There are still no statistics on how the youngest are experiencing this Russian war against Ukraine. And they should be the best thermometer, because they will bear more than anyone with its future consequences. I am writing from Brazil, where the war is still seen as distant, although the population is already feeling the weight of inflation that stiffens the poorest, who are the vast majority.
It is not possible to separate the wounds of war from politics. So many times in history bloody conflicts are born when politicians wither or corrupt. This has caused that in Brazil some figures offered by the newspaper OR State of São Paulo about the disinterest of the youngest in everything that means politics, beginning with the right to vote.
It was the Constituent Assembly of 1988, after the military dictatorship, that allowed 16-year-olds to vote, something that few countries still have today. In 1992, in Brazil, 3.2 million of these young people went to vote while now, a few months before presidential elections that are announced to be crucial, only 731,000 have registered to vote, which is being interpreted as a divorce from the youngsters of the problems that directly affect them.
Nothing could be, however, more dangerous than this lack of interest in politics on the part of young people at this time when Brazil is at stake in the elections in which the fascist extreme right of Jair Bolsonaro could win again. And these young people should be the ones most interested in democracy, which allows them to solve the serious problems that affect them more than anyone else, such as the defense of the environment, the new technological revolution, the defense of those who are different, the opportunity to freely choose their future, to develop culturally and to ensure a tomorrow without wars and with less injustice.
Young people should be the most sensitive to everything that affects their future and that is today in the hands of the politicians they reject. And the danger, which is already universal, is that they could fall into the trap of that extreme right that even flirts with Nazism and that has prostituted the word “freedom”, which should be sacred. And this is the trap set for them by politics that nests in its bosom the nostalgia for wars and conflicts, violence and absolutism. It offers these young people the disguise of freedom and of what they consider lost values, such as patriotism, defense of the family, of God and even of freedom, which in the mouth of the extreme right sounds like an insult.
Curiously, this was what Bolsonaro conveyed during his recent visit to the Russian chief Vladimir Putin when he told him verbatim: “We are united by faith in God, the defense of the homeland, the family and freedom.” And today, in the midst of the war provoked by the Moscow tyrant, Bolsonaro continues to boast of having shaken hands with “the most powerful man in the world.”
Perhaps young people are moving away from politics, and not only here in Brazil, because they sense that the values of democracy and freedom are disappearing in the hands of those who they consider have made politics a balcony of personal interests, Far from all idealism, which is what fascinates them at an age when their eyes are still free of prejudice and deceit.
Manuel Vicent, a few days ago, in his brilliant column, as always, painfully told us that today “all the violins are bloody”. And that blood is also from young people and even newborns. At the end of the Spanish Civil War, which claimed more than a million lives, the writer Ernest Hemingway, who lived through that tragedy, asked himself: “For whom do the bells toll?” Then, like today, the bells of the world toll again for the fallen in a senseless war.
In the Spanish language, when the bells “toll” it is to death, but they also “ring” to glory. Today and always, above all, young people are interested in the glorious ringing of the bells and that the violins, instead of bloody, shine in the sun and extinguish with their music the diabolical din of war. Will the politicians who, instead of looking only at their navel, still bet on democracy, righteousness and peace, end up understanding it?
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