Tyrannies and the Power of Their Followers
Throughout human history, figures such as Caligula, Napoleon, and Adolf Hitler have left an indelible mark on the fabric of humanity. They are powerful and unhinged characters who, driven by rage and frustration, have stained the curtain of history with innocent blood and disproportionate actions. However, rather than being champions of truth and order, they are simply a reflection of infinite ego worship and mental disturbance. They represent a dark facet of our nature, a disturbing but influential minority on the loom of historical events.
These powerful, defiant, and often unbalanced pseudo-leaders, laden with anger, frustration, and torment, have been agents of chaos and oppression. At heart, they are a jumble of disturbed minds who worship their own selves above all else.
The list of contemporary tyrants is as long as it was in the ancient Rome of Gaius Augustus Caesar or the revolutionary France of Bonaparte, where heads rolled indiscriminately. Even in more recent times, we saw the horror of xenophobia and genocide perpetrated by Hitler less than a century ago.
And who are his successors in the current landscape?
Contemporary history is witnessing several trials of this type of leadership. What is most alarming, however, is that these evil forces have been able to infiltrate the institutions of their nations, corrupting their fundamental pillars with totalitarian, autocratic and populist ideas.
However, it is troubling what these evil forces have achieved by embedding themselves in the institutional fabric of these nations, contaminating everything with their "alternative truths," creating the figures of the "enemies" of the homeland and fomenting hatred towards those groups "alien" to their culture, such as Trump's immigrants, Fidel's oligarchs or Chávez's neoliberals. And of course, all around the cult of the leader.
But they cannot be perpetuated without support. And to do so they must lie, creating half-truths and confiscating the peace and tranquility of mutual agreement, through the extreme polarization of the least informed bases, disconnected from the structures and marginalized by progress and education: the new political fanatics.
The globalizing phenomenon of social networks created "highways" for the recruitment of these new political actors. These pseudo-leaders require followers to veil them and repeat their nonsense; followers who support them and legitimize their actions. Let us remember the noble inhabitants of any German village or city next to any of more than half a dozen Nazi extermination camps, ignoring at will what was happening in those camps, where the enemies of the Reich: Jews, communists, anarchists, socialists, political dissidents, prisoners of war, homosexuals and the like, gypsies, slavs, church representatives, Jehovah's Witnesses, Common criminals, emigrated Spanish Republicans, people with disabilities and other groups classified as "inferior" or "traitors" to Nazi ideology were eliminated.
In 1924 the last elections of the Prussian States were held and in 1933 the last national parliamentary election. That was the end of the Weimar Republic and thus began the dictatorship of the Third Reich.
And then came emblematic programs such as "Noche y Niebla" (Night and Fog)
And its ardent defenders of the right, enthused by rhetoric and propaganda promises, supported without delay and against all dissident opposition... until it was too late. Such was the story of the prominent Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller, who, repenting for his complicity and silence in the early years of Nazism, told us:
"First they came looking for the socialists and I didn't say anything, because I wasn't a socialist. Then they came looking for the trade unionists and I didn't say anything, because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came looking for the Jews and I didn't say anything, because I wasn't Jewish. Then they came for me, but there was no one left to protest for me."
The clamor and worship of the Führer, even if it meant closing one's eyes to the atrocity, enveloped many sectors and exalted characters of that time around the world, who openly supported or maintained a complicit silence for many years.
We all know how that story ended.
However, the question we must ask ourselves is whether the era of concentration camps and supremacist movements is really over. Historical cycles tend to repeat themselves, despite romantic visions of a utopia free of oppression. Ignoring these evil forces, which have always existed, is a grave mistake.
The most serious problem lies not only in the person at the forefront of these phenomena, but in his followers, who have chosen to ignore warnings, facts and projections. It is time to reflect on our collective responsibility and act accordingly before it is too late.
Our responsibility as citizens of order, justice and progress obliges us to take action, beyond parties and above our preferences. We definitely become pawns of the poison when we decide to let ourselves be carried away by the current of lies or in the worst case, stay with our arms crossed, wielding the far-fetched phrase "I am apolitical" or the comfortable "everyone is the same". Those aren't reasons not to vote; They are excuses to perpetuate scammers.
Without your involvement, you become an accomplice of tyrants.
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