GUSTAVO VEIGA, ARGENTINE JOURNALIST
We are neither subjects nor vassals. We are the people mobilized as in other exploits that spring from deep below, from our history. That of a people with memory beyond momentary amnesias. An evil that faint-hearted rulers with the most concentrated economic power have always taken advantage of.
Mauricio Macri asked the King of Spain for forgiveness on July 9, 2016 because Argentina had become independent 200 years earlier. This time, the former president, a courtier of the caste, helped enthrone another monarch, as if we had skipped the May Revolution and the Congress of Tucumán in one fell swoop. Also to the emancipatory struggles of San Martín and Belgrano.
With his 82-page royal decree, Javier Milei left the country at the mercy of new invasions, just like in the 19th century, but in the 21st. Whether they will be English, American or some other decadent empire is not yet known. We’ll see.
The chainsaw lover first intends to leave the country defenseless. His brief tenure so far is an imposture. Last Sunday he wore olive green clothes when he appeared in Bahía Blanca, with a Rambo pose and outfit.
In that foray to produce meaning in one direction (“here I am as commander in chief”), and after voting for the Ibarra-Macri formula in the Boca elections, he did not announce a single measly bit of help to the victims of the tragedy that caused thirteen deaths due to hurricane force winds.
Today a different tragedy is coming. An economic, social and political tsunami, but one that will affect the lives of the vast majority of Argentines. Even from those who voted for King My Law, as Page/12 headlined on the cover. It comes reserved in the form of a DNU. One that destroys a republican institution like Congress, where the representatives of the people deliberate.
Our future, as always, will be subject to the correlation of forces that is largely defined in the streets.
The streets where in 1806 and 1807 His British Majesty’s soldiers received liters of hot water thrown from the houses of Buenos Aires. Where the people have gained and lost public space – as in civil-military dictatorships – but never lowered their flags of struggle.
These are very complicated times ahead. With bonfire stokers who want to throw us into the fire from social networks.
Why does the extreme right appeal to social networks as an indispensable communication tool to spread their ideas or parade in front of barracks as happened in Brazil during the attempted coup against President Lula?
That phenomenon that the Italian historian Steven Forti calls The extreme right 2.0 (21st century, 2021). He does it because he’s basically a coward. It takes refuge in anonymity, in repressive forces, in attacks against the weakest groups.
Another author, the Portuguese doctor in Sociology Boaventura de Sousa, maintains that “the tragedy of our time is that domination is united and resistance is fragmented.”
It refers to the fact that any idea of thinking about the world outside the capitalist system was obstructed. As if global neoliberalism had been winning the cultural war that it has unleashed against humanity. It is not like this. They declared war on us, but it is not lost.
The absolutism of the Old Regime has indeed returned. Even to a period before the struggles for decolonization. It takes us back to the 16th, 17th centuries… The word freedom is bastardized and this is demonstrated by the anti-picket protocol of the Minister of Security, Patricia Bullrich. One more courtesan of the caste that, like the king, intends to gag us and tell us where to walk or march on each street.
Crisis Observatory
