The Battle of Civilizations: Between the Right and the Left

The transformation of X has reshaped public debate. For decades, the left occupied a dominant position in universities, in much of the educational system, and in numerous cultural spaces, until it became the arbiter of what could be said and what had to be silenced. That hegemony was not exercised primarily through state censorship, but through more subtle mechanisms: editorial committees that rejected certain manuscripts, film festivals that excluded particular films, university departments that preferred not to hire professors of certain sympathies, and social-media algorithms that silenced dissenting accounts under the pretext of “disinformation.”

Many artists and intellectuals who rejected support in favor of the Cuban, Iranian, or Venezuelan dictatorships ended up relegated to exile, discredit, or silence. That segregation was visible in Latin American writers who, when they criticized the Cuban Revolution from a democratic left position—as Mario Vargas Llosa did after the Padilla case—were accused of betrayal rather than heard as legitimate critics.

That situation began to change when Elon Musk once again opened a space for voices that had remained marginalized for years, by acquiring Twitter in 2022 and transforming it into X, reducing algorithmic moderation and restoring accounts that had been suspended for ideological reasons. In a recent interview with The Economist, he defined right-wing people as normal people: those who advocate punishing criminals, respecting immigration rules, and excluding those who seek to attack democracy and free thought; in other words, people who want to do the right thing, live in peace according to the law, and reject the supremacy of violence. His statement recalls the message of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing: decency is revealed when a person maintains moral judgment in a society that seems to have lost common sense, when the ordinary person decides not to join the mob even if the price is solitude.

The reaction to this change revealed a broader phenomenon. Those who most frequently present themselves as fighters against the extreme right seem to need the permanent existence of extremes: without a fascist enemy to point to, a large part of their political identity would vanish. Their vision of the world divides society into fascists and revolutionaries, oppressors and oppressed, and turns every disagreement into a moral war. Discussing an inflation figure or an immigration policy ceases to be a technical disagreement and automatically becomes a choice between good and evil.

It is the logic of the schoolyard bully carried into politics. Those who in the schoolyard imposed their will through intimidation, shoving, and fear have found a much larger stage in adult life. Intimidation replaces persuasion, public shaming replaces argument, cancellation replaces debate. And those of us who renounce violence and aspire to live according to common sense and to what the Bible calls “the salt of the earth” are forced to accept labels we never chose. It is enough to doubt a slogan, to ask for a figure or a source, for the response to be an insult rather than a fact.

George Orwell masterfully anticipated this perversion of language in 1984, where the Ministry of Truth rewrites the past and “doublethink” allows one to hold two contradictory ideas at once without feeling the contradiction. Something similar occurs today when the same person who defended the draconian confinement of dissent denounces, without apparent irony, the supposed authoritarianism of their adversaries. For years that nightmare advanced with little resistance. The emergence of figures such as Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Nayib Bukele, Javier Milei, or Jair Bolsonaro represented, for millions of citizens, an open challenge to an ideological hegemony they consider exhausted and close to collapse. The Salvadoran citizen who today walks at night through a neighborhood once controlled by the gangs, or the Argentine who for the first time in years sees monthly inflation in single digits, find in this political shift tangible proof that the previous status quo was not, after all, untouchable.

It is also significant to observe the political instrumentalization of certain moral causes. Various investigations and security analysts have pointed to the existence of alleged influence operations promoted by authoritarian regimes, particularly from Cuba and China, aimed at eroding the ordinary citizen’s trust in Western institutions. These are hypotheses that deserve scrutiny rather than absolute certainty, yet they are consistent with the known tradition of Soviet and Cuban “political warfare” documented since the Cold War.

Within that broader process, some legitimate social claims were turned into tools of political mobilization foreign to their original demands. The historical paradox is evident: movements inspired by regimes that brutally persecuted homosexuals now present themselves as their principal defenders. It is enough to recall the Military Units to Aid Production (UMAP) that the Cuban government operated between 1965 and 1968—forced-labor camps where homosexuals, religious believers, and other “antisocial elements” were interned—or Article 121 of the Soviet criminal code, which punished homosexual relations with up to five years of forced labor. The gulags and the persecution in Cuba form part of a documented historical reality, denounced with extraordinary force by writers such as Reinaldo Arenas, who narrated in his memoirs his time in a Cuban prison accused of “corruption of minors” and “ideological activities contrary to the Revolution.”

That persecution was eventually converted into a political banner through a logic summarized in Machiavelli’s maxim: the end justifies the means. In The Prince (XVIII) he writes:

“Faccia dunque un principe di vincere e mantenere lo stato: i mezzi saranno sempre giudicati onorevoli e da ciascuno laudati.” “Let a prince therefore aim at conquering and maintaining the state: the means will always be judged honorable and praised by everyone, for the vulgar are always taken by appearances and by the outcome of events.”

A practice denounced for decades as characteristic of fascism—the subordination of historical truth to the convenience of the narrative—is today claimed by sectors that claim to combat it. At the same time, language has been reconstructed until words become ideological weapons: terms such as “fascist,” “far-right,” or “hate speech” are applied with such elasticity that they end up meaning almost nothing except “I disagree with you.”

In the face of this transformation there remains a criterion capable of guiding us: common sense. That criterion allows us to recognize barbarism even when it appears clothed in noble rhetoric. Something similar occurred in the 1930s, when numerous Western intellectuals justified or minimized the rise of totalitarianism. The Webbs returned from the USSR convinced they had seen a “new civilization”; Walter Duranty, correspondent for The New York Times in Moscow, publicly denied the existence of the Holodomor while millions were dying, and yet retained his prestige and his Pulitzer Prize for decades. Meanwhile, a few, such as Orwell himself after his experience in the Spanish Civil War narrated in Homage to Catalonia, denounced the danger, paying for that dissent with ostracism from much of the left of their time.

My experience as a philosopher and free-thinker in Colombia reinforced this conviction. For years I witnessed the pressure exerted on those of us who refused to justify guerrilla violence under the pretext of a struggle for peace. I never took part in that ideological liturgy that a large part of my generation considered almost obligatory. As I wrote years later in Theatre, Crime and Impunity: “I did not waste my youthful years in bars discussing the plagiarisms of Marx or Darwin, nor the exploits of Che Guevara. That was what the indoctrinated youth expected of us.”

In 2014 I presented that play at the Bernardo Romero Lozano Theatre of the Colombian Circle of Artists in Bogotá. Critics received it as a thriller that combined the mystery of Agatha Christie with the suspense of Hitchcock. Nevertheless, various sectors of the left called on their militants not to attend, and a television report already recorded by Caracol Televisión was never broadcast. Even more revealing was what occurred when the play was later presented in a theatre belonging to the Mayor’s Office of Bogotá: the official in charge, an actor surnamed Vélez, deliberately began talking in a loud voice during the performance. At the end he told me that the work was not up to the level of national art and that he would see to it that I never worked again in Colombian theatre. He did not entirely succeed, but from then on I was progressively excluded from numerous cultural and institutional spaces controlled by the left for more than a decade. That experience confirmed that modern censorship rarely needs official prohibitions: it is enough to close stages, withdraw invitations, or make access to the spaces where ideas circulate more difficult.

That same ideological apparatus presented as liberators groups that resorted to kidnapping, extortion, murder, and the forced recruitment of minors. These practices found ideological legitimation in the name of the Socialist International and of the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat—an expression that in practice has designated the dictatorship of its leaders: the same people who spoke of liberating the people ended up, time and again, building personal power structures indistinguishable from what they claimed to combat. Power was once legitimized by lineage; today it seeks to legitimize itself through an ideology of double standards that conceals the abuses of new satraps.

An inevitable question then arises: where is that extreme right of which so much is said actually to be found? Historically one would expect paramilitary organizations dedicated to the systematic exercise of political violence. Yet what we see are honest citizens who vote, express their opinions, and end up subjected to campaigns of defamation or threats. In Colombia, those who question certain political sectors can quickly become targets of intimidation.

The case of Miguel Uribe Turbay illustrates the serious institutional deficiencies surrounding the security of political leaders. The senator and presidential pre-candidate had submitted more than twenty formal requests to reinforce his protection scheme throughout 2025. Despite this, on the day of the attack, 7 June 2025, his escort had been reduced from seven to three people. Shot during a campaign event in the Modelia neighborhood of Bogotá by a minor, he died two months later, on 11 August. President Gustavo Petro himself publicly acknowledged that the security scheme had been reduced “strangely” that day. Beyond the judicial hypotheses still under way, the episode fuels an intense public debate about the real cost that dissenting out loud can have in countries such as Colombia.

The present battle between the straight and the crooked, the right and the sinister, belongs above all to the intellectual terrain. Even artificial intelligence reflects the tensions of our time: it tends to demand very rigorous proof before accepting certain accusations, while public debate continues to polarize around opposing interpretations of the same facts. Meanwhile investigations and denunciations accumulate concerning corruption, abuses of power, and human-rights violations. Evidence alone often proves insufficient to change convictions once they have taken root. At the same time we observe geopolitical alliances that many find troubling, such as the support of certain Western sectors for governments like that of Iran—where human-rights organizations have documented executions of protesters and the coercive control of the so-called “morality police”—or for organizations such as Hamas, despite abundant testimonies about its repressive practices against its own citizens in Gaza.

It is enough to recall that Adolf Hitler belonged to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party for a chorus of voices immediately to rise affirming that he was not a socialist. The argument is always the same: he persecuted the Bolsheviks, therefore he could not have been one. But such reasoning presupposes precisely what it claims to demonstrate. The reasoning begins by assuming precisely what it claims to prove, that the only authentic socialism was Stalin’s Bolshevik variety and automatically turns all others into impostors. Hitler then ceases to be a socialist because he fought Stalin, just as Stalin ceases to be one when his millions of victims are recalled, and Mao ceases to be one when the figures of the Great Leap Forward appear, and the same occurs with Pol Pot, Castro, Chávez, or Maduro. The result is a doctrine that never assumes responsibility for its own historical consequences: every failure is declared a betrayal of the ideal and never a consequence of the system itself.

The absurdity appears with full clarity when one observes to whom those labels are transferred. Churchill and Roosevelt, both avowedly anti-communist, defenders of private property, liberal parliamentarism, and the market economy, are identified with democratic capitalism, while Hitler—whose party was called National Socialism, which maintained extensive state intervention in the economy, subordinated private enterprise to political power, and turned the state apparatus into the absolute center of national life—is presented as a representative of liberal capitalism. This is not to deny the profound differences between Hitlerian nationalism and Marxist internationalism, which were real and ultimately led them to confront each other militarily, but to note how the discussion is frequently reduced to a battle over appropriating or expelling certain labels, rather than calmly analyzing the similarities and differences between regimes. History then ceases to be an investigation and becomes an exercise in ideological excommunication.

Here we find a revealing example of the power of words to shape historical memory. The linguistic shift did not occur in German, nor to the same extent in English, but in Spanish. A decision of translation gradually redirected attention toward nationalism, even though the internal structure of the German word places socialism at its core. German readily forms compound nouns, and Nationalsozialismus is one of them: National modifies Sozialismus. A literal rendering therefore yields National Socialism, and a member of the NSDAP was, in the strict sense of the original German, a National Socialist. Yet in the Spanish-speaking world the expression eventually became lexicalized as the single word nacionalsocialismo. Once fused into a single lexical item, the grammatical relationship between its two components ceased to be immediately apparent. The Spanish reader thus encounters what appears to be an indivisible concept, whereas the German reader still recognizes a compound whose grammatical nucleus is Sozialismus and whose modifier is National. This is more than a philological curiosity. History shows that language is never neutral: words do not merely describe reality; they also help organize it, shaping what appears self-evident and what gradually disappears from view. Every translation is also an interpretation, and every interpretation, to one degree or another, influences collective memory.

We find ourselves, consequently, before a dispute over the foundations of our civilization: freedom, truth, and moral responsibility. I am convinced that this battle will be decided on the terrain of ideas. Open debate, the defense of truth, and the preservation of common sense will allow us to protect our civilization from the new barbarian hordes of thought. But those hordes no longer advance with armor or banners: they present themselves wrapped in a language of tolerance, justice, love, and compassion. Discovering the violence that can hide behind the noblest words constitutes, in the last analysis, the intellectual battle that deserves to be fought.