The world is changing, and it is doing so like a boulevard comedy, like a Mel Brooks film.
I fully understand that people feel disoriented.
I also understand the many who struggle laboriously to march through the fog, dazzled by the little flame of some exotic hallucination of whatever kind.
What I do not understand is how this hallucination, whatever it may be, makes them swallow the bitter pill of exalting Eastern tyrants, mafiosi, financial gangsters, torturers, sexually repressed figures who impose dress codes and customs, serial hangmen, ignoble jailers, rapists, or deceivers of entire peoples.
This applies to everyone. One cannot exalt Trump and everything that follows from him simply because he captured Maduro, nor can one exalt Maduro with all his ignoble filth because Trump captured him.
The hallucination has turned into binary cheering and has frozen minds.
Entire peoples in struggle are condemned as “manipulated,” or dismissed because we do not like their political representatives.
When minds were still normal, this never happened. No one hesitated to defend Prague because they disliked Dubček, nor to demand Trieste because its return to the Motherland would have been “geopolitically” negative.
Dualistic positions are proof of existential malaise and confusion.
It is one thing to rely on ourselves against imperialism, whether from East or West; it is another to become, out of sheer partisanship, not European, not centered, not central, but “anti-Western,” as if the West were Evil (a Paleolithic, Old Testament term) and everything else were worthy of praise.
As if those who face death against tanks coming from the East, or at the hands of “religious” thugs delirious in the name of a god, were guilty of something.
At one time, did people support the Iranian Revolution? Perhaps at the beginning, before it became a regime.
Just as, in 1917, many future fascists applauded Lenin—then, before he turned Russia into an extermination camp.
After that, for any person acting in good faith, supporting such a regime today is impossible.
All of Iran’s political history since 1980 attests to this, not only its internal history.
It is not enough to be (or to pretend to be) hostile to Israel or to the United States to be better than them.
And it is even less enough to support that scoundrelly crowd—perhaps while talking about “remigration” and denouncing Sharia, or, as feminists, supporting Iran. Yet both things happen.
Signs of the times, indicators of a real stupor and an inability to situate oneself, to be at one with oneself.
All of this is merely the fruit of a profound malaise, of a “crisis of correspondence” with reality.
It is collective, not merely terminal or residual; it extends to much of the entire comedy of petty politicians.
Beyond formulas, proclamations, and buffoonery, powers—real or presumed—are increasingly interconnected and interdependent. Old forms of power are waning; progressive ruling classes are in existential crisis, and populist ones—with a few happy exceptions—are no better off.
The same theatrical and even bloody agitations of Trump or Putin respond to a desperate attempt to restore an old order. Of course, it is not the same thing: Trump’s gamble, which in the long run will end in a factual compromise, is productive in the short term for the United States, whereas Putin’s is disastrous for Russia more than the actions of any of his predecessors. But even this is not what truly matters.
What matters is accepting the challenge of “normality”—which has by now become a big word—in order to regenerate our society, both by fighting woke ideology and its surroundings, and by recovering a will to power, but within our millennia-old conception of the Polis and of Freedom.
It is not difficult at all: it is the conditioned reflexes dictated by the desperation of the maladjusted that make it seem so.
What is needed is lightness; we must rid ourselves of the spirit of gravity, which also manifests itself—largely so—in the “irreducible” dogmatism of empty, unthinking partisanship.