Argemino Barro is a correspondent freelance in New York for El Confidencial, La Sexta and Televisión de Galicia. In 2014, he covered the war in eastern Ukraine and won the European "Belarus in Focus" award for the best report on Belarus. As a teenager, he developed a passion for unravelling the dynamics of totalitarianism, like someone attracted to fantasy books: "I am fascinated by investigating how an apparently healthy, free and consolidated society slips into the tunnels of fanaticism, hatred and oppression".
Author of The candidate and the fury, on the rise of Donald Trump, and A History of Rus: Chronicle of the War in Eastern UkraineI may write a third one on the rise of culture. woke in the United States, a phenomenon that has taken hold in America's elite universities and public institutions. In Spain, his articles on the ideology of critical race theory published in El Confidencial were well received by readers.
For culture wokeThere is no such thing as truth, but only systematic and cultural constructs that try to impose themselves on others. Liberal democracy is nothing but an oppressive force of the white man. The individual is defined in relation to a collective and it is only possible to know oneself through this identity essence. In this sense, knowledge is always problematic - they distrust reason - because it is in a permanent struggle of narratives. For this reason, culture woke emphasises words; language is violence that imposes itself against other discursive forces.
-In one of your articles in The Objective, you wrote: "The United States remains a healthy, energetic and assertive democracy". However, after reading your articles on the culture of the woke In El Confidencial, one is not sure that this statement is true. How do the two analyses fit together?
-There are tendencies in any democracy that seek to destroy it. The good thing about this form of government is that it welcomes all kinds of currents; some of them seek to rethink or even destroy it. In your case, the United States is a very diverse and organic country. The currents of opinion change very quickly. A friend of mine thinks that, despite its rise, the culture woke will be forgotten in five years' time.
-This phenomenon stems from postmodernism, but I don't think many of those who espouse its postulates have read or even know of the existence of Foucault or Lyotard. How is it possible that this ideology has duped the American university elite?
-After the general trauma caused by the Second World War, the emerging world questioned certain truths. French postmodernist philosophy, led by Foucault and Lyotard, began to question reality and fundamental concepts such as the family, freedom of expression and justice. Their ideas took hold in the 1960s, only to die out in the 1970s and 1980s. However, these theories reached American universities and were mixed with other neo-Marxist theories - a key philosopher of this current was Herbert Marcuse, who came from the Frankfurt School. These two seeds of relativism - French postmodernism and neo-Marxism - gave rise to a new current: the application of Marxist dynamics to American identities. The class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie gave way to the struggle between races (white man versus minorities). This new formulation permeated university departments.
-For this movement, experience puts us in a privileged position. If you are not black, you cannot understand the reality of a black man; if you are not a woman, you cannot understand abortion. Experience overrides reason. Under this assumption, and now that we are no longer talking about Afghanistan, could we criticise, without having experienced it, the culture of the Taliban?
-Relativism is based on a positive idea: reality is always seen from one point of view. For example, if we were to read a history book about the conquest of America from an indigenous point of view, we would probably pick up new details. It is always interesting to broaden our vision. However, the extreme consequence of this thinking is the subordination of reason to personal experience. Under this assumption, a person can only have an opinion about what is his or her own. If you are African-American, you can only read African-American authors, for example.
Identitarian culture, obsessed with identity, experience and subjectivity, overrides any kind of rational debate. A common phenomenon is cultural appropriation: if you are white, you can't do hip hop; if you are Spanish, you can't participate in the Latin Emmys. A contradiction arises: on the one hand, cultural appropriation is wrong; on the other hand, whites have to make an effort to study and assimilate African-American culture and put themselves in the place of the other identity.
There are African Americans who do not want to define themselves by a collective identity. The consequence is that their life experience as African Americans does not count and they are not allowed to speak at universities. Only those experiences that coincide with the dogma count.
-What do you think Martin Luther King would think of the movement? Black Lives Matter? Luther King dreamed of sharing rights under the same democratic vision and not segregating them under subjectivities.
-I don't want to put words in Luther King's mouth. I don't know what he would think. If we look at the current identity narrative in a superficial way, we can glimpse common elements with Luther King's discourse. However, when one delves deeper into both positions, one realises that they are complete opposites. The American activist wanted to expand the rights of liberal democracy - the right to vote, which had been violated many times in the southern states, the right to lead a dignified life, etc. Postmodern postulates, on the other hand, seek to dismantle liberal democracy, because they see it as a creation of white supremacists. Today, Black Lives Matterwhich was created as a response to cases of police violence with a racist bias, goes further and questions concepts such as family and justice. It has also acquired a very corporate and profit-driven vision.
In some schools in the United States, racial affinity groups have been developed. Children, when they reach the age of three, are divided into groups according to their race, because it is believed that they can only feel safe if they are surrounded by their own people. Underlying this is the idea that the white man is by nature oppressive. It is an extremely sordid view of human relations.
-Can democracy be an export product? Is it possible, as in the case of Afghanistan, to bury a country's past, invest billions of dollars and transform it into a democratic state in 20 years?
-I suspect that Americans have lost a lot of innocence trying to export their model in recent years. It is a complex question, but it is rather naïve to think that democracy can be exported like Coca-Cola or jeans. Democracies in Europe were founded after a long, slow and nuanced process, a path of increasing prosperity, trade, exchange of ideas, culturisation of the masses and so on. I believe that democratic values are irreplaceable, but it is naïve to think that they can be applied to a pastoral country with 80% illiteracy and where women are completely covered up.
-Culture woke has carried out a historical revisionism of the discovery of America. The wave of smashed statues is striking: Columbus, Cervantes, Don Juan de Oñate, Fray Junípero or even George Washington. For culture wokeCan we analyse the past with the eyes of the present?
-The wokeThrough Marxism, they understand history as a constant struggle. The history of the American continent is summed up in the white man's oppression of the indigenous people. The white man is the dominant man. Again, it is interesting to review history, or to consider, and even adopt, other points of view; but when this relativism is taken to dogmatic and iconoclastic extremes, it leads to the implausible situation of wanting to sweep away the whole past, the whole of history. Something similar to what Mao Zedong's Red Guards wanted to do during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
Here's an example. In October last year, I interviewed the director of the Portland Historical Society, the most extreme city in the country. The institution told American history in a very sensitive way and devoted a lot of space to the life of the Indians before colonisation. The night before, however, the Society had been attacked and the windows had been smashed in. In front of its façade, the statue of Abraham Lincoln, the emancipator of the slaves, had been vandalised and thrown away.
In other words, this movement does not even have an internal coherence. The most important museum woke The US is also under attack. Not even Abraham Lincoln is safe. Dogmas are virulent and capricious.