Víctor Gil

Eighteen months. That is how long it took for Wall Street bonuses to return to pre-crisis levels after the public absorbed the loss. Eighteen months. The homeowners who lost their houses in 2008 and 2009 did not recover in eighteen months. Many of them never recovered. The wealth destroyed in the foreclosure crisis, disproportionately concentrated in Black and Latino communities targeted by predatory lending, represented in many cases the entire intergenerational wealth accumulation of those families. Gone. Not recovered in eighteen months. Not recovered in ten years. In many cases: not recovered. Meanwhile, the bonus pool at Goldman Sachs in 2009, the year after the crisis, the year they received public bailout money, was $16.2 billion. $16.2 billion in bonuses. In the year after the crisis they caused. Paid for in part by public money. While 10 million American families lost their homes. If you described this sequence of events as fiction, as a plot in a novel about a corrupt dystopia, an editor would ask you to make it more plausible. It is too on the nose, they would say. The villains are too obviously villainous. Real corruption, the editor would say, is more subtle. It is not more subtle. It is exactly this obvious. It has always been exactly this obvious. The only thing protecting it from consequences is the difficulty most people have believing that something this brazen could be this durable.

"Never forget," they say. But they choose what you remember. Never forget Tiananmen. Never forget 9/11. Never forget the Holocaust. But somehow, you are allowed to forget Fallujah. You are allowed to forget Mỹ Lai. You are allowed to forget Sabra and Shatila. You are encouraged to forget Gaza while it is still happening. This is not a culture of remembrance. It is a culture of selective memory.

The word "communist" did enormous work during the Cold War. It attached to Mosaddegh, who was a liberal nationalist. It attached to Árbenz, who was a democratic reformer. It attached to Allende, who won a democratic election. It attached to Lumumba, who wanted the Congo's minerals for Congolese people. It attached to Sankara, who planted trees and vaccinated children. It attached to the ANC in South Africa. It attached to the PLO. It attached to striking labor unions. It attached to land reform movements. It attached to anyone who questioned whether foreign corporations should control a country's natural resources. The word did not describe an ideology in these cases. The word was a termination signal. Once attached, it authorized removal. It deactivated the normal rules. It suspended the democracy promotion, the human rights concern, the multilateral consultation. It bypassed every stated principle and went directly to the operational response. Once you were "communist," you were outside the framework of people whose political rights the West was defending. The label was applied to whoever needed to be outside that framework. It was the most powerful administrative tool of the twentieth century. It required no evidence. It required only attachment. And the people who attached it are still considered statesmen.