My name is Mon González Ferrán.
In 2010, I officially changed my name to ‘Mon,’ which means ‘silence’ in Gujarati (the mother tongue of Mahatma Gandhi) and ‘world’ in Catalan, the language of my matrilineal lineage.
I was born in Salamanca (Spain) on 5 September 1970.
I have been a vegetarian since I was 18.
I studied Economics at university between 1988 and 1993.
In 1995, I took the competitive exams to enter the Spanish diplomatic service, passed them, and took the complementary course at the Diplomatic School. If you are interested in finding out how one joins the Spanish diplomatic service, click here (currently only available in Castilian Spanish).
From my learning period, I am uploading two documents: my university thesis or dissertation on Russia: Reform Process and Market; and my final project for the Diplomatic School on the revolution in Chiapas (Mexico): Chiapas: Causes and Strategies (both, for the time being, only available in Castilian Spanish).
I joined the Spanish diplomatic service in 1996, and I worked since then both in Madrid (the capital of Spain), and in our embassies around the world. If you want to know what a Spanish diplomat does, what the hierarchy is and how you are promoted, click here (currently only available in Castilian Spanish).
Since February 2024, I am retired due to health reasons.
My physical Monworld is in Spain: in the winter, in my flat in Madrid; and in the summer, in a house in Cueva del Hierro (Cuenca), my village of adoption, where I was elected Councillor in the municipal elections of May 2023 for +Cuenca Now—Depopulated Spain, and where I cultivate an organic vegetable garden.
Below, I will tell you in detail:
- how I learned my eleven languages;
- my professional career as a Spanish diplomat;
- how I went about click here.
In the Health and Spirituality tabs (both in Monanalysis), at the beginning of each tab, I also recount my personal experience, which serves as a complement to what is said in this tab about myself.
ABOUT HOW I LEARNED MY ELEVEN LANGUAGES...
Laying a good theoretical foundation either by living in the country or studying at the OSL
Castilian is the language I learned as a child, so my mother tongue.
When I was 10, I spent a school year at a boarding school in the south of England and learned English.
I then spent several summers in France and learned French.
From the age of 14, I began studying in the afternoons after school at the Official School of Languages (OSL) in Alicante (Spain). I started with Russian, then I added Arabic the following year, and then German and Italian the year after that.
The Official Schools of Languages (OSL) are public centers, very affordable (around £130 per school year) and their methodology is so good that if you follow it conscientiously (each language has six levels, i.e. six school years), you can end up mastering those languages, as I did.
In addition, the EOIs have level exams, so if you already have some knowledge of a language, you take the level exam and they place you in the course that corresponds to your level, so you don’t have to start from scratch. That’s what I did with English, French and Catalan.
Before continuing with my story, I would like to explain that in Spain, in addition to Castilian (which is known abroad as ‘Spanish’), there are three other official languages: (1) Galician, which is very similar to Portuguese and is a co-official language in Galicia; (2) Catalan, and although some people consider Valencian and Balearic to be languages independent of Catalan, others, like me, consider the three (Catalan, Valencian and Balearic) to be dialectal variants of the same language spoken in Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and the Valencian Community; and (3) Euskara, also known in Castilian as Basque, which is co-official in the Basque Country and Navarre.
Both Castilian and the first two languages are derived from Latin, i.e. they were brought by the Romans during their conquest. Euskara, on the other hand, is related to the languages spoken by the Iberians, the peoples who inhabited the Iberian Peninsula (now Spain and Portugal) before the arrival of the Romans, and is the oldest indigenous language spoken without interruption on the Iberian Peninsula (in Iberia).
So, I learned Catalan as a teenager at secondary school in Alicante. Although it was the mother tongue of my maternal grandparents (which is why I said above that it was the language of my matrilineal lineage), they had to emigrate to Castile during the terrible Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), and as it was illegal (and also very frowned upon) to speak Catalan during General Franco’s dictatorship (1939-1975), my grandmother and grandfather raised their daughters in Castilian Spanish.
During the five months I spent as a trainee civil servant at the Diplomatic School in 1996, I chose Portuguese, which I began to learn then and continued to do so on my own, in an autodidactic way.
Then, in Bulgaria, between 1997 and 2000, I learned Bulgarian, building on my knowledge of Russian.
And finally, in 2012, I embarked on the adventure of teaching myself the five levels of Basque using the Bakarka method. It was an immense pleasure. And, as I have always done whenever I have read a book in my life, I wrote down the corrections and sent them to the Elkar publishing house. I am uploading the comments on the five books and the final letter here (Bakarka 1 to 5 and final letter). It was a gesture of love from my heart for the Basque language as a way of honoring the multilingualism of our country, Spain.
Perfecting them through practice: scholarships
I was lucky enough to be able to study and/or work around the world to perfect these languages, mainly thanks to scholarships:
- In the summer of 1986, when I was sixteen, I spent the three summer months in Weldergoven (Hennef, Germany) working as an au pair, looking after a nine-year-old girl with a physical disability called Nicole, who had immense patience and was the best German teacher on the planet…
- At the age of 17, I was awarded two scholarships, one from the Spain-USSR Association – the cultural arm of the Communist Party – and another from the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and one scholarship began on the day the other ended, so I spent eight months studying Russian language and culture in Moscow (1988-1989), where I came of age with a notorious vodka binge (and I decided that, being alone in the world as I was, drinking was dangerous, so I never touched alcohol again). Here is a video of one of the first events I took part in, back in Spain, as a Russian interpreter, in January 1990: the twinning of the cities of Alicante and Riga (Latvia).
- In the summer of 1990, I was awarded a scholarship for a three-month internship at Daimler Benz in Gaggenau (Germany) and continued to improve my German.
- After completing the first three years of Economics at the University of Alicante, I was very fortunate to be awarded a scholarship from the European Tri-National Programme (a variant of the Erasmus Programme, which no longer exists) and I did my fourth year of Economics in Aachen (Germany); and the fifth at Napier University in Edinburgh (Scotland, United Kingdom), which meant that I ended up with a double degree: a degree in Economics from Alicante and a BA Honours Commerce from Napier.
- In the summer of 1993, I was awarded a scholarship from the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and took a two-month intensive Arabic course at the Burguiba Institute in Tunis.
- In 1994, I was awarded a scholarship from ICEX (Spanish Institute for Foreign Trade) and spent eight months working at COFIDES (the Spanish development bank) in Madrid (Spain) and four months at DEG (Deutsche Entwicklungsgesellchaft, the German development bank) in Cologne (Germany).
Perfecting them through practice: traveling
Another important incentive for practising these languages was my passion for traveling, and I have lived in or visited more than fifty countries in Europe, America, Africa and Asia. You can find accounts of two of these trips in ‘Monstories’. Hopefully, I will be able to upload more over time.
In summary
In summary, I believe that it is important, for any new language you wish to study, to:
- Establish a good theoretical foundation. If you are reading this from Spain, I would definitely recommend the Official School of Languages.
- Try to improve your language skills by applying for scholarships.
- Look for opportunities to practice by travelling to countries where those languages are spoken. There are many ways to travel, including working as an au pair, which does not require a lot of money. In addition, nowadays with social media, there are many people who travel and post their experiences online. I encourage you to take advantage of this to practice the languages you have already learned, as languages are the best vehicle to the soul of other human beings.
- Throughout the process, it is essential not to be afraid of making mistakes or looking ridiculous, and to throw yourself into speaking the other languages. Be brave and witty.
Getting into an eleven yards shirt
Finally, in Castilian Spanish, we use the expression ‘meterse en camisas de once varas’, which if translated word by word, would be “to get into an eleven yards shirt”. This expression can be translated into English as “getting yourself into a tight spot”, i.e. when someone meddles in a matter that is none of his/her business and, in addition, can get him/her into unnecessary trouble. Well, I am in my own particular ‘eleven yard tight spot’: the challenge of building this heterodox website in my precious eleven languages.
ABOUT MY PROFESSIONAL CAREER…
Below, I list the main positions I held between 1996 and 2024, and recount some anecdotes from my time in them:
1. Head of Service for North Africa, first, and then for the Middle East (1996-1997) at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation (MAEC) in Madrid. I fondly remember a meeting between the then Minister of Foreign Affairs, Abel Matutes, and the then President of the Palestinian National Authority, Yasser Arafat, at the Palacio de Viana, back in late 1996, where I was able to talk with Arafat and his team for the first time. I believe that was where my personal and intimate commitment to the sovereignty and statehood of Palestine was forged.
2. Consul of Spain to Bulgaria (1997-2000). As I arrived there speaking very good Russian, and the two languages are very similar, from the outset I was able to understand all the visa files without the need for translation, which greatly lightened the workload of the Consulate staff.
One issue that I found very moving from the outset was international adoption. In the three years I was there, nearly 300 children left Bulgarian orphanages to be adopted by Spanish parents. I have kept in touch with some of them and it has been wonderful to see them grow and develop in such a positive way.
I am also particularly proud of having successfully completed the file for the late registration of the birth of a Spanish citizen, the son of an exiled Republican who was born in the 1940s in the Czech Republic and who, at the end of the 20th century, when I arrived at the Consulate, was still stateless and was finally able to obtain Spanish nationality.
I also served as Embassy Secretary in charge of relations with North Macedonia, where I travelled once a month, including during the difficult period of the Kosovo war. I managed to establish a good friendship with the late President Boris Trajkovski, who sadly died in a helicopter accident, and I participated in the rapprochement between him and the Albanian-Macedonian leader Menduh Thaçi.
3. Head of the Balkans Unit (2000-2003) at the MAEC. Of the many trips I made to the area and the many issues I dealt with, I was particularly proud of having drafted the first note for decision that launched the process of opening the Spanish Embassy in Albania (a slow process which, including a change of government, was not completed until 2006). I also greatly enjoyed the lectures on the Balkans that I gave at the CESEDN (Centre for Advanced National Defense Studies).
This was the time of the illegal war in Iraq, waged by the Azores trio (US President Bush Jr., Spanish Prime Minister Aznar and British Prime Minister Blair) without any mandate or backing from the United Nations. It was a war waged by a trio acting on their own. A group of colleagues from the diplomatic service were firmly convinced that this war was illegal and ethically absurd, so we drafted a letter and I took it upon myself to circulate it among some 200 or 300 people in the Spanish diplomatic service to collect their signatures. In the end, only eleven of us signed it (my lucky number eleven again!). The then Under-Secretary (the Under-Secretary is the head of the diplomatic service) wrote to all of us asking us to confirm in writing that we had signed the letter. That letter took its toll on some people in the short term. However, shortly afterwards there was a change of government in Spain and all of us who signed it [except me, as I did not apply for anything because I was very happy in my next job – see point 5] were appointed to positions of the highest importance. Since it did not serve to stop an illegal war, at least the courage of that tiny fraction of colleagues who did sign it was rewarded.
4. Principal Secretary of the Selection Board for the Diplomatic Service (2001-2002). There I realized the power of empathy and how important it is to help women position themselves in worlds that were still very male-dominated at the time. There was a young lady who was taking the exams for the tenth time and was very nervous (which is logical and normal), so nervous that she couldn’t open the envelope containing her written exam, which she had to read out loud before the Selection Board. Without thinking twice, I got up, stood behind her, placed my hands on hers, put the envelope on the table and she managed to open it. That helped her relax, she was able to read her fantastic exam and she passed it.
After the selection process was over, I wrote a note to the then Undersecretary of the MAEC addressing the issue of gender in the competitive examination, which I invite you to read (currently only available in Castilian Spanish).
Finally, I would like to point out that my computer skills were well above average at the time (thanks to the year I spent studying in Scotland) and I made every effort to ensure that, at the end of each exam, the marks were uploaded to the Diplomatic School’s platform. We were the first Selection Board to do so, and since then it has been done on a regular basis, although previously we did it at the end of each day and now we wait until the end of each test. Thanks to the deputy secretary of the Selection Board, Elena Madrazo, and our beloved board member, Miguel Díaz-Pache, for their support in this battle, which at the time seemed rather quixotic.
5. Counsellor for Culture and Cooperation of Spain to the Dominican Republic (2003-2007). That was perhaps the best period of my professional career on a personal level, as my daughter was between 6 and 10 years old and was the happiest person in the world in the huge house with a swimming pool we rented in Santo Domingo.
And I threw myself, in my free time, into the Taíno culture, the indigenous people who inhabited the Greater Antilles before the arrival of the Spanish, especially the lesser-known aspect of femininity in the Taíno culture. In 2005, with my own resources, I organised the first celebration in the Dominican Republic of 9 August, the International Day of Indigenous Peoples (IDIP). It was beautiful. For more information on this event and this topic, see ‘Lo femenino en lo taíno’ (The feminine in the Taíno) in Monhomages when I manage to upload it.
A funny anecdote occurred during a technical stopover on President Zapatero’s flight at Santo Domingo airport in July 2004. There, the then Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Bernardino León, said to the president: ‘President, Mon is the Spanish diplomat who circulated the letter against the war in Iraq among several hundred Spanish diplomats in 2003, which was ultimately signed by only eleven of us.’ The president stood up, came over to me, thanked me and gave me two kisses. And, given how bitter that moment had been with the letter, when almost everyone took a back seat, that recognition felt like heaven to me.
And I saw the sky open up, so I asked the president if I could ask him a favour and he said yes. I told him that if he drew a line at the youngest diplomat who was an ambassador at the time (someone from the class of 1991) and made no distinction between genders, there could be more than forty women who could be ambassadors, but there were less than a dozen. He looked at me in surprise and asked his Minister of Foreign Affairs, Miguel Ángel Moratinos, who was sitting next to him, to look at that… And so it was that in the following years we achieved an absolute record number of female ambassadors for Spain… Of course, it wasn’t immediate. We had to keep working behind the scenes (see my letter to the then Under-Secretary in September 2004, currently only available in Spanish)…
Since 2017 as a platform and since 2019 as an association, the AMDE (Association of Spanish Women Diplomats) has been coordinating these and many other issues related to the promotion of women in diplomacy.
6. First political counsellor of Spain to the United Kingdom (2007-2012). Among the tasks I took on at the Embassy were monitoring the United Kingdom’s relations with the Arab world and Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as its development cooperation policy; and relations with the Muslim and Jewish communities in the United Kingdom… They couldn’t have been more wonderful topics!
From that fruitful and long period in my professional life, I have particularly fond memories of an event I organised on interculturality, where we presented Spanish policy on the integration of Jews, Arabs and Muslims in Spain and the Zapatero government’s support for the Alliance of Civilisations. The Arab press published in London reported on the event, including Al Quds Al Arabi. Below, I have also included a translation of that text from Arabic. I am not exaggerating when I say that it was the event I am most proud of having organised in my life, as I firmly believe in the benefits of interculturality and the Alliance of Civilisations.
It was also great fun to accompany the next ambassador to present his credentials to the Queen… Although I am a republican, these traditions have their charm… On the left is a photo of that moment.
I am also proud of two other episodes. One was that, in 2008, after attending several meetings at the British Foreign Office (the so-called ‘briefings’ of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office – FCO), I wrote a long telegram to Madrid (telegrams are the encrypted reports that we send from the embassies to the Ministry and that the Ministry sends to the embassies) in which I already predicted that the intention, devious and still hidden at that time, of the UK was to force the division of Sudan and cut off its southern part. And so it came to pass: in 2009, South Sudan joined the United Nations… Why? Because it had the backing of the United Kingdom as a means of weakening the imposing and wayward Sudan of Al Bashir. My question is: when will it be Palestine’s turn for the United Kingdom to support its independence? If UK supported it now, it would be a reality (the UK is still the United States’ putative father, whether we like it or not, and the only country it listens to on international relations). For obvious reasons (they are classified documents), I cannot upload a copy of that telegram, but believe me, I sent it and it was praised by the then team at the Directorate-General for Africa.
Likewise, after spending the last ten days of 2010 in my London flat in silence doing vipassana meditation (see the ‘Spirituality’ tab), that is, I dedicated my entire Christmas holiday to it, I channelled that a popular revolution was coming in the Arab world, following the self-immolation of Mohammed Bouazizi on 17 December in Sidi Bouzid (on Tunisia’s southern border with Algeria). And, having returned to the Embassy on 3 January 2011, I made an appointment at the FCO with the people in charge of Arab affairs. They booked me several appointments back to back for Friday 7 January 2011. I went. And I reported everything to the Ministry in several telegrams. It would have been impossible to get all those appointments just one week later, when everything had already exploded. But I managed to do so, guided by my intuition, when the media had no idea what was coming.
Something was already brewing in Tunisia, and so much that on the glorious 11 January 2011, the Tunisian people, with almost no bloodshed and with brutal courage, ousted the then dictator Ben Ali. My respects to the humble Mohamed Bouazizi and my heartfelt congratulations to his family for raising such a special person, a fighter for light, even though the price he had to pay, his own life, was immense… and did not serve much purpose, as a new dictator reigns in Tunisia through the ballot box: Kais Saïd. Unfortunately, the same is true in the few Arab countries that today can elect their rulers (monarchies, obviously, cannot and are the most iron-fisted dictatorships in the region).
Returning to my personal story, I circulated emails at the MAEC informing people that I had been able to foresee what was going to happen through meditation-channeling, and many colleagues came out in staunch defence of Cartesian logic and claimed that it was impossible for me to have known. Be that as it may, the truth is that I knew. If they didn’t believe me and still don’t, that’s their problem. Serendipity exists, has always existed, and will always exist.
Finally, during my years in London, I collaborated with the Miguel de Cervantes Social Centre for the Elderly (CSM), a centre that trained Spanish retirees who had emigrated to the United Kingdom during the 1950s and 1960s due to the harsh economic situation in Franco’s Spain, a situation that forced a million Spaniards to emigrate to northern Europe in order to survive. Many of them had learned to read and write at the CSM after retiring.
In 2008, I went to talk to them about ‘The Feminine in the Taíno’ for International Working Women’s Day on 8 March. And on Book Day, 23 April [the date commemorating the death in 1616 of Spain’s greatest novelist, Miguel de Cervantes, author of ‘Don Quixote’; and the date on which, by pure serendipity, William Shakespeare, the greatest genius of Anglo-Saxon literature, died], I went to talk to them in 2009 about “Don Quixote”; in 2010 about the distinguished Spanish poet Miguel Hernández; and in 2011 about the brilliant Chilean poetess Gabriela Mistral, the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for her poetry in 1945. I will be gradually uploading these lectures to Monhomages.
And our elders reciprocated by dedicating their writing efforts during the 2011-2012 school year to writing letters of gratitude to me, beautiful, deeply moving letters, which I am uploading here, and which, for the time being, are only available in Castilian Spanish.
7. Back in Madrid in 2012, I held several positions at the MAEC, first related to the United Nations and then to development cooperation. The first of the positions related to cooperation was, within the now defunct SGCID (Secretariat General for International Development Cooperation), as head of the area responsible for coordinating development cooperation issues in the EU and, specifically, for coordinating inputs for the EU’s CODEV working group. From that position, I supported the SGCID team that participated in the negotiations of the 2030 Agenda and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Then, in 2015, I moved to the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID) where I was head of the Department for Cooperation with Sub-Saharan Africa. In this position, I led Spain’s negotiations for the first European Union Trust Fund to address the root causes of migration in Africa. At the first meeting (in September 2015), only Spain supported the Commission; at the third (in November 2015), there was consensus in favour of an instrument that we had managed to improve and humanise. For me, that position at the AECID was the most rewarding I have held in my entire career.
8. In 2017, back at the MAEC, I took up the position of Deputy Director General for Planning, Policy Coherence and Evaluation, where I supported the drafting and led the complex process of approving the V Master Plan for Spanish Cooperation, in theory a four-year plan for 2018-2021, but which was eventually extended until 2024.
I was also actively involved not only in financing but also in supporting researchers publishing on cooperation issues, such as this research on the new development financing metric, the TOSSD (Total Official Support for Sustainable Development) – I am mentioned on page 20 of the pdf.
Likewise, at that time, I was very active in explaining the 2030 Agenda, including its implementation through EU policies, and disseminating its practical application.
The only criticism to my management as a diplomat that can be found on the web is from this period. An article in Vozpópuli states that: ‘It was then that the Deputy Director-General for Planning, Policy Coherence and Evaluation of the DGPOLDES, Mon González, had to sign a certificate guaranteeing that Susana de Funes had not signed any minor technical assistance contracts in the last year, which was indeed the case.’ No comment.
9. In October 2018, I took up the position of Deputy Ambassadress to Tunisia. At the end of July 2019, in a day and a half – and with the Embassy closed due to public holidays – I managed to organise King Felipe VI’s attendance at the state funeral of the Tunisian president… I have included a photo of that moment here on the right…
I also have fond memories of the end-of-year trip for the 71st class of Spanish diplomats. They came to Tunisia and I organised a busy and interesting schedule for them… I am uploading two funny videos: one when the bus was stuck and people came to help move a car so that we could continue, as we were already late for an activity; and another in which the 71st class, on the last day of their trip, cheered me on as a token of their gratitude…
My great regret in Tunisia was that I fell ill and in February 2020 I had to request a transfer to Madrid – although due to the COVID-19 pandemic I was unable to leave Tunisia until mid-May, when we came out of the lockdown.
10. So, from June 2020, I returned to work at the MAEC in Madrid within the Secretariat of State for the European Union (SEUE), first as counsellor and then as Deputy Assistant Director General for Economic and Trade Relations with the EU (EU Relex), coordinating in Spain the newly created international development cooperation instrument “Global Europe”, which envisaged disbursing €79.462 billion between 2021 and 2027; and relations between the EU and the Southern Neighbourhood (SN). In this context, I threw myself into organising the Third EU-SN Ministerial Meeting on 29 November 2021 in Barcelona (I am attaching a couple of press releases on this event: from the EU and from the MAEC).
11. We could say that this was my last act in service, as my health was deteriorating. I had to take sick leave (temporary disability), which led to permanent total disability. Since February 2024, I have been retired for health reasons. I retired as Minister Plenipotentiary and have been awarded the Order of Isabella the Catholic.
To conclude this subsection, I am uploading a compilation of newspaper and magazine clippings (social press) from Bulgaria, the Dominican Republic and the United Kingdom in which I appear in my capacity as a female diplomat…
A first attempt in 2011-2012
In early 2011, I designed a very rudimentary website, which I launched on 5 May and which was written in Spanish and English.
Unfortunately, I had to discontinue it in early 2012 because, after the change of government in Spain, the incoming government team was not very supportive of it. Sadly, there have been – and still are – government teams that, regardless of their political affiliation, do not like diplomats to have their own opinions. Now that I am retired, I believe I can and must speak my mind.
Some of the articles I had posted on that website were also on the following blog: https://mongonzalez.blogspot.com/, which I continued to update for a few more months on two separate blogs, one in Spanish (https://latercerarevolucionarabe.blogspot.com/) and another in English (http://thethirdarabrevolution.blogspot.com/).
A good Palestinian friend from Khan Yunis (Gaza strip), Ismail Al-Faqawi, translated my first articles into Arabic and they were published in the Arabic magazine A-Hewar by the Al-Hewar al Mutamaddin (Modern Dialogue) Foundation:
- The Saudi ballast: http://www.ahewar.org/debat/show.art.asp?t=0&aid=259694
- Beyond Japan and Libya: http://www.ahewar.org/debat/show.art.asp?aid=260040
- Arab women and moderate Islam: http://www.ahewar.org/debat/show.art.asp?aid=257963
- The Zionist-Ashkenazi ballast: http://www.ahewar.org/debat/show.art.asp?aid=259818
I keep these links here because I still believe that the more or less covert collusion between the Wahhabi-Saudi ballast and the Ashkenazi-Zionist ballast is what is preventing progress in the Middle East and its democratisation. Neither the Saudi dictatorship nor the Zionist dictatorship likes democracy for the peoples of the region…
A new website in 2024
In 2024, once already retired, a friend, Mariano Hernández, designed a website for me, which I launched on 21 June, the date of the summer solstice and the full moon.
I have been and will continue to nurture this website slowly, at a pace dictated by the limitations imposed on me by my illnesses.
The first draft of the texts will generally be in Castilian Spanish. From there, I will do the translations with the help of the translation programmes available on the web [https://www.softcatala.org/traductor/ for Catalan; https://www.euskadi.eus/traductor/ for Basque; and the fantastic German website https://www.deepl.com/es/translator for the rest] and then I will polish them manually.
As I mentioned above, although Castilian Spanish is known abroad as ‘español’, there are three other official languages in Spain, so when I use the term ‘Spanish’ in other languages, I will specify which Spanish I am referring to, although it will almost always be Castilian Spanish.
I wanted to register my domain as ‘.es’ because it comes from ‘España’ (Spain) and the word “paññā” in Pali, the mother tongue of my revered Buddha, means ‘wisdom’, understood as a wisdom that leads us to fulfilment and coherence; and ‘España’ in English is “Spain” and could be read as ‘`s pain’, which translated into Castilian Spanish would mean ‘it is pain’… And I am convinced that Spain will contribute to promoting a wiser, fuller, more coherent world, although the process of getting there may be painful. And if not, time will tell…
This website was created with a threefold objective:
(1) Firstly, to write down my memories to honour myself in my entirety, including my ‘oddities’. I have done this in this tab and in the ‘Health’ and ‘Spirituality’ tabs within ‘Monanalysis’.
(2) Secondly, to help me organise the artistic work I have produced throughout my life and be able to show it. For example, I have nearly a thousand poems written and waiting to be organised and, hopefully, published.
(3) Finally, to apply the knowledge and skills I have acquired throughout my life to certain issues of international reality and sustainable development with analysis and proposals that will hopefully contribute in some small way to building a better world. I have already started and will continue to focus on Palestine for many months or years, depending on how things go…
And time will tell whether the time and effort invested in this website were worthwhile or not…
Time will tell…
This website is an owwwm: an organisation of the worldwide web of Mon
Owwwm is an acronym I invented for the 2011 website and means ‘organisation of’; followed by that untranslatable modern hieroglyph that is “www”, which we Iberoamericans obediently put before internet addresses, and which means ‘worldwide web’; and, as it belongs to Mon, it would be owwwm.
My virtual Monworld is, therefore, an owwwm.
Monworld only exists on the internet and thanks to the internet, and therefore, this owwwm has four characteristics, similar to the four layers of the Internet Protocol Suite (IPS):
1. The equivalent of the first layer of an IPS or connection layer is this internet domain [www.mongonzalez.es] managed by a Spanish woman [in Castilian Spanish “Spanish woman” is “mujer española”, ME, and ‘me’ in English means ‘I’]; and I would like to thank the German company that hosts me (STRATO GmbH); the modern Indian sage Abhay K. Bhushan, father of RFC 114 and therefore a pioneer of cyberspace; and MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) for supporting him.
2. The equivalent of the second layer of an IPS would be that Monworld seeks to be an expanded NGO (Non-Governmental Organisation): not only an NGO that is not supported by any government, but also an organisation that is not affiliated with the United Nations; nor with multinational companies; nor financial institutions or banks or bankers; nor states or companies producing gas or oil; nor states or companies producing weapons or military equipment; nor traffickers of drugs, alcohol and sex; nor abusers of human rights; nor religious institutions; nor media.
3. The equivalent of the third layer of this IPS would be that Monmundo seeks to be a freedomopoly, the word ‘freedomopoly’ having been constructed by poetic analogy from the word ‘monopoly’. I have chosen ‘monopoly’ for the analogy because, in my opinion, all the organisations, states, governments, companies, institutions, bankers and traffickers mentioned above have consecutively attempted – in historical and geographical terms – to have the world under their ‘sole power’, which is what ‘monopoly’ would have meant in classical Greek, the language from which the word derives. If ‘monopoly’ could be metaphorically or poetically expressed as ‘Place whose Owner is One’ and, by poetic analogy, ‘freedompoly’ would mean ‘Place whose Sole Owner is Freedom.’ “Mono” in classical Greek means ‘one,’ but in Castilian Spanish it means ‘any of the animals of the suborder of apes.’ In my opinion, what has happened so far in the world is very similar to a world ruled by monkeys, that is, men who have only developed one part of their brain, and who have ruled humanity under successive monopolies [which were already listed in the second layer], and I will dedicate this website to proposing ideas for a world ruled by humans, that is, by men and women eager to develop both parts of their brains and connect them: (1) the left side or rational part; (2) the right side or creative part; and (3) the connectivity between the two, which is where the essence, the spirituality, resides.
Therefore, the tools of this third layer will be:
3.1. Words: information, especially historical information, freely available in books, websites and dictionaries;
3.2. Poetry: words in the form of poems that come directly from the right side of the brain. I will frequently quote and use the great Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral on this website. She was the first Ibero-American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and she was a woman, in 1945. and the fifth woman to receive this award, but the first to do so solely for her poetry. She was a self-taught teacher for the first part of her life and a Chilean diplomat for the second;
3.3. Chiripa or serendipity, understood as ‘the occurrence and development of purely fortuitous events in a happy and beneficial way’ and discussed in detail in the Spirituality tab within Monanalysis.
3.4. Heterodoxy: understood, as defined by the Castilian Spanish Dictionary of the Language, in its meanings 2 (‘Discrepant from the fundamental doctrine of a political, philosophical, etc. system’) and 3 (‘Disagreeing with generally accepted habits or practices’). And I have the theory that only majority thinking is accepted in the printed world (controlled by the monopolies listed in layer 2), but thanks to Life, the internet exists and can host minority thinking, such as that expressed on this website, which is based mainly on historical data that is easily verifiable, but presented in a different way, always trying to delve into the origin, the root cause, the moment when the manipulation of that information took place, and hence the information contained on this page may not agree with the beliefs that we currently accept as good or valid. I believe that it is precisely these old structures of thought that prevent the free flow of freedom and justice in the world, hence my desire to be heterodox, to return to the root causes, and to try to break the orthodoxies that are holding back human progress.
4. Finally, the fourth or top layer of Monworld, the Applications Layer (which this time has the same name as the fourth layer of the IPS) has a triple objective, which, in my opinion, can only be fulfilled consecutively, as if they were three pools of water in a waterfall:
4.1. Respect for the human rights of all people, especially women’s rights. In 2023 85.000 women were killed intentionally, 60% of them by their partners or close relatives;
4.2. Equitable distribution of wealth. We must put an end to the abominable statistic of 25,000 people dying every day in the world from hunger;
4.3. Peace in the world. If all the vandals, criminals, abusers and exploiters in the world stopped acting and ceased to exist, the silence that would ensue would bring world peace. And playing with the letters of owwwm in Castilian Spanish (oramm), we would also have a mantra for love (“amor” in Castilian Spanish means “love”):
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaammmmmmmmmmmoooooooooooooooorrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!
If there is love, there is peace… And if peace flows, there is love…
Presence on other social networks
My presence on social media has been limited until now…
I have mainly used LinkedIn and X, although I have been reducing my use of X since it removed content related to the genocide in Gaza.
Given that Google has financed Israel and indirectly its genocide in Gaza, I am trying to leave the Google universe. For example, I am replacing YouTube with the French network dailymotion.
Likewise, as Meta, the empire of the Jew Zuckerberg, has removed a lot of my content and that of people I know about the genocide in Gaza, I am trying to leave the Meta universe; I have stopped using Facebook, Messenger and Instagram, and I am also trying to do the same with WhatsApp, replacing it with Telegram. If all goes well, I will create a Telegram channel later on and add the icon to my website.
In the future, I would like to learn how to use TikTok and start being active on it…