The 30 years that run from the fall of the Berlin Wall to covid-19 are those of the great fracture, those of the “epochal rupture” in the West and its entry into the tunnel of uncertainties. The modes and symbols of the exercise of politics have changed and even the preached “death of political science” has been revealed as true, according to César Cansino. But the new or what will correspond to the New Era as the Chinese and Russians call it, is cooking quickly. Perhaps it will come from the Ukrainian “crematory ovens”. There will be no strangers to this global phenomenon, no matter how much some consider having reached its stability; Well, if this were true – let’s look at Venezuela – it will be about a stabilization in the background.
Two references are sobering in this regard. One, the lessons left by the most recent electoral experiences in Latin America, and another, the aforementioned war, deliberately? undertaken by Putin’s Russia, which distracts the United States and the fragmented Western Europe. And it is that China announced it, between the lines, last February!; before the world saw recreated by Russian hands, in the XXI century, the images of the great war that ended in 1945.
For now, the centrality of the Atlantic and that of its great Mediterranean seems to be faltering or reaching its end.
The Petro-Hernández drama in Colombia, as a laboratory exercise, reveals that the catechisms of political modernity have been thrown on a pyre by the legions of former Internet users –remembrance of the indignant Spaniards– who demand that politics and democracy be something other than what the texts or experience say. Not by chance did democracy enter into crisis after the end of real socialism in the Soviet Union and its widowers opt for preaching democratic disenchantment, electoralism, the rebirth of strong but virtual states in a context of open dissolutions.
The so-called Caracazo and the Tiananmen Massacre already suggested something, without the party establishments realizing it: anti-political insurgencies from extreme poles. Venezuela, in particular, is aware of its deconstruction process, showing fundamentalism as the first face, a consequence of the ongoing social and political anomie. The “Bolivarians” as a lodge, not the Armed Forces and as proof of what has been said, are in America the equivalent of the neo-Nazi Rostock Pogrom, both in 1992.
In addition to the above, after these three decades of tectonic movement, the knock of Russia’s war against Ukraine, previously agreed with China while the West thrives distracted with its bitterness and in search of other identities, is the fuse that triggers the story that the East now it seeks to mineralize – of its own accord it has tacitly imposed it on the West since 1989 – while the latter abandons its roots. America, meanwhile, asks Europe – all confused and in a domestic fray – to apologize for adding it to her cultural traditions, 500 years ago.
China at the head, Russia as a pawn on the board, thus put together the narrative for the New Era: Globalization and global economic, financial, commercial and security governance conducted from Asia and its Pacific, with hegemonic aspirations. The western “universal” canons of the declining World Order, because they are related to politics and democracy (Rule of Law and human rights) must subtract from national privacy, depending on the historical circumstances of each State. They are the conditions they offer for peace.
The annoyance with the United States and Europe over the Ukraine issue, in fact, finds support in these arguments. Not by chance, even the UN itself, from before refrained from condemning or dealing with tweezers to humanitarian tragedies – except to support the fiction of the investigations and give opinions in the manner of forensic experts. Nicaragua, Cuba, Venezuela, El Salvador, Peru and even part of Colombia and even Chile see each other today in that fragmented mold of retail freedoms. The diffuse popular violence, which burns property, destroys and desecrates churches, knocks down icons and statues in search of another present, orphan of paternity and denied utopias, announced it and was not listened to.
Ukrainian unity and exemplary character, for now, remain there as an agonal breath, as hope for a part of the world that hopes to see itself rebuilt, but, again, based on the primacy of human dignity. He resents seeing himself as an object or mere data for digital algorithms or as an inert piece of Pacha Mama.
In this last transit, the political exercises that are seen in the French and American Revolution are seen as old-fashioned. The dictatorships of the 21st century do not want them – legitimized after the speech in Beijing and accepted by the White House to stop their own deconstruction – nor do the preachers of real politik, such as Kissinger from Davos, want such exercises.
In short, the West of the laws lives its Roman tragedy and medievalizes itself in manors. The Orient of Lights builds, rooted in its ancient traditions, without discounting its Being, but pointing towards the pragmatic “having” of a world that decided to see itself exonerated from ethics and the transcendent sense of freedom.
It remains to be seen if, in the panorama under question, there are actors or elites with well-furnished heads on the planet and capable of following the teaching of John Paul II, namely, continuing to teach the “truth” even when there are only “twelve” left.
In the immediate term, while the East advances towards dominance from the East and towards the East, Westerners, in the absence of States and with frayed nations, remain in the trenches, without a guide up to the challenges. Even its majority religion becomes an NGO network and reduces life to the Network. Everyone chooses to flee to the Metaverse, whose 5G is a net Chinese invoice.
