(158) May 15, 2010
month I walk on the Bicentennial. It comes the celebration. The climate is excited: advertisements that invite to the celebration, speeches for all tastes, courses, conferences, book launches, special supplements and euphoric altered teachers from schools in putting together this little number capable of overcoming the dead and sellers scene street.
The figure is round and big: two hundred years. Any temptation. Also a good opportunity for memory is always selective, choosing an event to silence others and take sides. What story comes to us in this bicentennial? Who told us? What interests? Enrique Ponce Jardiel defined history as "the lie bound." What can we do to unbind some official history and start building other views? Some stories of our history they remind me of the story that the citizen was so very liar who told the truth when asked for forgiveness.
Forgive, then, that dewatering the stretch of this bicentenary and put the pointing of the history book says on Page 1910: Centennial Year.
the country prepares for the historic event: big parades, invited officials from around the world, the country pulled out of the window. You have to show the progress of the Queen's Plate. The exploits of their business with England, French style and culture. Argentina wants to be Paris. And it looks pretty. At least that sucks the elite of Buenos Aires. After all, the city is so pretty that even has its equivalent to the French palace. Resemble his own oligarchies: both can proudly display their fine manners and his arrogance, its forms "educated" as his spirit repressor. The two also think that Europe is the center of the world, the point of departure and arrival of any road. France craving thirst for conquest and domination, Argentina and historical loss. The elite of Buenos Aires celebrates the feat of having achieved at last a country for the winners. The victors celebrated its hundred years of fighting, massacres, with wars and genocides sinister carefully muted. Since 1880 had established a country at will and way, reflecting their class, their formidable ornament stock intact. That symbolized the majestic Teatro Colón as the center and symbol of the culture of power, national pride, originally designed for them, the elect.
civilization was the granddaughter who received the English king, the Infanta Isabel. They were good men who embraced Vicente Blasco Ibanez and Georges Clemenceau. Even the sky seemed to bless those days, sending the comet Halley. Multiplied neatly plaques and monuments erected in honor of the first patriots. From the bronze the men looked a country that proudly proclaimed himself the world's breadbasket.
But a country is not a barn, and Argentina is France. The indefinite progress of the story that proclaimed its intellectual leadership in power, would have its limits, as was the Titanic. Our leaders could not see the iceberg against which crashed. Fools can not see even the obvious. No one imagined a country for all, with industry, with workers living in dignity. These ideas they were completely unrelated to their perspective. Always thought life of easy wealth, the enjoyment of a right inherited class, exclusive and exclusionary.
Everything was perfectly timed, measured, studied. The big party, waste, spree, could begin. Then President Figueroa Alcorta solemn voice addresses his people. But what happens? We hear rumblings. An anarchist is tied with chains to the railings of the Rural Society. Take to undo it. A shame. Again barbarism. This is presentable. What will tell the prensa extranjera? Para muchos quedará descubierto un dramático decorado, una torpe fachada. Entonces cae la falsa escenografía montada y aparecen los actores de esa otra Argentina profunda. El mundo se entera que la Federación Obrera Regional Argentina había lanzado una huelga general para la semana de mayo realizando una manifestación que reuniría a 70.000 personas. Solo pedían condiciones de trabajo digno y libertad para los presos sociales, entre ellos, Simón Radowitzky, aquel joven anarquista ruso que había asesinado al coronel Ramón Lorenzo Falcón responsable de la matanza de once trabajadores y 105 heridos en la dramática "Semana Roja" de mayo de 1909. Lo cierto es que aquel 13 de mayo de 1910 en el corazón Centennial is implanted under siege. Is in effect the death penalty for labor activists, is severely limited trade union action, is expressly prohibited anarchist propaganda and the entry of foreigners who had been politically motivated convictions.
So passed that "wonderful" anniversary, the press working fire, censored, silenced, two thousand workers arrested, deported and another hundred one hundred buried in hell of the prison of Ushuaia.
Need I say that many of us want a bicentennial to be the flipside of that, What do you think party? "The bicentennial of what? All reactionary forces who made the first century triumphal feast of the ruling classes today are trying to silence voices, claims, demands urgent. Is it necessary to repeat that we will only be a country when there is work, production, consumption, domestic market, health and education as an inalienable right for all? We
worth this back through history to water of questions that stimulate our present. We have to choose what we want to celebrate. Chesterton said that "one of the ends most needed and most neglected in relation to this novel called History, is the fact that it is finished."
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