Gustavo Petro: Acceptance speech for the Grand Collar of the State of Palestine

Gustavo Petro, Bogotá, June 3, 2024
Translated by Supriyo Chatterjee, Tlaxcala

On June 3, 2024, in Bogotá, Colombian President Gustavo Petro was awarded the Grand Collar of the State of Palestine, the highest civilian order of the State of Palestine. Below is his acceptance speech

Photo: Andrea Puentes – Presidency of Colombia

“The young people coming out of universities in the United States, coming out in Europe, in Asia, in Africa and in Latin America, are the genuine expression of a new humanity; one that if it survives is going to build a different world, far removed from the material, much more rooted in frugality, but above all in wisdom and knowledge, where humanity no longer finds pages where some human beings kill other human beings.”

I have been awarded many decorations throughout my life. The first ones from my school, which are the ones I remember most; the medals of excellence that Father Pedro gave me -the last one he did not want to give me, but it was his turn-, and I must tell you that this is perhaps the most valuable one I have received because of what it undoubtedly means in the history of the world, in the history of resistance, and now in these fateful days we are living, which mark a point of departure in the history of mankind.

It is not just any event that we are witnessing: these are the new signs of a terrible world, but one that must also be filled with hope. It is not a world as Fukuyama dreamed, without contradictions, totally peaceful. It is a world deeply stressed by politics, perhaps more so than in the twentieth century, which experienced two world wars, which lived through the socialist revolution for almost the entire century.

The struggle between two different systems of understanding the world, of understanding the economy, of understanding society, which could have led to a third conflagration, undoubtedly, we were very close to it, but the responsibility of one and the other, in the Soviet Union and in the United States, which had already been allies in a war, an episode which is sometimes unknown, when together they decided to fight fascism, both the American society and the Soviet society knew very clearly that their enemy was not one of the two, that their enemy was a third one that was beginning to advance as a kind of specter in Europe at that time, throughout the world, carrying with it a series of criminal doctrines that became powerful and that filled drove humanity to one of its worst pages moments.

It cost fifty million dead to get out of that situation, and undoubtedly it was the soldiers of the Soviet and North American peoples who, together with many resistors in Europe, tens of thousands of people who took up arms, who did not agree with fascism, with absolute oppression, with genocide, and knew how to resist, in a journey that in the end was one of the great epic battles of humanity.

From there, the word democracy emerged with more force than before, and from those two conglomerates that disputed world power emerged the thesis of a society of nations that became the United Nations Organization, and with it the construction of something that we have been calling international law.

Little by little, after many discussions that in a certain way are the accumulation of human civilization, from its remote beginnings, which we no longer remember, until today, there is a summary of what we are as humanity; how not to kill ourselves with all the problems and contradictions that are reflected there, because neither more nor less is the genuine expression of humanity today.

And obviously it is diverse, obviously it is full of complexities, of inequalities, of deep injustices; human beings still kill other human beings. As long as that exists, we will not be able to truly embrace the construction of a civilization that is called human, not one that has the name of one country or another, one culture or another of those that we have already known so much and that have been configured in the preceding history, but in something that we can call, without homogenizing, human culture, what is specifically human, what has us here on planet Earth, even in spite of everything, and that can be projected, in my opinion, as an idea of humanity towards the stars, as many of our artists and sculptors and our own flags sometimes point out.

Not for nothing the stars are on the flags. Something to do with subliminal messages in the dreams of human beings.

A new 1933

That world born after the defeat of fascism is perishing. We are living its death throes. It is a time of death that we are living. I have called it the global 1933, because in 1933 Hitler ascended to power in Germany with a popular applause that was increasing, and for the destruction of the very values of European culture.

The same that had developed in Germany, the Germanic culture of  Beethoven, of Bach, of Mozart, of Goethe, of so many philosophers that we have read, perhaps the deepest philosophical thought of humanity is there in Germany. And in spite of that maximum culture, perhaps of that sublime expression of human spirituality, as Hegel came to point out, they entered into the worst of catastrophes.

From one moment to the next, brilliance turned into darkness, showing what human beings are capable of, not only in the realm of the sublime, but also in the realm of catastrophe, of the global Nakba.

Fascism is on the rise in the world

Today is a 1933 that is not in Germany, it is in the world. These forces are on the rise, fascism is on the rise in the world and we must call it what it is: it is the Nazis who are returning to power, who are coming to take revenge, who want to turn humanity into an enslaved robot, without freedom. Under the oppression of the strongest, international law  is giving way to brute force.

Geopolitics is nothing if not about who has the most planes and the most money in the capital funds, period; not who represents humanity and the general interests of life the most. We are on the brink, undoubtedly, of a global Nakba. I reacted to the Palestinian situation in the first place because from a very young age, almost as a child, we knew about it.

Revolution as the evolution of humanity

The Latin American progressive forces at that time, mostly in hiding, resisting dictatorships, the death that every day approached us, surrounded us, killed so many comrades by the thousands, a whole party.

Throughout Latin America, the forces that rose up in arms always had our hearts at the side of Palestine. Because a revolutionary is a special condition -not all human beings are born revolutionaries-, when a revolutionary is united with a people a revolution is made. Revolutions are always a new way for humanity to evolve. They cannot be looked at in a sinful way, as if they were something demonic, on the contrary, it is what makes us emerge as humanity.

We have developed from revolutions. We had revolutions here in the 19th century, in the 18th century; three lighthouses started a task and I may be ignorant of other struggles, but it seems to me that three lighthouses were raised in humanity almost at the same time.

Almost without the existence of the Internet and through the sailing ships and the sailors who carried the books - mostly Arab sailors - who took care of that clandestine and hidden literature of ideas, which could not be mentioned in the courts, in the palaces, in the royalist politics of that time; Clandestinely, across the seas, the Arab sailors were delivering the books written in French and they were revolutionary books and they reached North America and spread through Europe and surely reached the Arab world in some way and reached Latin America and in all three places the bonfires were lit, the light was raised, the flags were raised.

We thought almost in the same way in libertarian Europe, in the libertarian United States -which was not called that- and here in Latin America; we galloped, at the same time, with the same ensign, the possibility of building republics, because the kingdom is sovereign, we said, and the possibility of building a world of democracy and freedom, a dream that went with horsemen galloping across the plains, the mountains and the seas.

America: land of freedom

That spirit did not end here; we have continued it, in a certain way we are heirs of those young people who knew how to build these republics, with their pluses and minuses, and make America a land of freedom.

Here dictatorships have not been able to germinate; here monarchies have not been able to be; here authoritarianisms have been swept away by the peoples, time and time again. America is still a land of freedom and that is why, since we were children, with those same ideas, as officers of Bolivar in the resistance, we went to the Sahara, in a story that some survivors should write in a book to remember it, so that it does not remain behind, in the people who have already died and who were there, among them, my dear friend Enán Lora, from Córdoba.

There they arrived in the Sahara and there they found many resistant peoples taking up arms, fighting against slavery, against apartheid. There came peoples, armed organizations of black peoples who wanted to liberate themselves in sub-Saharan Africa, and there came the Arab organizations.

Ties with Palestine

We also built alliances with Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization; we trained together there. I was not there, but I knew of their stories when they arrived, of Francisco Vargas, who died in Zipaquira and was my friend, and of Enan Lora and all those who were there and there joined with the Arab dreams, under the desert stars, building common dreams in the tricontinental, which we thought was the germ of a great world revolution.

Those dreams, more or less, have been destroyed everywhere; resistant we are and follow it, some of us. Arab socialism was completely destroyed, Arab pan-Arabism was destroyed. In Europe nothing but fascism arises, denying its own thought. In Athens, where the word democracy was created, there is the biggest pit on the planet, full of corpses at the bottom of the sea of people escaping from Africa to get to Europe for a bowl of soup.

The greatest injustice in the lands, in the seas, where the thinkers who spoke, for the first time in the world, of democracy and republic, also spoke of tyranny and oligarchies, sailed. They taught us the first glimpses of politics and the possibility of being free spirits, as the Greeks taught all mankind.

We met the Palestinian people there in the Sahara.  That is not written in the Colombian press; that does not appear in the official history, because it was the meeting of human resistances in the underground, as in a kind of veins with blood that ran subway, bringing together the peoples for a common struggle, in solidarity. That is why we reacted immediately when the bombs fell on Gaza.

Gaza, a global laboratory

I believe that in Gaza there is an experiment going on, there is an experiment going on, using Gaza as its laboratory.  It's a dreadful experiment that has to do with the Nazis; the Nazis practised it in small-scale, relatively, and they tried to exterminate the Jewish people, and the Soviet people, and the democratic people, and the socialists and the communists, and everything that seemed different to them had to go to the concentration camp and the gas chamber.

Europe died there, in those camps. And what Hitler proposed is what is being applied in Gaza, but as an experiment for the world. That is how they want to dominate us; that is how the majorities of humanity, who do not live under the world economic power in Europe, in Japan or in the United States, and who are not willing to maintain a status quo of absolute injustice, where there are vaccines against the disease for some, but for the poor there are none or they arrive late.

Such a state of injustice, even in the face of life itself, what the philosopher Foucault once called the biopolitics of power, that is, how power can end life premeditatedly and in a generalized and massive manner, as Hitler proposed, is what we are seeing today.

They are experiencing it in Gaza. The bombs in Gaza are not fired by a few simple Israeli soldiers. It is a huge capital in the world, centralized, coordinated, influencing the big governments. That is why we see a France contradicting itself against its own slogan 'liberty, fraternity, equality'.

They had already contradicted themselves when it was the blacks of Haiti who raised that same slogan and raised the flag and the Haitian revolution, which is the most important of all America, also forgotten.

Now we have it here; the Nazis are in power; they ascend through financial capital, they manage to lead the government of the United States, even if it is self-styled democratic, with progressive currents, but that youthful, black, Arab, diverse, Latino progressivism, which is there, does not manage to change the will of the State, which continues helping to fire the bombs.

And it does not happen in Europe. After so many workers' struggles and socialist and democratic revolutions, after so many barricades erected in the great European cities, building the democratic and humanist project, Europe itself surrenders to the Nazis.

The greed of capital

In Germany itself, the socialists who were exterminated by Hitler are today unable to stop the genocide while still in power. The great world powers are subordinated to an enormous financial capital, whose liquidity is based on the fossil economy, which must come to an end in the world; and terrified of the idea of a world change, of a world revolution, which is a revolution for life, which had not happened before in our human history, but which today is absolutely essential.

We have no way out, because the other way is the death of the species, of all our children and grandchildren, because in a fossil economy what dies is everything, it is omnicide, starting with the human species.

The greed of capital does not want to let us see the need for transformation, it constantly slows it down, it lobbies in the United Nations, in the centers of world power, it influences governments, it finances them, there is no campaign that they do not finance, and thus they take over politics, and thus end the freedom of the human species, they blind it through their media, which dominate everyone, and the great panopticon of humanity, as Foucault said, begins to be managed from some desk, in a cold office in the north.

Orson Welles had already written it, and it is today's reality, it is what we are living, a humanity that is blinded to enslave it, so that it does not realize that the accumulated quick profit is bringing the death of the human species, that as the German economist and philosopher Marx, whose name we do not want to remember any more, had already said, that capital destroys its own conditions of wealth, which is nature and the human being.

Marx said that man, because he was patriarchal, European and macho - but he should have written human being - is destroying the human being, and all the tension that we are seeing on the planet, rising politics, has to do with this attempt of humanity to survive, and the attempt of fossil capital, through violence, to stop the change.

This is dressed up in speeches and ideologies, blablablas in the press, but we are already in a war; we have been summoned to a war, and it is either the extinction of humanity or the world revolution for life, and what is being concentrated in Gaza, in such a small space, is the condensation of that conflict. What is firing is not Israel - it is a means -, what is firing is the great world fossil and financial capital, against a people that cannot resist, cannot endure, because they have been resistant, because they have taught all the peoples of the world that there is no other way than resistance.

Raising the banner of life is today's moment

Something that we already knew, and that is why we got together as children, speaking different languages and with different religions, we understood that it was the same flag. Raising the flag is today's moment, and that in all parts of the world.

The young people coming out of universities in the United States, the most distinguished ones - Harvard - the young people coming out of universities in Europe, the young people coming out of universities in Asia and Africa and Latin America, are the genuine expression of a new humanity, one that if it survives will build a different world, far removed from the material, much more rooted in frugality, but above all in wisdom and knowledge, where humanity no longer finds pages where some human beings kill other human beings, because we will have discovered our own history and our own mission.

That is what we have to recover in Gaza, that is where the first battle is being fought, it will not be the last, and we have to prepare ourselves, as in the old days. When I was a child and very skinny I used to prepare myself, mentally and physically, because what is coming is the pages of the history of humanity, in Gaza that battle is being fought and we have to win it.

Among the rubble, among the blood, among the shattered bodies of the boys and girls of so many thousands of babies murdered by capital, among that hardship and that pain that must be immense, part of that we understand in Colombia, because here too they have massacred and thrown bombs and many innocent people have died.

Some figures speak of 500 thousand, others of 700 thousand killed by greed, compared to Gaza, perhaps we are facing a worse Nakba that was unleashed on Colombia decades ago and still does not end, in spite of this government, this fight still has to be fought in Colombia.

That is why in Colombia we can understand and in Latin America what is happening in the soul of the Palestinian people and we cannot turn our backs on them, there is no ethical or moral reason that prevents us from raising our voices when we can and actions as long as we can. We are weak, but together we are humanity and that union, we have to put it together, that union has to be built among all the languages of Babel, as the Bible said.

In the Bible are the images of the appearance of the Jewish people and the Muslim people; both Semites, according to the Bible, descendants of Shem, according to the Biblical chronology. Those who criticize us, saying that we are anti-Semitic, have no idea of the Bible, they have not even read it; because if they had read it they would know that in those ancient books there is the history of the two peoples under the same father.

Today they have to be brothers. Somehow you have to find the way, if you can be brothers, humanity will have found the way to the definitive fraternity, so that difficult search has to be found.

Somehow Yasser Arafat felt the instinct, like Pizarro here in Colombia, of what could be the possibility of peace on the path of humanity; a peace that is revolutionary. It is not war that is revolutionary, as we ourselves falsely come to believe. It is peace that is revolutionary.

Yasser Arafat found it, he found that message somehow in his existence and he changed the situation by saying that the two peoples could be brothers; of course, without tyranny, of course in freedom; of course in pure democracies. That Palestinian land can live in diversity, as it has always lived, because it is a land of diversity of beliefs, it is a land of freedom.

Jesus was a Palestinian Jew, that was the nationality of Jesus, under Roman subjugation, and he built a path that was not that of the Jewish guerrillas, who walked beside him and contemplated him; a path of words and he built words based on love and life. And I have the impression that the world revolution of today does not raise a simple red flag as in the past; perhaps it is red, but it is the flag of life that is the revolutionary flag.

Today is a revolution of life, it is the task that we all have to altar, to weave, to build, to organize; they will call us revolutionaries, yes, but we are proudly so, because we are the genuine expression of a humanity that does not want chains, that does not want injustice, that wants to be free, spirit, among the stars.

Thank you for your decoration, my greetings and my love to the Palestinian people.