This week, the Venezuelan dictator
Nicolás Maduro
and President
Javier Milei
starred in an exchange with both broad and ephemeral impact on social networks.
Maduro dedicated a section of his long speeches to the Argentine president, whom he apostrophized, telling him that he was
“a fatal error in the history”
of his country.
Milei responded that coming from where he came from, he considered his personal reference more as a compliment than an insult.
And he retorted that “the mistake” was him, for all of Latin America.
So much for
politics on Twitter, or
"They must defend their values, they are co-opted by a vision of the world that inexorably leads to socialism and poverty."
There she launched an attack not only against socialism but also against feminism, environmentalism, international organizations and the Davos Forum itself, which she also blamed for having
"become intoxicated with the socialist ideas of the 2030 Agenda"
, in reference to the commitment assumed by all member states of the United Nations in 2015 for sustainable development.
And she ended her speech to the global forum with her traditional battle cry: “
Long live freedom, Carajo!
”.
The thesis that there is a global power that seeks to impose its agenda on nations and peoples to subjugate them and keep them backward
is thrown into disarray with a liberal vision of the world
and with the defense of an open society like the one that the government of Freedom Advances says to maintain.
And yet, this conspiratorial vision was fully expressed in the message that Milei brought to Davos, in her first presentation before an international forum.
President Javier Milei speaks at the World Economic Forum in Davos, 17/1, 2024. Photo: Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP.
Intending to argue about the superiority of the liberal West against communist totalitarianism, the reasoning presented by the President denies that premise and ends up disrupting the use of his own categories.
That's how he said it, that's how he sees it:
“Neo-Marxists have known how to co-opt the common sense of the West.
They achieved this thanks to the appropriation of the media, culture, universities, and yes, also international organizations (...) This is how we got to the point where, with different names or forms, a good part of the Political offers generally accepted in most Western countries are collectivist variants.
Whether they openly declare themselves communists, or socialists, social democrats, Christian democrats, neo-Keynesians, progressives, populists, nationalists or globalists.
Basically there are no substantive differences: they all maintain that the state must direct all aspects of individuals' lives.
“They all defend a model contrary to the one that led humanity to the most spectacular progress in its history
.”
Conspiratism
is
not left or right.
Or in any case, there are both poles in their extreme visions.
It is, rather,
a characteristic of populism
, a Manichaean conception of the world where everything can be reduced to a permanent struggle between good and evil;
in which the “people” take the form of a homogeneous and virtuous community, in the face of a corrupt and vicious elite, who are
“motivated by well-considered desires to want to help others”
or “
by the desire to belong to a privileged caste ( ...) they condemn us to poverty, misery and stagnation” (
sic) as the Argentine president tried to instruct in Davos.
The speeches are almost symmetrical and interchangeable, you just have to replace the word
“neoliberalism”
with the word
“socialism”
.
In both cases they are somewhat similar: they deny the substantial and substantive difference between a democracy and a dictatorship.
They prefer “hybrid” regimes.
….