Translated by Tlaxcala
The world is a madhouse. So many unleashed beasts will not be controlled even by a Salvation Army of Humanity. A theatre of cruelty is needed just to stifle the assault on reason that has seized human societies. Performative disruptions, massive paralysis, the breaking of normality, widespread cries for truth and freedom, bold actions, challenges to the powers. Until common sense reappears each morning with the rising sun.
The United Nations — the UN — is a theatre of
simulation and lies. Nothing meaningful for the tranquillity of living beings
springs from this instrument of the corporate elites that oppress the human
family. An entity without authority before military and economic powers. An
entity without a soul, without rooted peoples, without representation of the
oppressed. The voices of life, of water, of the sacred, of the ancestral, of
peace, of childhood, of the migrant, have no place there.
Diplomacy failed once
again, as Petro said in the streets of New York. For two years, the parade of
words across the UN carpets has been unable to stem the rivers of blood in the
deserts of Gaza. Since its founding 80 years ago, it has prevented almost no
wars. The conflicts that broke out ended largely because of the deterrence
caused by the very weapons themselves. The UN is so ineffective that countries
place more trust in the deterrent capacity of nuclear weapons or in strategic
alliances. That is why they worry about developing them. A country that does
not want to succumb to the rapacity of aggressive powers shows its atomic and
supersonic weapons.
The world is governed by
original accumulation. It follows a pattern of economic behaviour that emerged
six centuries ago with modernity, at the dawn of capitalism. Greed and avarice
are the masters of the planet. They discovered that if they armed themselves to
the teeth, their fortunes would grow. With bomber planes, tanks, invasions,
they appropriated the riches of the continents most backward in technological
development. The world divided into centre and periphery, into first and third
world, into slaveholders and slaves, into oppressors and oppressed. The class
struggle (now called polarization) deepened across the globe. From liberal
capitalism we moved to neoliberal capitalism, and then the exploitation of labour
was exacerbated, the appropriation of public patrimonies (common goods) through
privatizations, through legalized corruption and looting carried out in leonine
public–private alliances.
The planet became a global
village of gossip and disinformation to hide how the orbital economy works.
Theft is the essence of economic dynamics. The plundering of national resources
under the seal of free trade and economic development. Financial, stock-market,
industrial and commercial systems were structured based on a tangle of laws
that largely favour them, to the detriment of workers (lower and middle
classes). All human activities are regulated by a digital network. A technical
network controls power. We are slaves observed and classified by algorithms and
data.
Global policies are
nothing more than manuals for concentrating wealth and the political-economic
domination of the more developed countries over the more backward ones. U.S.
anti-terror and anti-drug policies are strategies of penetration, interference and
the ability to dominate and attack countries that possess goods indispensable
to first-world industries.
These relationships of subordination between countries
and continents have produced a planet where the law of the jungle predominates,
where the strongest countries dominate the weakest. To legitimize and disguise
that aberrant, unequal atmosphere of humiliation and infamy, they created the
UN. And among its declared objectives they decreed that it would be in charge
of preserving world peace. The UN knows that war-mongering has guided the
destinies of this global village, that war is the most prosperous business,
that it sells in record time what would take hundreds of Black Fridays to sell.
The eagerness for return-on-investment has no compassion for the most
vulnerable. To establish an extensive seaside hotel industry, one must
annihilate more than two million Palestinians in Gaza. The desire to create a
state of the Great Israel makes the State of Palestine impossible in the words
of the butcher Netanyahu. He says that “it would be living with the enemy
beside you,” when they have been invading and killing them for 78 years.
A world with that kind of
dysfunction is quite predictable. The dystopias of the 1930s and 1940s foretold
the irrational madhouse we live in today. Surveillance on social networks, the
persecution of migrants, a sociopathic dictator like Trump, a thug like
Netanyahu, an fool like Milei, a comedian puppet like Zelensky. Several films
anticipated the Covid-19 pandemic, social explosions, political assassinations.
Cinema also warned about the proliferation of lone gunmen. The system always
reveals its plans in advance. It is not coincidence, it is a script.
The UN has been bypassed
by a false civilization. Its uselessness is overwhelming. Its bureaucracy is
offensive. Its role as a cover-up is buffoonish. The great powers trample
international rules. President Petro’s last speech at the UN was an honourable
and courageous expression of dignity; it was the reproach of many voices and
constituted the decertification of that body by the oppressed peoples of the
world.
Instead of international order there is chaos; the law
of the strongest and every man for himself prevails. There is no planetary
authority to put things in order, to defend life and universal justice. Since
avenging heroes exist only in comics, collective heroes of flesh and blood
arise who perform a kind of theatre of cruelty, understood not as bloodletting
or spreading terror, but as the manifestation of the desire to live well, under
basic principles, without harming any human being. It is expressed in bold
actions like the harangue Petro gave on a New York street. It is expressed in
the explicit desire of Peruvian protesters who want to burn down the corrupt
Congress in Lima, in the manner Generation Z did in Nepal [and as is
happening in Indonesia, the Philippines, Paraguay, Madagascar and Morocco, transl.
n.]. It is expressed in the rebellion of Italian dockers that refuse to
load genocidal weapons bound for Israel. It is expressed in the decision by the
governments of Spain and Italy to accompany the humanitarian flotilla heading
to Gaza with warships. It is expressed in the blockades the Houthis in Yemen
impose on ships trading with Israel, and in their attacks with home-made
weapons on that country’s coasts. It is expressed in the massive marches for
Palestinian freedom in Australia and Great Britain. It is expressed in the
seizure of the nerve fiber of power (the digital network) carried out by
hackers Julian Assange (WikiLeaks) and Edward Snowden who revealed the
existence of global surveillance programs.
The theatre of cruelty is taking the streets in the
face of the UN’s failure. It is the peoples of the world who can stop the
fascist irrationality metastasizing on the planet. Dionysian and Promethean men
humans coming out of their lairs. Disruptive torches promise to set prairie and
seas alight. Nosfenyahu’s face already burns on a pyre. Israel is being sentenced to an uncertain
future. To awaken a hypocritical and deceitful world, thousands of Petros
taking to the streets of major cities are needed. To pinch a planet ruled by
the stupid, the theatre of cruelty must burst forth more forcefully, to tear
apart the false reality with its extreme conscience, its high humanity, its
exemplary lucidity, its misunderstood purity.
Without cruelty life on the planet cannot continue.
Accepting it is defending, through images and scenes, the desire to live with
solidarity and empathy. Cruelty is the representation that disturbs, the
description of the essence of human existence, the incitement to live
genuinely, the unmasking of all imposture, hypocrisy, fallacies, trivialities,
infamies, incoherences. The
superficial bourgeois society is destroying human dignity.
