To a full room but with the intimacy of a radio column, the journalist, announcer and writer Víctor Hugo Morales presented his new work this Saturday afternoon Caste of cruelty. Misery and surrender in Milei’s Argentina at the Book Fair, published by Colihue publishing house. In a climate of complicity with his readers, the author released his book that is “alive with indignation” and reflects on the first months of management of the current national government.
The work is structured in some 72 sections of two to three pages in length that have titles that challenge with humor and indignation such as “Twitter is the nightly reading of a president who decides to attack the entire culture”, “What makes vote for who is going to be your executioner?”, “Democracy in the hands of the rich while those below fight”, “The doctrine of shock in rational analysis Informational automatism” or “The Argentine middle class, a hottie ready to be swallowed by the heroes”.
The presentation panel, which took place in the Victoria Ocampo Room, included Florencia Mazzadi, historian, researcher, film curator and director of the CineMigrante International Festival, who collaborated in the production of the piece and wrote its prologue entitled “A Call urgent in the face of the ineffable things of the world”.
“Faced with the blackout of insensitivity until the end of history that the mathematical door of the financial code infers, this book tries to think of a break in another place, dissolving the classic opposition between poetics and politics. It proposes a hiatus of resonances where memory, potentiality and futurity call us to reappropriate the knowledge of the body, its affections, its languages, imagination and desire as the only way to preserve ourselves from the capture of our vital force,” said the historian during the introduction of the activity.
Throughout the book, in a reflective, essayistic, journalistic and above all literary tone, Victor Hugo turns to different determining references for history such as Napoleon, Maxentius, Marcus Aurelius, Garibaldi, Moses, Aristotle, Spinoza, Goebbels, Hitler, etc. as well as the contributions of contemporary thinkers such as Eric Sadin, Naomi Klein, Bifo Berardi, Noam Chomsky, Nuccio Ordine. He puts all these ideas, from here and there, into dialogue with the current national and global political situation.
About Milei he was forceful: “He is servile. He is on his knees in front of that royal power that has appointed him. Milei is a confusion. In this book, in daily life and in everything we read, Milei is directly a representative of that caste of cruelty called the business community of the Argentine Republic,” he noted and then compared his mandate with that of Julio Argentino Roca.
In addition, he referred to the national government’s controversy with the Book Fair and the attack against culture. “The absence of the government is also symbolic. This, which is the highest place, the most important agora that we have precisely to celebrate what makes us so proud: we fill our mouths with Cortázar, Borges and Galeano, we live proud of the baggage that we little by little, more or less, we have acquired throughout our lives and we know that each of those books made us better citizens. All of that is what they want to avoid. Why is someone who educates and prepares himself? a thinking person, and becomes dangerous because they reject stupidity and lies, they have better exercise to stand up against flimsiness.
In the full room, the heterogeneous audience, made up of older people, adults with their small children and many young people, sitting and standing, nodded reconfirming the convictions, sighed at the unworthy and burst into laughter with some relief in response to the different moments. from Victor Hugo’s speech, told as an editorial for a radio program. A murmur of collective concern was felt at the news that the author gave about the government’s measure for the alleged closure of Tecnópolis, with the aim of being converted into a circus for the shows of the company of the artist Flavio Mendoza. “We will have a circus there, almost a metaphor for what is happening to us, right?” commented the journalist.
“Every day I ask myself ‘what are we doing?’ square, for the hug, behind the need to say ‘here I am’. One arrives at the Plaza de Mayo and recognizes it, because it always knew how to be there to call itself the people. We are the face of a multitude of millions that we love. again help us change, because millions remained on this side and hope is not in vain,” he reflected.
Page 12 He spoke with the author about the reasons that led him to undertake a production on this topic and the expectations regarding the reading public.
―What was the initiative when writing this book?
-For my own good, it is good for me to write and I like to do it when I have the need to say something urgent like this time, when it seems to me that we all have to express ourselves as soon as possible against the atrocity that is being committed by what We call real power against a sector of citizens that is very important and against the citizens themselves who accompanied with their vote this very strange stage that Argentina is experiencing politically.
―For what audience is it directed? Who were you thinking about while you were writing it?
―I think about strengthening the convictions of those who think similarly. I don’t know if my book is capable of capturing or captivating those who already think differently, who are made of a fanaticism that would not allow them to change and others are that sector that evolves to one side and the other according to the political moment of their life. . I believe that there is a fixed forty and forty of right and left in the country, and there is a twenty that must be addressed in the hope that they can be brought to this side, which for my way of seeing the world is the good side.
Report: Carla Spinelli
