Escape from dystopia

In the end it happened. What we didn’t want to believe has happened. The American electoral majority has preferred to make president again a billionaire convicted of 34 crimes of fraud and violating the electoral financing law, a racist, sexist and anti-democrat who encouraged the violent assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and serves as threatening thug… rather than a former prosecutor of Afro-Indian origin who would have been the first female president of the United States. But we must accept and react to this terrible fact for democracy and even for global survival. The first thing Trump and ultra-capitalist neo-fascism want is for us to lower our arms. They are fine.

Just this week, before the elections, when especially Valencia but all of Spain were suffering a movie catastrophe come true, I discovered in elDiario.es the existence of the film “2073” by British director Asif Kapadia that projects us to 50 years from now to show us a future of a technomilitary dictatorship governed by Trump’s daughter. A nightmare that would be brewing now. In this present that the colleague Javier Biosca has x-rayed in his interview with the historian Steven Forti with these terrifying figures:

Let’s face it: we have long let cynicism and hypocrisy gnaw away at our democracy like a worm through an apple. And it is becoming increasingly fragile as collective well-being and the rule of law become hollow.

The nightmare of 2024 with leaders like Trump, Putin, Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi, Milei, Kim Jong-un, Giorgia Meloni, Geert Wilders or Víktor Orban who aspire to be joined by Le Pen, Abascal or Alvise is a real nightmare, it exists . Like the mud floods that destroy everything. But we can draw strength from seeing that they rebel and deceive people because they know the transformative potential of the feminist, environmentalist wave, of social, racial, gender, sexual egalitarianism… We must open our eyes, stand up, roll up your sleeves and together, institutions and citizens, organized people, in civil groups and through their political representatives, rebuild that hopeful collective life within reach.

To do this, the first thing is not to cheat on solitaire. Recognize what we already know: that our democracies have been deteriorating and weakening for a long time. That cynicism and hypocrisy have been gnawing at them from the inside like a worm in an apple. And we have accepted that its heart, the Rule of Law, the collective well-being supported by taxes, and social justice are empty of substance, hollow.

Cure from cynicism and defeatism

I write this and I almost hear and see the disbelieving comments and looks because we have spent our entire lives surrounded by those who inoculate us with the defeatism of “it is what it is.”

They have brought us here by making us think that, with the communist wall fallen, the left had no alternative to offer to ultra-capitalism. They have brought us here with individualistic aspirations of success, money and eternal youth when the reality for the majority (even in glittering professions such as cinema, music, literature…) is jobs with precarious salaries that do not pay for a flat, battered public services and growing inequality while the mega-rich are forgiven taxes or undercharged out of fear. They have brought us here by discouraging associations and stunning us with hypnotic viral videos (of cats or paid intoxicants) on vampirizing social networks. But also with a deterioration of the journalistic profession pampered and encouraged by politics, allergic to “fuck flies.”

Here we have arrived, in a final rush since 2015, with the sudden resurrection of fascism via an “anti-immigrant discourse” that tunes the “anti-Semitic discourse” of the 1930s and 1940s and with some politicians on the right, but also on the left ( from the governments of Germany, Denmark and Spain and in the EU bodies) who have underestimated the risk of criminalizing immigrants themselves, as if they did not remember that fascism enters raising that spear to destroy the democrats as a whole, democracy.

Better choose social references

Before reaching the White House, not this time, but in 2016, Donald Trump was foolishly laughed at for years. Even the leaders of the Democratic party. Hillary and Bill Clinton frequented him, they even went to his wedding with his current and third wife, Melania. Of course, Trump financed them. He was a benchmark of success for American society, despite the rude and despotic ways he had and is increasing.

In Spain, with whatever differences you want, it has also been elevated and elevated in an incomprehensible way, in the press, radio and TV, and not only in the media cave but in newspapers and stations that are a reference for democratic and progressive commitment, to figures nefarious people like Pérez-Reverte or Juan Manuel de Prada who this week, with the excuse of DANA, have attacked the democratic party system and in the case of the last one even urged, on ABC, to “hang” and “dismember” the rulers that we elect and represent us, targeting Pedro Sánchez.

Our healing as sick democracies must entail sincere reflection and self-criticism about what and who we admire and illuminate with the powerful public spotlight, leaving in the shadows, instead, researchers, thinkers, creators, entrepreneurs, valuable, humble and anonymous people, like those who these days elDiario.esAndalucía has awarded for contributing with concrete actions and lasting commitments to a collective advance of which, in addition, they are an inspiring example.

To convince, you must first believe

Now faced with the vertigo due to the advance of authoritarianism, all the people convinced that democracy continues to be, despite its defects, the best system to manage discrepancies, to overcome class differences and build well-being and equal opportunities, the entire people, organized in groups (labor, union, social, political), all including right-wing democratic people like Javier Ruipérez, historic member of the PP and former Spanish ambassador to the US, who has condemned on Telecinco “the coup d’état against the constitution” that Trump encouraged in 2021 and then left indignant with the pro-Trump lies of another talk show host, Democrats have to meet, think together, develop a plan and coordinate it with international actors as I proposed in my previous article and build with that plan the protection of our system of coexistence, of our free way of life, which is threatening death.

And either we do it now and for real, or we do it seriously, or we will not convince anyone of those who are voting fascist. Because there is a human intuition, developed since childhood, that perceives, almost smells, the truth behind the words. That is why calling yourself a democrat is not enough, calling yourself an anti-fascist is not enough, calling yourself a leftist is not enough, we must defend universal human rights (also those of anti-fascist activists like ‘the Zaragoza 6’ still awaiting a pardon), defend international legality. that the genocide in Gaza seeks to destroy, taxes and public services, the basis of social well-being, freedom of the press with the annoying critical work that it entails…

A lot of work, not easy and with an overfunded and emboldened counterpart. Day after day, a PP senator or a Vox regional leader calls President Sánchez a “rat”, another Vox deputy mayor calls him a “pig” like the Nazis did with the Jews to dehumanize them and thus prepare the ground for his subsequent persecution and extermination. Every day that passes the uphill is more arduous. But giving up is not an option, for us and for the youth to come. Which leads to a clear destiny: let’s get to work immediately, today better than tomorrow.

#Escape #dystopia