5-04-05, 9:00 am
From
Nobody has ever seen all of Geneva, only some of its more visible and distinctive elements, such as a lake, a government officer, an immigrant… and a peacock's feather on the ground of the United Nations garden. Although it may not seem so, says Hinkelammert, nobody has yet seen a school, only the visible elements that form it: a building, chairs, people. Neither has anybody quite seen a Human Rights Commission. Persons, microphones, a place to meet have been seen. But nobody has seen the things that finally turn a territory into a city, a building into a school, a Human Rights Commission into a representative body of one larger than the sum of its members. These are things like a sense of belonging, the purpose of teaching, accepting a duty of justice.
Years have gone by, economy has developed, they say, what is visible, such as a car or a TV screen, has prevailed, they say, over and above ideas, principles, relations between people. But this economy, developed they say, hasn't put an end to the need of invisible things. The advertising practice that links values to objects is well known; bright and shinny mobile phones sell invisible and ethereal friendship; cars, self-esteem and recognition.
Nor has it been completely possible to do without invisible things in politics. It has been frequently attempted; they have tried to mask politics as a mechanical chore, giving it strange names like “modernizing” the country. For instance, the director of Foreign Policy magazine recently and publicly expressed the idea that corruption shouldn't be an objective to fight against in the field of politics. “The war against corruption,” he said, “damages the world,” without explaining exactly what groups and in which part of the world.
In fact, some wish that corruption weren't important, that legitimacy weren't important, nor that invisible things were important.
Corruption puts an end to legitimacy because it puts an end to justice. A corrupt person is one who gets more than is fair for something he's done. Corruption is supported by violence; between the person who pays off a manager to get a contract and the one who sends a pair of hoodlums, there's no qualitative difference, only one of intensity. However, the corruption of those who have political authority is much more serious because it destroys social cohesion. That's why the director of Foreign Policy would like it to be ignored. He would like that the law of survival of the fittest didn't have to pay homage to any virtue. He would like that corruption not be tolerated so many times but rather, and above all, something tolerable. Thus, the legitimacy of governments, so weak sometimes, so damaged, would stop being necessary. This way would stop the possible contradiction between those who have authority and those who only have power, between those who have legitimacy and those who only have strength. It's possible that invisible things may have their days numbered. It's possible that the wishes of the director of Foreign Policy end up imposing themselves through violence. But it's also possible that the opposite takes place. That more and more the law of survival of the fittest crashes against the strength of those who demand the legitimacy of laws, of the rulers, of the social processes.
These days, a group of intellectuals has questioned, through a manifest, the legitimacy of the United Nation’s Human Rights Commission. A manifest is like a unique political act. When it comes from an organized group it resembles a program, it becomes a way of making public a group of intentions. When, as in this case, it comes from diverse persons, its meaning is different. It seems that today nobody really knows what role intellectuals should play. But nobody has any doubts to assign them an assiduous treatment of words, of the meaning of words, and of the representation of the world, around which moral attitudes and behaviors are organized.
When an intellectual signs a manifest, he is somehow vouching for the text he is signing, betting on it, betting on its trajectory and his capacity to manage the meaning of words. Anyone who has signed or asked someone to sign a manifest knows how important each line is. Because it's the role of intellectuals today -whether he wants it or not- to take for valid, to consider true some representations of the world and not others.
These days, many worthy persons in their fields and others still in training, many Nobel Prize winners, musicians, philosophers, writers, etc. -in the beginning they were 200, now they are many thousands- have carefully read 26 lines on the Human Rights Commission in Geneva and they have considered that what is stated there is true and have vouched for it with their signatures. They have sustained that “the Government of the United States has no moral authority to become a judge of human rights in Cuba” and they have demanded and continue to demand that the governments of the countries represented in that Commission do not allow it to be used to justify “the intensification of the policy of blockade and aggressions that, violating International Law, is carried out by the greatest super power of the planet against a small country.”
It's not common for intellectuals from five continents to join to make the diagnosis of a United Nations Commission. Those who grieve for the scarce participation in the elections in the European Union should consider it good news, a sign that remote international institutions can attract interest. A sign that men and women know that what is going on there has to do with them. It should be good news and in some countries it has been; in all Latin America this manifest has had considerable repercussion. Not so in Spain. The great media have been silent. Maybe those in them, who determine what could be interesting for the citizens, know the reasons why.
And I still haven't talked about Cuba. I try to think of a time in which talking about Cuba could be something simple. Then I think that today's abundance is not only -as it has always been- unattainable for more than two thirds of the world population but that in a few years time it will also be unattainable for the middle classes of the privileged countries. Soon, a fair and at the same time austere relationship with consumer goods will be the only horizon that an honest political party can propose. Any other proposal would be the same as the vile and blind attitude of those who have fed the proliferation of nuclear weapons while they built bunkers for themselves, as if “oneself” could exist when we're talking about an entire country, an entire continent, an entire planet.
Under such circumstances, we might think that the strength of those who only have on their side some invisible things might grow. And, under these circumstances, perhaps it's also possible to think that Cuba is being accused precisely for having set out on a process of transformations with the objective of assuring the fuller practice of justice, equity, and integration of the peoples in a project that is not devastating for the rest of the world.
It's difficult to talk about what Cuba is and what Cuba can come to be. Judging by the words written in the plan “for the Assistance for a Free Cuba” by the US government, Cuba would have to become a colony, Cubans would have to have their houses, lands and schools taken away from them to return them to their old owners, who would return from the United States. Health care would have to be privatized as well as education and the wealth and the patrimony of a people turned over to American transnationals.
Meanwhile, and perhaps to favor the possible violent implantation of that plan some day, news would continue to appear about how badly four prisoners are treated in Cuba. And, meanwhile, there would also have to be some -although few may hear them- who say that the Cuban Revolution would never make -and it would have a right to- a quantitative calculation. A single mistreatment of a prisoner, should it exist, must be avoided. In Cuba, in Spain, in the United States. And, Cuba knows it, and Spain knows it, and both countries, each in its own way, try to take care that that doesn't happen and if it should happen, that it won't happen again. But, what is being discussed in the Human Rights Commission in Geneva isn't the fact that there could be prisoner abuse in each country; it's the fact that the United States -the country which considers abuse admissible when it practices abuse; admissible and therefore outside of any jurisdiction- the fact that it's that country which is accusing the rest.
I try to imagine a time when talking about Cuba is a simple thing. I try to imagine a time when the future of a country isn't at stake in a possible war. Because invisible things are different from those that do not exist. The Iraqi mass destruction weapons, which do not exist, are already full of death. And it's strange, but it may happen that those who defend killings and deaths on a video-game or for a barrel of oil, be the ones to say that invisible things, legitimacy, justice, are not worth fight for.
