Columnistas invitados/Guest columnists

«No esperamos que los políticos digan la verdad. Nos hemos habituado a la teatralización de la política, tanto como al uso de un lenguaje manipulado»

Es imposible leer a Orwell y no señalar con el dedo a gran parte de nuestra clase política, a los intelectuales de pacotilla y a no pocos periodistas, incluso a esos que ahora se llaman "creadores de cultura". Página Indómita acaba de publicar una compilación imprescindible del maestro británico titulada La corrupción del lenguaje. Ensayos sobre propaganda, mentira y manipulación en la política. Son cincos textos culminados por los Principios de la neolengua, el revelador apéndice de 1984. Si usted, lector, quiere comprender uno de los factores de la crisis política que sufrimos, y en la que todos participamos, tiene en Orwell la explicación que necesita.

El escritor británico no tuvo reparos para denunciar a esos intelectuales de pacotilla que vivían de darse palmadas mutuamente, como gran refrendo de la mediocridad, y sin atreverse a gran cosa para no perder su posición. Eran esos que hablaban a la gente con condescendencia y misantropía, desde una torre de marfil que a nadie importaba más que a ellos. Esto es muy actual. Orwell los retrata bien, por ejemplo, cuando dice que son esos que, entre otras cosas, utilizan palabras de otras lenguas para darse un aire culto, a pesar de que esas mismas palabras existen en su propio idioma. Son esos «malos escritores» instalados en la «ciencia, la política y la sociología», obsesionados por aparentar modernidad.

Orwell alertó también del uso de frases hechas que ahorran la utilización del ingenio, sí, pero que también crean marcos mentales. Las sueltan los políticos y las reproducen los medios. Hoy serían, por ejemplo, "líneas rojas", "ultra" o "mover ficha". Pero hay otras prácticas peores que atañen a la colaboración con el autoritario. Se refiere a la creación y difusión de palabras nuevas con un significado partidista, y que buscan la manipulación. El engaño consiste en que esos vocablos recién nacidos sustituyan a los antiguos para monopolizar una interpretación de la realidad.

    «La verdad existe. No es una construcción narrativa. Su vínculo con la democracia es obligatorio»

"La tiranía es implacable y cruel porque es cobarde y débil".
Romain Rolland

Las movilizaciones contra el conflicto entre Israel y Palestina introdujeron este año, en ciudades como Nueva York, la cancelación de las navidades en plena nochebuena. Su propósito no era protestar en paz o transmitir un mensaje pacifista, sino crear confusión y producir el caos, dos elementos asociados con el terrorismo urbano.

Desafortunadamente, este tipo de “pacifismo” no es más que la recusación y obvia hipocresía de los grupos de espalda al terrorismo de las guerras de guerrillas y las tiranías en muchos lugares del planeta. Los mismos que se valen de medallas y premios para promover a los cómplices de la violencia.   

Han desaparecido los gestos de buena voluntad, como el de la no violencia al estilo de Mohandas Gandhi, que liberó a su patria sin las armas. No se escuchan voces razonables invitando a participar de un genuino pacifismo como la de Romain Rolland que supo diagnosticar los síntomas de la primera y la segunda guerra mundial.

Un filósofo de la paz

Los libros, artículos y ensayos de Romain Rolland fueron muy leídos y discutidos en Europa durante la primera mitad del siglo pasado. Lo suyo era un pacifismo sincero y genuino. Y es que dedicó su vida entera a buscar medios efectivos de comunión, conciliación y comprensión entre las naciones. Su amigo y biógrafo, el escritor austríaco Stefan Zweig, dijo de él, que Rolland había sido “la conciencia moral de Europa”, durante los años de agitación y guerra en el Viejo Continente.

Hombre de gran formación cultural, Rolland recibió el Premio Nobel de Literatura en 1915 “como tributo al elevado idealismo de su producción literaria y a la simpatía y el amor por la verdad con el cual ha descrito diversos tipos de seres humanos”.

This paper intends to recognize political ideologies as influential determinants of international humanitarian assistance by examining the Cuban case. Ideologies have both internal and external modus operandi. Internally, according to Destutt de Tracy’s original conceptualization, it had five characteristics: it contains an explanatory theory about human experience and the external world; it sets out a program of social and political organization; it recognizes the need for struggle to bring it about; it seeks to recruit loyal adherents, demanding their commitment to the worth of their claims; and it usually confers leadership on intellectuals. While multiple definitions and approaches to the concept of ideology exist, John Thompson’s “external” view of ideology as systems of beliefs, symbols, and language mobilized rhetorically to advance the interest of specific constituencies seems most apt for this case study. For Thompson, the goals of ideologies are to obtain specific social and economic interests and acquire power-overvalued entities: they have to do with the setting of public policy, are supra-individual entities and the property of groups, and are engaged in conflict with other ideologies and systems of social control over the state. Ideologies aim to obtain social and economic interests and control valued ends. Ideologies are used rhetorically to help or justify domination over others in what Thompson calls “systematically asymmetrical power relations.” This process occurs in specific social-historical settings and has five primary ways: 'legitimation,' 'dissimulation,' 'unification,' 'fragmentation,' and 'reification.' Thompson's emphasis on competition for power is a more proper approach when trying to understand struggles among multiple ideologies and the international humanitarian assistance of state actors, as is the case of humanitarian aid to Cuba.

It is newsworthy to note that what follows is neither a history of Cuba and the revolution nor an evaluative, analytical, and critical account of the pros and cons of its economic development programs and practices. Instead, it examines Cuba’s current disaster-related predicaments brought in part by climate change and how the struggle among three main ideologies affects Cuba’s receipt of international disaster aid. Here, the doers of these ideologies are absent, and the ideologies are understood as abstract and idealized conceptual constructions used to try to understand the lack of international disaster aid for Cuba.

Cuba. The present-day setting for international aid to Cuba is minimal and incapable of bringing about effective and long-lasting remedies for the victims of disasters. Cuba is excluded from disaster assistance from US government agencies such as the Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). In fiscal year 2020, Cuba did not receive aid from the USAID “LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN USAID/BHA Development and Disaster Risk Reduction Assistance” program. The same is true of USAID’s Climate Change Subcommittee members; none are from Cuba despite the presence of excellent Cuban scientists working in this area. While the agency has supplied limited assistance to needy families and encourages people to organize, its involvement in Cuba is minor: USAID’s 2015 budget for programs in Cuba was $6.25 million. Cuba is also discriminated against by other international agencies, like the Interamerican Development Bank (IDB), and it is excluded from the list of countries that are members of the IDB. It is also infrequently mentioned in available reports of the World Bank, which gives countries in the developing world financial resources for disaster reconstruction and development.

This dire situation is aggravated enormously by the significant increases in the risks of hurricane exposure in Cuba and all other countries in the Caribbean basin due to climate change.

Centralization

America’s Founders set out to build a government entirely upon the will of the great body of the people. This had never been done before. And they set out to accomplish this across a great continent —George Washington’s army was strikingly called the Continental Army— despite the prevailing idea at the time that popular governments could only work in small areas. They succeeded in doing both these things, and the way they succeeded is contained in the American Constitution, the longest-living and the greatest constitution ever written.

Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution contains 18 paragraphs that enumerate the powers of Congress. Seven of these have to do with national defense, and one with piracy. The rest, save one, mostly have to do with commerce—weights and measures, currency, unimpeded trade between the states, post offices, and post roads. The last power has to do with the federal government’s authority over the District of Columbia. Other powers were reserved for the states and localities.

In Federalist 63, James Madison writes proudly of the fact that ours will be the first purely representative government. This doesn’t just mean that instead of a king being sovereign, as in England, we would elect our rulers. It means that no one inside the government—none of the people carrying on the activities of the government—would be sovereign. The sovereign would be located outside the government. As Abraham Lincoln would later put it, the constitutional majority is the only true sovereign of a free people. All powers are to be delegated from the society to the government.

A diagram of this system would consist of a large circle representing American society. Inside that large circle, government at all levels would be represented by a much smaller circle, about one-tenth the size in terms of gross domestic product. This smaller circle would be divided then into parts. It would be divided vertically with the federal government on one side and states on the other—that’s federalism—and the federal side would be divided horizontally into the legislative, executive, and judicial powers. It was a brilliant and novel system for gathering authority to a national center for limited national purposes and distributing all other authority outwards. And it worked for a very long time.