Between the last presidential period of Kirchnerism and the one currently running under the libertarian insignia, Signs of kinship are abundant and coincidences are not recommended. for a society that has not stopped aspiring to spiritual progress nor has it given up returning to the ideological sources of genuine liberalism on whose basis the best of our moral and institutional history was formed.
José E. Burucúa is the author of The Image and Laughter and Excesos readers, iconographic asceticisms, among other books.
The concept of “Cultural battle” is one of the worst features of such convergences. Few common places must have been and are more disastrous for the present and future of the Argentine nation. Every time societies, both those of others and their own, have incorporated this expression or others that are very similar to it into everyday language, the peace and prosperity of the future have been put into question. serious risk of crisisif not a true historical catastrophe.
The advent of Javier Milei and La Libertad Advances to power not only resumes the climate of “cultural battles” but he has used with certain relish the vocabulary and common places taken from military language applied to political life. This persistence and insistence, from one political hegemony to another apparently of opposite sign, does not bode well in terms of the social peace necessary for the material and spiritual recovery of the country.
Our historical panoply is very rich in terms of the hegemonies of such aberrations: the Rosas dictatorship, the massacres of native populations during the “conquest of the 15,000 leagues”, the residency law, the crushing of the strikes in Patagonia, the infiltration of fascism from the mid-1930s, the shelter of Nazi fugitives during Perón’s first presidency, the persecution of Justicialism after 1955, until reaching that sort of culmination of cruelty that was the military tyranny of 1976, then the fallacies and self-censorship imposed by the Kirchnerist vulgate between 2008 and 2023 and, now, the much applauded delirium of rudeness recounted, daily, by the first magistrate of the Republic.
On many occasions, let us remember, the guerrilla organizations of the 60s and 70s used the notion, taking it from political processes of open struggle for emancipation against the cruelties of the colonial regimes of Africa and Asiaeven though from a sincere and strict analysis of the Latin American realities of those decades, the differences, not only of degree but also structural, seem to be evident between the societies subjugated by the European imperialisms of the 19th and 20th centuries and the dictatorial regimes. or directly tyrannical that, for more than a century and a half, dominated the political landscape of the nations of our continent.
Fierce governments of Latin America adopted the concept and seasoned it with their own linguistic expressions. worthy of the comic absurdities of the character of Ubu King, if they had not transcended from the spheres of discourse to those of political action, with its consequences of persecutions and massacres. Who could forget cultural campaigns against the “stateless” subversions who brandished the dictatorships from Argentina, Uruguay, Chile and Brazil in the 70s? Combats in which those of us who did not agree with official cruelties became assimilated to bacterial or viral infections. These “cultural battles” were sublimated as confrontations between healthy bodies and epidemic invasions.
Fortunately and thanks to noble spirits like that of Raúl Alfonsín, or dominated by pragmatism, ultimately beneficent, like that of Carlos Menem, for almost twenty years we were free from being summoned to any culture war. Only the 2008 crisis, which confronted the political forces formed in the horizon of rural jobs and industries with the Kirchnerist government, once again placed the concepts of “battles and cultural war” in the arena of Argentine social debates.
On November 14, 1993, the Olivos Pact was signed between President Carlos Menem and former President Raúl Alfonsín. Photo: Cecilia Profético
The tension of the agon The political situation only increased from then on (except perhaps – let’s say it honestly – for a good part of the Macrista period when verbal exacerbation was systematically avoided).
Of course, Argentine history also generated its self-healing and hope projects: the Alberdi Constitution, Mitre, Sarmiento and Avellaneda, the Sáenz Peña law, the labor reforms of the 1940s, the patriotic administrations of Frondizi and Illia, the democratic restoration of Alfonsín, unique in the world and continued in part by Carlos Menem when he dismantled military power through the abolition of compulsory service and sought to clean up the currency. In any case, the drift of events towards the discursive construction of “cultural battles” It does not allow us to predict anything good.
Juan Bautista Alberti Daguerreotype taken around 1840.
Having already enumerated the calamities unleashed by the repeated use of the commonplace in the last eighty years of national history, could also remember the world catastrophes to which the circulation of equivalent concepts in other places on Earth in contemporary history has contributed, for example: the Kulturkampf from the time of Chancellor Bismarck, the “heroic and virile” combats of militant fascism invoked by the philosopher Giovanni Gentile in his proclamations, the cultural battles of Stalinism satirized by George Orwellthe monstrosities of the Chinese cultural revolution (if you want to have a rough idea of what that represented, I recommend watching the first ten minutes of the series The three body problem which is currently showing on the Netflix network), the massacre perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the cultural combats preached by the president of Russia Vladimir Putin. The etcetera would choke us.
A Russian woman walks past a digital screen displaying an image of Russian President Vladimir Putin and a quote from his recent speech to the Federal Assembly, in St. Petersburg on March 13, 2024. (Photo by Olga MALTSEVA / AFP)
In summary, Let us not poison the cultural debates with warlike or military words and phrases., which should be open and generous exchanges par excellence, let us not accompany them with the sound of any drum or instrument of war. In our Argentine case, we are on the verge of multiplying those despicable resources of political discussion. Nothing good can be expected from such outbursts and rantings.
José E. Burucúa is an art historian and has been a professor at the University of Buenos Aires and the National University of San Martín for years. He is the author of The image and the laughter and Reading excesses, iconographic asceticismsamong a dozen essays.
