The opening of the Center’s year-round activities of Studies of Economic and Social Reality (Ceres), made in the golf Clubhad the participation of John CarlinBritish journalist and author of the book that inspired the film Invictus, who focused much of his career on the politics of that country and forged a very close relationship with Nelson Mandelaicon in the fight against apartheid and former president of South Africa.
His conference was precisely focused on telling a series of anecdotes that involved him in his personal and professional relationship with the South African leader.
The presence of the intellectual and the richness of his anecdote with Mandela motivated the interest of a prominent audience of listeners that included, among others, the president of the Chamber of Commerce and Services, Julio César Lestidothe president of Ancap, Alejandro Stipanicic, and the presidential candidates Guido Manini Ríos and Jorge Gandini, among others.
Carlin began his presentation by positioning the figure of Nelson Mandela as a reference for peace in complex times in history, comparing it with the present and the need for new leadership to emerge in that sense.
“It is still a long way off for you and I hope it stays that way, but the fact is that the world in general is now in a dangerous stage of war. There is something in Europe, which evokes the atmosphere of the thirties of the last century. Many countries in Western Europe are rearming, Sweden and Finland who always opposed entering the NATO, they just did it. Today there are more than 100 armed conflicts in the world,” he stated.
For the writer, these episodes have “as a seed the Polarizationwhich is a word that we use a lot, but it is still the correct word to define our times.”
“The problem with polarization is that the political conversation becomes a kind of dialogue of the deaf and exchange of insults, where politics becomes a game and a sport without rules in which the agenda that each person has becomes almost irrelevant. party has,” Carlin added.
“The idea of serving the public is very secondary to winning the game and everything is subordinated to that and if one is careless it can be a very slippery path down. From there you can go to dehumanize the rivaldemonize it and once you get to that, it becomes a license to kill and you reach the extreme that you see now, for example in Israel-Palestine“, warned the intellectual.
“I am sure that here they are not absolutely immune to global contagion. You have to be very careful because you can go down that slippery path very easily and you have to keep in mind that the justicethe freedom and the peace In general, this is what entails prosperity.
John Carlin was controversial when he opined that “it is no guarantee the democracyI think that young people in particular today take it for granted and neglect it like a garden, they don’t water it, they don’t put fertilizers in it, but the truth is that democracy has occupied a very small percentage of the history of the humanity,” he concluded.
When it came to anecdotes about Carlin’s relationship with Nelson Mandela and his entourage, the journalist defined the historical moment in which the leader was involved in South Africa as one of “a lot of violence and at the same time an admirable negotiation process that has been the basis for many negotiations that have been done in other countries such as North Ireland either Colombia”. “Everyone has studied the South African who was the one who patented this way of negotiating peace and the transition to democracy,” he recalled.
Finally, Carlin expressed that coherence is the main virtue that characterizes the social and political construction of the figure of Mandela. “It is the essence of everything he preached and everything he fought for. One captures that integrity, one detects when a leader is coherent and if he transmits it with that capacity for conviction that Mandela knew how to have,” he concluded.
Source: Ambito
