Federico Reyes Heroles
Don’t just look at the pyramids and the dead Indians; think about the living Indians; they need it.
Manuel Gamio
“If there is Auschwitz, there is no God.” This expression is attributed to Primo Levi, the great Italian writer and Holocaust survivor who confronted fascism through his writing. Anna Akhmatova, another warrior, challenged Stalin with her poems. The Middle East revives Levi’s sentence.
But humans can also seek concord, build it, and overcome horrors. Let us think of the mutual wounds between Germany and France at the end of the Second World War. And yet, a few years later, with greatness of spirit, Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman proposed a plan for cooperation on coal and steel to Konrad Adenauer. The idea caught on. Soon after, six countries adopted it: Germany, France, Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. They buried hatred. It was the seed of the European Community and the European Union, which, with all its problems, remains the most elaborate human civilizational experiment. In contrast, Moscow and Washington were fueling the Cold War.
The pursuit of prosperity was the ethical fiat that prevailed over all hatreds and grievances. Japan and Germany – defeated – found their own paths. Japan ended absolute monarchy in 1947 and moved towards modernity with great rigor and a lot of technology. Exports, a stimulus to the private sector, opened up to the world. Germany came to terms with its defeat by creating a social market economy. Shattered -in a literal sense- it accepted the support of its former enemies, took the Marshall Plan, and moved forward. There were resentments, I am a witness, but they overcame them.
We were traveling in Vietnam. A certain bewilderment visited us the first few days. A polite but consistent refusal to take us to anything to do with the war: the tunnels, the weapons museums, and so on. One day, traveling along a battered highway, we stopped for gas. We saw a huge facility that looked like a hangar a few meters away. We went to look around. Women and men busily occupied hundreds of sewing machines. We walked to the store that sold the products. Then we noticed that all the workers were missing a limb, a leg, an arm. Surprised, we inquired about the origin. They were second or third-generation people affected by the agent or orange gas used by the US. A pesticide so powerful that it causes alterations in the human genome, cancer, and congenital deformations and can remain in pastures; from there, it can pass to cattle, milk, and… to humans—an endless chain. Seventy-six million liters were dumped. But Vietnam decided to look to the future. Its GDP per capita is still very low, but the country grew – enviably – to 5.05% in 2023, already the 34th economy by GDP volume. It ranks 83rd in corruption – Mexico is 126th – and in Doing Business, it ranks 70th, Mexico 60th. Vietnam is one of the big winners in nearshoring.
Nihon Hidankyo is the organization of survivors of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Norwegian Nobel Committee did not need much justification: the organization has been fighting since 1956 for a world free of such weapons. The Academy called on the nuclear powers to take up the issue again. The co-president of the organization, Toshiyuki Mimaki, said: “In Gaza, parents are holding bloody children in their arms. It’s like Japan 80 years ago.
Thirty-two years ago, before the commemoration of what used to be called the “Discovery of America”, the great Miguel Leon Portilla, in several brilliant writings, pointed out the absurdity of the expression. He proposed an alternative he launched in 1959: “Encounter of two worlds”, a painful, traumatic, and fantastic encounter. We are mestizos, we are Mexico, and we have nothing to gain with the angry tone towards Spain.
Let us better think of the living.
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