Silent bombs

(ES)

They kill twice: first, when they explode and take the lives of innocent civilians, mostly women and children, and second, when survivors of the explosion die in life slowly as they mourn the deceased and demand justice. A justice so blind that can barely see the atrocities and the suffering inflicted.

But perhaps the most destructive effect of a silent bomb is the one that endures over time. This absence of noise that kills hope of survivors, and that stifles the screams and laughter of childhood games. A shockwave of silence and destruction. A void life. An endless wait. An unanswered why.

And that silence becomes impunity for attackers, who systematically violate the right to life in the face of the negligence and complicity of our leaders.

I can not avoid innocent people to be killed, but at least I would wish that bombs that have exploded and explode almost daily in Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Sudan, South Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Kashmir, Palestine, Mali and Congo, to name a few countries in almost constant conflict, resonate in our homes with the intensity of bomb attacks committed  in Europe or the United States. That the silence of children resound in our ears unbearable. That the tears of those who weep flood our senses and emotions to dip them in the same loneliness and hopelessness of the victims. And so, react against this apathy, as a drowned person that takes a deep breath when it rises to the surface, so we will back to life, reborn as human beings who share their existence and struggle together for a peaceful world.

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A life of Passion

(ES)

The invulnerability of the inhabitants of the wealthiest and developed world isolates them from an innocuous present, disconnects them from an irrelevant past and makes them live concerned solely about a future as distant as nonexistent.

Cities of individuals, consumerist leisure, alienating technology, life without passion, life by obligation.

The dispossessed, by contrast, they live with Passion. The necessary to overcome their painful past, and to face a present without future. Survival by obligation.

When it is easier to die than to live, life turns into struggle and only the present exists.

Compassion is useless if not accompanied by passion. The passion to help. The passion to change this reality so unfair and unequal. The passion to stand up for for the belief that another world is possible.

Living the passionate life of the dispossessed ones without opportunities nor future. Filling with passion and compassion the existential void that occupies the material wealth of the rich inhabitants of the developed world.

Transferring passion in exchange for opportunities for a more caring world.

Duino elegies

"Each vague turn of the world has such disinherited ones,
to whom the former does not, and the next does not yet, belong."

"Who has turned us round like this, so that,
whatever we do, we always have the aspect
of one who leaves? Just as they
will turn, stop, linger, for one last time,
on the last hill, that shows them all their valley - ,
so we live, and are always taking leave."

Rainer María Rilke (Prague, 1875 - Switzerland, 1926)

What would you do if today were the last day of your life?  

Leave your comment or use the hashtag #IfTodayWereMyLastDay

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Grandparents' house is a refugee camp

(ES)

Yes, I admit,  I am not a victim of apartheid or ethnic cleansing. Nor am the victim of an armed conflict or a natural disaster. But I affirm that I am an internal displaced person in my country.

In southern Europe, the Europe of the periphery, not armed conflict has displaced thousands of people arbitrarily, and such displacement, as is reflected in the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, generates conditions of severe hardship and suffering for the affected populations. It breaks up families, cuts social and cultural ties, terminates dependable employment relationships, disrupts educational opportunities, denies access to such vital necessities as food, shelter and medicine, and exposes innocent persons to such acts of violence as attacks on camps, disappearances and rape. Whether they cluster in camps, escape into the countryside to hide from potential sources of persecution and violence or submerge into the community of the equally poor and dispossessed, the internally displaced are among the most vulnerable populations, desperately in need of protection and assistance.

No doubt, causes and effects of displacement are mixed together in my case, and not even my intention to compare my life to the millions of people living in a refugee camp, it would be unfair on my part and would invalidate my speech, but I can assure you I am also under conditions of suffering and severe hardship, and that I am a victim of an economic conflict based on a large-scale neoliberal project called EU that does not seek the common good.

Somehow, the grandparents' house has become an economic refugee camp, where they get together again children and grandchildren who live badly with the meager pension of their parents. The family unit has become a haven of this systemic crisis. As a huge refugee camp spread across the geography of the cities and towns of my country.

The Aliu and Lopez families looked out from their window at the arrival of the police, who were coming to evict them from their home in Viladecavalls, north of Barcelona, Spain. Alfredo Aliu and Montse Lopez had been unable to pay their mortgage for two years after their coffee shop went bankrupt.
Samuel Aranda for The New York Times

Young unemployed, families evicted from their homes. A gray panorama of exclusion, recession, unemployment and scarcity to the shadow of the Troika and their fiscal adjustment policies based on social cuts, privatization of public services and deregulation of markets.

I learn from the 25 million internally displaced persons worldwide, their incredible stories of resilience and hope. Their daily effort to survive encourages me to keep fighting against this capitalist violence, genocidal of the middle classes and social welfare, that condemns to poverty millions of people around the world.

When economic violence of the capitalist system is considered as widespread violence, or a violation of human rights, I will be truly an internal displaced person.

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Planned misery

(ES)

[...] These facts, that shock the conscience of the civilized world, there are not however those who have brought more suffering to the people of Argentina and the worst human rights violations in which you are incurring. In the economic policy of the government must be sought not only the explanation of their crimes but a greater atrocity that punishes millions of human beings with planned misery. [...]
 
Open Letter from a Writer to the Military Junta
Rodolfo Walsh. - C.I. 2845022 Buenos Aires, March 24, 1977.

40 years of planned misery. Corporate governments; connivence between governments and corporations. Speculators. Corporate greed and generalized corruption. Globalization. Debt and structural adjustment; prescriptions of the IMF and the WB. Capitalism without limits to prevent the development of poor countries, to increase the inequality gap in emerging economies, and to put and end to the welfare state of more developed countries.

Consequences:

• The genocide of the middle class where it exists. An economic genocide whose acts are committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, not so much a national, ethnical, racial, political or religious group, but a social and economic class whose development has contributed to the welfare state based on principles of solidarity and equal opportunities.

• The extension of the misery in the emerging and poor countries, where any attempt to prosperity of the working classes and peasants is stifled by force of arms, and by political, corporate and judicial corruption.

The path of neoliberal individualism only leads to inequality, and in these conditions of inequality, the competition is never fair, because it is not possible to compete when opportunities are not the same.

The  "free market" utopia that frees people from state intervention, becomes the "market free" dystopia that enslaves people by the action of the corporate state.

There is only one possible response to the neoliberal economic aggression and impunity of perpetrators: SOLIDARITY AND RESISTANCE

 

"Reproduce this information, circulate it by the means at your disposal: by hand, typewritten, mimeographed, orally. Send copies to your friends: nine out of ten will await them.  Millions want to be informed. Terror is based on the lack of communication. Break the isolation. Back to feel the moral satisfaction of an act of freedom. Defeat terror. Circulate this information. "
 

ANCLA (Clandestine News Agency - Argentina 1976)

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The sonorous silence of the peaceful crowd

(ES)

I remember a TV show. It was titled "The Magic of David Copperfield". On one occasion the famous illusionist vanished the Statue of Liberty in front of the live audience on Liberty Island. It was unbelievable. A magic performance never seen. The very same Statue of Liberty became invisible behind a large curtain for a few seconds before the astonished gaze of the spectators. Premonitory?

Almost 30 years later, governments and large multinational corporations have improved this trick of invisibility leaving stunned the civil society as a whole.

Millions of people displaced by armed conflicts, many of them fueled by geostrategic interests of governments and greedy corporations exploiting natural resource.
Million of people unemployed, without hope, to the brink of social exclusion.
Millions of workers in precarious working conditions with wages that do not allow a dignified life. One effect of offshoring and free trade agreements, in general, of globalization.
Millions of people living below the poverty line, while a minority live in opulence.
Millions of people evicted from their homes because they can not afford the payments on their mortgages, in front of millions of empty houses result of the property bubble.

© Tommy Trenchard/IRIN

Hardly in the news of mass media. Only one more figure in the statistics. Without taking into account that each one of those millions of people is living a personal tragedy that we can not overlook.

Invisibles. Covered by the curtain of statistics. Covered by the curtain of oblivion. Unemployed and evicted people only on the news when the only way out they find is suicide. Strangers whose stories of misery and suffering only appear on the covers when refugee camps are visited by death, hunger, thirst, or sexual abuses.

But like Statue of Liberty reappeared behind the curtain when it was moved aside for a second time, I am wondering what the underprivileged of the world must do to make visible their terrible situation. Perhaps, like the main characters of the Spanish film "Los lunes al sol" (a group of unemployed people who meet themselves every Monday lying in the sun to share their lives, their stories, their hopes, their frustrations and fears ...) we should establish globally the "Mondays of the invisible ones". One day a week for the underprivileged to appear at the eyes of society, at the eyes of the MPs elected democratically. A day to stop being invisible, all gathered in the streets and public spaces in our towns and cities.

Because before neoliberal capitalism seizes freedoms and people sovereignty, making them disappear as a famous illusionist, it is necessary that the people by themselves take control of their destiny and move aside the curtains that hide the victims of the system.

The "Mondays of the invisible ones", without anger, without bitterness, without hatred, without harangues. Only one day to remind our MPs and society in general that sovereignty resides in the people. And also to make visible the human tragedy that millions of people suffer in silence, but with the hope that another world is possible.

"Sometimes cannot see anything on the surface, but beneath it everything is burning"

Y.B. Mangunwijaya

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