By Frei Betto on October 16, 2024
image: Rebelion
I am not referring here to the celebrated film (1991) directed by Jonathan Demme and starring Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins. I am referring to all of us who, endowed with a critical conscience, do not know how to act in the face of the vertiginous rise of right-wing politics, the worsening of environmental destruction (fires throughout Brazil and desertification in the Amazon and the Cerrado), the genocide of the Palestinian people by the Israeli government, the connivance of politicians elected by the votes of the left with the trickery of the right.
Moved by a political dogma of religious character – historical determinism – we believed that the future would inexorably belong to the post-capitalist society. History was supposedly pregnant with that future; it would be enough for us progressives to play the role of midwives. And suddenly, the facts came crashing down on our utopias: 70 years of socialism in the Soviet Union evaporated without a shot being fired; the Berlin Wall precipitated the advent of capitalism in the East, which was welcomed as good news; the United States, like the Rome of the Caesars, came to hold the world’s ideological and economic hegemony.
Who on the left realized the seriousness of the climate issue? It was necessary for Chico Mendes to pay with his life, in 1988, for his warning cry. And we did not listen to him when he warned that “ecology without class struggle is gardening”. We are so colonized that our inertia shows that, in reality, we also believe that environmental protection harms our developmentalist projects. How to stop exploiting oil reserves?
How to avoid the construction of hydroelectric dams, even if it means water contamination and devastation of indigenous villages? How not to satisfy the demands for financing and tax exoneration of agribusiness, which guarantees the wealth of our exports?
Today I wonder if the left still exists. According to Norberto Bobbio, leftists are those who are indignant with social inequality and are determined to eradicate it. In Europe they are rare, and the one who stands out most as a man of the left is not even European, because he was born in Argentina: Pope Francis. Like John the Baptist, a voice crying out in the wilderness?
Where was the left when, after the demise of socialism in Eastern Europe, the United States invaded Iraq, Kuwait, Somalia, Bosnia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Yemen, Kazakhstan, Libya and Syria? And now the White House is supporting the wars in Ukraine and Israel against the Palestinian people.
It is worth remembering that successive U.S. governments have openly intervened in at least 81 elections – and some covertly – in other nations between 1946 and 2000.
Today, the right wing possesses a powerful weapon: digital networks. It controls the big techs, mobilizes its algorithms and bots. And it has figured out how to manipulate crowds for the market and its political proposals. Just read Max Fisher’s The Networks of Chaos: How Social Networks Reprogrammed Our Minds and Our World.
What is the antidote to this immense power that makes us exchange the real for the virtual? Every day we waste hours hanging on our cell phones, watching the pecked world, feeding our bubbles, looking through the electronic keyholes. We are incapable of getting up from our chairs to participate in a social movement meeting, a union assembly, a partisan event. And we let the streets be occupied by the right, because we have lost the capacity to mobilize.
Fire devours our biomes, polluted air invades our lungs, politicians make promises, and with our silence, commiseration makes us think that we are innocent lambs…
Frei Betto is an internationally known liberation theologian. He is the author of 60 books of various literary genres including Fidel and Religion. He is also tireless activist and advisor to social movements including Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers Movement.
Source: Cubadebate, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English