It went unnoticed amid the President’s howls and the national rock songs his band sang, but what happened at the Movistar Arena on Monday the 6th was truly a book presentation. “The construction of the miracle”, from the Hojas del Sur publishing house, is the work that Javier Milei went to present, although strictly speaking he “sang” for an hour and spoke about the text for only 25 minutes. Although at that event the president presented the book as the latest and illustrious installment of the “cultural battle”, the truth is that the volume borders on the unusual on several levels. It is a new turn in the history of the serial plagiarist.
Laziness
The first thing to say is that Javier Milei did not write a single line for “The Construction of the Miracle.” Not a single character. It is not a way of saying: the entire book, of 573 pages, is a great compilation of his old speeches and other writings. The libertarian could well say that he is not the first nor the last to publish an anthology of recycled works, but this book has a peculiarity never seen in the publishing world: unlike what is usually done when compilations like this are published, Milei did not even take the trouble to write an introduction or an epilogue, the minimum effort that is asked of an author to justify the $35,500 that the book costs.
However, this fact is far from the only peculiarity. The thing is, chapters 1, 2, 3, 9, 17, 18, 20 and 21 are not new. What does this mean? Which were published, as is, for “Capitalism, socialism and the neoclassical trap”, the Editorial Planeta book that Milei released last year and presented at Luna Park, where she sang for the first time with her band. This is another enormous peculiarity: there are no records of an author publishing, exactly the same, eight chapters of a text that has only been out for a year. Furthermore, the choice of the chapters of the previous work does not seem coincidental: the paragraphs of that book that were plagiarized were deliberately removed, one of Milei’s specialties that this magazine has been denouncing for a long time (see box).
The first to warn about the repeated chapters was @nachilos_ in “X”. And then the user did something else: he crossed statistical data, using the digital version of all Milei’s books, to discover that repeating his own texts in new books is not at all new. With this methodology, he discovered that 50.6% of “The Construction of the Miracle” is a copy-paste of “Capitalism, Socialism and the Neoclassical Trap” (48,026 repeated words out of a total of 94,923), which in turn has 31% repeated (29,737 words out of 94,537) from “Pandenomics”, from 2020. There is also another gem: in the book that presented at the Movistar Arena, there is a chapter repeated twice. Once it is in Spanish (“tracing the origin of the error in neoclassical literature”) and another in English (“tracing the origin of the error in neoclassical literature”). In any case, it must be clarified: the true miracle is that in his last book Milei did not plagiarize other authors, other than himself.
Changes
The text, no matter how much it is repeated, has some hidden gems. One is that there was so little editing that in the old speeches that appear, from 2022 and 2023, Milei appears thanking old allies such as his “dearest Ramiro Marra” and “Dr. Victoria Villarruel.” Some things, it seems, changed. In that same chapter (the first, “The cultural battle for a possible future”, when he received the Honoris Causa from the Benegas Lynch University, a symbolic award for which Milei calls himself a doctor even though he is not one) the lack of care of the book is evident: a presenter appears asking that “please turn off the cell phones” before Milei spoke. In chapter 12, a recording of a speech of his from June 2024, the libertarian expresses his “maximum support for our friend Zelensky.” That friendship, after Trump’s slap on the wrist to the Ukrainian, seems rusty.
The book has only three quotes. One is for “West Wing,” an HBO series from which Milei extracted a phrase for a speech, and another is for the world champion coach, Carlos Salvador Bilardo. The only place where you can see any directive from the President is in regards to that superior being with whom he believes he is in dialogue: he ordered to change all the times in which “God” is mentioned by “G..d.” “That is the ‘Jewish’ way of saying God without using the word in Hebrew: because God is unnameable,” clarifies the intellectual and specialist in Jewish culture, Facundo Milman. We will have to see what other miracle God has in store for Milei.
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