“We have the past behind us, the future ahead of us. The past is not seen. It’s funny, because we don’t have our eyes on our backs.”
Ionesco
The anti-democratic mood of the regime that sat comfortably on the bayonets was always assumed, since they lost their sharp ends and became a comfortable armchair in search of financial interests. Then that germ of depersonalization towards the opposite of power was strengthened until achieving that in that same turn of the tongue, the human being lost his essence and with it his ability to be considered equal, to be treated with dignity; Right at this inflection, laxity gave way to run over the dignity of those who were considered different from the human being and therefore recipients of all kinds of humiliations, first of a linguistic nature and then in the strictly practical.
The great triumph of this usurping hegemony of power lies in the depersonalization of its opponents, in the rigidity of the language in the separation of the human being from his ability to argue clearly, to then think accurately, all this has become poverty of the spirit and destruction of the molding habits of the character, turning into virtuous what is absolutely reprehensible, the prisons, dungeons and ergastulas, are not evident from the purely physical or tangible plane, they are the result of a treacherous process of dehumanization of the population , a dystopia that has gone from the totalitarian to the playful, without losing the absolutely cruel, brutal and incompatible aspect with the human essence, from power they have managed to install a system that generates poverty in the soul and in the spirit, a poverty that makes it impossible for us to act in a coherent way with the drama that we are going through as a society, the language has been dismantled, making the construction drinkable creation of dichotomous stories that coexist with horror.
The deformed message of the revolution of all failures has been injected into society from the discourse, as studied by Viktor Klemperer, author of The language of the Third Reichin his work this German philologist was able to warn the imminently seriousness of Adolph Hitler’s message and also corroborated with horrid protagonism how the language was increasingly delimited, rigidified, robotized and therefore split from meaning to the ends and means of making it capable of to argue that the outrage, outrages and planned homicide were plausible, necessary and therefore irreproachable state policies, in this way the language of the Third Reich became a valid linguistic turn, all totalitarianism enjoys an empire of its language or of a “lingua tertii imperii”, Chavismo would not be the exception to the norm, although there are reckless people who, outside of this horror, establish that there is no range of comparison between Nazi Germany and the Chavista horror, those interpretations would change from living and suffering this sum of horrors, as well as the disorderly exodus of millions of nationals escaping from this imprisoned country.
From the ergastula, life goes by, it coexists with the lightness of being, which can be unbearable like Milá Kundera, but there are not only ergastulas of thought, which are terrible in themselves, there are also cold concrete , in leaden gray of bars and even in remote places of the capital of this schizoid country, from those infernal places dignity is run over, torture is made, others are made to suffer, in those cracks of malignancy the club that is not vile prevails , but it is transmitted by the open signal of national television, to intimidate, threaten and immobilize a captive nation with fear, fear is the least free of all feelings, since it immobilizes, cuts off, amputates and prostrates human action, fear is not free, it is actually an imposition to make us less and less independent and poorer in the three dimensions that we have been developing in each installment, so we are poor in language, in spirit and in material wasteland
The latest report from the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations Organization reports the existence of at least seventeen torture centers in the country, seventeen infernal circles, that is, with that count we add ten circles to Dante’s inferno, in those limited spaces, in which the Greas live, those horrid old women, who shared an eye and a tooth, all kinds of malignancies are produced from physical and psychological torture, to the most lewd acts in terms of sexual violence, returning to the Greas, there alone sharing a single eye: Dino: The horror, Enio: Destroyer of Cities and Pefredo, The alarm, are able to withstand the mist of evil, endless violence and human perversion, Pefredo the alarm must feel happy with a society that walks on these ergastulas, that transits in front of them and that follows the course of their empty lives of survival while a minority lives the harvests of their hymens with the power, naively believing that they will not be victims of the same guillotine blade that decapitated Robespierre, no one is safe from Saturn’s appetite, his thirst for blood and his desire for power, a drive that makes him gobble up his offspring to keep the throne he occupies.
These ergastulas of postmodernity are relative, liquid and lax, they coexist with this society of simulation, the same one that is indolent in the face of cruelty, perverted forms and of course improvisation, they are seventeen torture sites, seventeen tangible hells of concrete and steel, in them those who oppose the regime of horror suffer unspeakable martyrdom, but they are also ready to continue receiving captives, kidnapped, victims, they are an emulator of the spawn of Pasifae, violence made physical space, lax violence, violence in language, those are our bars, our walls and this suffocation that materializes in the lack of freedom.
We Venezuelans are ontological orphans, split from identity, plundered from being, in this our drama the technique turned into science thrives, the conjunction of both in our sad reality is the negative opposite of good governance, what is truly serious is not the triumph of barbarism, but the barbarism that emerges in the midst of civilization that is increasingly approaching a buffoonish show, the contest of the clown who is also a dictator and in which the playful and the cruel are juxtaposed in a span of thought from the ergastula that we impose on ourselves daily, to make horror insignificant, the work of Norman Manea concurs, the idols of this broken society underlie, in images of a caricature, in which the president is represented, accompanied by a governor who seems to want to be remembered for his fixation with a character from Bram Stoker’s fiction.
We turn, then, to the dismantling of reason, to the triumph of post-truth and, of course, to the poverty of language, keeping as a backdrop the development of the theater of cruelty in the best style of Antonin de Artaud, the challenge is at least denounce, not fall into the ambush of the charlatan language of this ominous regime that tries to make lax and insignificant, which is absolutely scandalous, in these moments in which the tyranny tries to ignore us the free and real academy, without accommodating poses is the best response.
Finally, the ergastula is always open, hungry for victims, in its limited spaces there is no room for justice, but as a result of abject legislation it can fall into its clutches, in this country there are no laws, but rather management or control of technical ratio on reason and science, no one is safe, not even those who attend the banquet of the crowned anarchist, all daily life runs like viscous oil between the machinery to dominate and trample on freedom and dignity, before this reality There is no room for indolence, because the unconscious construction of this collective drama thrives on the basis of collective anaesthesia, trifles and laxity, which daily expels 50,000 unfortunates towards the Darién Gap, which is an extrapolation of horror, despair and the drama of many, the magnitude of the Venezuelan catastrophe becomes a Kafkaesque outline, in which we all run the risk of dawning changed into blah all.
As a warning, I leave for the reader the clear interpretation of a reality that coexists with all of us and is the tangible existence of torture centers in the country, either under our feet, or in any house or establishment of daily walk, on this new report of the UN Human Rights Commission, the regime is silent, the conventional media are obediently silent, but such a paroxysm does not stop the development of this horror at all, we live in bleak, complex and horrid times in all areas and of course in the midst of everything thrives the absence of freedom and the rule of law.
Could Evil have been incarnated only in such petty and ridiculous messengers? Is the great emblem of hell only manifested in those stupid, yet terrible, stammering pantomimes?
Norman Manea
