The renegade and the hero

What distinguishes victims from those who say they are victims is that they never engage in victimhood.

Perhaps the proof that someone is truly a hero and not a fake or a loudmouth is a certain air between modesty and serenity.

Neither the victim shamelessly displays her condition nor does the hero, the heroine, display her courage.

Rosa Parks sat on her bus in Montgomery, Alabama, with the same temperance with which she would sit in the Baptist church of which she was very devout, with her hat and gloves, her purse on her knees together, her glasses that accentuated his thoughtful expression.

Energumen in and out of uniform yelled at her so close that they would stain her face with saliva, but not even the bad manners with which they made her get off the bus and took her to prison for the crime of occupying a seat reserved for whites managed to alter the dignified presence of she.

Rosa Parks' serene expression resembles that of Alexei Navalny's widow when she speaks looking at a camera with the same accusing fixity as she would if she looked into Putin's eyes;

and also that of those men with black coats and gloves who carried the coffin with Navalni's martyred remains on their shoulders and knew that this simple gesture was marking each of them like a telescopic sight.

John le Carré said that you need to think like a hero to act with some decency in daily life.

Perhaps when heroism is most necessary is when what is faced is not a tyrannical political power, which by its own brutality awakens the spirit of rebellion, but the vast majority of the community in which one lives;

not a foreign invader, who is easily identified, but the countrymen themselves, the next-door neighbors, even the closest relatives, the parents, the children.

Eugène Ionesco, who had witnessed during his early youth in Bucharest the monstrous transformation of many of his literary friends into fascists, invented the fable of a town where people, for no known reason, turn into rhinoceroses.

Only one neighbor, a drunken nobody, turns out to be immune to this metamorphosis.

Unlike most of those friends—among them, sadly, EM Cioran—Ionesco was never infected by the collective madness, and as soon as he could he escaped to Paris, perhaps sensing that being abroad is healthier and less dangerous when one He suffers it far from his own country.

With certain tricks one can avoid the surveillance of the secret police, but not that of a neighbor or a friend who is quick to denounce him.

In Russia, in St. Petersburg, in the days following the invasion of Ukraine, when using the word “war” to name war was suddenly reason enough to get you sent to jail, a young activist and her girlfriend pointed out They used their ingenuity and invented an unusual form of protest: they printed false price stickers for the shelves in supermarkets, and on each one of them, with the same font that designated the products, they included short and emphatic messages against the war.

One of the two, whose name is Sasha, was reported by a kind retiree who saw her out of the corner of his eye changing stickers.

It is known that in oppressive regimes voluntary cooperation is more efficient than police surveillance.

Sasha's neighbor's denunciation took her to jail, where she has spent an unknown amount of time waiting for trial and requesting provisional release in vain.

I see his face and that of his girlfriend, both equally young, in a documentary by Gesbeen Mohammad that here has been titled

From Russia against Putin:

the two look with the serene fatalism of someone who knows he is destined for misfortune and yet is not renounce hope or give up courage.

There are several similar stories in the documentary, almost all of them from women, except that of a man, a law professor who has lost everything because under his profile photo on a social network he wrote in large letters: “NO TO WAR ”.

From one day to the next what was normal became a crime.

This man with a calm and rather melancholy air was kicked out of the university, but he was not only disowned or avoided like a contagious sick person by his former colleagues: his daughter, who is 13 years old, is one of many Russian children and adolescents alienated by the propaganda, dressed in uniforms, exalted by the choreographies of anthems, flags and parades in which they participate.

For this man's daughter, Putin is a hero and his father is a mistaken and weak being, who has brought ruin upon himself.

Because of her she will be singled out.

Which of us, when the time comes, would choose ostracism, public shame, rather than the conformity that shelters us and at the same time makes us complicit in the crimes against which almost no one raises their voice, not out of fear, but out of voluntary ignorance, by following the flow, by the cunning of not opening their eyes or not seeing what is in front of them.

In Muhammad's documentary, an activist who daily risks denouncing repression on TikTok, using her technological prowess to circumvent censorship, walks on a sunny morning through a Moscow park where lazy, smiling people play or have a snack. on the grass, chatting, drinking soft drinks, riding a bicycle.

She is identical to the others, but she knows she is different and excluded, and possibly watched.

Nowhere is there any sign of the war in Ukraine, nor of the persecution of dissidents, nor of the corruption and fear that rot inside the country.

This girl says that her mother has changed recently and now she only watches patriotic programs on television for hours and hours and thinks that Russia is surrounded by enemies.

The enemy is suddenly you.

“You don't know how terrible people can be / too good people,” says a bolero lyric.

There is no need for servile judges or police with batons and guns when your peers point out you as a traitor.

The Israeli film director Yuval Abraham gave a three-minute speech at the Berlin festival denouncing the inhumane treatment to which the army and fundamentalist settlers subject the Palestinian population of the West Bank and now he is a plague-ridden man who cannot return to his country. not because they are going to arrest him, like Navalni, but because hundreds of his compatriots do not stop sending him fierce messages of hate and death threats.

“When you come back we will be waiting for you, motherfucker.”

"I'll hunt you down at the airport."

In the photos, Yuval Abraham does not have a face of heroism, although he does have a look of stupor and determination.

He is alone in the face of the vast majority of those who no longer recognize him as one of their own, those who prefer not to see the crimes against humanity that his country is committing, and those who see and celebrate them.

One day you walk down the street and see that all your neighbors have rhinoceros heads, and they look at you and point out that you are a scandalous anomaly.

In Russia, one word is enough to send you to prison.

With a simple gesture of decency, with his willingness to bear witness to injustice, Yuval Abraham has become a renegade, and therefore a hero.

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