The Spanish right wing has been quick to harshly criticize what it considers an intolerable harassment against Ayuso and an attempt to curtail the freedom of expression of the president of the autonomous community of Madrid. On the other hand, that same right-wing sphere considered the booing of Pedro Sánchez on October 12, for example, an impeccable exercise in freedom of expression. In the same way, the left sphere defends the freedom of expression of the students who opposed the recognition of Ayuso and criticizes escraches when they are suffered by politicians or progressive figures. It is an endemic disease of this country, the conception of freedoms, rights and even laws according to the ideological color (rather, partisan) with which one looks.
cancel culture
The debate, in any case, is complex even if it is approached from a perspective that avoids partisanship. The culture of the cancellation and the ‘woke’ have generated a debate regarding the limits (or not) of freedom of expression in the United States and many European countries. The university, precisely, has been a battlefield for a long time in this confrontation between your freedom of expression and mine. Catalan universities, for example, have been difficult territory for leaders and figures of the Spanish right for years, long before the ‘procés’. It is true that some politicians (and politicians) have taken advantage of this reality to obtain political and electoral gain (or at least try), but it is also true that it is one thing to protest and another to prevent a candidate or an elected representative from giving a speech. I find it very difficult to understand that exercising my freedom of expression amounts to prevent someone else from also exercising it.
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A few years ago, in the middle of the great depressionthe escraches of those affected by real estate evictions generated great controversy. The left defended them; the right, the same one that justifies the unpresentable and unjustifiable harassment of women who abort at the doors of abortion clinics, considered them almost a crime. All the escraches were unpleasant for those who suffered them, and on some there was even a judicial pronouncement: the justice in Madrid considered the escrache to the then Vice President of the Government, Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría, as a means of “democratic participation”. So that, having a hard time due to the harassment of a group affected is part of the democratic game. Seen like this, the protest in the Complutense was precisely what Ayuso claimed: an exercise in freedom.
It is impossible for this to be seen in a political conversation of such low quality as the Spanish one. And less so in these times of confinement in impermeable bubbles convinced that the debates are over and that they have proven to be absolutely right. Doubt, conversation, arguments and tolerance With those who do not think or act as we are listed below, Voltaire was an equidistant lazy. In the information age, contrasting opinions is a unicorn, which leads to maximalist positions. Only those who have no doubt that they are right come to the conclusion that their freedom of expression surpasses that of others. It happens on the networks, it happens in the media, it happens in Parliament, it happens in conversations with brothers-in-law and it also happens at the University. The spaces of freedom, the real ones, are getting smaller and smaller because we continue in the logic that liberties and rights are not universal, but rather depend on who are ‘we’ and who are ‘they’. In this sense, doubting is a radical act of freedom.