We live in an unstable time.
Who are our enemies?
Who are our friends?
This is how US President Richard Nixon greeted Chinese Premier Chu-En-Lai when in 1972 he made his famous visit to Beijing to meet with Chairman Mao.
The latter, for his part, when questioned about the question of Taiwan would have said to the North American: "Keep that to discuss it with the premier, I dedicate myself to philosophy."
At least that is the version of Alice Goodman's libretto for the opera inspired by said event and recently premiered at the Teatro Real in Madrid.
A few days after attending the performance, I was able to hear from Lionel Fernández, who ruled the Dominican Republic for 12 years, a similar analysis, according to which we live in unpredictable economic and military times,
President Fernández demanded last Friday to work for the elaboration of a culture of peace and the in-depth reform of the United Nations Organization.
He did so in a speech before the graduates of the Global Governance master's degree that is taught at the UAM in Madrid, within the framework of the Jesús de Polanco Chair for Ibero-America.
And today he will participate in a meeting of the World Association of Jurists, in which King Felipe VI will present the Prize for Freedom and Peace through the Law to Andrew Young, a historic defender of civil rights who accompanied the fight against mythical leader of that movement, Martin Luther King, until the day of his assassination.
Also today the same organization will honor Nancy Hollander, lawyer for a Muslim prisoner nicknamed El Mauritano, kidnapped by the intelligence services,
We are talking about ancient rains that caused the current muds.
The establishment of relations with Mao's China represented a revolutionary change in the politics of the Cold War, which came to an end a few years later with the collapse of the Berlin Wall.
We are now witnessing his resurrection, symbolized by the Russian aggression against Ukraine and the involvement of Washington and the NATO countries in a kind of commissioned war in which the West provides the money and weapons and the Ukrainian people the dead.
The rupture between Moscow and Beijing after Nixon's trip has been repaired by the alliance signed between Xi Jinping and Putin.
The new China, designed half a century ago by Deng Xiaoping, has become a major economic, technological and military power.
Also a commercial power,
Andrew Young, Carter's ambassador to the UN, was forced to resign for calling his country's previous presidents racist.
He had also proposed a Marshall plan for Africa in order to head off Soviet influence on the continent.
Today his fight lives on in the heart of American society under the banner of the Black Lives Matter movement.
The Guantánamo prison has been open for more than 20 years;
It still holds some thirty prisoners, of whom only 10 have been charged as perpetrators of various crimes, including planning the attacks on the Twin Towers, but they have not yet been tried.
Obama promised to shut it down and was unable to carry it out.
Biden made the same commitment with the same result.
In other words, we are once again living in a time that is actually much more unstable than the one mentioned in the opera.
We are facing the fall of the American empire, the emergence of a huge competitor and the astonishment of Europe.
All this in the midst of a systemic financial crisis aggravated by the decisions made during the pandemic, despite the proud declarations of political power, willing, and not only in Spain, to distribute bonds and banknotes in the name of solidarity.
Without the West being able to sing a mea culpa for its mistakes.
Subjected to suffocating propaganda about war, we barely know anything about what really happens in it.
The few critical voices raised by the most prestigious intellectuals, calling for a ceasefire and talks about the future of Europe, are ignored and even belittled by governments, which approve multimillion-dollar investments in weapons and promise an improbable victory against Putin.
As if Russia is not the world's leading nuclear power and does not have the most powerful submarine navy, the presence of which in the Atlantic Ocean was warned not long ago by the NATO chief general himself.
In the name of democracy, although for obviously opportunistic reasons, sanctions are imposed on the Russian economy that end up suffering mainly the citizens of Western Europe and Third World countries, while failing to seriously damage the economic performance of the invader from Ukraine.
And on the other hand, they soften, or they promise to do so, in the case of Venezuela, where the whitewashing of the figure of Maduro has already been launched.
One cannot boast with impunity of being on the good side of history, nor of the strength of the rule of law, while in what serves as the first democracy in the world there are flagrant violations of human rights such as the Guantánamo prison.
In the name of democracy, NATO and the Western powers have a particular curriculum, as deadly as it is useless.
There are Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, the former Yugoslavia, to attest that the international order cannot be established or understood as if it were about being winners in a war between good guys and bad guys.
It is not admissible to ignore one's own mistakes or crimes, nor to justify them in the crimes and mistakes that competitors or enemies commit.
It is indecent for democratic governments to get involved in a dispute like the one in Ukraine,
In most of the conflicts cited, the fight was not and is not so much for political power as for control of energy sources.
With what the military-industrial complex denounced by General Eisenhower continues to grow.
Although the figures are confusing, the United States maintains several hundred bases or military installations in 80 countries around the world.
Beijing just five.
In Nixon's China script Mao comments: “Our armies don't go abroad.
Why should they?
We have everything we need."
His empire is not military;
not for the moment.
It is technological, commercial and economic and has just announced the financial challenge.
Brazil, and surely other non-aligned powers, will begin to use the yuan in their exchanges.
That is why the legal community's recognition of Andrew Young and Nancy Hollander, fighters for the values of democracy and for making good the true American dream, that of freedom, is so important.
The one that led the great colored poet Langston Hughes to utter those magical verses: “Let America be America again.
America was never America to me."
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
Keep reading
I'm already a subscriber
