"Against tolerance", Rafa Villaró


AGAINST TOLERANCE (I)

Tolerance, at least in Catalan and Spanish (in Roman Castilian), means that, in another linguistic record, we express as 'to forgive life'. And that can only be done by who can. That is: who has power, ability to coerce with respect to the tolerated.

When you talk about tolerating someone, you are being defined as dependent on the "good" will of others. And one is tolerant in the sense that one is aware of one's capacity to get rid of those who are tolerated.

The tolerated is that person or collective, which has to condition his life to that of the tolerant, collective or person. Aspiring, in the best of cases, to be ignored. At least in the tolerated aspects of his life.

Who wants / can aspire to be tolerated?
Who can - aspire to tolerate ?, to be tolerant?

Who tolerates others part of the denial of these. Although, instead of eliminating them, it lends them a status, always subordinate and provisional, in their own world.

Tolerance does not need the (re) knowledge of the tolerated. Only from a 'labeling' - meaning - from the unquestioned codes themselves.

Precisely the antagonistic attitude of respect.

AGAINST TOLERANCE (II)

When a Spanish citizen tolerates that another Spanish citizen speaks in some official Spanish language that is not theirs, they do not have an attitude, a premise, a value that governs their performance with respect to others, different from that which governed Milosevic (or Stalin , or Hitler, or a ...) before the Kosovo Albanians, the non-Orthodox of Bosnia, ...

When a European citizen, conscious of the discrimination of the gypsy communities (for example), brandishes tolerance as a way of integration of those underprivileged, it does not differ much -nothing- from the one who goes into the house of Another with the enlightened intention to offer him life and salvation at the low price of self-renunciation understood in the terms set by the tolerant.

Being tolerated is nothing more than a permanent reminder of one's impotence, of being at the mercy of the good intentions of the tolerant. Good intentions that, on the other hand, remain, as any intention, subject to the sociomaterial circumstances of the moment.
So, how many tolerant in times of bonanza and margin for complacency remain in it in times of conflict and need?

We can not trust coexistence, social peace, paternalism of the good-natured alterophobe (always coyunturally), but respect between different, between different (respect between equals is nothing but self-respect, praiseworthy, but socially indifferent).

Tolerance means in Castilian what, in another level of language, we express how to forgive life. And that can only be done by those who have it (tolerance is never established as symmetrical, that would be a balance of forces).

Given the good intentions of the State with -one- identity, the State guarantor of all.

Rafa Villaró, 2001.