Why Did Rafael Chirbes Hate Ukraine?

Do you want to guess to what Chirbes dedicated the last pages of his diaries?

To how much he hated Ukraine and loved Putin.

Why, you would ask? What is it to him? A dying Spanish writer in the last months of his life who had never been to Ukraine and knew absolutely nothing whatsoever about it. Why would he be possessed by a profound dislike of a country that had never been on his horizon?

The answer is simple. Mass media told him that the 2013 revolution in Ukraine was a revolt of Nazis. Chirbes had spent his entire life reading and thinking about Nazis, and the possibility that some new Nazis were suddenly cropping up at the outskirts of Europe was devastating to him. Putin’s regime advertises itself as fully dedicated to the goal of battling Nazis. So if you are opposed to Nazis, the reasoning goes, you have to be pro-Putin.

I am not sad or disappointed to find out that Chirbes was pro-Putin. Every Spanish and Latin American writer in existence, except for the Colombian Hector Abad Faciolince, is painfully and hysterically pro-Putin. It is only upsetting the first 63 times when an artist you otherwise admire turns out to be what my daughter calls a “dodo head.” After that, you get inured to the whole thing. Hispanic means anti-American, and since nobody is more anti-American than Putin, Hispanic invariably means “passionately in love with the anti-American Putin”.

The reason why I’m mentioning this at all is, once again, to insist that we need to move imaginatively, intellectually, and spiritually away from dwelling on Nazism. It’s not working out well for us. Look at Chirbes. He spent his entire life dwelling on a big evil of the remote past, and as a result of that, he supported and celebrated an identical evil of the present.

It gets really funny at times. At one point in the diaries, Chirbes bemoans the increased criminality and mountains of trash that migrants bring to the area where he lives. He describes these migrants as “Africans and Ukrainians.” Given that there is absolutely no way in existence he could have distinguished a Ukrainian from a Russian or a Belarusian, it’s clear that the choice to identify dirty criminal migrants as Ukrainian was ideological.

Chirbes is still my favorite writer, and I will continue bugging the living daylights out of everybody with him. If I cared about the absolutely unhinged hatred of Ukrainians among Hispanic writers, I’d have to quit my profession, and it’s kind of too late for that.