Back in the 1970s, Jorge Luis Borges complained that American publishers would not publish his novels and short stories because he called the black man “negro” and not “colored man” and the blind man “stone-blind” and not “visually-impaired.”
Around that time, Yankee intellectuals began to use what is today known as “inclusive language”: the use of invented and repetitive rhetoric like “everyone” for “men and women,” “child and children” for “boys and girls,” “”workers,” for “the working man,” etc. In North America it now no longer needs to be used; but, as usual, it arrived twenty or thirty years later in South America where progressives have adopted it as a novelty.
Progressivism, that senile disease of old ideologies such as Marxism and liberalism, found in this pseudo-language its most successful expression: it speaks without saying anything and defines without defining. Its method is to be always at the forefront of everything. Hence, man cannot have a pro-ject (something moving forward) because he (the progressive) is his own project.
When political analysts ask themselves about this or that project of a progressive government, they are asking a false question, or a question without foundation. It is like pretending to ask the hanged man about the noose or rope he’s hanging from.
This senile disease, a mixture of liberalism and Marxism, supported by the secular religion of human rights, is slowly occupying all the governments of the West, thus establishing a single, politically correct way of thinking.
The common areas of this thought are: concern for humanity and not for the needs of the people; concern for individual well-being and not for that of families; concern for consumption and not for savings; concern for the Earth and not for the land; concern for ritual and not for the sacred; concern for the economy and not for politics; concern for virtual companies and not for work; and so on in all aspects of behavior and thinking.
As early as 1927, Martin Heidegger, in Being and Time (Section 35), spoke to us of the dictatorship of the “anonymous one (das Man)” who “says, thinks and acts [in me] as one says, thinks and acts,” which governs improper being. In nearly a hundred years, the issue has worsened and intensified.
Today the power of progressivism, being hegemonic, is unconditional. This explains why any questioning is considered right-wing, fascist or imperialist. If multiple sectors of society say “no” to erroneous measures, the response is “no response,” silence, ignoring—in short, the canceling of the objector. Canceling has become a mechanism of denying everything that discomforts or questions progressivism. What is particularly serious is that at the same time that cancel culture denies or does not listen to the objections of its opponents, it yet calls for dialogue on the basis of a consensus that does not reach a consensus; that is, by way of a false consensus.
This pernicious mechanism is the basis of progressive governmental action. The philosopher Massimo Cacciari has rightly observed that these governments do not resolve conflicts but only manage them. The lack of a firm ideological definition (President Fernandez of Argentina is both a Peronist and a social democrat, as he has declared) allows governments to swear allegiance to Biden, Putin and Jinping at the same time.
But all this is nothing more than feints; appearances used by progressive governments to join the globalization process that seems to be inevitable in the world.
After two years of Covid, the economy became completely independent of politics. The indirect powers (the lobbies, the mega-corporations and the international imperialism of money), according to Pius XII’s preclear expression, justify their actions in and with progressive governments.
However, the indirect economic powers demand that progressive governments be installed on the basis of the “one man, one vote” mechanism, since they need to have the legitimacy offered by the democratic mask. Democracy, being limited only to the legitimacy of origin, denies any demand for legitimacy of exercise, which is the requirement of good governance. Just and correct actions are what characterize good government, which is why there have been and will be good governments without them necessarily being democratic.
In South America, the ten governments we have are progressive in their different variants: in Argentina a Peronist who defines himself as a social democrat; in Chile a Marxist who calls himself a Peronist; in Bolivia a Marxist who calls himself a nationalist; in Uruguay a liberal who defines himself by Agenda 2030; in Paraguay, as usual, nothing; in Brazil a nationalist who lets multinationals do business; in Peru and Ecuador Marxists subjected to the crudest capitalism; in Colombia a liberal partner of the United States (now, a former FARC guerrilla converted to green ideology is taking office); and in Venezuela a Marxist with a calling to be rich, to the torment of his people.
Who governs South America? In reality, the international imperialism of money with all its ramifications, although nominally the ten progressive governments that with their disregard for a legitimacy of exercise facilitate the work of anonymous imperialism that has neither hands nor feet.
In this sense the great corruption of the ruling class counts a lot. To give an indisputable example, a thousand kilos of gold and ten thousand kilos of silver leave Argentina every year for Europe and the USA, practically without paying taxes. In the ports on the Paraná River, from where the grain production, worth millions (wheat, corn, soybean, sunflower), is shipped out, the annual tax evasion comes to 10 billion dollars. Fishing depredation in the South Atlantic by hundreds of Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, Norwegian and English ships is uncontrolled.
Cancel culture has ensured that these and many other issues are not talked about. The title of Marcello Mastroianni’s movie, De eso no se habla (I Don’t Want to Talk About It) is the rule.
When Perón returned from exile in 1974, he stated that the Argentine man is broken and it will be very difficult to recover him. Since then, no attempt has been made to systematically recover our system of civic values, such as savings, hygiene, conduct, etc. Such values have been left, more and more, to their own devices, without any restraint. Those institutions that made Buenos Aires great (la piu grande cita italiana del mondo, as Franco Cardini said), such as the neighborhood clubs, the libraries and the popular swimming pools, the schools that gave on to the streets, the parishes with their festivals and tents—all them disappeared. The support for that Argentine man, who is all of us, was null. And so, teachers who do not read, professors who do not study, priests who do not take care of the soul but of food, librarians who do not invite to readings, clubs where drugs and not sports are the main focus; the combination of all this ended up with the promotion of the mediocre. And that mediocre, today between 40 and 60 years old, is the one that is holding office in the progressive governments of South America.
What to do with a subcontinent like the South American one that covers nearly 18 million square kilometers; that is, twice the size of Europe, or twice the size of the United States. It has 50,000 km of navigable waterways in its interior that take us from Buenos Aires to Guaira in Venezuela; or from the Atlantic in Belém do Pará in Brazil to Iquitos in Peru (San Martin, when he was governor of Peru in 1823, donated his salary to build a ship to stem the advance of the Bandeirantes, by sailing the Amazon from one end to the other). This subcontinent has minerals of all kinds, forests still impregnable, oil, gas, electric energy, and the largest reserve of fresh water on the planet in the Guarani aquifer. And above all, the subcontinent has a diverse human type (about 440 million) but with similar customs, habits and traditions, and speaking the same language as the Hispanic man, according to Gilberto Freyre, the greatest Brazilian sociologist, who speaks and understands without difficulty four languages: Spanish, Portuguese, Galician and Catalan. This extraordinary advantage has never been promoted as a State-policy by any of the ten countries that integrate it.
Anyone who studies us should not underestimate the order of these magnitudes. Hegel has readily taught that the order of magnitudes, when it is immense, transforms them into qualities.
The disadvantage of this great space is that anti-Hispanic colonial powers, such as England (in Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago and Malvinas), Holland in Aruba and Surinam, and France in Guyana are still installed in it. (All plans for subcontinental unity since the time of San Martin and Bolivar have been aborted by the contrary intervention of these three countries).
I proposed in the Social Forum of Porto Alegre in 2002 the theory of the rhombus, with its vertexes in Buenos Aires, Lima, Caracas and Brasilia, as protection of the South American heartland. But this idea did not succeed. Chávez surrendered to Cuba, and the latter, as it has been doing for 70 years, sterilizes any Hispano-American nationalist project.
I invite European and Yankee researchers to study sine ira et studio the process of Cubanization of Our America as the source of all the failures of regional integration attempts.
Lenin’s question returns: What must we do? To dissent, which is nothing more than to raise, to propose “another version and vision” to that established by the single thought. To practice dissent in all its forms and ways is to stop being the mute dog of the Gospel. Dissent is not a negative thought that says no to everything. It is a propositional and existential thought that starts from the preference of ourselves. It rejects imitation and relies on our genius loci (climate, soil and landscape) and on our ethos (customs, experiences and traditions). You may consult my book Teoría del Disenso (published in Buenos Aires, Barcelona, Porto Alegre and Santiago de Chile).
Finally, you may note that I never spoke of “Latin America” because it is a spurious, false and misleading term, created by the French to intervene in America. The Italians know it very well because none of them call themselves Latin except those from Lazio. And in the USA, they are Italian Americans, never Latin Americans. Latin excludes the Basques who have done so much for America since the time of the conquistadors. The concept of “Latin America” is clearly a politically correct one, as it is used by everyone: the Church, the Freemasonry, the liberals, the Marxists and, obviously, the progressives—and also the clueless nationalists.
When we speak of Hispanic in America, it is not like in Spain, which is limited to the monarchy and the Catholic religion. Here, the Hispanic opens us to the whole Mediterranean culture (Italy, France, Portugal), the Arab world (Syria, Lebanon, Morocco). This explains why the millionaire Italian, French and Syrian-Lebanese immigration to South America has been comfortably welcomed.
The first thing to be lost in a cultural struggle is the semantic war, when one adopts the enemy’s denominations. We are Hispano-Creole, neither so European nor so Indian, as Bolivar affirmed.
Alberto Buela is an Argentinian philosopher and professor at National Technological University and the University of Barcelona. He is the author of many books and articles.
Featured: “Daniel Defoe in the Pillory,” by Eyre Crowe; painted in 1862.