Translated by: María Blanca Ichihara (Literary and Tech. Scientific Translator, Instituto Nacional del Profesorado en Lenguas Vivas "JRFernandez") - mabla222[at]yahoo.com.ar
This is a voluntary-based translation. Proposals, proofreading and comments about the understandability of the contents highly appreciated here
© Pablo Castiñeiras
I am sensitive to the home’s warmth, the rumour of rivers, the shadows of mountains... As I come from another planet, I do not understand the nationalism that intends to grab the natural and artificial landscapes built by groups of humans, to turn it into something to embalm and get profit. None we need, created by people’s imagination, should be used to separate inhabitants of the same planet. I do not understand the reason to take exportable inventions, such as language and stereotypes which of oneself a humane group would like to consider as its motivation letter, like an argument of superiority used against the rest of the groups, just because different mounts and rivers surround them. Why do we not use these natural differences to stir up the tremendous human curiosity for the other and the others? This Curiosity has been demonstrated to turn easily into fear if we propose it.
We, the evolved animals, the illustrated, are eager to meet aliens from other planets to understand more about ourselves. As in the story of the planet “Contrasts”, we ignore those living immense regions of the own planet. We use differences such as thrown weapons, rejecting and forgetting the equal ones that we treat as aliens with the excuse of race at first, or the ethnic group and the different culture nowadays.
We resemble to the tribes who make themselves call “human beings” in order to be able to consider the members of other rival or aliens tribes as inferior animals. We use to call primitives, the “no human” inhabitants of those groups, because they do not have invented ideologies so sophisticated as the occidental ones with which the slavery, racial superiority, inequality, etc is justified. It was a reality in Europe not so long ago. We are not exempt no to consider others as human beings again, because of their condition or difference of any kind, despite the fact they do have two eyes to see, two hands to build, two feet to discover...
Nationalism and xenophobia are unnecessary inventions. Everyone who, for their own wish or life vicissitudes, have had to leave their home, looking for new horizons, do not need others to mention where they come from to go on keeping in memory, in a lively way, not embalmed, all the smells and sensations of home.
In some places, nationalist harangue could become a useful excuse to get rid of an oppressor who nobody had invited to stay, or to make it easier the living together with foreigners in new lands alien of Utopias, such as in the multicultural model of not experienced natives in the creation of the United States or Australia. In the historical reality, nationalism was used, mainly, by all the ideologies that in Europe have existed for the secession or the conquest, and seem to go on doing so. In both cases, nationalism has been a useful resource, manipulated by politicians and unscrupulous leaders, eager to gain power, glory or money, to get their people involved with the pathological madness of making ones feel better than the others, the madness caused by free fanaticism not even xenophobe.
*
I neither am a hero nor wanted to become a robot. I am a human being too human and too curious. I am a European, urban and communicated, belonging, more or less, to the Y generation coming after the X generation, famous in the whole world for the American novelists who created it.
Y coming from young, the generation where the great privilege, envied by the former ones, is to be physically young, something they have lost and tried to recover with the chemistry and physics of the new technologies.
Our elders let us, as their heritage, the destruction of all the future and utopia illusions, the crisis and the continuous virtual uncertainty, often-real uncertainty. Will it be the consumption necessity of keeping apparently young, virtually young as supreme value, the result of having betrayed, those youngsters of the may 1968, all of the ideals that have kept them alive in those times? Do they want to forget that they have become old, renounced and yielded and try to keep the illusion of being young to feel alive?
My generation and the one before, particularly in those countries incorporated to the democratic normality and the velocity of the neoliberal market since a few decades ago, is a generation of transition: we knew the dreams and lies of our fathers while we contemplate the “no future” of our young brothers and sisters. A generation in contemplative crisis trying to recover between the antidepressants consumers from the X and the quietness children (Now Generation) who are becoming grown-ups in the underground of the networks of virtual communication.
The informatics revolution witnessed us come into the world to have to learn and develop the internet scarcely dreamt. We are hybrids between the majority educated by television and the ones anxious to act on it and to prostitute themselves audio-visually in reality shows of easily earned money and ephemeral fame, as it is the youth.
The majority of us define our vital objectives first in being rich and later famous, either in the favourite chat room or as our younger brothers in the broadcasted videos that the equals download from the internet. In the end, neither a person nor a thing deserves the effort, and only the power that the Euro provides is valid in an ephemeral life where the classical recognitions and the contributions to humanity are the quickest way for being forgotten by history.
It is useless an entry in an encyclopaedia which has already disappeared. It is much better the virtual “my space” profile that will tell, without shyness or privacy, each minimum detail about your intimacy. After all, once died, all sleep and nobody enjoys the honours.
To kill a man you only need impunity, not even a reason.
To help a man it is necessary a complete moral system that proposes a reason to share the vicissitudes of the others. It is useful to consider others problems as something that may also happen to you, aspiring egoistically to a reciprocal help. One of the greatest achievements of western civilization is to consider the people shares a common destiny with the rest of the men and women and do so it is something laudable to help mutually in the common adventure of life.
The necessity of survival has created tribes, casts, classes and sects that exist all over the world, but have not created in all the civilizations the concept of human solidarity between particular persons. Some eastern people believe that to help another person in an unlucky situation is not recommended because each one has to be responsible for its evolution and pay for the sins in past lives. In the western world, even the most absolute Calvinism, proclaiming a similar idea, avoided that charity and social work were considered as something necessary to be performed by those who their richness demonstrated to have been already selected to be in Heaven.
What it is contrary to solidarity, the violence, the way of impulse, many times fuelled by fear and confusion, including the less obvious, the more psychological or xenophobic, is enough to become dust the respect, the living together, and the love persons and countries could feel during decades.
We must be always alert in the presence of all those ideas and persons who due to fear, power or any other intentional pretext or not, encourage hatred and promote violence. When somebody becomes ill, the blame is only to the ones careless with their health, but generally the agents of illness use to be parasites. We should always be alert against viruses and pathogens that want to take advantage of the healthy ones and inoculate them with illness of hate, using any pretext, in Yugoslavia or in any part of the planet or neighbouring community. We must always support, as an antidote, any possibility of dialogue or pacific agreement.
The people´s integrity and respect, so fragile to maintain, are necessary to live in harmony with the rest of the human beings. Planet earth is also claiming to be in peace between Gaia and ourselves.
*
The “clash of civilizations” could be plausible in a romantic context or accepting interested excuses like the ones that considered some civilizations, such as the Islamic, some centuries behind with regard to the modernized process, which has apparently already taken place in the western culture, to take away the frequent inquisitorial practice of annulment of difference. There are many cultural immigrants, considered so because their immigration reasons were not strictly economic or a sacrifice to get an improvement of the life of their people from their places of origin, but for some other reasons more circumstantial or personal. They can be considered as the seed of the multicultural globalized society, in which we are already immersed, and the hope of cultural dialogue between the individual represented in society.
*
Where is it hidden, the longed mechanism of communication between European? Despite some political and institutional daring efforts, how do we manage the linguistic diversity, which is cultural richness meanwhile, speeds up the difficulty in creating a real European social and cultural identity? How do we avoid feeling like a minority in a land of European civic, cultural and educative space not cooperating sufficiently among each other?
Is there anything that attaches more closely than the fact that one belongs to the same lineage? Yes, civil wars between brothers have demonstrated, that the magical ideas supported by the language vehemence converted in metaphor, are stronger than the blood, the honour or the first social relations created in the atmosphere of our own families. Foster brothers became strangers.
If nationalism was referred as the embalming of folks, ideology can be considered as the curse of a mummy abandoned in its coffin, in view of the bestialities that in the name of ideologies, divines or civil, have turned up in the world and visibly in the Europe of the past century.
One would expect to have learnt the lesson of the danger of words manipulating the feelings. Try not to take seriously anyone liking to sell us the same ideological stuff. The proclaimed representatives of obsolete ideologies or other presented as new ones, should appear, from the point of view of experience, as the echo of this world upside down that we seem to inhabit and of which we have talked in other pages.
There are just personal ideologies to try to live among the chaos that peace tries to put in order. Ideologies will go on making harm and separating while we go on forgetting the dangers and consequences the majority of them, to consider a theory as genial, a system of values as definitive, brought not so long ago.
*
Where is coming from the love for ideas born outside of life reality? At schools, the modern achievement to allow all the population, and not only the privileged, to benefit from a universal education, necessary for the social and political revolution of the moment. On the reality, public education has been a method and idea, extensively used by dictatorships of any kind to try to perpetuate themselves.
Where were the modern ideological revolutions born? In the University, the supreme temple of knowledge, where creativity and initiative, curtailed and annihilated in the preceding educative phases are expected to be able to appear among excellent classes and debates between equals. On the reality, we find conceited teachers, well stuck to their scholar armchairs. There is new and functional campus outside the cities, for the young not to have time to realize what is going on the heart of them and to avoid that they fall in the temptation of rebelling against what they dislike or think it is unfair.
It is necessary to contain students in order not to repeat apocalyptic drunkenness like the one of May 1968 that later the University tried to put down through the integration of their leaders in scholar seats ad hoc. What is profitable is to keep young leaders and future top men of the official sector as if they were in a zoo, dedicated to pay homage to get in chance a degree which certifies their ignorance and the uncritical thought. The boys will occupy their time with “wine, card games and women”, as good members of a student ‘tuna’ subsidized by the state or parents, ingenuously thinking of the enormous remuneration that they expect to earn when getting the mandatory diploma. The more disciplined female schoolmates will dream that their academic efforts will be rewarded with an equal access to the spheres of economical power, with the fact that they may be the boss and will earn the best salary for their future family. On the other hand, some of their mothers, will aspire they will find in University a good husband who will keep them; meanwhile they lose their time there.
*
The romantic poet Novalis remembered in 1799 in his work “The Christianity or Europe” to the medieval Christianity before the Protestant Reform. He dreamt, with the vehemence proper of the youth, of a new Christianity rearranged and united in the future, as a possibility of European union in peace, through the impartial mediator of the divine personified in the Christian faith.
Many years have passed and this idea lasted, even in the discussions over the frustrated European Constitution. However, we must not forget, in spite of what the Catholic Church teaches at their schools, that the union of different Christian ideologies can be considered a belief more than a reality, what this poet already perceived intuitively, centuries ago, and clearly after Lutero:
With the Reform, Christianity came to an end. Since then, Christianity would not exist anymore. Catholics and Protestants were, in sectarian divorce, more distant between them than the Muslims and pagans
The ideology of Catholics and Protestants has scarcely changed in substance since the Reform and Contrareform. However, each time more Catholics feel their religious practice as something more separated from the mass doctrines and the Vatican catechism. They adopt a way of understanding their faith practice on daily basis that, hidden and condemned by their priests, is in fact very similar to the practice of the Protestants, because of the hegemonic Capitalism, symbiotic with the protestant ideology in which we are immersed.
Strange is that many put their hands at the helm in defence of Christianity and against the participation of Turkey in the Union because it is a Muslim country. Even if the Turkey`s membership, brings a crisis for the European identity, it will not represent an strange singularity unavoidable. The Muslim printing, imposed by centuries of trading or conquers, has influenced the history of several cultures, especially in the Euromediterranean countries, becoming the rules of Islamic life much closer, in certain aspects, to the Catholics and Protestants ones, than what they are between them. I think Novalis would also agree with this idea.
*
Once again there is no clash of civilizations but clash of personalities who elect themselves as representatives of some ideologies, and of whom follow them blindly to get some benefit or comfort.
One thing is culture originated by a group of human beings in their coming about life. Even the culture created because of proper or improper ideas that would not have to have anything to do with reality. Another very different thing is the spurious and interested use that from ideas and feelings, transmuted in concepts by gurus, are considered and labelled as ideologies that should not be at the same level than the popular cultural creations.
There are minorities that seem to have come apparently successfully from the equalizing rights struggles. One of them -created recently according to the modern conception that proclaims freedom of sexual election but basing it to some magic effect during birth- is not an ethnic minority. Queers like the homosexuals, and, in a minor way, because they suffer the discrimination of these ones and society in general, bisexuals, transexuals, asexuals... seem to have agreed a cordial pact with the heterocentrism alongside a great media repercussion in each one of its achievements.
Day by day their rights are more recognized, getting part of the social pie in place of renouncing to their alternative way of life, not created but compelled by the repression of the difference. Way of life accepted now, just in exchange for converting its clichés into an object of global consume. Their differences are annihilated to avoid the inspiration its authenticity suggests to the models of traditional romantic relationship in deep crisis. In exchange of accepting to adapt to models such as matrimony, “out of date” religious institution, and the consumption, idem in the civil world, to be accepted such as innate followers of the status quo with all their rights and the homogenization that implies to accept this paper in the great theatre of the world.
*
Another minority, I would like to reflect about, is constituted by more than the fifty per cent of the population, they are women. A minority relegated in the past for their difference in rights, especially in the free West and Islamic East.
The majority of those who read these words surely are women. More women than men are daring to go to another country to study or to work, even to embark in socially mundane projects or just for searching themselves.
Men are educated in the task of competition for the egoistic and nuclear accumulation of richness. Meanwhile, some parents let women to waste their time in social matters that, in any case, would train them for the care of their future family.
It is said that men are now terrified because their place as dominating machos of the planet has been put into question before the emancipation of women after centuries of machista or patriarchal submission. The term machismo is paradoxical by itself, attributed to countries such as Spain, where effectively during the military dictatorship up to the middle of the seventies, women did not have the right to own a private property nor to decide for herself. They were just a possession, first of the father and later of the husband. Today the machistas realities are still present in areas Spaniards have influenced as in Latin America; demonstrated by globalized phenomenon such as pieces of Reggaeton music, condemned by the well thinking European feminists. Because of the machismo´s paradox, Spain is one of the few countries of the world where married woman preserve her familiar surnames without having the obligation of adopting her husband´s surname.
It is surprising to see many women, so-called feminists, trying to find a place of their own (as Wolf said) in society and in the life, exercising a way of behaving that is not anything more than the same macho dog with a different collar. Aggressive women who perhaps have heard the name of Virginia Wolf or Simone de Beauvoir but never read a book of them, just dressed for life with attitudes of men kept in the pockets of their costume trousers.
Reality is not easy to prove and assume in the western societies, where the necessary incorporation of women to the production chain, made compulsory, after the World Wars, new ideological arguments. The, let us call it, feminism of masses, was created. Its catechism would be feminine magazines to advice about fashion trends and sex, published for women and even, when the topic was already mature enough, published by women themselves. These pieces of advice for women to consume more cosmetics and, at last, to get to know how their condition, behaviour and habits should be, they have demonstrated us how intellectually superior women in fact are, as some of them affirm, when they need read this expert publications.
In the XX century, women revolution became past ideology. It was changed the place of women from the submission at home, education and family well-being, to become obliged to be economically productive. An ideological change that, as in the great majority of changes, was attained thanks to women themselves through the education of their children they always are in charge. What I mean is easy to understand reading honestly. Another thing is what now it is called and longed, ended the century of revolutions, women equality.
*
In the oppressor countries of the former east soviet, women had possibilities at space distance of which free women from the other side of the wall enjoyed. I do not believe it was for idealistically egalitarian ideas of communism, although attributable (because of reasons, similar to the ones that amplify the rights of women in the postindustrial world) to a necessity in which everybody, regardless the sex, participates in the social and economic soviet project.
The socialist family model, marking the difference with western dictatorships after wars, was based on the work of all the family members for the multiplication of the social system. Here we could find a reason for other no integrated minorities, such as homosexuals or Roma people, not being recognized by these nor by present regimens, having lived and living a life of occultation and shame, yet up to the present, in all the vast territory that covered the soviet fingerprints. They were considered sterile and perverted members for the social sublime project, so as they were lazy and criminals for the laws of the clerical dictatorship that moulded my country for the same period.
It is not casual that I speak of differences of rights between men and women in the democratic western. I have seen at first sight other realities at the other side of the iron curtain, confirmed by some anecdotes. A Hungarian teacher told me about some University mates, calling themselves feminists, who said strange things. They affirmed women are subordinated to men. If now they are not in Hungary, as I find out comparing their lives and the lives of the modern and liberated women of my country of origin, certainly they will be so, thanks to this way of understanding freedom of women that perpetuate societies highly influence by civil ideologies or patriarchal religions, directly misogynous.
Any doubt, as a man, I do not want to live in a soviet regime and I stay where I am. If I were a woman, checking out what happened in the land of freedoms, I would have to think it twice. In the former soviets countries women (while that from the west was paid inferior salaries and her rights vetoed or granted in terms of inferiority considering those of men) was considered in better terms of equality, with real opportunities of access to education, culture and work. In most of the countries of the post World War, woman had to add to the domestic work a job that allows their families to consume at the pace demanded by the free economy. Only the most advanced countries in the third via of the Welfare State could compete with the paternalist communist State in the application of measures such as the creation of public dining rooms and some other resources for the domestic task not being of exclusive dominion of each housewife.
They were bad times for women to whom were promised, in the name of freedom, to reach the stars, while they could not even get to the space. I do not consider occasional that the first woman travelling to the space in the Soviet Union went two years later than the first man, while in the land of freedom for men, the United States of America, the first woman had to wait twenty years more.
Examples like these soon will not worry any European woman. The big percentage of enterprising women that are in Poland will probably be reduced to the minimum expression by the European airs that, supported by exclusive ideologies, will educate women towards the task of taking care of home and to the man the task of taking care of the capitalistic company. It seemed to me a premonition when a Serb friend commented with irony that now in the new books used at school they speak about women rights as if in the Yugoslav they were more repressed in the past than now. The anecdote comes when more than a half of the content was dedicated to speak about boys’ realities, instead of talking over women reality and their rights as human beings.
The stories of the winners, proclaiming that already exists no more History, will make soon forget all the bad things that have come in the name of freedom and all the good things that have come in the name of a defeated dictatorship. We continue believing with the fairy tales in which you can find the good and the bad, the white and the black and that winner is equivalent to good and losers to bad.
*
The minorities lobby and the debates because of the increase of migratory currents, make us to believe posmodern democracies are characterized by a horizon of progress and utopia, exemplified by the fact that it protects general interest without forgetting the integration and respect to the ethnic or social minority’s voices, which used not to be represented in the majorities. The reality proves this is just as an illusion though we sometimes take the right path, especially in the European Union, when in its adherent policies for the new members emphasize the respect at all levels, beginning with the legislative, to eliminate ambiguities and discrimination that may appear towards minority groups.
The global and hipercommunicated society´s demands are the ones that are placing the uppermost of the social policies towards minorities. I believe in supranational attitudes in these cases such as the ones that the Union impulses. These considerations help to change the classic conceptions of democracy as a regime representing the willingness of the majority, instead of the general one trying to include and integrate everybody. Great achievement of which we can feel proud once attained.
Beyond good intentions and behaviours, the reality appears as mere spatial co-habitations among minorities, as ghettos, and the common public space. Circumstantial unions between sects needing themselves by reasons of origin, aesthetics or ethics, classics or recently occurring, inciting the eternal problems of integration. It is going on not only for the new Europeans but for the old ones as well; through new exclusions, before the disassembling of the Welfare State, the precarious work or directly the unemployment or the lack of stable supports.
Society of sects, the ones in debt condition, fathers of family, the addicts, the freaks.... Some can get out of the daily routine absorption or the hermit autism to try to originate an action, demonstration or social pressure for the attainment of interests (lobby). Other ones, more every day, abandon the interest of pressure through belonging to any kind of sect that represents them. The ideological autism characteristic of the present society is the culture broth for some to promote the fear to be really excluded of the social scene and their rights. Some new disciples of this ideological Europe perhaps take advantage of the good intentions of the longed intercultural dialogue, using it as an excuse to impose particular moral conceptions and claim them as legitimate in the social sphere in which they live. Proselytising intolerance and egoism is the best to encourage the punctual and opportunistic participation in the public tribune.
The base of dialogue, as it happened, for example, in the transition from dictatorship to democracy in my country, is based on the fact that everybody accepts to yield to his wishes for the well-being of other cultures ideological and socially confronted, even enemies in lineage.
Neither assimilation nor surrender, dialogue is possible if one is able to leave aside, for a moment, one greatest truths and face them with reality. It is a big effort but it is not impossible.