Politics. Cartoon of 13/11/2022 in CTXT
TR cartoon: "When they were involved in politics, they were accused of being politicized".
Ayuso and anti-politics
"Do as I do, I don't get involved in politics", is what Franco is said to have once told José María Pemán. The dictator made his radical anti-political stance clear, and he set himself up as the only possible option, the one chosen by God, and anything outside that framework was revolt and anti-Spanish. In this way he managed to permeate absolutism in all aspects of society.
Don't give it any more thought, Ayuso's anti-political discourse is a carbon copy of Franco's. Ayuso speaks of"boycott" and accuses the health workers, and all those who attended yesterday's massive demonstration, of"political activism against me".
This redneck discourse continues to work because it exploits another reductionism and key point from a well-known propaganda manual, the principle of simplification and the single enemy. Adopt a single idea, a single symbol; individualise the adversary into a single enemy.
Although it should not be necessary to say it again, because it is obvious, the totalitarian and privatising Madrid trumpite should be reminded once again that the demonstrations, boycotts and many other actions, which he intends to criminalise, are legitimate and natural movements that are part of the set of tools for the active participation of citizens in politics.
These characters have so devalued politics that they have managed to make saying that something is "politicised" be interpreted as something pejorative, an insult.
If you don't see it, it still exists
Another common practice in the manual of propaganda and manipulation is to hinder or block access to any communication channel that cannot be manipulated for the official version. Thus, Olmo Calvo reported that"the police at the Palacio de Cibeles had orders not to let anyone with professional equipment in", according to Olmo there are not many quality aerial photographs, "because the Madrid City Council has given orders to the police who were at the Palacio de Cibeles not to let journalists with professional equipment in to take images from the rooftop. Not even with the pre-purchased tickets that many of them had". Source.
Another coincidental situation was that all the traffic cameras of the Madrid City Hall around Cibeles stopped working just that day.
"The rabble against the generalissima"
The treatment on Madrid's public TV was also subjected to Ayuso's invisible hand. The Comité de Empresa de RTVM has published this communiqué giving a good account of the deplorable coverage of the demonstration by Telemadrid and Onda Madrid.
A review of today's front pages leaves some nice tidbits, like this one from El Mundo, which devotes almost more space to the announcement of a clock than to the demonstration at the bottom of its front page.
The organisers put the turnout at 670,000 people, while the Government Delegation speaks of 200,000. Ayuso, in his inexhaustible incontinence, has already gone on to talk about ETA, a max-mix of the locuron and all that rubbish that MAR usually writes for him during another of those agitated and ethylic weekends.
But reality is setting in and Ayuso will meet tomorrow, Tuesday, with the doctors' union. After the verbiage, it's time to sheathe it and get down to work.
