The Spanish language is one of our greatest instruments of soft power. And it would also be hard work, if there was the vocation and talent to exercise it.
Therefore, the recent, apparently untimely, barrage fired from the Cervantes Institute in the direction of the Royal Spanish Academy is not innocent.
He lit the fuse, cowardly hiding his hand, Luis García Monterowho was a poet of the “other sentimentality” and today serves as commissioner of official sentimentality as director of the Cervantes Institute, to the displeasure of the Complutense.
The recipient of the invective was Santiago Muñoz Machadojurist of recognized rigor, National Essay Award in 2013 and History Award in 2018.
Muñoz Machado has a trail of publications of the highest level and his performance at the head of a sensitive and strategic institution such as the RAE has been impeccable. He is a State director, with a management background marked by professionalism, innovation and institutional neutrality.
We already know: In our Spain, such excellence does not usually go unpunished.
The director of the RAE, Santiago Muñoz Machado, in the academy’s plenary hall.
Under the mandate of Muñoz Machado, the RAE has maintained a rigorously rationalist profile, calmly and sensibly resisting the innumerable attacks of political power to impose ungrammatical delusions such as those derived from supposedly inclusive language.
In recent years, the RAE has addressed digital modernization, has reinforced its international role and has lowered the volume of those vulgar siren songs that demand obedience not only to what is politically correct but, even worse, to what is politically imposed.
He correctly reported it Arturo Pérez Reverte: The RAE is, like all independent democratic institutions, an obscure object of desire of this government. It is a prestigious entity with global projection that sets the language of more than 600 million Spanish-speaking brothers on both sides of the ocean.
And if these hucksters of social engineering know anything, it is that whoever masters the language defines reality and decides what existswhat can be named and who is left outside the semantic framework, exposed to the ideological elements.
The rumors that place Juan Luis Cebrian as a favorite for his succession, they have intensified the attacks of a government dedicated body and soul to ending all traces of independence in the fundamental organizations of the State. They will not rest until they “tezanize” the RAE, as they have already done with the Constitutional Court, the State Attorney General’s Office or RTVE.
It will not help Cebrián to be one of the most recognized social democratic thinkers of recent decades: His intellectual rejection of the madness derived from Sanchismo disqualifies him as a dangerous fascist.
The absence of skeletons in Muñoz Machado’s neat closet has forced García Montero, today diminished into a poet of circumstance, a mediocre and paniagua battering ram of his master, to accuse him, generically, of having managed money and business, a capital sin of capitalism in the progressive commandments.
“Language is the last trench of freedom. If they occupy the RAE, censorship will no longer be necessary: it will be enough for us to speak as they want”
So critical of other people’s management, García Montero could well reflect, even if it were from his insipid poetry of everyday experience, about his own work at the head of Cervantes, predictably catastrophic.
Embarrassing, for example, was the loss, for four years, of the contract for teaching Spanish in European institutions, which a Belgian academy won for not adjusting the Cervantes offer to the terms of the call.
The appeal that followed such a debacle was also lost, also forcing the suffering Spanish taxpayer to pay the legal costs, unaware of the calamity that occurred, since there was only public record of the shameful episode once it was over.
Instead of resigning, our exalted Granada native cultivated international soirées in favor of regional languages. The nonsense of empty classrooms subsidized by the Ramon Llull or Etxepare Institutes was not enough, so Cervantes had to adjust his barretina and txapela. García Montero also tried out the montera picona, enthusiastically going to the General Meeting of the Principality to claim the official status of the Asturian.
Meanwhile, García Montero responded with characteristic intellectual dishonesty to those of us in civil society who requested support for beleaguered Spanish speakers in various regions of our country.
He then said that the Spanish language was in very good health and was not in danger, as if its rise in Miami or Bogotá compensated for the violation of the rights of speakers in their own country on which the institution he directs depends.
Don’t worry if you can’t educate your child in Spanish.: In Florida more and more people speak it. If you want a bag.
The cultural dream of Sanchismo is a language without dissent: an inclusive, obedient and happy Spanish, in which every word is already purged of risk and thought. A domesticated language for second-rate speakers.
It is worth remembering: language is the last trench of freedom. If they occupy the RAE, censorship will no longer be necessary: it will be enough for us to speak as they want.
*** Carlos Conde Solares is a philologist and professor of Spanish History at Northumbria University.
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