Paris Demetriades
From the ridiculous, but not funny, antics of Panayiotou, who appeared in a video with a clown’s nose to announce the creation of a new political party, to the tragically comic, Hollywood-style show staged in Sharm El-Sheikh to supposedly announce peace in the Middle East by the egomaniacal U.S. president Donald Trump, the circusification of politics reached a peak last week both inside and outside Cyprus.
Of course, Fidias as a clown and Trump as a peacemaker are two incidents incomparable in scale and significance, yet they both stem from the same grotesque phenomenon: the shocking first-level trivialization of politics. We live in an era of unprecedented absurdity in the public sphere, where the more uneducated, brazen, and clueless you appear, the greater the attention and importance you receive.
From the creation of a new party in tiny Cyprus to massive events of enormous geopolitical tension and significance, like the equally ridiculous but not funny spectacle staged by the disturbed global leader in Egypt for the blood-soaked Gaza Strip, it becomes clear that sobriety and rationality are everywhere in a comatose state. Long live demagoguery and populism.
As for the farce of the so-called Peace Summit in Egypt, where does one even begin, and with what stomach: The glorification in the Israeli Knesset, earlier the same day, of the greatest massacres of our time as the greatest peacemakers? Or the fact that, in his usual spoiled-five-year-old manner, Donald Trump even congratulated Netanyahu amid enthusiastic applause for the “amazing” way he had used American weaponry? In other words: congratulations, Mr. Prime Minister, for the thousands of civilians you’ve murdered, you did it with great success and efficiency. Well done. And to say it with no moral restraint, without a hint of hesitation.
Moreover, the completely normalized, outrageous narrative of the war-torn Gaza Strip as an… excellent asset to be exploited, while countless dismembered corpses remain buried under the rubble, leaves one wondering if even commenting would sound petty or moralizing.
The deification of Erdoğan by Trump as yet another grand peacemaker, and the announcement that Turkish authorities have begun deploying specialists to recover bodies buried under Gaza’s ruins, is another story that, especially for us in Cyprus, might be best left uncommented upon.
Not to dismiss everything, of course: the implementation of the ceasefire (let’s hope it lasts forever) is a positive development, as was the extremely heartening and relieving news of the release of thousands of Palestinians and twenty Israelis who, after unimaginable hardships, returned home. What kind of “home” the Palestinians returned to is best left unmentioned. It is, however, certainly significant that after two years, the children of Gaza woke up without the deafening roar of military drones and the thunderous, deadly explosions overhead. Every sensible person hopes that the ceasefire will last and that peace will prevail for all peoples in this embattled region. With Trump’s narcissistic, pathological antics and the complexity of the issue, expectations must remain modest. But hope persists.
One of the sharpest comments in recent days, I believe, came from Aristotle University Political Science professor Nikolas Sevastakis: This, he said, “is the era of dealers at every level, where after the military orgy comes the commercial frenzy, and in between, the glorification of the guilty.”
P.S. The fact that many in Cyprus swelled with pride at Christodoulides’ “historic achievement” in being part of the farce in Sharm El-Sheikh, I believe, is indicative of the decadence that, along with the rest of the world, we too experience as a state and society.
