A democracy without spies

Norma Morandini

06/15/2021 6:51 PM

• Clarín.com

• Opinion

Updated 06/15/2021 19:02

To put it elegantly, I was twenty in the seventies.

In generational terms I am among "the witches who could not burn", as the young women with the green scarf sing who have filled the country's squares with batucadas and slogans and with that song they recognize that other women preceded them in their demands for equality.

For this reason,

it saddens me that women journalists reproduce what we suffered, persecution, disqualification, espionage

.

I have told, over and over again, the same anecdote of the beginning of democratization when the right-wing Peronist magazine, “Cabildo”,

denounced some five hundred journalists as “subversives”

. On the list, aligned with the bureaucratic mentality of police files, we include all the journalists whose articles had been analyzed under the magnifying glass of state spies hunting "subversives."

If I repeat the anecdote, it is because nothing better reveals

that authoritarian conception

that

confuses opinion with a crime

and muzzled opinion by terror.

It was the end of the dictatorship, the true spies of the State

disguised themselves as journalists to infiltrate our lives

and the organizations and people that we denounced the dictatorship.

With democracy we were correcting the consequences of living in fear.

Laws, cloisters, politics

were

democratized

and the Constitution was impregnated with the philosophy of human rights, whose legal heart is equality and respect for the plurality that the universal word implies.

It disturbs that

with four democratic decades

, the ideological patrolling of those who stand on moral superiority for invoking gender equality survives and few dare to oppose so as not to suffer from

the "escrache", a word that we should eradicate from our language

since it was born to point out crimes, repressors of the dictatorship, and now frivolously it is applied to point out activities that are not crimes, such as what is thought, practicing journalism in freedom, defending ideas of the left or right, under the only limitation, no incite hatred or violence.

Because I was also a witness in the National Congress of the

moral pressure that in the name of human rights was exerted on many legislators

to pass laws that restricted them.

I am afraid that now the same thing happens with the invocation of gender equality to pass laws that cancel other rights and, what is more serious, impose behaviors that

contravene the rights of equality that they claim to defend

.

The official guideline is not an instrument of control, it is the obligation of the State to guarantee the right of companies to be informed and mediatize journalists.

Fifteen years in parliament taught me that

we are not lacking laws.

There are many that increase penalties to punish the violent, but

few that establish rights and promote the education

of girls and adolescents.

If every day we mortify ourselves with new young deaths at the hands of those who say they love them, may it not be that we must change our strategy and focus on education?

Instead of controlling others,

shouldn't we promote an egalitarian education

that frees women from submission, takes them out of the place of victims?

There is nothing more dangerous than a person resentful of abuse, nor is there anything more beautiful than the fullness of knowing ourselves worthy.

By demanding equality in numbers, we

postpone the debates that help us to be better citizens.

We are more, but we do not improve parliamentary representation.

Little by little authentic democratic leaders are emerging but the model of obedient wives and women to the party leadership survives.

In journalism, there are more and more women in the newsrooms but they are scarce in the male opinion tables on television.

The most prepared and independent are beginning to stand out.

However, television models of beauty survive who ignore and imitate the aesthetics of actresses because they still choose them to be looked at more than respected.

It is understandable that the new generations born and educated in freedom associate the right with the times of the dictatorship, which also reveals the ideologization with which new journalists are trained,

since they confuse journalism with espionage and ignore that the press it is inherent to the democratic system

and journalists are servants of the citizenry.

Not from the rulers.

All legacies of authoritarianism.

Thinking on the right is not a crime and if we don't like their ideas,

let's learn that democracy is a school of argumentation

.

Not a ring of personal disqualifications and insults.

It is not a consolation to say that the fear of the fascist extreme right is planetary.

Albert Camus, author of "La Peste", advocated freedom of the press so that citizens can build their own freedom.

On the other hand, it is worth learning from the vigorous journalism of ideas that opposes it and these days they evoke the immense figure of Albert Camus, who not only with his novel "La Peste" teaches us that pandemics are fought with decency, and as a journalist he advocated for the freedom of the press so that citizens can build their own freedom.

What is despised so much in Argentina since by putting all the blame on the media and seeking its control, they

underestimate the capacity for discernment of the people

who are ultimately the ones who must decide who is lying to them.

For Camus, free journalism had to

be lucid not to publish what incites hatred and hopelessness

, disobedience to stupidity, the irony that tyrants lack, and stubbornness to overcome obstacles. Seventy years have passed and his advice is still valid. Except that he wrote during the war, he risked his life because many of his writings were clandestine. At the end of the war he asked himself what to do after Nazism and advised what we still need, “to try a completely new method that will be justice and generosity, which is only expressed in hearts that are already free and spirits that are still clairvoyant. ”.

If we do appreciate freedom, journalists owe ourselves that task, both modest but necessary, which is to train free spirits, capable of confronting hatred in order to defend democracy.

This is what young journalists concerned about the growth of neo-Nazism in Germany do, like Caroline Emcke, one of the most listened to voices in her generation, who warns us:

"Democracy is only possible if we have the courage to confront hatred

.

"

Unless, in reality, what is despised is

liberal democracy

, which gave birth to human rights and is not defined by electoral majorities but by the strength of its institutions and the guarantee of the rights of citizens to protect them from the arrogance of the states.

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