• Justin Trudeau apologizes for a photo of 2001 dressed in Aladdin: "It was a racist thing"

It is not a crime. However, in a matter of minutes he is able to bury brilliant political careers. A disguise, a line of coca or an incendiary joke on Twitter can be the wick capable of waking up at any time, even if it is many years late. Its late detonation does not limit the damage.

Faced with such pressure, the politician seeks to survive with only one way out: to sing the mea culpa. Be this an unfair or disproportionate accusation. Failure to do so will overestimate the threat of resignation or, as a minor evil, the bleeding of votes.

Political hypercorrection no longer only ties to the chair of the present. If Shakespeare wrote that the past is a prologue, he was right in the era in which the error does not expire. Never. At least until there is someone willing to remember it.

«We live in a society that has given up the future, in which only the present is lived and to correct the past. A society of reporters and suspects, ”says Edu Galán , editor and founder of the satirical publication Mongolia . His pessimistic diagnosis is reinforced, he explains, with the Trudeau case. A recently published photo, but taken 18 years ago, of the current Prime Minister of Canada disguised as Aladdin with his face painted black , has raised a lot of controversy in his re-election campaign. To avoid greater evils, Trudeau has apologized for his imposing blackness. "I did not understand how harmful it is for people living discrimination every day," he said the day before yesterday.

This politician has not taken into account in his apologies that the images (in the last hours more photos have been published and even a video) were within a playful and informal context - a costume party - or that his career is an example of Respect for minorities and immigrants.

It is true that racial sensitivity in Spain is very different from that of Canada and the United States, where a white make-up like a black ( blackface ) has had considerable racist significance for more than a century, but even so, there are many who believe that Trudeau, like so many others, has behaved like a "political overcorrection" enthusiast.

"It's a typically Puritan scandal." notes the journalist Juan Soto Ivar s, author of Arden las Redes (Debate, 2017), an essay on constant irritation and censorship in the virtual world. «Everyone pretends to be holy. Nobody relativizes a gesture. An old photo can thus turn the path of someone clearly anti-racist into disguised racism. It is all of a vomiting hypocrisy and literalness ».

The apologies of the acting Canadian Prime Minister have a long history. Former US President Bill Clinton acknowledged - ridiculously funny - to have inhaled but "without swallowing the smoke" from a pot of marijuana in his college years; British minister Michael Gove confessed very regretted a couple of months ago having taken cocaine in his time as a journalist and, in Spain, Guillermo Zapata had to give up the Culture portfolio of the Madrid City Council for some tweetable jokes about the Holocaust and the victim of ETA Irene Villa.

The philosopher or Javier Gomá has dealt with this issue in his Tetralogy of exemplarity (Taurus, 2014). For him being exemplary represents an ideal of dignity and beauty, not a lynching tool. "Too often, exemplarity is invoked opportunistically in power struggles or in a race to quench the thirst for punishment of a scandalized society," he says.

Too often, exemplarity is invoked opportunistically in power struggles

Javier Gomá

Undergoing this social severity, which today amplifies the media and social networks, makes it virtually impossible to get rid of any exam. "There is no human skin entirely clean of bacteria and biological waste no matter how much it is washed or rubbed," writes Gomá when he addresses the issue of unfriendly exemplarity. This control of the past is very disturbing for the Basque philosopher. He fears that if we do not grant ourselves the right to make mistakes, to grope or to give up throughout life, we will fall into a "moral totalitarianism . "

For Galan, chronic revisionism is dangerous because it does not rest. "It should be borne in mind that even in a dictatorship even the security officials of the Stasi-like state [intelligence organ of the former GDR] who spied on citizens would have their schedules," he says, "today the control is 24 hours, seven days a week ».

It has been discovered that political correctness is not only a dictatorship, but also has memory.

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  • Canada
  • Guillermo Zapata
  • Justin Trudeau

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