Because everything is linked

In this campaign for the elections in Portugal, the candidate of the Social Democratic Party (PSD), Rui Rio, has said that if public television does not give benefits, it will have to be privatized.

Privatization seems to be the solution for everything, it is a solution common to the PSD, Chega, Liberal Initiative or the Social Democratic Center (CDS).

But television, like culture, theater, health, education, does not have to give benefits in a pragmatic sense!

In the case of culture, the benefit is immaterial, but it is a heritage that is being built and that is priceless.

I think that the entire left defends culture, in the same way that the right was never interested in educated people, because that means a people that thinks, questions and is critical.

A cultured and educated society is a society that is more apt to demand a decent life, it is a society that will more easily defend taxes as a way of helping and maintaining “public affairs”.

An educated people will fight more easily, I think, for the defense of the planet because they will know that everything is part of everything, that I am only me because there is someone else.

See how in the argumentation of the anti-vaccine movement, which is largely linked to right-wing extremism, there is never a reference to the "other".

Noam Chomsky has a book,

:

(2017), in which he defends that two of the principles for the concentration of wealth and power by the rulers, by the capitalists, by American ideologues are “keeping

within the order” and “attack solidarity”. This connects with what I have just explained about the relationship between the self and the other, because attacking solidarity means opening the way to hatred, with the insistence on the perpetuation of gender roles: the supposed femininities and masculinities. In other words, it is just as important that we pay attention to social inequality as it is to gender inequality. In the case of men, the right-wing promotion of a hypermasculinized, violent language; in the case of women, of a language of docility and submission. I remember a phrase that Trump supporters shouted, before the invasion of the US Capitol: "Testosterone is coming!"

It's just that everything is linked.

Retaking the tradition of dressing girls in pink and boys in blue, as was defended by the Global Strategic Motion for Portugal, presented at the Chega convention, which also defended "the removal of the ovaries" of "women who abort in the National Health System for reasons that were not of imminent risk to their health.

That motion was denied.

But it was listened to and discussed seriously, as if it were a matter of national interest.

And it was highly applauded.

There is no culture of hate without defamation, and the neoliberal project of destruction of the public sphere is in cahoots with it. For this culture of hate to progress, it is necessary to lie and distort the facts, attack solidarity, declare the movements of social emancipation as threats, place people against people. It is a shocking experience (and at the same time very enlightening because of the similarities) to read

, Anders Breivik's manifesto,

the Norwegian Nazi terrorist who carried out the 2011 attacks. In it, Breivik blames feminism for fueling the erosion of the fabric of European society and advocates the restoration of patriarchy to save European culture through the defeat of "cultural Marxism," a much appreciated expression on the right.

If social activism is fundamental, so is the activism of those of us who work with literature, with art: promoting thought about poetics and policies related to gender, sex and sexualities, reflecting on this wave of recent world context that has come to feed a retrograde and reactionary vision of human rights and the exercise of differences, fundamental bases for true citizenship.

Now I think about how the extreme right in Brazil and the United States have dealt with the environmental issue. Jair Bolsonaro said in April 2017 that “the indigenous reserves and the

[former slave organizations, constitutionally recognized in Brazil since the 1980s] hinder the economy.” Or that almost famous anecdote, if not a tragic gesture, by Republican Senator James Inhofe, fundamentalist, anti-feminist and against homosexual rights, when he brought a snowball to the US Senate to prove that global warming was a fraud. I would like to highlight the scant debate in this electoral campaign in Portugal on an issue linked to the environment and, therefore, to people. I am referring to the exploitation of lithium, a huge attack on the environmental balance, on the harmonious coexistence of humans (and animals) with their environment, on the beauty of the landscape.

The left has always prided itself on having a plural discourse and a solidary practice.

May you now have the opportunity to try it.

Ana Luísa Amaral

is a poet.

He received the Reina Sofía Prize for Ibero-American Poetry in 2021.

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