“The truth is one; the error is multiple.” With this resounding phrase begins the book The Political Thought of the Right, by Simone de Beauvoir, published in 1955, during the decolonization processes that convulsed France in those years. The work, written in the middle of the bipolar world, with its Cold War behind it, had notable success and many translations; but then she disappeared, as we know now, and very few remember her, me among them.
I confess that I read it back in 1967 and it helped me a lot to refute those in power – political, ecclesiastical, economic – who accused us of being motivated by “foreign and unspeakable interests” for our activities opposing the PRI, thereby affirming, without saying so, that we were not capable of thinking on our own. We were, in that vision, tools of the communist agitators who turned us into instruments of their own ends, always external.
The country was good, splendid, there was social justice, a kind hegemony that made us democratic, although the elections were simulatory rites or frauds when there were mishaps. And if the agitators were the cause, then it was necessary to eliminate them, imprison them and, if necessary, kill them.
Those who acted in this way thought that society was an organ that moved under the impulse of a single thought and that pluralism – a condition of real democracy – was something of the enemies of the past, of reaction or those resentful of the great Revolution that began in 1910.
I know in advance that drawing historical parallels is not always successful. However, now in these times of the “second floor” of a “fourth transformation” (lost in Clío’s numbers) it is at least somewhat pertinent to try some because, changing what needs to be changed, there is crumb to it.
Strong opposition has begun to the MORENA governments, in general; but in particular they focus on the figure of President Claudia Sheinbaum. It is of varied nature and those in power try to see it as something that obeys anything, except a real dissent, with diverse roots and with points of view that are disdained because “the truth is one” and is in the hands of the ruling party, and everything that deviates from there is a matter of persecution. There is no “diffuse discontent” – the author’s term quoted –, what is done is to exploit and organize oppositions to the established power and, generally speaking, all of this is called “the right”, which translates into an intolerant insult, attached to a language that is about to derive in great resemblance to that of diazordacism.
The CNTE teachers are in the capital’s Zócalo despite the fact that they are attended to and talk to their management. They want to agitate and nothing more. It is understood that this is the response of an inept Secretary of Education who fell into that position at a bad time. The thousands and thousands of Michoacans who took to the streets, after the assassination of Mayor Carlos Manzo, do not have Michoacán on their agenda, they do not care about Uruapan; The agitators behind them are the ones who have closed their eyes so that they do not see the fourtheistic achievements.
The mobilization of the self-called “Generation Z” is being agitated from Spain, Colombia and other latitudes. They are the right, national and international. If they were reasonable or attentive to the brilliance of the ruling party, they would do politics by attending the laudatory rallies of AMLO and his successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, and only then would it be correct to do politics; They forget that the liberal Benito Juárez is credited with the phrase “the reactionaries, who are finally Mexican.”
The opponent, the one who disagrees and expresses himself publicly, is a scavenger, he feeds on rotten and stinking thoughts. He has no rights, would be the conclusion; and therefore, sooner rather than later, he must be liquidated, in the full range that this is possible, from tiring him to throwing dead dogs in his domestic garden, to imprisoning him and, in the extreme, killing him. “The truth is one”, do not forget, and it is a lie that generates free women and men, even if they speak with solid arguments, such as those published by the Legal Research Institute of the UNAM of the excessive and illegal overrepresentation that gives the Morenista ruling party a qualified majority in both chambers of the Congress of the Union, and in the same bag they put the critics of Adán Augusto López and his Sweeper. What is said by dissent expressed with support in the rights established by the Constitution are right-wing arguments or manipulated in advance, morally defeated.
And as a result of a close reading – if they have done one – of Simone de Beauvoir, they foist the nickname of “right-wing pluralism” on anyone who says “I disagree”, even if they are a committed and consistent leader of the real, anti-capitalist, anti-militarist, anti-autocracy left.
We all have the right to raise our voices, to seek platforms for action. We are part of a society where vast conflicting interests are nested; That is why in Mexico there has been a bold search for a democratic system that resolves them without resorting to a policy of adversaries, and to which, however, Morenoism is denied and believes that a prophet came down from Macuspana a long time ago with the new tables of the law.
Where have we come!