To underline his commitment to truthfulness and intellectual honesty, Sartre made it clear that “every word has consequences and so does every silence.” The author of “La Nausea” and “El Ser y la Nada” assumed responsibility for the effects of his words and silences. When opinion makers and leaders listened to by society, that responsibility is lost, and when instead of questions or requests for explanations for what was said, what ensues is silence, it is because politics and society have become ill.
This is happening in many parts of the world and also in Argentina, where a word in a presidential speech should have generated multiple demands for an explanation, but the only thing that was heard was silence, that is, the absence of reaction.
In the stalls, gatherings, cazuela and boxes of the Teatro Colón the word “society” must have resounded deafeningly in a section of the speech that Javier Milei gave at the DAIA anniversary event.
Referring to the bloody pogrom perpetrated by Hamas in 2023, Milei said that that “October 7, we were all able to see the face of evil; we saw how a society committed, filmed and proudly shared with the rest of the planet the most aberrant crimes in living memory.”
Without a doubt, the Hamas attack was an atrocity that once again demonstrated its repugnant nature. But the president said that “a society” acted in that despicable way. And having said “society,” where he should have said “Hamas” or “ultra-Islamist terrorism,” implies blaming the civilian population of Gaza for what the criminal organization that rules over them did. Do you think that civil society in a territory controlled by a bloodthirsty entity can be informed and express itself? Do you believe that the entire Gazan people, including the more than 80 thousand civilian deaths with the tens of thousands of children who make up that dismal statistic, are guilty of the abominable attack perpetrated by an abject organization?
What Milei did was criminalize the entire population of the Palestinian enclave to take away the weight of the crimes committed by order of Netanyahu, in response to October 7. He blamed “a society” for the aberrant crime committed by Hamas, to demonize an entire population, thus “justifying” the crimes that Netanyahu committed in the scorched earth war that he tries to justify with the 2023 pogrom.
If we all “saw how a society committed, filmed, and proudly shared with the rest of the planet the most aberrant crimes in recent memory,” that society would deserve (according to the dark reasoning hidden between the lines) to have been the target of a scorched earth war that destroyed more than 70 percent of homes and public infrastructure, in addition to annihilating tens of thousands of people. But no one corrected him or asked him for an explanation.
Assuming the commitment to combat anti-Semitism, as Milei did at that DAIA event, is correct. But part of that abjection that is anti-Semitism is the miserable stratagem of accusing anyone who questions what an Israeli government is doing as anti-Semitic. A totalitarian trick used by dictators. To those who questioned his dictatorship, Fidel Castro responded by accusing them of “attacking Cuba.” Nicolás Maduro does the same, according to whom denouncing his fraud and his calamitous regime is “attacking Venezuela.”
Nothing is more anti-Semitic than the Netanyahu government’s trivialization of anti-Semitism. The Israeli leaders who do so deserve the label with which José Saramago defined them: “Holocaust rentiers.” In this case, Netanyahu and his fundamentalist allies act as “rentiers” of the aberrant Hamas pogrom against Israeli civilians.
Mauricio Macri also said something that should have had consequences, but only silence ensued. Telling his interviewer that in 1989 he traveled with his father to China, he said that there they traveled in official cars that ran over people on bicycles. “On every trip we made, five or six bicycles flew through the air… boom, a guy flew to hell and was left lying there, without getting up, passed out or dead, I don’t know… crazy, right?”
The person who told such an outrage as if it were a funny anecdote was the president of Argentina. Crazy, right?
As if Fontanarrosa had listened to Milei and Macri when, resorting to two subdisciplines of Physics (optics and acoustics), he explained the phenomenon in the following terms: “Because the speed of light is much greater than the speed of sound, certain people seem brilliant to us until we listen to the nonsense they say.”
