Havel, Aznar, Zapatero

For a long time, the speech given by Václav Havel on January 1, 1990, shortly after being elected president of the Czech Republic, was cited as an example of a leader who dared to speak with frankness and honesty to citizens, always addressing them as adults and responsible individuals. He unreservedly acknowledged the ruin the state was in after the communist dictatorship, but also explained that the responsibility for the disaster lay not only with the rulers who had been in power, but also with all those who, in one way or another, had acquiesced to it or had reaped illicit benefits from it. To set the future on the right path, he appealed to the civic conscience, responsibility, and the defense of the rights and freedoms, as well as the duties, of each and every citizen.We have witnessed an operation of demolition and emptying of public language that makes Havel's discourse, today, unviable in the terms in which it occurred thirty-six years ago. “Speaking frankly and honestly to citizens” has become another banner that charlatans and demagogues, especially those from the far right and its circles, have adopted to degrade it into a barrage of lies, insults, and absurd conspiracy theories. In this way, the debate is poisoned to such an extent that often whoever shouts the loudest, and does so with the most visceral, absurd, or irrational arguments, appears in the eyes of many – often a majority – as the one who speaks “the truths,” when it is quite the opposite. If he were to deliver his famous speech today, Havel would be attacked by a swarm of accusations from fake media and fake journalists, and from social media influencers and activists, who would defame him and accuse him of all sorts of vileness. The uproar would be so deafening that it would be difficult to distinguish, as is often the case today, reality from falsehood. One effect pursued with this confusion is to change the necessary criticism of institutions into a permanent, poisoned distrust that is never anti-system, but rather one of the most perverse ways the system has of perpetuating itself.The judicial dirty war in Spain, which has been going on for decades and has trampled over a large part of Catalan independence movements and the Spanish left, now wants to get rid of the part of the PSOE that bothers them, no matter what. Zapatero is the first Spanish president to be indicted, curiously in the National Court, curiously with lawsuits from Manos Limpias and Hazte Oír involved, curiously before any similar lawsuit accuses other architects of Spanish democracy like Felipe González – with his enormous, and never explained, increase in wealth –, José María Aznar or Mariano Rajoy, who are obviously the main responsible parties for scandals like Gürtel, Kitchen or Operation Catalonia. “Whoever can, should do it,” said Aznar. Often, what seems too obvious turns out to be true. We live in days when, from a state deformed by a judicial and police power that acts as a party, they want to call it democracy: it was precisely against this that Havel fought and wrote.