Bernardo Kliksberg (*)
The world is becoming more and more uncertain. On the one hand, there is a technological revolution considered one of the greatest in history. On the other hand, essential questions are multiplying and serious problems are advancing.
Among the main concerns are the following:
An Unstoppable Fire
California is considered the sixth largest economy in the world. A key city, Los Angeles is currently facing a mega-fire that is assuming ever worse proportions. Vast areas of land, forests, houses are burning. Intense winds are spreading the fires. All the usual measures are failing. Ever larger areas are being evacuated, the government has asked for urgent help from the federal authorities and even the direct collaboration of Canada and Mexico. Insurance companies are cancelling their policies. It is the expression of what global warming and the breakdown of environmental balances mean. The year 2024 was the hottest in history.
Hunger
One hundred and fifty Nobel Prize winners and World Food Programme prize winners have written a letter demanding that priority be given to the growth of famines. There are 700 million people who do not know what they will eat tomorrow. In a world where there is food available for 12 billion people, food security for the most disadvantaged has not been guaranteed.
The Amazon
The most important forest on the planet is drying up due to illegal exploitation, predatory deforestation, tree felling, and pollution. Eliane Brum, a prominent environmentalist, wrote the book “The Amazon: Journey to the Center of the World.” She points out: “If we continue to lose it, we will be left without the largest absorber of carbon dioxide that is poisoning the atmosphere…it is not that the indigenous people are in the Amazon, they are the Amazon.” Protecting them as the current Brazilian government is doing is preserving those who know best how to care for the forest and love it most.
Holocaust
A global survey (ADL 2024) has found that 20% of the total population does not know that the Holocaust, the great Nazi massacre of Jews, took place. A hellish lack of education and information that paves the way for new neo-Nazisms and racisms.
The Beast of Auschwitz
Maria Mandel, Rudolf Hess's second in command, murdered 500 people in Auschwitz with extreme cruelty and sadism. She delighted in using her little finger to decide their fate: gas chambers or forced labour camps, or, if they were pregnant women, reserving them for Mengele's experiments, whom she assisted. She was hanged after being tried in 1948.
A Historic Success
In 1960, Israel's prime minister and founder, David Ben-Gurion, ordered the secret capture of Adolf Eichmann, the main person responsible for implementing the Holocaust, who was hiding in Argentina. In 1961, in an open trial, with full guarantees, and hundreds of witnesses, he was sentenced to death. Ben-Gurion later explained: "It was the great way to show the whole world the abominable crime so that it would not forget it." He was right, but it was not enough. The danger of Nazism remains.
Fighting for democracy
Anti-democratic conspiracies invade social spaces today, generating hatred towards women, people of color, anti-Semitism, and multiple forms of racism. But there is also the opposite. The ultra-conservative president of South Korea attempted a coup d'état to suppress Congress and govern dictatorially; the great majority of Congress opposed it and suspended him from office. The police went to arrest him for investigation and were repelled by his personal bodyguards, who numbered hundreds. They returned with high-tech means and this time managed to take him away. In Romania, the presidential election of a neo-Nazi was annulled by the courts due to open fraud carried out in his favor by disinformation gangs serving Putin.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Proteins
Nobel Prize winner in chemistry David Baker announced that his team has managed to use AI to create proteins that do not exist in nature. This will allow the “democratization” of access to proteins. It is already being applied to some of the so-called forgotten diseases, which are rarely addressed by laboratories.
A Conclusion
The problems outlined must be included in the public agenda and addressed collectively by alliances of well-managed public policies, responsible companies and citizen participation.
(*) Advisor to various international organizations. Doctor Honoris Causa of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His new work “Where is social responsibility going in the world” has appeared (2024, Council of the Judiciary of the City of Buenos Aires). kliksberg@aol.com