“Power stuns the intelligent and drives the fools crazy.”. Andrés Manuel López Obrador
It is not that a deployment of more than 250 “members of the cultural community” is going to change the course of the election. It matters little that the list has such relevant figures in the history of the left as Roger Bartra and Ricardo Pascoe or of liberalism as Enrique Krauze and Federico Reyes Heroles. This group has expressed that “the elections next June They will be a confrontation between authoritarianism and democracy. We believe that the democratic option is represented by Xóchitl Gálvez. Our call to vote for her responds to the enormous urgency of defending threatened democracy.” It is unlikely, however, that this display will generate more votes than those of the undersigned.
The furious reaction of President López Obrador, who has become more than ever the campaign manager of candidate Claudia Sheinbaum, is notable. Yesterday he declared: “And then, there is another group, which are the pseudo-intellectuals, who also act as pimps for the corrupt oligarchy. These legitimize, with a whole host of pseudotheories, why the regime has to be maintained. They dare to talk about freedoms, they come to invoke democracy, and all of them – or the majority, also not to generalize – at the service of the regime, sold or rented, freeloaders at the service of the regime of oppression. Apparently academics, studious, but they never defend the people. They are vassals, they are servile employees of the oligarchy.”
The president has already accustomed us to these reactions. He always disqualifies and insults those who think differently. He believes that he has the monopoly on honesty and goodwill. Only he can be right. He automatically reduces anyone who dares to question his policies, from the nation’s top television studio, to “a pimp of the corrupt oligarchy.” Opponents are described as “sold or rented”, “living”. The president does not know how to debate, only insult.
I don’t know if the official candidate has the same contempt for those who do not kneel before the dogmas of their boss and mentor. In her team of advisors there are respected intellectuals, such as doctors Juan Ramón de la Fuente and David Kershenobich, who have always been open to the diversity of ideas. Astronomer Julieta Fierro has expressed her support for Sheinbaum, while continuing to express her concern over policies such as government appropriation of unclaimed pension funds. In the candidate’s team there are politicians like Tatiana Clouthier and Cesar Yanez, who have been tolerant. The president, however, is increasingly intransigent. As the end of his term approaches, he has become cantankerous, aggressive, rude. That is why he calls the participants of the pink tide “traitors to the country.”
The intellectuals who have signed the statement of support for Xochitl They have the right to support the candidate they prefer. They are right when they warn that there is “the danger of authoritarian regression”; the concentration of power that drives AMLO so it suggests. The group, on the other hand, is very diverse; They have had differences, “but always with a basic respect for the plurality of ideas.” Perhaps the signature is of little use: “The writers. “We have no power,” Krauze acknowledges; “we don’t have weapons, we don’t have budgets”; but “that little bit is better than nothing. Power has made a president arrogant, who from the opposition prided himself on his closeness to the people and critical intellectuals, but who today locks himself in the National Palace, refuses to discuss ideas and launches furious attacks on those who criticize him. The power has driven him crazy.
Pressure
“The more pressure we put on, the easier it will be for the authorities to assist us.” This was said yesterday by a leader of section 10 of the CNT while the group maintained a blockade on Circuito Interior and Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City. They know that the more damage they cause to citizens, the more generous the authorities will be. It is institutionalized blackmail.
- About politics and worse
- Presidential incontinence
- The intellectual and ethical weight of Bartra
- “Sold press”, another blow to democracy!
#Emissions #heat
