washington exported, the United States entered the era of messianic authoritarianism. The resurrected specter of Augusto Pinochet has moved to the Capitol and will remain there for a time. In his swearing-in speech (January 27, 2017), Trump praised Americans who voted for him “to form a historic movement the world has never seen before.” And it is there, far, far from the “majesty of American democracy” with which former President George Bush greeted Bill Clinton’s victory in the 1993 election.

“Majesty” is a rag trampled on by a madman in whom millions of voters continue to see a Messiah. Trump is more than Trump: he is the ban whereby the moral collapse of a society that is tired of making moral heroes in the cinema ends up choosing the most complete actor of immorality. The American dream has turned into a planetary nightmare. In the abyss between one and the other, from dream to nightmare, not only the childishness of the myth falls. In this fall, our gentle and constant submission to the feet of a cultural, financial and technological model that has hypnotized the entire planet is also on display. The years in which in Latin America and Europe attempts at sovereign aesthetics were explored and carried out in many cultural fields have either vanished or recycled into a cultural and technological dependence unprecedented in the history of mankind. There have never been so many millions of human beings, from cultures and geographies as different as they are distant, using or admiring the products made by the same empire.

Mental dependence on the United States has been a global abdication. Even the empire could not control its own inventions. He has amassed an Imperial force so destructive that he has no more weapons to protect himself. Once again, Facebook, Twitter or YouTube were unable to stop or manage the flow of false information generated by the election in the United States and the deluge of aberrations that followed, propagated by Donald Trump. and his supporters. In English – English only – Twitter issued a warning about Trump’s questionable messages, but did not stop them from spreading. As for Facebook, all false messages from the president denouncing an alleged “massive fraud” are freely accessible. In Spanish or French, there is no brake: conspiratorial repeaters translate and retweet them easily. Thus, messages appeared in Spanish seen by millions of people who spoke of fraud in Arizona or denounced the imaginary presence of far-left militias deploying in the United States. Not to mention YouTube and its alternative channels.

Misnamed social networks have once again proven themselves to be weapons of mass slaughter (MEA). From this subculture emerged Qanon. This radical far-right group, follower of violence, hyper Trumpist, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, anti-Latin and anti-African-American works through encrypted messages broadcast on the network and believes that there is a deep state ruled by an elite of pedophiles who conspire against who he is, for them, the savior of the world, Donald Trump. This violent illusion presented 20 candidates and one of them entered the Lower House a few days ago: the current Senator Marjorie Greene (Georgia). She is blonde, racist, pro Qanon, armed to the teeth, promoter of a war campaign against the “satanic pedophiles” of the supposed “Deep State” and the socialists. The FBI views Qanon as a terrorist threat with “the capacity to motivate domestic extremists to carry out criminal and violent activities”. The finest and most developed technological tool has spawned a monster that eats its own democracy.

The true democrats of the West could very well turn to our South to reinvent themselves. We have resisted murderous dictatorships, disappearances, torture, state terrorism, privatizations, internal colonialism, liberal evangelists, the plunder of our natural resources, the disloyalty of our bourgeoisies, the manipulation of institutions. , corruption, impunity, underdevelopment, inequality as a political philosophy and a permanent war that, from the start, the United States declared on Latin America. They have always been at war with us. There has been no American president who has not left us a dictatorship. Obama left us the coup d’état in Honduras (Manuel Zelaya) and Trump and the OAS the pathetic masquerade of the coup in Bolivia against Evo Morales.

We have looked into your eyes and breathed the breath of barbarism for decades. We never cease to be the collective dream of freedom with which our American histories were forged. What an enormous and sordid paradox! Today, it is up to the world’s leading power and the pilot democracy to fight for their own freedom. And the other colonial empires of Europe are shaken and overrun by a violent and xenophobic far right that corrodes everything it touches. Argentina tells the world a lot more than internal confrontation and media garbage can hear. Bolivia returned to modern democratic times after a hiatus in the 19th century, and Chile banished dying sighs of institutional infamy. Global media is looking at Bolsonaro’s Brazil, but the epiphany is us. It beats in this haunted and violated magic triangle of the South, which has managed to restore and believe in what the West no longer believes. The rampant authoritarianism that is spreading in the West contrasts with the slow but constant conquest of our freedoms.

The Age of Enlightenment which presides over the birth of Western democracy has been shrouded in the secrecy of shadows. Who would have told us that a crass puppet would turn the White House into the shadowy castle of a nascent autocracy? Trumpism reveals a lot about us because it focuses, in its fatal contradiction, our emancipatory power, the horrors we have suffered for freedom and the inalienable way in which we have consolidated it. It also shows us the futility of addiction and the cost it still entails.

Today, it is the South that can help the American people, with open hands and rancorous memories, to free themselves. We have a lot of experience with autocrats trained in Washington. We know better than them how to get out alive and without submission. We did not build a school of the Americas to train dictators like the United States did, but rather developed a democratic practice with a new identity.

An upside down journey is already beginning. The South can transmit to the North the ethics of emancipation and freedom that this same North has intercepted so many times for its convenience.. They can count on us. Perhaps our weaknesses and institutional imperfections do not legitimize us in the West. But today we are a halo of light. The shadows cast by empire illuminate our own collective greatness, our deep past of imported violence and our sovereign resurrection. The Americans, our mass graves, our death flights, our missing, our stolen children, our death squads, our dispossessed indigenous peoples, our sold democracies are part of the secret war that successive North American administrations have waged with the lackey. national. We have overcome these bloody vicissitudes. In Argentina, we delivered justice and condemned criminals against humanity. We have a lot of accumulated wisdom to share. If you lose the path to freedom, look south.