On the 26th and 27th of February, the Russian Federation hosted over 500 participants from more than 130 countries in Moscow to challenge Western hegemony in the Second Congress of the International Russophile Movement (MIR).
UWI documents in the following days some speeches delivered in the congress. Today we publish the presentation of Ismael Blanco Martino, lawyer from Uruguay.
Friends and comrades:
As in student assemblies in order not to repeat many concepts, when it is one’s turn to talk about the middle backwards, I am going to at least try to say something different.
When I was at the Russia-Latin America Parliamentary Conference in October last year, I remember that Vyacheslav Nikonov, a member of the Russian State Duma, asked us that when we talk about the “Global South”, we should think about whether these are the most appropriate words to use to refer to these countries.
It is food for thought, perhaps they are the most pertinent words to refer to the issue we are all talking about here. Professor Atilio Borón, in his speech just now, reminded us of Comandante Fidel Castro talking about the “tricontinental” and the “non-aligned” countries. Paraphrasing Machado, it comes to mind that one world is born and the other one dies…
I say this because it is also good to ask ourselves where the compass is, because in the South there is also a North and in the North there is a South!
Russia is in the geographical North, and this is at least an interesting detail to take into account, because Russia is part of the necessary global response to the hegemony that we are proposing and that must be transformed.
But I would also like to reflect – coming from the geographical South – that more than 100 years ago, in the words of our renowned Uruguayan artist and master of Constructivism Joaquín Torres García, “our North is the South”, and to illustrate this he turned the planisphere in his work.
Like everything that has been constructed in texts and discourses, words are never innocent or capricious; they all contain a profound ideological component, paraphrasing the great Italian intellectual and revolutionary, Antonio Gramsci: “Reality is defined by words. Therefore, he who controls words controls reality”. And in a similar vein Ryszard Kapuscinski wrote in his journalistic chronicles of his extensive literary work: “The beginning of wars is not marked by the first shot with a gun but by the change of language. The language of hatred comes before the bombs”.
Our African friends here present are aware of the words of the Polish patriot, who with his own eyes and through his wonderful pen, made us see the pain and tragedy of Western colonialism and neocolonialism on his peoples, so far from the hand of God and so close and forgotten by the unipolar and hegemonic world of the USA and European powers that devastated it.
It is not the first time in history that the voices of the peoples have been raised and taken flight, however, the turbulence, the contradictions; the betrayals; the skillful actions of the enemy time and again, in moments of crisis, the well-known thesis of Political Science of “gatopardism” expounded by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa was defended, stating: “if we want everything to remain as it is, everything must change”, but change it like a great swindle in which nothing changes.
Under this slogan, the hegemonic power of the USA and its allies has been sustained; the Washington Consensus was implemented; the “end of history” was proclaimed through Fukuyama; the people were made to believe that they had reached the culmination point of a world social organization, with a unipolar centrality dictated from Davos and in terms of police and gendarme based on the territorial and permanent expansion of NATO against anyone who dared to challenge this concept…
Our friends in the Russian Federation know perfectly well what I am talking about, because today in the East, today in Ukraine, fascism is being fought against!
In fact, like a computer file, the unipolar world is throwing away all the libertarian and egalitarian principles enshrined in the French Revolution and the Charter of Human Rights. They want to erase the history of the last two centuries. They believe that the social struggles and their conquests, for which millions of women and men paid with their lives, can easily be consigned to oblivion!
Closer here in time, they also tried to grotesquely twist the facts of World War II and to appropriate the victory against Nazism and fascism, ignoring the glorious epic of the Russian and Soviet people who paid with 27,000,000 lives the price of freedom for the Soviet Union and the whole Europe.
They went so far as to consummate the ultimate affront and insult to the Russian people, heirs of the Soviet Nation, by not allowing their authorities – including President Putin – to attend the commemoration of the Liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army!
While all this rottenness is going on, the new conception of the Multipolar World, as an emancipatory and all-embracing conception of all the countries of the planet, is emerging with the force of a hurricane. And this is not only in discourse, but in methodical and permanent actions. As Professor Borón said, this is not about palace diplomacy but about realities.
Today, the BRICS have become the tool where the new conception of a multipolar world is being developed. Without bosses or gendarmes.
This morning, in this Forum, Maria Zakharova, told us: “The BRICS are not an instrument to help, for example, so that someone can get something… The BRICS are a new way of conceiving trade; they are opportunities for countries to develop in various areas, such as the economy, ecology, security, technology, education and culture”. … She concludes, “BRICS is a new way of thinking. You can be independent and, at the same time, unite and be with us and still protect yourself and maintain your national dignity…”.
Dear friends, we know of defeats and pains, but despite this we continue to believe with deep optimism that yes, another society is possible! That this vision is not a matter of pure whim or voluntarism.
We must be clear about this premise, which will only be possible if we are deeply convinced and act in this direction in a pragmatic, methodical, orderly and permanent manner, without hesitation, without oscillations and above all without melting in the face of the vagaries of power as wax does in the face of the heat of the burning wick.
Today the world is in the midst of the 4th Industrial Revolution based on technology, robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology and the development of communication, among others. However, every minute that passes as I say these words, shamefully children are dying of hunger, or will be scarred forever by malnutrition; or will be scarred forever by the bombs that are falling on Gaza minute by minute.
Wealth is obscenely and immorally accumulating in geometric progression in a few hands, as the richest 1% have cornered almost two thirds of the new wealth generated since 2020 to date, which is almost twice as much as the remaining 99% of humanity.
The fortune of the billionaires that President Putin reminds us of is growing at an exponential rate and reaches 2.7 billion dollars a day, while at the same time we see the pitiful life of the majority of humanity, so to speak, not far from that miserable life of the children who worked in the coal mines in industrial England and died exhausted because they had small hands to be exploited.
The answer to these problems IS IN THE EMERGING MULTIPOLARITY, since it offers us the only POSSIBLE AND EMANCIPATING alternative IN THE TIMES WE LIVE IN.
And I end by saying dear friends, Alfredo Zitarrosa, a poet of my homeland, a singer, said that our peoples are like “giant submerged icebergs that tremble”.
Let us wait for them to emerge!….