Victimhood and amnesia

In just a few days, we have witnessed some of the worst figures in current politics presenting themselves to the public as victims of state conspiracies and relentless witch hunts, with the undisguised aim of evading responsibility for their crimes (we are always talking about criminals, alleged or confessed). It began with Mazón, who took his crocodile-like whining to the extreme of lamenting his family's suffering, completely disregarding the pain of the families of the victims of the DANA storm, most of whom died due to his negligence and that of his administration. And we have continued with the boyfriend of the president of Madrid and his entourage, comprised of Isabel Díaz Ayuso herself and her advisor, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez. This González Amador character took his victimhood before the Supreme Court to the point of self-parody, but far from trying to tone it down, the blinded Madrid nationalist press is intensifying it even further, driven by their desperation to bring down Pedro Sánchez and his government by any means necessary.

For some years now, the writer Bret Easton Ellis, hardly a suspect of leftist leanings (although the new mayor of the city where he lived for almost two decades, Zohran Mamdani, who has emerged strongly as a potential anti-Trump figure, should certainly be watched with interest), has been pushing the boundaries of the Democratic Party's victimhood narrative: everyone wants to appear in public as a victim, because it's a way to secure attention and minimize criticism. Paradoxically, it is the powerful who most want to portray themselves as victims: people who hold high government positions and have economic, judicial, and media resources at their disposal, people with influence and the capacity to exert pressure, want to be seen as suffering injustices and abuses at the hands of shadowy powers. Trump, since we've already mentioned him, is the archetype of this charade, and many imitate him.

The fact that so many unscrupulous people play the victim has the consequence of blurring, obscuring, and erasing the true victims, both in current events like the recent floods in the Valencian Community and—even more so—in historical events like the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship. I write this thinking about this terrible statistic from the survey by the Catalan International Institute for Peace (ICIP), according to which only four out of ten men A significant percentage of 18- to 25-year-olds in Catalonia consider democracy a preferable system of government. If that's the percentage in Catalonia, it's frightening to imagine what it might be in other regions for which we lack data. Victimhood fosters historical amnesia, historical amnesia breeds ignorance, and ignorance breeds fear. And fear is the primary fuel for populism and neo-fascism. Hypocritical rhetoric and the degradation of the meaning of words (phenomena that have shaped public debate for many years, now on a global scale) are not without consequences.