Zaragoza, May 7 (EFE) how Europe lost and won its democracy”. Now, the continent is, in his eyes, “an oasis of democracy” in a world in which this political system is regressing.
Altares (Madrid, 1968), who has attended dozens of crucial events in recent history as a special envoy, believes that the war in Ukraine shows us that “having an autocracy like Putin’s is a danger to democracy throughout Europe” .
Q. How does ancient Greece or Rome help us to understand the history of democracy and the absence of it?
A. Over the centuries, many societies have taken their democracies for granted and this was not the case at all, in fact they lost them. They work a bit like warnings. Why have so many movies, series or novels been made about Augusto’s rise to power? Actually, there was a Roman Republic that had established a series of counterpowers, guarantees, something similar to the rule of law, although it must not be forgotten that there were slaves or that women had no rights.
But free male Roman citizens did participate in public affairs and run their empire. And Augusto destroyed all that; we have looked at it so many times because he shows that there is no democracy that is sufficiently established that it is completely out of danger.
Q. You affirm that from the first moment democracy was born in the Athens of Pericles it was in danger. What is it that constantly haunts her?
R. There are many and it is very difficult to know. In the case of Athens, institutional deterioration and trust in providential figures who come to save us all, and end up destroying our values. In the case of Ancient Greece, I had always thought that Athenian democracy ended with the arrival of Alexander the Great, but no.
At the moment of maximum splendor of democracy, there were two coups produced by the deterioration of democratic institutions, by the Peloponnesian War, which is a useless war that ruins and destroys democracy from within.
Actually, one realizes that the dangers of democracy are really internal, much more than external.
Q. It takes us to the military debacle in Athens and the establishment of a dictatorship, the so-called regime of the Thirty, as a moment that set a pattern of terror for other tyrannies. What are the repeating mechanisms?
R. The regime of the Thirty, which is the second Athenian dictatorship, has two interesting things that are very contemporary. One is terror, many dictatorships exterminate their enemies, and that is something that is repeated in Augusto, in the Thirty, in Franco’s Spain, in Hitler and that reaches our days, like Pinochet. There is always a kind of pattern that when a dictator comes to power, the extermination of the enemy occurs.
And then they have another very interesting thing; When the dictatorship of the Thirty ended, the Greeks decreed a kind of -not only amnesty- but what they call “forgetting the crimes of the past”. And that is a problem that is repeated throughout history. What do we do with memory?
Q. The book inevitably transits through the Holocaust. What were the lessons of that black age?
R. Although it is difficult to make an assessment of crimes, if there was something similar to the greatest crime of humanity, it would be the Holocaust. It has many lessons. As the Auschwitz memorial reminds us, the gas chambers are the end of the process, not the beginning. Genocides begin with hatred, with the dehumanization of the other, with propaganda…
And another lesson is that a civilized, advanced and educated state is capable of committing the worst crimes. There is one thing that is often forgotten and that is that without doctors the Holocaust could not have occurred. The gas chambers were always operated by doctors and before that there was the mass murder of the disabled, of the people that society had the most to protect and help.
Q. As you say, after Rome leaned into the abyss of dictatorships, Europeans would not be citizens again until the second half of the 20th century, with some exceptions for short periods. Do you think we have this in mind today?
R. I think that in Europe many times we take democracy for granted, which is partly fine; I don’t think we have to live in constant fear that this is going to end. But we do have to be aware that Western Europe and the European Union in general is an oasis from many points of view.
For example, regarding security, in many Latin American countries you cannot walk freely in any part of the city, while in Europe it is different.
Europe is an oasis of democracy in a world where democracy is receding. India is becoming more and more authoritarian, China is a dictatorship based on technology and the Arab Springs – with which we hoped that radical change would take place and that the Arab world would move towards democracy – they have all failed. The only one left is Tunisia, which is now turning into an autocracy.
We have to be aware that freedom, democracy and human rights are a privilege, and that we have to fight to maintain them, because no one guarantees that there will not be a similar drift as in Hungary or Poland.
Q. In January 2021, the assault on the United States Capitol took place. What can we read about this event?
R. It is something that marked me a lot because it is one of these things that you cannot imagine. If they told us that we were going to have to leave the house by time slots and with masks or that a country like Russia was going to invade a neighbor in a large-scale assault, we would not have believed it.
And if they tell us that a bunch of guys armed to the teeth were going to storm the Capitol for the purpose of lynching the representatives of a democracy and that a guy with his chest bare and horns was going to howl in the Capitol… These images are put on a TV and you don’t believe them.
This shows that when someone like Trump appears, who despises democracy, he puts everyone’s coexistence in danger. And also something that is happening in many societies: the deep divergence of what is true. Deep down, there are many people in the United States who continue to believe against all evidence that Trump won the election.
But we live in a society in which there has been a fracture in the truth and that is something quite serious, because we do not agree on what it is.
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