Posted by: Arturo Larena May 9, 2023

 

When we are dispersed, we are weaker. When we are divided, we lose the ability to react and leave room for hate speech to be the most effective tool for making politics, reaching the whole of society.

Hate always comes wrapped in simple ideas, generally false, easy to understand, which quickly permeates a significant part of public opinion, which is not alert or which, for whatever reason,  has limited critical capacity .

Camp for Peace and the Right to Refuge was born in 2016 with a central idea, the unity of action of organizations and people who look with sadness, but without resignation, at the decline of Human Rights and the advance of a totalitarian intolerance that, Hastily but steadily, it is taking over our spaces of democracy, our rights and our social and political achievements, suffocating the future of citizenship.

In these years, in the successive International Meetings that we have organized, we have seen many forms of hatred, discrimination and abuse of the weakest.

We saw this at the meeting dedicated to war refugees, where hatred kills, insults and destroys thousands of lives forever. We also saw this at the meeting on climate change and the plundering of resources, with the hatred exacerbated against environmental activists or those defending their own assets plundered by other countries, companies or multinationals.

The hatred against women is obvious, treated as second-class beings, always more vulnerable because of their own gender, always less protected on migration routes, with sexual violence used as a weapon of war.

In this VII Meeting, which will take place in A Coruña between June 16 and 18, we invite citizens to choose: Hate or Coexistence.

And we do so by proposing an uncomfortable walk through the reality of hatred that runs rampant everywhere.

Through the media and social networks, with hate speech riding on ideas. Through the streets of any city in Europe, the US, or Latin America, with the far right and fascism shouting their slogans, whitewashing their speeches, becoming normal, as photojournalist Jordi Borràs will show us in his images.

With the help of two photographers, the American Sarah Blesener and the Polish Hanna Jarzabek, we can approach the “programming” of children and young people who have become toy soldiers, patriots educated to put themselves first, to put themselves first, to put themselves first. These are strategies that are repeated, whether in Poland, the USA or Russia…

And, of course, citizens will have to stop once again in front of what happened at the Melilla fence on June 24th last year. Javier Bernardo gives us his perspective, which goes far beyond the numbers.

These are numbers that should shame us all: 37 people dead. 77 missing. 470 returned on the spot.

Human rights are being trampled on at the southern border, where our country, our democracy and Europe have decided to outsource their obligations and hand them over to the Kingdom of Morocco, looking the other way.

Fence Melilla 2022. ©Javier Bernardo

Óscar Corral and the Ollo Collective will keep the public sailing in the same sea, urging them to look at the Central Mediterranean, the first European supranational liquid cemetery and to remember what happened in 2018 with the Aquarius ship or to see what happens, day after day, in its waters.

There will also be windows of hope. Photojournalist Nuria López Torres will allow us to glimpse color and respect by looking at her Muxes. Her exhibition captures the daily life, the role played by the Muxes, a true third gender in the Zapotec communities of southern Mexico, accepted and socially protected.

If all of the above will reach the streets of A Coruña in the form of large-format photographs, Red Acampa will also bring voices.

Qualified voices such as that of the former president of Uruguay, Pepe Mujica, who will go live to talk about hate as a political weapon, or that of magistrate-judge Baltasar Garzón who will talk about universal justice as a tool to overcome hate speech.

Amnesty International’s head of domestic policy and researcher, Virginia Álvarez, will present the harsh reality of the decline in human rights. And the head of operations for the MSF ship Geo Barents, Virginia Mielgo, will bring to the audience the harassment suffered by rescue ships that save lives in the Central Mediterranean.

Because if there is one thing that is known, it is that hatred is multifaceted. It can arise from beliefs, prejudices and violence that we have or suffer, from conflicts between groups or from economic problems, inequalities or turbulence and political promises whose unfulfillment frustrates the population.

But it is important to remember that no one is born hating another person because of the color of their skin, or because of their origin or religion, or because of their educational/social/political or economic status. Hatred is an elaboration, a learned response.

And so, in the same way that we learn to hate, we can – or rather, we must – learn to respect, to love, to live in harmony with those who are different. Respect, empathy, solidarity… are essential values, the seed that must be spread so that prejudices do not arise or take on alarming proportions such as those that support fascism or the different forms of violence that are ignited here and there.

In recent times, hate speech has been filtering and settling into the social fabric and the imagination of the world’s population as a drag on discontent or social frustration, riding on fake news, idolatries or public policies that do not respond to all citizens. Hatred grows in disrespectful and dangerous media, it ferments on social networks…

Toy soldiers. ©Sarah Blesener

The reality is that we are facing a crisis of multiple identities aggravated by unfulfilled promises, by a deceitful globalization that broke old structures without a secure counterpart for the people most affected by it.

Speeches and measures that benefit a very small group to the detriment of populations living in misery due to this disastrous, dangerous and unscrupulous capitalist process of globalization. Hatred must be fought from the grassroots.

School is, without a doubt, the first space for prevention, knowledge, reflection and action on good practices because it plays a fundamental role in understanding and respecting differences.

As tempting as it is for public authorities to use this type of discourse, it is precisely they who hold the key to containing it, by applying strict legislation that restricts its persuasive impact.

Peace is much more than the absence of war, it is living together with our differences – of sex, race/ethnicity, language, religion, culture – promoting respect for equality among human beings, universal justice and the active and resilient defense of Human Rights on which, ultimately, such coexistence depends.

The global outlook is not encouraging. Hate speech infiltrates reality. Migrants, millions of them, are no longer seen as human beings and are transformed into “threats”; the extreme right is shouting, ever louder and ever more freely, in the streets of every country… Minorities, those who are different, are increasingly persecuted and discriminated against.

The rights that cost so much to consolidate disappear. The same citizens, sleepy and fearful, give in and renounce them.

Vulnerability is growing and, as if that were not enough, Artificial Intelligence is here to demonstrate that human beings, and with them their values, are completely dispensable realities.

Faced with all this, the only thing that citizens cannot do, should not do, is remain silent.

It’s your turn to choose: hate or coexistence?

Green Opinion Creators #CDO  is a collective blog coordinated by  Arturo Larena , director of Environment and Science at EFEnoticias and   EFEverde

https://efeverde.com/odio-o-convivencia-toca-elegir-por-xose-abad/

 

10/10/2024