The deafening silence of the intellectuals

17 min read BOAVENTURA DE SOUSA SANTOS

BOAVENTURA DE SOUSA SANTOS

Intellectuals do not have a monopoly on culture, values or truth, much less on the meanings attributed to any of these “domains of the spirit”, as they used to be called. But neither should intellectuals refrain from denouncing what they consider to be destructive of culture, values and truth, especially when this destruction is intended to be carried out in the name of those "domains of the spirit". Intellectuals should not refrain from greeting the sun before dawn, but neither should they refrain from warning against the clouds that accumulate ominously in the sky before nightfall, preventing the enjoyment of daylight.

Europe is witnessing the alarming (re)emergence of two destructive realities of the "domains of the spirit": the destruction of democracy, caused by the growth of extreme right-wing political forces; and the destruction of peace, caused by the naturalization of war. Both destructions are legitimized by the same values that each of them intends to destroy: fascism is promoted in the name of democracy; war is promoted in the name of peace. All of this has been possible because the political initiative and presence in the media are being ceded to right-wing and far-right conservative forces.

Social protection measures aimed at making people feel, both in their pockets and in their daily lives, that democracy is better than dictatorship are becoming increasingly rare precisely because of the costs of the war in Ukraine and because of the economic sanctions against the “enemy”, who are supposed to harm their intended target, are actually harming above all the European peoples whose governments have allied themselves with the United States.

The destruction of peace and democracy is affected above all by the unequal and parallel layout of two circles of guaranteed freedoms, that is, freedom of expression and freedom of action guaranteed by political and media powers. The circle of liberties guaranteed in the case of progressive positions that advocate a just and lasting peace and a more inclusive democracy is getting smaller, while the circle of liberties guaranteed in the case of conservative positions that advocate war and fascist polarization along with neoliberal economic inequality continues to grow. Progressive commentators are increasingly absent from the mainstream media, while conservatives present us with page after page of staggering mediocrity every week.

Let's look at some of the main symptoms of this vast ongoing process:

1) The information warfare over the Russia-Ukraine conflict has taken such a grip on published opinion that even commentators with a modicum of conservative common sense have submitted to it with sick subservience. Here is an example among many of the European corporate media: during his weekly appearance on a Portuguese television channel (SIC, January 29, 2023), Luís Marques Mendes, a well-known commentator, usually a voice of common sense within the conservative camp He said something like this: "Ukraine has to win the war, because if it doesn't, Russia will invade other European countries." This is more or less what American television viewers hear every day from MSNBC's Rachel Maddow.

Where does such an absurd idea come from, if not from an overdose of misinformation? Have they forgotten that post-Soviet Russia tried to join NATO and the EU, but was rejected, and that, contrary to what was promised to former Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev, NATO expansion on the borders of Can Russia constitute a legitimate defense concern of Russia, even if the invasion of Ukraine is actually illegal, as I myself repeatedly denounced from day one? Don't you know that it was the United States and the United Kingdom who boycotted the first peace negotiations shortly after the war broke out? Have not commentators considered, even for a moment, that a nuclear power facing defeat in a conventional conflict might resort to the use of its nuclear weapons, which in turn could lead to a nuclear catastrophe? ? Don't they realize that in the war in Ukraine two nationalisms, one Ukrainian and one Russian, are being exploited to force Europe to depend totally on the United States and to stop the expansion of China, the country with which the United States is really at war? Don't commentators realize that today's Ukraine is tomorrow's Taiwan? Strangely, amid all this ventriloquist propaganda fever, no details are ever offered about what a Russian defeat will mean; Will it lead to the removal of Russian President Vladimir Putin or the Balkanization of Russia?

2) The anti-communist ideology that dominated the Western world until the 1990s is being surreptitiously recycled to promote anti-Russian hatred to the point of hysteria, despite the fact that Putin is an autocratic leader, a friend of the right and the extreme. European right. Russian artists, musicians and athletes are prohibited from participating in events, while courses on Russian culture and literature, which are no less European than French literature and culture, are suppressed. Following the Treaty of Versailles of 1919, with its strategy of humiliating Germany after its defeat during World War I, German writers were prohibited from attending the first meeting of the PEN's annual Congress, held in May 1923. The only The dissenting voice was that of Romain Rolland, Nobel Prize for Literature in 1915. Despite everything he had written against the war and German war crimes in particular, Rolland had the courage to say, “in the name of intellectual universalism”: "I will not submit my thinking to the tyrannical and insane fluctuations of politics."

3) Democracy is being so emptied of meaning that it can be defended instrumentally by those who use it to destroy it. At the same time, those who serve democracy to strengthen it against fascism are branded as radical leftists. Internationally, the West unanimously applauded the 2014 events on kyiv's Maidan Square, which is where the current war actually began. Despite the fact that the flags of Nazi organizations were in full view during the protests; despite the fact that popular anger was then directed against a democratically elected president, Viktor Yanukovych; And despite the fact that, according to wiretaps, Victoria Nuland, the US neoconservative and then Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, had explicitly named the people who would wield power in the event of victory, including a US citizen, Natalie Jaresko, who was later Ukraine's new Finance Minister from 2014 to 2016; Despite all this, these events, which amounted to a well-orchestrated coup aimed at removing a pro-Russian president and turning Ukraine into a US protectorate, were celebrated across the West as a vibrant victory for democracy. In fact, none of this was as absurd as the fact that when Juan Guaidó, a Venezuelan opposition figure, declared himself interim president of Venezuela in a public square in Caracas in 2019, it was enough for the United States, along with many other countries, to of the EU, recognized it as such. In December 2022, the Venezuelan opposition itself put an end to this farce.

4) The double standard to value what happens in the world is acquiring aberrational proportions and is used almost automatically to reinforce the apologists of the war, stigmatize the leftist parties and normalize the fascists. The examples are legion, so the difficulty lies in choosing between them. Let me offer just a couple of illustrations from the national and international contexts. In Portugal, the strident and offensive behavior of members of the far-right party Chega is very similar to that of German Nazi party deputies from the moment they entered the Reichstag in the early 1933s. An attempt was made to stop them, but the political initiative belonged to the Nazi party and the economic situation was on its side. As early as May XNUMX, the Nazi party held its first book burning, in Berlin. How long will it be until it happens in Portugal?

Largely backed by US counterinsurgency institutions, the current global right's position on left governments is that as long as they cannot be overthrown through soft coups, wear them down with accusations of corruption and force them to deal with governance issues to prevent them from governing strategically. It seems that corruption in Portugal is limited to the Socialist Party, which secured an absolute majority in the last elections in 2022. In the eyes of the hegemonic conservative media, all Socialist Party government ministers are presumed corrupt until proven otherwise. contrary. It should not be difficult to find similar examples in other countries.

In the international context, I will mention two flagrant examples. There is now a general consensus that the September 2022 Nord Stream pipeline explosion was the work of the United States (and allegedly “supervised” by President Joe Biden, a claim he denied), possibly with the help of allies. An incident of this magnitude should have been immediately investigated by an independent international commission. What seems evident is that the aggrieved party -Russia- had no interest in destroying an infrastructure that it could render useless simply by turning off the tap. On February 8, Seymour Hersh, a respected American journalist, used conclusive information to show that the sabotage of Nord Stream 1 and 2 had in fact been planned by the United States since December 2021. If that was indeed the case, we have before us a heinous crime that is also an act of State terrorism.

The United States, which claims to be the champion of world democracy, should be supremely interested in finding out what happened. Was this the only way to force Germany to join the war against Russia? Was the sabotage of the gas pipelines intended to put an end to the European policy, initiated by former German Chancellor Willy Brandt, of being less dependent on the United States for energy? In a context of expensive energy and closed companies, was this not an effective way of slowing down the economic engine of the EU? Who benefits from this situation? A heavy silence hangs over this act of State terrorism.

The other example of flagrant double standards is the violence of the Israeli colonial occupation of Palestine, which is intensifying. In January 2023 alone, Israel killed 35 Palestinians; In a January 26 raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank, Israel killed 10 people. A day later, a Palestinian youth killed seven people outside a synagogue in a Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem, an area illegally occupied by Israel. There is violence on both sides of the conflict, but the disproportion is staggering, and many acts of terrorism by the State of Israel (sometimes carried out with impunity by settlers or by soldiers at checkpoints) do not even make the news. There are no Western media correspondents reporting what is happening in the occupied territories, which is where most of the violence takes place. Other than sneaky mobile phone footage, we have no harrowing images of suffering and death on the Palestinian side. The international community and the Arab world have been silent on the matter.

Despite the vastly disproportionate means of warfare, there is no movement to send effective military equipment to Palestine, as is currently the case with Ukraine. Why is Ukraine's a fair resistance and Palestine's not? Europe, the continent where the Holocaust that killed millions of Jews took place, is ultimately at the origin of the crimes committed against Palestine, but today it shares a hateful complicity with Israel. The EU is currently rushing to create a court to try war crimes, but - and herein lies the hypocrisy - only those committed by Russia. As in the years leading up to the First World War, calls for Europeanism (pan-Europeanism, as it was then called) are increasingly turning into calls for war, giving rise to rhetoric intended to hide unjust suffering and the loss of welfare that is now imposed on the European peoples, without having been consulted about the necessity or the advantages of the war between Russia and the Ukraine.

5) Today we are witnessing a confrontation between US, Russian and Chinese imperialism. There is also the pathological case of the United Kingdom, which, despite its abysmal social and political decline, has not yet realized that the British Empire is long over. I am against all imperialism, and I admit that Russian or Chinese imperialism may turn out to be the most dangerous in the future, but I have no doubt that, with its military and financial superiority, US imperialism is currently the most dangerous. dangerous of all Of course, none of this is enough to guarantee its longevity. In fact, I have been arguing, based on sources in US institutions (such as the National Intelligence Council), that it is a declining empire, but its own decline may be one of the factors that help explain why it is especially dangerous in these days.

I have condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine from the start, but since then I have also pointed out that the US had actively provoked Russia into that conflict, with the aim of weakening Russia and containing China. The dynamics of US imperialism seem unstoppable, fueled by the perpetual belief that the destruction it causes, encourages or incites will take place far from its borders, protected as the country is by two vast oceans.

The United States claims that its interventions are invariably for the good of democracy, but the truth is that it ends up leaving a path of destruction, dictatorship or chaos in its wake. The most recent and probably most extreme manifestation of this ideology can be found in the latest book by neoconservative Robert Kagan (Victoria Nuland's husband), entitled The Ghost at the Feast: America and the Collapse of World Order, 1900-1941 (Alfred Knopf, 2023). The central idea of the book is that the United States - in its desire to bring greater happiness, freedom and wealth to other nations, fighting corruption and tyranny wherever they exist - is a unique country. The United States is so prodigiously powerful that it would have avoided World War II if it had had the chance to intervene militarily and financially in time to force Germany, Italy, Japan, France, and Great Britain to follow the American-led New World Order.

All US interventions abroad have been driven by altruistic motives, for the good of the people to whom the intervention is directed. According to Kagan, US military interventions overseas -since the Spanish-American War of 1898 (fought for the purpose, which is still in force today, of dominating Cuba) and the Philippine-American War of 1899-1902 (fought to prevent Philippine self-determination, which left more than 200.000 Filipinos dead) - have always been inspired by altruistic notions and a desire to help people.

This hypocrisy and erasure of uncomfortable truths fails to even take into account the tragic reality of America's indigenous peoples and black populations, who were subjected to ferocious extermination and discrimination in those days of supposedly liberating interventions abroad. The historical record exposes the cruelty of such mendacity. US interventions have invariably been dictated by the country's geopolitical and economic interests. In fact, the United States is no exception to the rule. On the contrary, it has always been so in all empires (see, for example, the invasions of Russia by Napoleon and Adolf Hitler).

The historical record shows that the precedence of imperial interests has often led to the suppression of aspirations for self-determination, freedom, and democracy and the extension of support for murderous dictators, with ensuing devastation and death, since the Banana Wars in Nicaragua (1912), support for the Cuban dictator Fulgêncio Batista or the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 until the coup against former Chilean President Salvador Allende (1973); from the coup against Mohammad Mossadegh, former democratically elected president of Iran (1953), to the coup against Jacobo Árbenz, former democratically elected president of Guatemala (1954); from the invasion of Vietnam to fight the communist threat (1965) to the invasion of Afghanistan (2001), supposedly as a defensive measure against the terrorists who attacked the twin towers in New York (none of whom were from Afghanistan), after 20 years of US support for the mujahideen against the Soviet-backed communist government in Kabul; from the invasion of Iraq in 2003 to put an end to Saddam Hussein and destroy his (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction to the intervention in Syria to defend rebels who, for the most part, were (and are) radical Islamists; from the intervention in the Balkans in 1995, carried out through NATO without authorization from the UN, to the destruction of Libya in 2011.

There have always been "benevolent reasons" for this type of intervention, which has always had accomplices and allies at the local level. What will be left of the martyred Ukraine when the war ends (because all wars finally end)? What will be the situation in the other European countries, especially Germany and France, which continue to be dominated by the false idea that the Marshall Plan was the manifestation of the selfless philanthropy of the United States, to whom they owe infinite gratitude and unconditional solidarity? And Russia? What will the final assessment be like, beyond all the death and destruction that all war entails? Why are we not witnessing, in Europe, the emergence of a strong movement in favor of a just and lasting peace? Could it be that, despite the fact that the war is being waged in Europe, the Europeans are waiting for some anti-war movement to emerge in the United States, so that they can join it with a clear conscience and without the risk of being seen as friends of Putin, or even as communists?

Why so much silence about all this?

Perhaps the most incomprehensible silence is that of the intellectuals. It is incomprehensible because intellectuals tend to claim to be more insightful than ordinary mortals. History has taught us that, in the periods immediately prior to the outbreak of wars, all politicians declare themselves against war while contributing to it with their actions. Silence is nothing but complicity with the masters of war. Contrary to what happened at the beginning of the XNUMXth century, now there are no renowned intellectuals making loud statements in favor of peace, “independence of spirit” and democracy. When the First World War broke out, three imperialisms coexisted: Russian, English and Prussian imperialism. No one doubted that Prussian imperialism was the most aggressive of the three.

Curiously, at that time no great German intellectual was heard to speak out against the war. The case of Thomas Mann is worthy of reflection. In November 1914, he published an article in Neue Rundschau entitled "Gedanken im Kriege" (Thoughts in times of war), in which he defended the war as an act of the "Kultur" (that is, Germany, as he himself clarified) against civilization. In his opinion, the Kultur was the sublimation of the demonic (“die Sublimierung des Dämonischen”) and was above morality, reason and science. Mann concluded by writing that “the law is the friend of the weak; would like to flatten the world. But war draws strength” (“Das Gesetz ist der Freund des Schwachen, möchte gern die Welt verflachen, aber der Krieg läßt die Kraft erscheinen”). Mann saw culture and militarism as brothers. In 1918-1920 he published Reflections of an Apolitical Man, a book in which he defended the Kaiser's policy and claimed that democracy was an anti-German idea. Fortunately for humanity, Thomas Mann would later change his mind and become one of the staunchest critics of Nazism. Instead, from Peter Kropotkin to Leo Tolstoy and from Fyodor Dostoevsky to Maxim Gorky, the voices of Russian intellectuals raised against Russian imperialism never failed to make themselves heard.

There are many issues that intellectuals have an obligation to address. Why have they remained silent? Do intellectuals still exist or have they become faint shadows of what they once represented?