A ghost haunts the world… from time immemorial, but we may now be living in perhaps the worst of worlds, where almost anything can be shattered in the name of malice and insult. In every country (in all, including mine, and to a high degree) the care of good manners is being forgotten, and now the insult appears as the sad, yet celebrated, sign that everything may be said against the other, and vice versa. From the North of Trump to the circles of Putin, but also in our own territories, where I write and for which I write, there are terrible ways of insulting; neglect is not the only way to explain it.
The insult, as English professor Paul Preston told me when I conducted a survey about this scourge for the book Against the Insult, “is not merely verbal violence; it is the creation of fear, and therefore of hatred, among citizens, to instill cowardice or, in any case, a mistreatment of human dignity.” The insult is not merely a word, a fallacious expression, a bad wish expressed with verbal violence, spoken or written, anonymous or signed with a real name, I myself said in 2012, when in my own country the Spanish contempt began and insult became part of national life. Now this is the time in which the world is already disordered. It grips political parties, journalists, and the citizenry…
Manuel Rivas, perhaps the best Spanish poet, author of the book The Language of the Butterflies, which centers on the Spanish Civil War, told me when I asked him to speak to me about insult for that book: “The insult that offends the most is the one that arises from a process of maltreatment, the one perpetrated by a tormentor against a victim, and which can say, as Paul Valéry said, the surrogate of an assassination. There have been many historical cases, but one that crosses the limit of the imaginable was the order given by a Francoist official to tear from the Civil Registry the page bearing the birth record of Santiago Casares Quiroga. In justification of such an order, along with a string of insults, it was said that Casares Quiroga —a liberal, tolerant, and very educated man— did not deserve to belong to the human species, and therefore his name should be erased forever from history and future generations should not know of his existence.”
“The worst insult,” said Rivas, “is the one that forms part of a language that aims to dominate. The insult that, consciously, is issued to grease the gears of the friend/enemy dialectic. There is also another dimension: the ‘neighborhoodist’ insult is a tool of the mediocre. The more insults produced, the lower the informational quality.”
As a journalist, I have lived the insulter’s bravado firsthand.
When the dictator Francisco Franco had just died, in November 1975, Blas Piñar appeared in Tenerife, my hometown, then the most visible leader of fascism in Spain. We were there, after the dictator’s death, waiting for Blas Piñar. He stretched it out, perhaps to fit his own timetable: the timetable of bad manners.
Before his arrival a sizeable team of employees appeared to frisk us as if we were criminals. They were tall and strong, as if they had come from the jungle, and then he arrived, Blas Piñar, who gave us a lesson in rage and in nothing. Spain was still Franco’s. We were all afraid, because the dictatorship had not ended and that man was one of the mirrors remaining from that nightmare that had begun in 1936, with the civil war.
Later, after I had been in London as a correspondent for El País, I experienced in Madrid a ruinous afternoon but not unexpected. In one of the center bars there was a group of thugs like those who had attacked us in Tenerife. Suddenly the thugs grew strong against those of us there and they forced us to sing the “Cara al Sol”, which was still the Falangist anthem that years later seemed obsolete. Until recently.
Now the fascists have long been roaming the streets to claim that Franco did not die, or at least that he still lingers as the resurrected sequel to that war and that massacre. Spain, once again, breaking apart, shouting at one another, once again understanding itself through insults.
Again, “Cara al Sol” is sung. As if Franco and a group of his successors were among us, offered once more to be part of a past that repeats itself as the new threat. The streets become part of Francoism again, which now goes by the old name again. The upcoming elections, to be held at the end of November, seem to presage radical changes, which will be joined by those who yearn for that era, still young in years, that time of blood and sorrow, exile, and forgetting.
It’s not that that era had ended: it had merely waned. Now all of that is revived as if it never happened, and it is not unusual to feel the same fear that, on that day of Blas Piñar’s arrival, set us firm against a group of exalted ones who refused to bid farewell to the war. And once again in Spain it settles, gradually at first and then abruptly, in the ranks of fear.
But in this era, when one thought those dark swallows would not return, neither Blas Piñar nor his henchmen of that time remain. Yet those who sing those hymns, in bars, on streets, in cities, and everywhere, resemble those who, as soon as the dictator died, dedicated themselves to glorifying him. Franco is sung in the streets as if he were coming back. Or as if he were already here, ruling.
They say his name so much, again, that it feels as if one day he will appear somewhere explaining how to end, as he did, freedom. That freedom was not made of plaster but of people. In the name of Franco rise those who would destroy those who are not, by far, of the various factions that swarm in search of creating fear and meanness.
Now the world is inhabited by little Hitler-like figures who are willing to chant the “Cara al Sol” that once put Spain on a war footing. The war lasted fifty years, between jokes and seriousness, and now the bugles ring not only from Spanish rage but also from the support of powerful countries that have decided that Europe should dissolve or break apart.
A few years ago, in August 2017, when this sense began to emerge as part of what is happening and what is feared, I wrote for El País an article about the nature of what is now also occurring. I titled “The Invincible Elements of the Insult”, which dealt with what now also seems ruinous and hard to live with in a country that already suffered, in 1981, a coup that ended in the Cortes until the government and the king of the time prevented a future that seemed icy.
That model for assembling was then a terrible threat that relied only on insult, aimed at leftist politicians, but also at citizens who did not share what some believed. The insult was what it is now, but in this era it is energized by devices that did not exist before. Now shouting against some and against others is part of a kind of return to bad manners, to stubbornness that summons rage.
The insult, in short, is the companion of bad language, which can be insulting in itself, as the now-academic and lifelong journalist Alex Grijelmo told me in that book. The trash language, said Emilio Lledó, is based on the insult. Today, here, and around the world, insult is now a mode of speaking that no one finds frightening anymore. Now to insult, in the streets, in newspapers, on television, indeed around the world, is a deadly entertainment for those who would kill the other if necessary.
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