The Mediocre International
"The Mediocre Internationale." The expression is Georges Bernanos's, and he would have uttered it in conversation with Stefan Zweig in 1942, in Brazil, a few days before the Austrian committed suicide. Bernanos survived him by a few years. Bernanos and Zweig had fled Hitler's war: their world—the civilized and idealized "world of yesterday" described by Zweig—had collapsed. Europe had entered a mad decline. In the book ZB (Ed. Mèl·loro Rosso), the Majorcan philologist and writer Jaume Capó, through the texts of both intellectuals, recreates in the form of a play a meeting that would have taken place in Barbacena, in the farm where Bernanos had settled. [The book includes the Catalan and Portuguese versions.]
There's a moment when Zweig asks Bernanos how he views democracies. "Sometimes their leaders strike me as high commissioners of the Mediocre International, as I mentioned earlier. Making a pact with Hitler or not intervening in Spain. Masterful, even-handed moves, but a sure fiasco." To which Zweig replies: "In the long run, not taking sides is taking sides." False neutrality. It wouldn't be hard to draw parallels with the pusillanimous, not to say complicit, attitude of today's democracies with Ukraine and especially Gaza, would it? Putin and Netanyahu are doing just that, pursuing their plans of conquest and extermination without too many obstacles.
Eight decades ago, Zweig felt guilty and defeated: "After sixty years of education as a European citizen, as a citizen of the world, what am I today? Just another old European exile." And he would say to Bernanos, who suffered from a limp as a result of a motorcycle accident: "You're lame and I'm hurtling through life. And I, who could run, feel like my days are coming to an end." He himself finished.
The Catholic nationalist Bernanos, from Mallorca, where he had sought peace and quiet to write—a relative peace: he was accompanied by six children, his wife, and his dogs—witnessed the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Initially, he sided with the rebel National Catholic Falangists. But seeing the repression they unleashed, and seeing how the Church preferred resentment to piety, he returned to France, where he wrote a book of denunciation: The great cemeteries under the moonA work that dislocated him ideologically. That's why he ended up going to America. He was a free-spirited conservative. Zweig was a nostalgic free man. They were united by freedom and culture.
Zweig, a Jew, had also quickly found himself not only dislocated, but in danger. "My passion for Erasmus was my salvation. In his stance against the fanaticism of Catholics and Protestants, I found a certain solace. Like him, caught between two teeth, I felt that I would only survive if I could maintain a free and humanistic way of thinking, away from extremes."
How difficult it is again today, in this polarized 21st century, not to fall into extremism. Far-right populism is running riot around the world. How can we combat its ubiquitous demagoguery, fueled by social media algorithms? Where would it flee today? Is there any corner of the planet sheltered from this corrosive plague? Certainly not Bolsonaro's Brazil against Lula. If anything unites leaders like Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, or in our country Ayuso, Abascal, and Orriols, it is their human and intellectual mediocrity, their vain and uneducated lack of compassion for the suffering of others, their insidious capacity to stir up hatred.
It is the same thing that Bernanos and Zweig saw in their time, disillusioned with the belief that "cultural brotherhood [was] stronger than the difference of languages and capable of erasing borders," Zweig lamented. "What deceptions and what mediocrity! These mediocre people who promise us the moon have always been a trap of the devil," Bernanos said. And Zweig, always so self-critical, responded: "Let's look at the two of us, how easily we are carried away by exaltation and patriotism."
Today, as then, murderous mediocrity once again equalizes humanity at the bottom. We don't learn.
