Catharsis

Two days after the revelations and denunciations about the aggressive sexual – and other – voracity of Íñigo Errejón, the Spanish left continues in shock, while many others are moving from sympathy towards the victims to relentless scrutiny of their moral character, since, As is customary in Spain, a man’s sexual crimes always have to end up, in some way, being the responsibility of a woman.

A part of that left seems to concentrate its efforts on making it very clear that they did everything well and now – it would have been better before – the important thing is the victims. Another part unapologetically concentrates its efforts on proving the political right right and confirming that Errejón is the smoking gun they were looking for; the incontestable demonstration that all the rest of the left are only whitewashed tombs that “on the outside they look beautiful, but on the inside they are full of rot.” Both parties agree, however, on two things: holding press conferences to say what we already know and confirm what we feared, and announcing courses, workshops and anti-harassment protocols by the dozen.

There are not many who ask aloud why Errejón’s individual responsibility for his dark conduct should be blurred into a kind of collective responsibility that, apparently, corrupts and discredits the work, struggle, commitment and sacrifice of thousands of people for decades in this country.

According to the accusatory finger of the political right, Errejón is living proof that everything was a lie, that another hypocritically raised banner is falling, because apparently, as everyone knows, it was the right-wing governments who placed it on the agenda public and the general budgets of the State the drama of gender violence or the horror of sexual harassment, those who legalized the right to abortion, those who approved equal marriage, those who recognized the rights of trans people or those who have placed consent in the center of sexual crimes.

The left cannot give lessons, it is true. There were and are many right-wing people fighting for those freedoms and those rights, it is also true. But it is also equally true that the left in Spain has facts and laws to prove decades of approving and promoting equality policies that always encountered another equally historical constant: the fierce opposition of those who now want to turn us all into hypocritical complicit or Errejón’s cover-ups.

This is not about claiming any moral superiority. It’s History. I don’t give lessons, but I don’t receive them either. Neither my behavior nor my beliefs are reflected in some kind of Errejón test imposed by the same people who deny gender violence and call it domestic, who consider the budgets for equality policies a waste on beach bars and courses for children to learn to masturbate, who lie when talking about women with false complaints or frivolize with the discrimination that LGTBIQ+ people suffer daily in this country.

It is a commonplace to maintain that it is no longer a time for left and right. I dissent. It never seemed so necessary, if only for the sake of historical rigor.

#Catharsis