Antonio Navalón
January 6, the day that for our culture and civilization represents the day of the Magi (Three Wise Kings), brought an inappropriate, unwanted, and terrible gift just one year ago. For a long time, the Christian population in the United States has clearly been the dominant one. I could not say precisely how many genuinely practice their religion and who among them believe in the figure of the Magi. But what is clear is that the gift of the assault on the Capitol – which could represent the beginning of the explosion of the civil war in which the United States of America is embroiled – is an image that we have all been willing to accept and get used to living with. However, what happened on that January day marked not a point of no return but highlighted a fact shaping the times we live in, creating problems that could end up taking everything with them: no one wants the truth.
It is no longer just that there are always other data. It is no longer just that you do not look up, like the famous but horrible movie. It is really that what we know, what we can construct in our brains as logical, or the brutality of the images that signified the uprooting and trampling of the most significant symbol of American democracy, had an origin, and someone detonated it. But, above all, the world was able to witness a terrifying scene. On that day, the world, referenced mainly by structures, examples, and behavioral patterns – both in the economic and political order – saw how the essential legal referent of what had been the most successful democratic experience in the history of humankind until recently assaulted.
Everything that has happened to us since September 11, 2001, until now has made us numb. As I watched the towers collapse, I knew that the fact that billions of people could see at the same time that orgy of violence was going to make a completely different world, among other things, because of the loss of sensitivity to the violent events themselves. Then, in the blink of an eye, we went on to live in a world that advanced so fast, that was so insubstantial and so full of images, that we got used to not being able to distinguish the reality of our world from what we see in video games. It’s as if our world was composed of giant TikTok videos or as if it were images arranged by Instagram filters.
The image of the assault on the U.S. Capitol signifies the end of the experiment of the success of democracy in that country. It means that – as it happened in Abraham Lincoln’s time – today they are more eager and closer to fight among themselves and against each other than to build spaces where they can move with respect for the laws and with respect for what is no longer of any importance, which is respect for the truth. If nobody cares about the truth, if it doesn’t matter, if it is enough to put into practice Joseph Goebbels’ principle that “repeating a lie often enough will make it become the truth,” then we are destined to fail. How will we build justice and balance if we can live in oblivion to the impact of images? But what is worse, in forgetting that at the end of the day that fact happened because a President of the United States – the forty-fifth to be specific – months before the election polls even began, had already warned that a gigantic electoral fraud was underway to remove him from the White House. However, Trump’s was not an announced fraud, it was a desired fraud, and it was a fraud that corresponded to the other facts. It was a fraud against the truth in a world where the importance of truth has disappeared.
Joseph Biden’s administration has not lived up to the expectations it generated. But nothing takes away from the fact or the truth that what happened on January 6, 2021, in the Capitol of the United States of America, was the product of a coup initiated based on constantly repeating a lie long before the event took place. What amazes me is how today our brains can live without any repugnance or instinct of self-preservation in the face of a world in which, if the first victim is the truth, from here on tell me with what or how we will build the rules of coexistence or simply with what values we can continue to build our societies.
The United States is not the only place where these phenomena occur, but it is where the consequences of the triumph of lies can be seen most spectacularly. And linked to that is the failure and the deep division in the hearts of some police, military, and all those who did not show up in time to prevent the barbarism in the Capitol. Of all those who, without uniform, belonged to the forces of law and order and participated in the assault. Of all those who for a few minutes, seconds or hours, hesitated about what they had to do, whether to follow the orders of the Commander in Chief – responsible for the fraud – or to respect the Constitution and prevent what was the most significant violation in the history of the United States.
Thomas Jefferson was the first president to be sworn in at the Capitol – with a half-baked dome. From that moment on, that staircase by which we saw the aggression against the American political system advance, made by themselves and based on the loss of common sense, has always been the great symbol of the democratic and institutional continuity of the country. Another fundamental reflection is whether societies know what a lie is and what it represents. If we know that a lie is used to build what is the destruction of a system. If we know that there are liars and criminals, despite having been Presidents in the past. If we know and are aware of all this, how is it possible that one year after the assault, we are witnessing a spectacle where many are investigated, but very few are convicted? And what is worse, we are facing a situation in which concentric circles are given to try to explain that one thing is the incitement by the other data and another thing is the criminal responsibility contracted by launching the masses against the Capitol.
I don’t know if Biden will succeed in doing so, but if American society and America is not serious about restoring the truth – an example for all of us to follow – the democratic system as a whole will be gone. Moreover, the joke of political calculation that doing anything to Donald Trump for his criminal responsibility that day would mean putting him back in the presidency cannot be pursued. Whatever we do, Trump will surely return to the U.S. Presidency. However, the only way to keep the lie from returning to the presidency, and the only way to restore some common sense in this crazy world, is for each of us to pay for what we do. And, like it or not, a fraud perpetuated months before an election should not go unpunished. Nor should the violation of the physical space where American democracy is practiced every day go unpunished.
I see only one advantage to this situation, and that is the fact that we have reached the end of a road. And in that end may be the destruction of the world we knew without further ado – as has happened to other empires and other societies – or we may also have the possibility of recovering the cornerstone of our life. This cornerstone lies in trying to have clear truths that illuminate values – which may be different and sometimes conflicting – but based on truth.
In conclusion, it is not enough to make notes or avoid mentioning Trump by name. What is required here is the enforcement of the responsibilities that each of us has contracted with our behavior. And if this remains so – as a simple dialectical fight – we will not only be leaving the bad guys free, but we will be laying the foundation of the authoritarian State where it is not necessary to have history or reason or values. A State where it is enough to have a loudspeaker to repeat – over and over again – the lie that ends up being the truth.
