The difference between outrage and polarization, or how the left went from anger to whining

@ElentirENG EN 8·14·2024 · 6:58 0

Some readers of Counting Stars are very young and may not know or remember certain things that happened a few years ago.

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In 2011, the so-called 15M movement emerged in Spain, created by the extreme left (a fact that was very clear, although some naive people took weeks or months to realise it) in order to capture the votes of dissatisfied socialists and prevent them from abstaining, after two disastrous terms of the PSOE with José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero as president of the government.

That movement soon showed the characteristics of the classic extreme left: in the summer of 2011, the 15M movement set itself the goal of disrupting the visit of Pope Benedict XVI to Madrid to participate in the World Youth Day (WYD) organized by the Catholic Church in that city. In August of that year, Catholic pilgrims suffered a wave of insults, threats and attacks by 15M thugs in the face of which the socialist government of Zapatero did absolutely nothing, giving orders the police for not taking action against violent far-leftists.

Despite these facts, the leftist media defended and whitewashed these thugs, calling them "the outragers". This form of propaganda was intended to present the classic violent far-leftists as young idealists who were worried and restless. In contrast, the right's criticism of the Zapatero government had been labeled "crispación". In this case, it seems, it was not a question of outragers idealists, but of evil agitators who wanted to irritate the Spanish people.

The 15M movement gave rise to Podemos, a far-left party that has openly supported violence and that has even justified attacks against political rivals accusing them of "provoking" (the old miniskirt argument with which some excused rapists). That violence did not bother the so-called moderate left, but when the socialists returned to power, they recovered the story of "crispación" to demonize any protest from the right. A story that has been repeated so many times that it is no longer effective.

So the left has pulled another trick out of its hat: "polarization", a word that serves to adopt an attitude of feigned concern because more and more people on the right have had enough of the left's double standards and are applying their own syrup to socialists and communists. It is, moreover, a concept that the lukewarm members of the Popular Party and its related media are prone to adopt, in their desire to appear more moderate than anyone else.

Yesterday, the newspaper El Mundo published an interview with leftist journalist Ana Pastor, with the following definition in the headline: "Polarization is when you say good morning and they call you a bitch." One thing to note about this statement is that according to the left's propaganda manual, this is "polarization" when you do it to a leftist, but when the left did it to the right it was "outrage".

I am not defending violence with political purposes. In this blog, I have a rule of not insulting anyone. My weapons are words, arguments and reason. What I am very clear about is that the left is reaping the hatred it has sown for years, a hatred that has led it to try to dehumanize all of us who are not socialists or communists, labeling us as "fascists" or worse, labels that turned us into people who deserved all kinds of violence, in the eyes of a radicalized left that sees fascists everywhere.

The left has been systematically using the straw man fallacy against the right, a fallacy that invents a false image of someone and builds a fanatical discourse on it that in recent years has left a trail of leftist attacks, especially against Vox, attacks that the socialists and their communist partners have never condemned, treating those attacked as if they were plague-ridden. And the left still dares to talk about "polarization," going from anger to whining. How nerve-wracking.

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Photo: A violent far-left protest in February 2015 in Madrid.