Foreword by Manuel Talens, member of the BRussells Tribunal Advisory Committee, member of the web collectives Cubadebate, Rebelión and Tlaxcala, the network of translators for linguistic diversity: About heroes, fake heroes and the decline of capitalist mythology (Is there anything in the world that money can’t buy?)

2008, the year that is coming to an end will be remembered for many things: George Bush, the most sanguinary tyrant in recent history, gave way to Barack Obama, the first Black Usamerican president. Several Latin American countries followed their anti-imperialist path and consolidated their popular and democratic victories. The resistant fighters in Iraq and Afghanistan kept their occupiers busy and in the defensive while the whole African continent continued to die a little bit more, a victim of multinationals, arm traffickers and middle-sized post-colonial powers. But above all these events 2008 will be remembered for the beginning of the worst financial crisis in history, a crisis that not only mirrors in many ways the one of 1929 but is succeeding on its relentless destruction of all previously considered inviolable myths of capitalism. Let’s review some of them:

For the first time in the not so long history of our “democratic” bourgeois democracies the unthinkable has happened: a Western state ― Iceland ― went bankrupt and I have no doubt that others will follow. A second myth that is now something of the past is the supposed economic solidity of multinational giants like American Motors, Chrysler or big megabanks all over the world. They were hard as a rock but now have proven to have feet of clay. Who will trust them again if people have lost their faith and faith was their “only” real asset?

On the political front the crisis has been devastating for our former socialist parties, nowadays reconverted to social democracy. Capitalism has never allowed a true left wing party to control power through the vote. This axiom should have alerted left-wing voters to distrust the easiness with which social democratic parties were permitted to govern in our Western hemisphere. But the political scam was not even there: it was instead on the left-wing rhetoric social democrats used to lure possible voters and to keep alive the marvellous fiction of being able to choose between right and left. There was not ever such a choice: all social democrats are on the right. Now the crisis has burst open this left-right myth as these so-called socialists on government (i.e. Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Hungary, the UK, etc.) are financing the rich thieves with public money in order to save the failing capitalist economy they have always supported.

Even one of the last bastions of decorum is now under suspicion. The Nobel Prize of Medicine, the ultimate honour of science, apparently can also be bought! Is there anything in the world that money can’t buy?

And last but not least the current financial crisis has destroyed the myth of capitalist heroes. Who were they? Millionaire sport stars, decadent singers, Hollywood famous faces with six digit salaries, soldiers of imperialist armies honoured when they return home after having raped girls from poor countries and having killed babies and innocent people… as well as Wall Street brokers like Bernie Maldoff, who used to give big sums to charities and was revered for it until the financial crisis left him naked and showed the real face of capitalism. Is it possible to be a loving, affectionate human being when the thirst of power and accumulation of capital are the main targets in life? I repeat: is there anything in the world that money can’t buy?

My answer is yes: money can’t buy dignity. Dear reader, the article you are about to read deals with examples of just the opposite to these fake capitalist heroes. Dirk Adriaensens presents them as they are: simple human beings who did great actions risking their lives and they did it for the sake of dignity and love. There was no money involved on it. They even didn’t pretend to be heroic and this is precisely why they are heroes. Their flesh is not papier-mâché like the flesh of capitalist heroes. Greed is not their business. They are just left-wingers.― Manuel Talens

This Prologue published on http://www.tlaxcala.es/pp.asp?reference=6627&lg=en

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