I can not imagine being left wing without knowing that my solidarity crosses any border that I can think of, geographical, cultural or whatever else. Perhaps that idea of extended international solidarity is a crucial part of our myth of origin, right from the moment that “Proletarians of the World, unite!” was written, so long ago already. I don’t know about you who read me, but I know that I can hardly type those old worlds without my pulse accelerating. They make us, literally, part of something bigger than ourselves. And that is a powerful thing. Knowing that there is people out there, people that you will never know, that are fighting the good fight, your good fight, is a real powerful thing.
But what if you are wrong?
It just takes a minute, and we remember the examples. Remember Sartre in the demonstrations supporting the Khmer Rouge? Of course, plenty of people at the right of the political spectrum uses this to proof, once and for all, the unbearable naiveness/cruelty/wrongness/stupidity of the left. And we go and argue that Tatcher supported Pinochet even after all his murders were publicly accepted facts, so they go and argue that… never mind. For a moment, never mind those critics. Let’s ask ourselves “Could Sartre knew better?”
The question is relevant. The follow up question “Should we know better?” is even more important and actually, it has already had plenty of consequences. The green european family gained political identity when a whole generation recognized that the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia was not condonable. Most of the persons that founded european green parties were members of the youth of the communist party back in the sixties. Quite some of them started smelling something rotten in their kingdom, so they started anew and away from the Communist Party, the ultimate reduct of international solidarity. Look at us greens now! About to be a prime coalition partner in Germany, arguably the motor of Europe.
We might have to refrain our solidarity with those far away comrades after all.
But It does happen the other way around too. Today’s 21 october’s editorial of The Guardian, not quite the most right wing newspaper out there, is about Lula, the former president of Brazil, and a likely favorite candidate for the next elections. Words more, words less, The Guardian tells us that Lula was right all along. He was framed, and he was innocent. I have been a Lula’s fan for quite some many years… But of course I started doubting when he was accused of corruption, and then stripped of his political rights, and then even jailed. I do want to believe in institutions, and the top of the Brazilian judiciary accused and judged him. Along the years I talked with brazilian politicians, and the tales of corruption are ubiquitous. But about Lula, about the person Lula, I should have known better indeed. Perhaps.
That might be the thing with us lefties. I like to believe that this international solidarity “thing” is our foundational myth. But what if it is, also, part of our foundational sin? What if we can not trust anybody? What if we need to check by ourselves, all the time? If that would really be the case, then the concept of ideologies would collapse, wouldn’t it? At least it would become a lot less useful. Because, in the long run, ideologies are containers to define groups, to identify the people that is likely to think like us, to identify our tribe…
But wait, this is it, isn’t it?
Because the problem is not solidarity across the borders, or ideologies as containers that mobilize (possibly wrong) international action. The problem is that stupid human thing of always try and look for our tribe, for “our” people. That is the problem. Because that is the thing that blind us. We are less critic with those that are like us, those that are us, actually. We judge others, but we don’t judge our own, not that harshly anyway.
In the end, we should recognize that if we really believe in that borderless solidarity, there is no us. We need to know that the day that there will be no us, there will be no them neither. And perhaps then we will have made the next step.