By TARSUS GENUS*
A spa in Gaza is a criminal monument to democracy and freedom, which could only be conceived by those who make necrophilia a high-performance sport
1.
The great American poet Walt Whitman tells the story of how, from 1862 and “without rest” until 1865, he visited the sick and wounded on the battlefields of the Civil War, closely following the barbarity, cowardice and, above all, the heroism of the common men and women who fought, died and survived, in the construction of the nation that would later become a powerful colonial-imperial country, a landmark on the political and military scene of the world, to this day, with its impressive strength poured out over the world during the last two centuries.
In an episode narrated in a chronicle,[1] Walt Whitman recounts that on March 27, 1865, Sergeant Calvin Harlowe of the 29th Massachusetts Regiment was the protagonist of “a singular example of heroism and death” (…) “I say heroism,” writes Walt Whitman, “of the grand old stamp!” At just 22 years old, Harlowe was faced with the choice of saying the words “I surrender” to his Confederate captors or dying, as an example to the other prisoners, also Union soldiers.
Harlowe “was too great in spirit” to utter the words “I surrender” and so he spoke his last heroic words before the Confederate officer, who reproached him, once again, for not surrendering and, therefore, encouraging his soldiers to resist: “Never while I live,” said Harlowe, firing at his enemy who returned fire. And both fell. Both died. Walt Whitman said that this episode marked his life forever and generated his concepts and emotions about any war and that, when he thought about them, “he saw the figure of young Calvin Harlowe, in the middle of the night, refusing to surrender.”
“My love, they are on the march: heads forward, eyes bulging, the red glow of burning cities (…) / crops trampled, endless footprints and slaughtered people (…). My love, sometimes I have lost my freedom, my bread and you / but never my faith in the days to come / emerging from the darkness, the screams and the hunger / knocking on our door with hands full of sunlight.” It is a poem from prison, by the great Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet, a revolutionary who spent most of his life in the prisons of dictatorial Turkey.
Will men like Harlowe and Nazim Hikmet, women like Rosa Luxemburg, like Sophie Scholl – a young resistance student shot by the Nazis –, like Olga Benário, never return? This is what Donald Trump is confident of, with his visceral arrogance, characteristic of human beings for whom “everything human is profoundly alien” and who is preparing, with his words and his weapons, a general Holocaust of Humanity, which is still fighting bravely to survive.
2.
A new period is underway in the same world order. It is not yet known whether this is a change that comes from the essence or whether it is an appearance that has not yet defined its destiny. The low importance of the European Union, the cautious moves of China, and here, the responses of Mexico, Canada and Colombia, as well as the intelligent precautions of Brazil, configure the poles of democratic confrontation in the Americas on the Continent, against “Trumpist” totalitarianism. These countries are feeling their way on infected ground in an attempt to protect themselves from the orange neo-fascism that is besieging the world.
Donald Trump is organizing a progressive “coup d’état” against the protocols of imperial-colonial coexistence of the second half of the 2025th century, which will reach its peak in XNUMX: it is the combination of neoliberalism, which declines the public functions of the State, with the depreciation of the climate crisis, integrated with the defense of health denialism, which creates a new “revolutionary situation”. This time, however, to give rise to a “fascist counter-revolution”, which links the worst of the business elites with the upper rentier classes and these with the excluded of all kinds, astonished by the impotence of the Republic to overcome its crises.
This impotence is being partially overcome here in Brazil. Only partially, it is true, not only because we have a government legitimized by a complex electoral process that elected a political cadre who knows how to deal with extreme situations in politics, but also because the majority of Brazilian society supports democracy and trusts Lula. And they do so because they know, especially, that he is a man of the democratic game and that he defends the rights of the excluded and oppressed, without forgetting the other social sectors that also make Brazil function and grow. In the narrow corridors of history, however, dozens of 'Trumps' contemplate with a smile the crisis of liberal democracy.
Donald Trump's incredible speech, when he said he could enter Gaza and that the ideal for the region – after uprooting two million Palestinians and taking them to Egypt and Jordan – would be to transform it into a Riviera, is the announcement of a phase that, if it prospers, will lead us to the deepest darkness. The statement by the American president is not only a mockery and an improvisation, but above all a process of naturalizing barbarity so that we can – soon – wish that everything that is a little less than that is already a return to civilization.
Donald Trump is already the end of dystopia as a concept and the beginning of a new type of barbarism, after this set of centuries that began with the Renaissance and ended with the French and American Revolutions, to devour them whole. Only the spirit of heroes, like that of soldier Harlowe and the bravery of many poets, like Nazim Hikmet, will save us from the fate that Donald Trump is promising, with a Bathhouse in Gaza: a criminal tomb monument to democracy and freedom, which could only be conceived by those who make necrophilia a high-performance sport and turn humanity into a space to dispose of their most perverse and murderous desires.
*Tarsus in law he was governor of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, mayor of Porto Alegre, Minister of Justice, Minister of Education and Minister of Institutional Relations in Brazil. Author, among other books, of possible utopia (arts & crafts). [https://amzn.to/3DfPdhF]
Note
[1] Walt Whitman. Exemplary days. Buenos Aires, Corregidor, 2013.
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