Other Voiceless
I don’t think I’m the only one going through this but, over the last couple of weeks, I’ve found it harder and harder to write. It’s a disorienting experience – this sense that everything that might usefully have been said has already been said far too many times before.
Juan has been calling for other voices, which is just as well because, these days, my own seems to have gone AWOL.
Unable to write, all I can do is link to others who are doing it well. One I’ve started to look out for is John Manuel Silva, an uncommonly stylish and nuanced voice who cut his teeth in the Panfleto Negro circuit.
Here he is meditating on the strange passivity with which chavista intellectuals witness the dismantling of their friends’ civil rights:
La tragedia de Venezuela no es que el chavismo sea mayoría, sino que es una mayoría indolente. Una mayoría que ha contemplado impávida como se disminuyen los derechos de los demás, sin que eso sea su preocupación. Una mayoría que no cree en el derecho ajeno. Una mayoría de personas que están muy dispuestas a ser amigos de sus opositores, que en el ámbito privado los aprecian y comparten con ellos; pero que como ciudadanos no están dispuestos, en lo más mínimo, a abogar por sus derechos ante el gobierno que apoyan y sufragan.
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