Rural dwellers know it well and are very wary of approaching it. Although science has explained the “bad light” as a spontaneous combustion of gases that produces iridescence, villagers know it is a soul in pain that wanders the countryside and ponds, spreading fear. When it appears, the locals recommend saying a prayer and biting the scabbard of the facon[1]…
But the bad light has gone beyond the limits of popular imagery, moving into the political arena. The most recent cases can be seen with meridian clarity in Argentina and Ecuador.
The southern nation is today living a nightmare, which threatens if the virulent national and transnational corporate attack represented by the measures of the current government is consolidated, to sweep away rights won over a century, also stealing a large part of the collective social accumulation.
Faced with the predictable and just reaction of the organised sectors and a growing part of the middle class, the right-wing alliance promises to corner any tumult with fines, jail and bullets. Likewise, it is negotiating votes in Congress with a part of the once gallant radical party, a degraded offshoot of the workers’ struggles of the beginning of the century, to give a veneer of legitimacy to its dark purposes of plunder.
In Ecuador, the social panorama has gone haywire. Drug trafficking and common crime are now destroying the image of peaceful coexistence that the country has offered to tourism, one of its main sources of income along with oil.
The government of the novice Noboa, also a representative of a big capital like Milei, has decreed a state of internal armed conflict. The war strategy, even backed by the opposition, bears similarities to that of Nayib Bukele in El Salvador. The list of criminal gangs released does not even remotely include the hegemonic media, the tax-evading companies, or the capital benefited by the neoliberal programme of the provisional government, all of them co-responsible for the situation of anguish that the Ecuadorian people are living through.
Acute analysts point out that in reality, this is an anxiety provoked to avoid that, as happened in 2019, a new popular uprising could bring down the planned looting. These observers point out that one of the objectives of the call for “national unity” is to take away the prominence of the political opposition and thus perpetuate a weak government beyond the months legally established for its mandate as a result of the dismissal of the previous president, the banker Guillermo Lasso (but not of his policies).
The also continuing line of addiction and dependence on the venial interference of the United States of America enables the entry of US troops and advisors into the country, as has already happened in neighbouring Peru – where the deposed legitimate president Castillo faces a possible 34-year prison sentence – fuelling suspicions of a planned conspiracy.
It is the same bad light, also known as “Mandinga’s lanterns”, that penetrates the interstices of a failed sovereignty and a feigned democracy. Meanwhile, the devil is on the loose.
Mandinga and his lanterns
Mandinga[2], one of the many names of the devil, knows how to incarnate himself in the most diverse characters and adopt the most varied names to fulfil his nefarious mission of perverting coexistence and good manners.
This task does not respect borders, continents, or cultures. Thus, it is that after his destructive wanderings in Iraq, Libya, and Syria, just to mention those of this century, Lucifer, the self-styled bearer of the democratic light, leader, and lord of demons, came up with the idea of continuing to collect for his benefit the fragments of the former Soviet bloc. To this end, he supported a revolt against a debased government at the gates of the Russian Bear, which, having been betrayed in its promises not to see NATO extended to its borders, reacted by invading adjacent regions.
Thus war returned to European soil, sowing new discord between brotherly peoples – a speciality of the house of Beelzebub – and revitalising a military alliance that had lost all raison d’être, if any warlike association can have one.
Embroiled in its geopolitical contest with the Asian Dragon and sensing the approaching end of its economic and cultural hegemony, the Eagle threaded new sinister pacts. It struck deals in the near-China area with the UK and Australia (AUKUS) and tried something similar in the Middle East with the Negev Summit, where the Biden administration’s Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, met with the foreign ministers of Israel, Morocco, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, with the declared purpose of forming a political and military front against Iran.
The Evil One” could not tolerate the fraternal rapprochement between two historically warring factions of Islam, the Shia Persians and the Sunnis of the Saudi kingdom – a contact mediated by none other than China’s arch-rival – let alone the entry of both into the BRICS club, now the Mecca of multipolarity. So, the controversial Anglo-Saxon hegemon saw fit to stir up confrontation in the area.
This would claim new victims in the plight of the Palestinian people, once again threatened by Israel with territorial expulsion or genocide. A few kilometres from there, in the face of the actions of force in the Red Sea by the Yemeni Houthi government, supported by Iran as well as the Hamas movement, the response of the Anglo-Saxon axis was a direct bombardment of its coasts, thus continuing the aggression that the population of this country suffered from its own North (Saudi Arabia), supported by the same “international community” as always.
War absurdities of minds poisoned by hatred and fear, which not only claim thousands of lives, but also cause humanitarian catastrophes of gigantic proportions, the scars of which are very difficult to heal.
The insane pretence of unipolar world domination is thus currently adopting the tactic of presenting numerous battlefields, intending to form a sort of globalised NATO, but with local actors, in a kind of simultaneous but fragmented world war.
Lack of references and the right-wing extremists
But the Fatuous Fires, as the effects similar to those of the bad light have been called, can also be seen in other pampas, forests and tundra. Souls in sorrow abound. With vast groups of people submerged in miserable living conditions, manipulated by ideologies of consumption and individual success but with no prospect of change, hate speech rages, poisoning the social and political atmosphere.
Added to this are creeping transformations that have broken up communities and extirpated any point of reference, creating a widespread sense of uncertainty, confusion and personal and social meaninglessness.
In this fog, in this fetid swamp, the dying lights of smug ghosts of the past, who see the time has come to lead with their fanatical hordes and their hallucinated proposals, find popular support.
This is how, from the bowels of the social crisis, recalcitrant forces emerge in different parts of the world and in the most diverse cultures, which come to take electoral preponderance. Whether it is the offspring of the old fascisms like the current Italian premier or the son of the dictator Marcos in the Philippines, a racist tycoon like Trump, traditionalist conservatives like Modi or Erdogan, right-wingers like Orban and Netanyahu or religious fundamentalists like those reigning in Arabia or Persia, there are plenty of examples of this flood of radical identitarianism, whose correlate is the violent exclusion of those who are different.
Proof of this is also the triumph of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, the rise of far-right parties in Sweden, Finland and Spain, and even in booming Germany, where, despite its painful and criminal National Socialist past, the Alternative for Germany, a far-right party that garners its support from its rejection of immigration, the European Union and Islam, now appears in the polls as the second national force.
All these reactive elements show the characteristics of the end of an institutional, economic and political cycle, of a system without answers to the needs of the people.
The good lights
There is no darker night than that which precedes the dawn, goes a well-known metaphor, the meaning of which is to sow hope in difficult times. Ophthalmology, for its part, explains that in darkness, pupil dilation is vital for more light to reach the retina. Finally, history teaches that utopia, unreasonable or illogical when the waters are calm, are the ones that end up prevailing in times of instability.
Thus, it is necessary to be able to look at the glimmers of incipient lights, which do not take centre stage. Although they may seem like futile efforts doomed to immediate failure, they are the forerunners of the powerful beacons that will illuminate the future.
These lights indicate today the need to leave behind an exclusively materialistic and object-oriented culture and to invest simultaneous efforts in the exploration and development of human interiority. An awakening of consciousness, a leap similar to that which humanity experienced with the handling of fire, with the advancement of science, in artistic inspiration or with spiritual elevation, must accompany any parallel effort to achieve dignified living conditions for the whole species.
Because equal opportunities will not be achieved on an unjust planet, wars, violence in any form, or environmental depredation will not end if the internal parameters that guide people’s lives do not change.
There will be no greater empathy or collaboration between peoples, no better policies if the excluded share similar values with the oppressors. A radiant future cannot be embarked upon with a heavy backpack of bitterness, resentment, and revenge. New women and men must emerge as they advocate social change.
Hence, it is time to vibrate higher and undertake an integral revolution with a profound humanist sense, a revolution that rejects all forms of violence and discrimination and illuminates a new sense of life that has as its axes of conduct the coherence between thinking, feeling and acting and an unrestricted solidarity. “Nothing above the Human Being and no human being below the other” is the slogan for these times, in which societies will not be able to take new directions unless the attitudes and motivations of social groups are changed.
Because to change, you have to change.
[1] From the Portuguese and Spanish “faca” is, a knife, used by gauchos to kill and slaughter animals and as a fighting weapon.
[2] Mandinga derives from Manding, the geographic and ethnic name of a people living in West Africa. It is the language spoken by millions of Mandinga in Mali, Senegal, Gambia, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, but in Spanish, mainly in rural America, where the name was brought by African slaves, it is the name of the devil.
