Columnistas invitados/Guest columnists

Fascism is as far left as Communism.
Both are socialism’s children.

"Fascist” is one of the most common terms utilized to brand one’s political enemies. This phenomenon has been aggrandized to epic proportions given its immersion in popular culture. While most people or groups who employ it know extraordinarily little about Fascism, they understand all they need to know and it is that it has negative connotations. The term has become atomically weaponized, primarily, by the left to describe, well, basically anyone they do not agree with. However, some on the right, most likely to score politically correct points, have also succumb to the temptation and throw jabs with it every once and a while.

The truth is that its misuse demonstrates the high level of political illiteracy that exists. Some radical left-wing groups, like Antifa, even have it embedded in their name: “antifascism”. Yet, it should surprise no one that just as so few have bothered to read Karl Marx or Friedrich Engels, it is likely that they never even heard of Giovanni Gentile, Fascism’s intellectual overseer. This nescient charade of concept and language manipulation, if consciously confronted, would surprise many.

Luigi Sturzo, the prominent Italian priest, and sociologist, categorized Fascism “…as black Communism and Communism has red Fascism”. Sturzo, one of the intellectual stewards of the Christian Democratic International and a lifelong antifascist and anticommunist, made a solid connection between Fascism and Communism in simple laymen’s terms. The coupling of what is falsely perceived as being opposites on the ideological spectrum, could not be further from the truth.

I am too ignorant (entirely so, in fact) of how computer systems work and how they can be rigged, of polling and ballot procedures, and of how votes are counted and reported to the election authorities to have an informed opinion about whether the election this year was electorally stolen or not, though the proliferation of staggered vote dumps, and their frequently near-unanimous contents, certainly strike me as hugely suspicious. And while it is by now apparent that all the usual irregularities and frauds that have occurred in every previous democratic election in history, here and every other country in the world, did so again in this one, there is no means to prove that they were sufficiently numerous and widespread to have determined the final count that appears to have given Joe Biden the presidency. In that sense, then, the 2020 was not stolen—at least, it cannot be demonstrated to have been an act of highway robbery. But miscounting and misreporting votes is far from being the only way in which a democratic election can be stolen, as I believe this one was.

One of them is by changing the voting rules in the period leading up to an election. No one denies that this happened in 2020; numerous state and local governments, indeed, have boasted of having done just that from their concern for the mental, emotional, and physical welfare of the citizenry during the pandemic. By doing so, however, they ignored entirely the interests of the political candidates at every level of government, who went into the election season that began last year armed with strategies whose effectiveness depended upon the assurance that their campaigns would follow a fixed schedule allowing them exactly so many months, weeks, and days to build their case for election or reelection, and present it to the electorate before the voters went to the polls on the first Tuesday following the first Monday in November: a sure and regularized process that is not only of enormous benefit to the candidates, but also to the voting public itself. In 2020, state and local governments robbed both parties of that benefit by allowing voters to cast their votes before the incumbents had the time they deserved to fulfill the political commitments they had made during previous election cycles and finalize their political accomplishments, and that the electorate needed to judge for itself whether they had done so–or not. 

“Renunciar a la libertad es renunciar a la cualidad de hombres,
a los derechos de humanidad e incluso a los deberes”.
Juan Jacobo Rousseau.

Sobre la libertad política, en la línea de Juan Locke escribió el Barón de la Brède y de Montesquieu. Su obra “Del Espíritu de las leyes” ha pasado a la historia de las ideas políticas básicamente por las páginas dedicadas al tema de la división de poderes. Su tesis estuvo dirigida contra el absolutismo, que se caracterizó por la concentración del poder en un solo individuo. La propuesta de la división de poderes tiene como objetivo lograr la libertad política y evitar la tiranía. Promueve un poder Ejecutivo encabezado por el monarca, un poder Legislativo con dos cámaras, una aristocrática y otra de elección popular y un Poder Judicial para los nobles y otro para el pueblo.

Cada poder actúa como freno o contrapeso de los demás. Por medio de ese mecanismo, se logra un balance o equilibrio de poderes que hace posible la libertad política. En realidad, dichas ideas de Montesquieu ya habían sido esbozadas en “La política” de Aristóteles y puestas en práctica en Inglaterra, pero el pensador aristócrata las promovió en Francia, contribuyendo a minar el absolutismo y a crear condiciones para la Revolución Francesa de 1789.

Su objetivo político era superar el despotismo, es decir, el gobierno de uno, sin leyes y fundamentado en el miedo y sustituirlo por la monarquía constitucional y parlamentaria, es decir, el gobierno de uno, con leyes que a su vez respetaran los derechos de la aristocracia, sin llegar a la república democrática. Pero no cabe duda de que Montesquieu, fue un crítico del absolutismo, del Derecho Divino de los Reyes y un pensador de la libertad.

También Juan Jacobo Rousseau escribió sobre la libertad. En su Contrato Social sostiene que “El hombre ha nacido libre, sin embargo, por todas partes se encuentra encadenado”. Encadenado, diríamos nosotros, por las monarquías absolutas de su época. Ante esa realidad escribe: “mientras un pueblo se ve obligado a obedecer y obedece, hace bien; más en el momento en que puede sacudir el yugo, y lo sacude, hace todavía mejor”, porque así recobra su libertad. Es decir, un llamado a la revolución.

Y en cuanto a los hijos dice: “Ellos nacen hombres libres, su libertad les pertenece, nadie tiene derecho a disponer de ellos sino ellos mismos.”

It is truly outrageous how the schools in the United States, and also in other countries, indoctrinate children with misrepresented arguments about slavery and racism. To top it all off, children's minds are filled with a sense of guilt and shame, while some others, depending on race, are flooded with an overwhelming resentment. As they grow-up, children and teenagers face new arguments at the level of higher education and, above all, at the university level, that undermine the truth about these scourges that humanity has suffered and still suffers.

What we are experiencing in the United States, in particular, is a teaching method whereby teachers and scholars do not teach history with the objectivity that this subject requires, but transforming it as a message to induce contempt for America. Therefore, students are “taught” the lies contained on The New York Times’ “1619 Project” where they argue that the United States was founded to preserve and protect slavery, and stuffing them with such works as Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility.” DiAngelo is an education professor and —most prominently today— a diversity consultant who argues that whites in America must face the racist bias implanted in them by an extremely racist society. Their resistance to acknowledging this, she maintains, constitutes a “white fragility” that they must overcome.

Of course, the history student must know and delve into the events that marked the tragedies of slavery and racism throughout several centuries. And they must also analyze the influence that these events still have on human relationships nowadays. But the perspective of these tragic facts should encompass this and many other countries and regions of the World that were equally responsible for abuse, discrimination and cruel submission. In other words, if truth and moral clarity are to matter to teachers and academics, students must also learn that slavery was universal. They must learn that many slaves were sold to slave traders by Muslim-Arab groups in Africa and even by some black African tribes holding slaves from other tribes. In fact, slavery was a real and widespread fact as well among Native American Indians and Native South Americans who held captives from other tribes to do their dirtiest and heaviest works.