Intellectuals Unmasked

When we say a nation is a world superpower, do we know what we’re really talking about? Any country considered a global force should boast political maturity, economic stableness, military force, natural resources and productivity.

This amalgam of fortitudes is usually called “hard-power”. But a nation’s international leadership is evaluated by its “soft-power” or what we might call the cultural industry, including all relevant institutions and companies that define national identity and convey –or sell– it to the rest of the world. On a global scale United States is No.1 in soft-power, while China holds one of the last places in the ranking. Despite Europe’s reluctance to admit it, American culture (media, television, film, literature, music, lifestyle, fashion) is to a large extent, today’s Western culture, with English as the bridge language and Spanish occupying a prominent second place. In our Western World, two main cultural formats are movies –younger generations now tend to reach literature through audiovisual products– and pop music, which is actually contemporary poetry.

Though modern-day culture does not necessarily have a political content, many of the liberties and rights enjoyed in the Western World have been conquered thanks to the activism of intellectuals and artists who used their work to fight for the society they believed in. Now that Western society is established, many of the members of this intelligentsia seem to have lost their purpose. Protest song writers of the sixties and seventies like Pete Seeger, Tom Lehrer, Joan Baez, Jacques Brel, Georges Brassens or even John Lennon are figures of the past. In Spain it is unclear what singer/songwriter Joaquín Sabina has been protesting about these last decades. And since he is anti-war, why would he now be blasting the international community for acting as “imperialistic cowards incapable of wiping ISIS out”?