From Granma

THE French dramatist Jean Cocteau once wrote: 'A myth is a lie that ends up being true.' Bush’s reelection in the United States has given the right to the author of Beauty and the Beast.

The culmination of such a subversion of values diminishes the democracy proclaimed by Lincoln as government of the people, by the people and for the people, which has become the regime of lies, by lies and for lies in that country.

At the end of the 1950s, somebody, evoking Truman’s frequent broadsides and the illness that often removed Eisenhower from his functions, put about the joke that in the United States anyone could be president and there could even be no president.

Bush, the current president, is unique, capable of talking with God and Aznar at the same time. It is no coincidence that a few days after the US elections he received the former Spanish prime minister, one of the few European politicians to identify with Bush’s vision of the world and to share with him a lack of sticking to the truth that characterizes the two of them.

In the conversation between Bush and Aznar, of course the latter did not recall that 180 years ago the establishment of absolutist terror in his country served to further debilitate the imperial power, shaken by the glorious victory of Ayacucho on December 9, 1824 when Sucre sealed the end of colonial domination in South America. Wisely, Bolívar had warned of that in communications to officers who still maintained the colonial domination, knowing that the terror enthroned in the metropolis and the restitution of the inquisition via the euphemistically called Faith Juntas would lead to a lack of unity among Spaniards and the demoralization and debilitation of the empire, as much in the military as in the political and ideological order. The 'Long live the chains,' launched by deceit and accepted by ignorance, behind which the robber King came to power, militated against the liberation of South America.

No prediction could be worse for Bush than to talk with Aznar, likewise overtaken by that Spain which almost 450 years ago appealed to the Inquisition to repress the Spanish, which finally cost the strategic decline of the empire where the sun was still shining: intolerance finished off and cruelly led to the independence of the Low Countries; to the arrogance of force, the disaster of the Invincible Armada and the loss of initiative at sea; as well as the incapacity to colonize America north of Mexico and Cuba, which favored England and France. Finally, Felipe II’s attempts to assimilate Portugal in fact resulted in Portuguese dominion extending to half of South America and to benefit that country in Asia and Africa, leaving Spain relegated in these continents.

Intolerance, terror, lies and ignorance are capable of generating the decline and the end of any empire, however powerful it may appear in the history of humanity.

When the Soviet Union opened the way to the cosmos, the US press called on Harry S. Truman to explain how that was possible. The ex-president answered that this was the case because of the repression of scientific thought in the United States and intellectuals’ fear of being branded enemies of the state: in other words, fear, had relegated the United States.

In having recourse to terror inside and outside of the United States by appealing to formulas that ended with medieval theocracies, Bush was able to use passing fears and support to his benefit, but in truth, that veritable captain of the time wars will paint reality in its real environs. If Bush is proposing to close the United States to the friendship of nations and base its relations with the world on force, then one only has to recall Talleyrand’s famous phrase that 'bayonets serve for anything other than leaning on them.'

When the fascists assumed power in Italy, there was a confrontation in Parliament between Benito Mussolini and Antonio Gramsci in which the former argued in a thunderous voice that the Italian people had opted for fascism with their vote, to which the brilliant Marxist intellectual responded, face to face with Il Duce: 'fascism is consensus by sticks.' In the course of the enforced imposition of fascism in Italy, Gramsci was imprisoned and became seriously ill due to the lack of any effective treatment. The stick consensus led Italy and Germany to disaster and humanity paid, with millions of lives, for the arrogance of the world domination of Hitler and Mussolini.

Bush has remained alone in government 'dialoging with God,' as his justice minister, John Ashcroft, having bound and gagged the U.S. people with the Patriotic Act, has given way to the Texas hangman in the U.S. Attorney General’s Office. Bush is placing vigilance over the application of U.S. legislation in the hands of a man with a record number of number of death sentences under his belt: Albert González, the bespectacled pettyfogger who decreed the death of humanitarian law, varnished over the acts of torture in Guanatánamo and Iraq and declared the Geneva Convention anachronistic, represents the threat of terror to the people of the United States and all the peoples of the world.

Noam Chomsky, considered the greatest living U.S. linguist, recently stated that the United States has become a terrorist state. The presence of the Texan hangman gives it the spice it lacked for configuring Bush’s savage theocracy.

Bush’s two wars have degenerated; the first with the creation in Afghanistan of an ‘opiateocracy’ that is already producing 86% of the world’s opium and, the second, which has still not ended, despite the fact that the deployment of the machinery of war in all its ferocity against the resistance of the Iraqi people has provoked genocide and destruction with consequences difficult to predict.

In Central America, corruption is sucking dry the peoples, who are calling for the imprisonment of Bush’s corrupt allies.

Confirming the OAS in its true nature of a U.S. ministry of colonies has established standards taken from U.S. bureaucracy for the designation of the secretary of that organization, by demanding that candidates fill in a form declaring that they are not corrupt. The United States has promoted the nomination of a coup leader, Francisco Flores, the former president of El Salvador, which means under the sponsorship and impetus of the second presidential term of the Bush theocratic mythocracy, that terrorism, destabilization and coups are the order of the day, as during the self-styled regional organization’s worst times.

It has been said that only Cervantes’ genius allowed the second part of Don Quixote to be as good as the first, and a book that was published 400 years ago in 2005. The immortal work, which embodies the ideal of human justice, was conceived of in prison, 'where every discomfort has its place and where every sad noise makes its home,' by a hero of the Battle of Lepanto, twice excommunicated but venerated by his people and humanity.

Bush, who has imposed an anachronistic theocratic absolutism in the United States, should not forget Lord Acton’s phrase: 'absolute power absolutely corrupts.' And, at a time in which he is reviving the practice of terror on his people and the peoples of the world, to recall Winston Churchill’s words that only empires of intelligence have a future.



» Find more of the online edition.