The imperialistic “nation” and “national consciousness” (XX)

EUSKAL HERRIA AND THE KINGDOM OF NABARRE, OR THE BASQUE PEOPLE AND ITS STATE, AGAINST FRENCH-SPANISH IMPERIALISM

XX – The imperialistic “nation” and “national consciousness”

Iñaki Aginaga and Felipe Campo

I

The historical process by which the oppressive States came to establish their imperialism does condition their ideology in this regard. English constitutionalism: ideologically, historically and sociologically considered, takes a form politically concrete, embodied and determined – in its foundations and even in its fictions – in correspondence with the structure of real power that constitutes it. It does always refer to the historical and sociological mediation and continuity of the preceding political institutions, which therefore – and unlike the French-Spanish imperialism – are formally maintained.

As regards terminology, in England and its Empire, the terms and concepts of People, Nation and State did not exist with the meaning, value and function that they had in the Continent, and they were adopted and adapted consequently so as to give rise: in the dominant ideology of the post-World Wars and in the subsequent official vocabulary of the United Nations’ Organization (officially created – from the first words of its Charter – by “We, the Peoples of the United Nations”), to the replacement of the term “Nation” – that had been assimilated to that of “State” – by the term “People”, which had already been invoked and falsified by the “French revolution”; what resulted only in the semantic transfer of the misunderstandings. Thus, the “State” ate the People as it had already eaten the Nation. The ideological and strategic implications are of such magnitude, that the confusion and the recuperation of terms and concepts extend to all fields; counting with the contribution, collaboration and complicity of the Pnv-Eta supporters of “the institutional path and the armed struggle”.

(Anyway, the imperialism will never accept the subjugated Peoples, Nations or Countries, no matter how they may be called. They are not the name changes that will make it change its attitude; neither will the ideological monsters hiding behind denominations such as “People of peoples”, or “Nation of nations”. Actually the French and Spanish nationalists do transfer to the oppressed Peoples their own non-existence as Peoples, in the dimension that is postulated by the imperial State. We will have occasion to appropriately expose it in this chapter.)

After a brutal military occupation and dispossession (both in its material symbols and national institutions), Wales was subjected to English rule by King Edward I of England through a full-scale war of conquest (1282-3), and incorporated to England: first by the Statute of Rhuddlan (1284), and then formally by the “Acts of Union” in 1536 and 1543. As it was established in the first Act, the English language was to be the only language of the courts of Wales, and those using the Welsh language were not to receive a public office in the territories of the king of England.

Edward I, “Hammer of the Scots” (‘Malleus Scotorum’), started also the conquest of the Kingdom of Scotland in 1296 with the bloody conquest of the city of Berwick, thus resulting in the First War of Scottish Independence. From that moment on the control of Scotland was maintained through military campaigns, atrocious cruelties (between them, the execution of William Wallace), and an Administration in the hands of English colonists and Scottish collaborationists.

After the Scottish victory of Bannockburn (1314), the Declaration of Arbroath (1320), written in Latin at the Chancellery of Scotland and sealed by fifty-one nobles, confirmed the status of Scotland as an independent State (and not as a feudal land subjected to the kings of England, as Edward I had insistently sought to obtain), and affirmed Scotland’s right to use military force when unjustly attacked. In the said Declaration, in addition to reaffirming that Scotland had always been independent (indeed for longer than England had been), and to denounce that Edward I of England had attacked unjustly and committed atrocities, was made also the most surprising assertion: that the independence of Scotland was the prerogative of the Scottish people, rather than the King of Scots. In fact, it stated that the nobility would choose someone else to be king if the current one proved to be unfit in maintaining Scotland’s independence:

“Yet if he should give up what he has begun, seeking to make us or our Kingdom subject to the King of England or the English, we should exert ourselves at once to drive him out as our Enemy and a subverter of his own Right and ours, and make some other man who was well able to defend us our King; for, as long as a Hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be subjected to the lordship of the English. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting but for freedom alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.” (From the Declaration of Arbroath, 1320.)

Eight years later by the Treaty of Edinburgh-Northampton (1328), written in French and not in English, the English Crown recognized the Kingdom of Scotland as fully independent; and the border between Scotland and England, as it was before the English invasion.

In times when the theocracy established the principle of royal authority by divine delegation, the Declaration of Arbroath implied an outright rejection of such a fraud, and it was a clear practical example of the fundamental principle that the Peoples do politically precede and legally constitute the States and the Governments, and not the other way round; a statement that the totalitarian and imperialistic powers, and the ideologists to their service, have always sought to hide, combat and deny. It was the same idea that the Nabarrese Commoners had established in the Kingdom of Nabarre twenty-three years earlier, in 1297, as it appears in the “Act of Federation of the Commoners’ Council with the Good Villages” of the Kingdom: ‘Pro libertate patria, gens libera state’; that is: “Remain ready, you free people, so that the homeland may be free”.

(In front of the despotic government of the king consort, the Capetian Philip I of Nabarre after his marriage in 1284 to Queen Joanna I of Nabarre, “The Navarrese, however, did with preference turn over to Queen Lady Joanne, seeing in Philip only the husband of her ‘natural lady’”. [José María Lacarra; ‘Political history of the Kingdom of Navarre’.] From 1285, and upon the death of his father, the king consort was also King Philip IV ‘the Fair’ of France.)

This general ideological task against the acceptance/existence of the subjugated Peoples as full-fledged Peoples, that we’ve just mentioned, is also maintained currently, by even questioning that those Declarations be a sign of the existence of Nations and an affirmation of the People’s sovereignty, as they undoubtedly are so; and this based on the simple argument that “definitions change over the time”. “The meaning ascribed to words similar to ‘nation’ during the ancient and medieval periods was often quite different than it is today”, they say. “Than it is today”, as it is claimed that it is by the imperialistic States-Nations, of course, which do by definition deny the existence of the Peoples and Nations that they have subjugated; but this is something no one should be surprised at.

“We’re bought and sold for English Gold, / Such a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation.” (From a Robert Burns’ poem about some particulars of the Union of Scotland with England.)

“A Scots rabble is the worst of its kind: for every Scot in favour there is 99 against.” (From a report by Daniel Defoe, acting as an agent and spy paid by England, on popular demonstrations against that Union.)

Finally, the “Kingdom of England” ( = England + Wales) could or tried to give an appearance of historical continuity in the establishment of its “United Kingdom”. Making use of a profusion of bribery and thanks to the work of spies and ‘agents-provocateurs’, as well as to the imposition of martial law (and not of “referenda”) in Edinburgh and other places by the Parliament of Scotland, because of fear to widespread popular unrest against its “parliamentary assent”, it was “approved” in 1707 the “Act of Union” of Scotland with England that did create the “United Kingdom of Great Britain”. In 1800 there was approved the “Act of Union” with Ireland to form the “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland”. (Nevertheless, the English did never incorporate Scotland, Eire, or Bengal in England.)

Unlike all this, the French “revolutionary constitutionalism”, and its Spanish imitation, do resort to the evacuation and discontinuity, denial or break of those preceding political Institutions whenever they have needed it: not even in full occupation of war could nor understood the French and Spanish Nationalists to follow a similar procedure with regard to the legal, State and democratic Institutions of the Basque People and the Kingdom of Nabarre.

French imperialism formalized the incorporation of the Kingdom of Nabarre after the military occupation with a null and void Edict of Union (1620); although recognizing until 1789 and 1830 that Nabarre (not Nether Nabarre, which never was a Kingdom nor reputed as such) was not France. Whereas in Spain, where the oriental despotism and the transition to modern totalitarianism to French style were spread and consolidated with the ruin of the Comuneros freedoms and the liquidation of the national rights of the surrounding kingdoms, the Spaniards did not reach that far: they had to assume the existence of a “Kingdom of Spain” that – a complete and shameful undocumented historic spawn – had neither process nor Act, Charter or Birth Certificate, nor baptismal waters nor known parents to give shape to their own “legality”, whose unpresentable iniquity could not confess even to themselves.

The French and Spanish imperialism: its corresponding States, in full possession of the monopoly on violence, are not in need of any vulgar, banal and conventional historic, sociological, political or legal considerations and procedures to accomplish and justify their constitutions: either real and primary, or formal and secondary. Nationalism and totalitarianism are their reality. And in order to “justify” them, they replace the real history and concrete society by the ideological, hypostatic, abstract, metaphysical, mythological, mystical, romantic, imaginary, finalist, essentialist, substantialist and constructivist production of the “new” sociology, history and law of the supreme and transcendent “national entity”: the imperial “Nation”, consisting of “the architecture formed by a State and the country dominated by it” (S. Weil), thus encompassing all the subjects dominated by its imperial State. This "Nation" was turned into dogma and axiom by the ideologists of the French imperialism. A production, indeed, deliberately functional, equivocal, ambivalent, variable, multiform, transformable and protean. The comparative consideration shows that there is nothing similar in the legal formalization of the constituent processes of Switzerland, Germany, the USA, Sweden, Austria etc.

Hispania has always been a geographical notion-convention; and “the Empire towards God” that they now call “Spain” has never been a People nor a Kingdom but an aggregate of Peoples and States illegally annexed and retained by means of violence and terror within a fraudulent “Kingdom of Spain”, from which only escaped Andorra, Portugal, and the ‘disjecta membra’ of Nabarre and Catalonia, annexed to France.

The real history that founds “democratically” the Empires of France and of Spain did not begin in 1789 with the Revolution, nor in 1975 with “the transition and the constitutional pact”. It is a history of violence and terrorism, aggressions, pillage, oppression and crimes of war, against peace and against humanity, with twelve centuries of occupation, dismemberment, despotism, absolutism, fascism, colonialism and genocide. The régime that they have imposed has as its origin, foundation and “legitimacy” the successive and criminal aggressions and the destruction: against the contemporary national and international law, of the independence of the Kingdom of Nabarre and of its statutory remains.

Thus, and through the hectic period 1795-1841, the Spanish Governments did formally avoid any act or process of annulment, union or annexation of the “Kingdoms of Spain”, taking for supposedly constituted the Kingdom that they were trying to impose, and for non-existent the national and State realities that they were trying to suppress:

“If this peace [Peace of Basel, 1795] was followed by the union of the [Basque] Provinces and the rest of the Nabarre without the statutory barriers that separate them and make of them almost a dead member of the Kingdom, Your Grace would have achieved one of those great works that we haven’t seen since the times of Cardinal Cisneros or the great Philip V. These are the times that ought to be seized so as to increase the funds and force of the Monarchy. The Customs of Bilbao, of San Sebastian and of the frontier would be among the best real estates in the Kingdom. The rateable contributions of the three provinces, even lowering them quite a lot, would amount up to two hundred thousand duros [five-peseta coin], according to my calculations. It can be reckoned that the troops that we could get out of there would not go lower than seven thousand men. There are legal grounds for this operation: they have essentially failed in their duties; it costs to the Monarchy the recovery of a part of its territory, and we will have enough forces on the spot to get this carried out without firing a shot, nor there being a soul who dares to reject it. I suggest Your Grace to think about it: don’t comment it with many people because there would be a risk,” etc. (From the letter that Mr. Francisco Zamora: “auditor general of the army of Navarre and the Basque provinces”, did address to the Minister of Charles IV, Manuel Godoy, urging him to take advantage, against our Country, from the consequences of the War of the Pyrenees [1792-1795] and the Peace of Basel.)

“[...] and it’s said that the [Basque] Provinces write ill at ease because they have failed to realize their project with the French in order to become independent from Spain, which was all their ideas and efforts [...]. It is said that having checked our Minister the futility of the aid of the Provinces for the defence of their land and their adherence to the French, and the damages caused to the State in people and money, he tries to avoid hereinafter the same damage, and establish in the three exempt Provinces the government and laws of Castile; and although of course those who are concerned with charters and privileges will lament it, time will show to them the advantages and happiness that it will ensue for the Provinces, their natives and inhabitants; as it is seen and known by those who are not infatuated with the privileges and charters.” (Ibid; quoted in ‘The Separation of Guipuzcoa and the Peace of Basel’; F. de Lasala.)

The pedantic conviction of the Bourbon spy – similar to the incurable optimism of warmongers and conquerors of all times – could not help that not a shot but three wars, with their horrible post-war periods of violence, repression, destruction and terrorism, were needed to consolidate the military imperialistic occupation and annexation of the Kingdom of Nabarre, and the ruin of the foral régime, up to reach the current situation. For the fascism and imperialism, the “Kingdom of Nabarre” is the name of a football field. But the State historically constituted around the Crown of Pamplona remains the only State of the Basque People, who has never accepted nor acknowledged any other.

According to Yves Person “The French people seems to have had always a certain discomfort in defining its identity and in accepting itself as such. It has remedied it by a constant flight towards a universalism that it has also decided to reduce to itself.” “The will of cultural genocide seems to mark Latin peoples, and amongst them, completely at the top, France.” “The power of the French genocide is primarily based on the myth of the universality of French culture.” “Therefore they are surprised that the whole world would not willingly join them, and suffer from neurotic rage crisis when they encounter a stronger language, such as the English. The tragedy is that this murderous myth has been accepted without any criticism and diffused with formidable efficiency by our Normal Schools. Although labouring under the illusion of being themselves of left, the mass of our teachers does always adhere to the goal of transvestiting in universalism the nationalist pretensions of the French.” They “have worked to destroy the collective solidarities, and with them the national cultures of the colonies.” They have thus formed among the Peoples dominated by France “an uprooted bourgeoisie well determined to devote itself” “to the destruction of its own national values, which it had been taught to despise”. (Yves Person, ‘Impérialisme linguistique et colonialisme’; Les Temps modernes, nº 324-325-326, août-septembre 1973.)

The French view the others but as inferior beings, susceptible – at the most – to be remade in the image of themselves. For this purported model Country, arrogant and pretentious, even its language is “the most logical” and will be the universal language... The infernal repetition of myths that is being constantly encouraged in the ‘Penguin Island’ makes it problematic the idea of a better future society.

The Nationalist ideology does immediately pose the romantic, dogmatic, essentialist, constructivist and mystique identity of France attached to the universal, the absolute good, the reason, the thought of the world, the hope of Peoples, the abstract and cartesian reasoning, the work of civilization, the humanism, the universalism, the justice, the freedom, the human rights and the democracy. Nothing in all those attributes could contradict the French Nationalism: expression of the superiority of French race, language and culture. Once the nationalist ethnocentrism has been turned into universalism, emptying the world and putting France in its place remained the only task to perform. This comes down to turning all human persons into civilized beings, that is French, provided that they are capable to become so; and to liberating all human persons, that’s to say: dominate all Peoples, exploit them, exterminate them, and incorporate them into France in the name of freedom and democracy.

Moreover – they imagine – this is what they themselves want “at the bottom” (very deep at the bottom) of themselves. Because, who wouldn’t want to belong to the top People that is going to become the material and spiritual master of the world, and that one day – unfortunately still distant – will be confounded with the human species? As Domenach has written, despite the “sometimes atrocious” means which have served to reduce them, “the conquered nationalities by France have joined to it. And not only the elites, because of the prestige of Paris and of a civilization that was the greatest one in the world, but also the peoples, and with an enthusiasm that substituted the violence of the fact with the accession of the heart”. (“Behind their own free will’s back”, no doubt.) It is the right of free disposition in French version. As we’ve previously indicated, the imperialistic romanticism forms part – a very significant one – of the nationalist romanticism in general. The humanist-Christian-personalist-nationalist pretends to believe whatever he wants to believe, and expects well that the others will want to believe it too.

The ignorance and – correlatively – the contempt for the others are the ideological basis of imperialism. For the dominant Nationalism, the Nations that it reduces or wants to reduce to its mercy are worthless. Their race is inferior or degenerate; their economy, miserable; their history, non-existent; their territory, land without an owner; their “policy”, tyranny or anarchy; their customs, immoral, degrading and cruel; their “culture”, trivial, childish and pernicious; their “languages”, slangs, jargons, gibberish, hodgepodge and dialects (without a language). Actually, those are not Peoples or Nations, which excludes all right of free disposition; this one owned solely by the true Peoples, by the noble, strong, full, complete and adult Peoples, capable of history and civilization. One should not abandon those villages and those tribes in their sad plight but get them out of there (if necessary by force), submit them, give them the post that corresponds to them in the civilization and, if possible, liquidate them to install the superior race in there. Moreover, weak of body and spirit as they are, devoid of reason and will, they couldn’t find the necessary forces and will to continue the folly of a serious and prolonged resistance, which could be quelled by some pacification expeditions or some massacres correctly conducted, consolidated by a well-organized military and civil occupation.

To tell the truth, these conquered “populations” have quickly understood where their interest is, and they themselves ask to be occupied and colonized. It would be inconceivable that they could refuse for a long time the opportunity that is offered to them; that they could reject the contribution of civilization and progress that the superior peoples are spreading in their expansion throughout the world. In their overwhelming majorities, the Aborigines are submissive, loyal and grateful; with the exception however of some irreducible wrongdoers, in addition manipulated from abroad, who are trying to take the place of the French. For the French Nationalists, the defeated Peoples weren’t anyway much worth, and becoming French was the best thing that could happen to them. If perchance the reality should come to refute these prejudices; if the resistance comes to darken this idyllic picture, the Nationalist-imperialistic fury will be proportional to its disappointment.

Here are some examples taken from socialist literature that show French Nationalism. According to Engels:

“These [French] people demand now, because the German victories have given them the gift of a Republic (and what a Republic!), that the Germans must immediately leave the sacred soil of France, otherwise: all-out war. They continue to imagine as in the past that France is superior, that its soil was sanctified by 1793 and that none of the ignominies committed since then by France can desecrate it, and that the hollow word ‘republic’ is sacred.” (From a letter to Marx; London, 7-September-1870.)

“Generally speaking, an international movement of the proletariat is possible only among independent nations. The little bit of republican internationalism between 1830 and 1848 was grouped around France, which was destined to free Europe. ‘Hence it increased French chauvinism’in sucha way as to cause the world-liberating mission of France, and with it France’s native right to be in the lead, to get in our way every day even now. [...]

“Also in the International, the French considered this point of view as fairly obvious. Only historical events could teach them – and several others also – and still must teach them daily that international cooperation is possible only among ‘equals’, and even a ‘primus inter pares’ can exist at best for immediate action.

“Therefore, as long as Poland remains partitioned and subjugated [as is the Kingdom of Nabarre], there can be no development either of a powerful socialist party within the country itself, or of genuine international intercourse [...]. Every Polish peasant and workman who rouses himself out of his stupor to participate in the common interest is confronted first of all with the fact of national subjugation; that is the first obstacle he encounters everywhere. Its removal is the prime requirement for any free and healthy development. Polish socialists who fail to put the liberation of the country at the forefront of their programme remind me of those German socialists who were reluctant to demand the immediate repeal of the Anti-Socialist Law, and freedom of association, assembly and the press. To be able to fight, you must first have terrain, light, air and elbow-room. Otherwise, you never get further than chit-chat.” (From a letter of Engels to Kautsky; London, 7 February 1882.)

Marx wrote to Engels about the ‘Proudhonist clique’ in Paris, which:

“declares nationalities to be an absurdity, attacks Bismarck and Garibaldi. As polemics against chauvinism their doings are useful and explicable. But as believers in Proudhon (Lafargue and Longuet, two very good friends of mine here, also belong to them), who think all Europe must and will sit quietly on their hind quarters until the gentlemen in France abolish poverty and ignorance – they are grotesque”. (Letter of June 7, 1866.)

Perhaps the best example that, in hindsight, can be shown about the ridicule that have attained some wise and doctrinaire “Marxists”: sectarian fanatics of the economic development always and necessarily prevailing over what they contemptuously do call “national question”, is the first sentence with which Lenin begins chapter 8 of his aforementioned work, which he describes as: “The utopian Karl Marx and the practical Rosa Luxemburg”. And the best thing about that example is that Lenin, while bringing it up when he wrote it in 1914, could not know how close it was to be attained (albeit partially) what Rosa Luxemburg posed ironically as the height of nonsense and absurd, namely: the independence of Ireland. It’s just that Luxemburg despised the desires for national independence of the “backward” Poland, which – as she believed – should be glad to be dominated by more advanced nations that would make it progress, and – in a regrettable and stubborn action that did objectively favour imperialism – she refused, therefore, to include its independence as an objective in the Socialists’ program; just the same as – “of all evidence” according to her – Ireland should be delighted to be under “the British progress”. And so it is: because of her own fanaticism, as she herself leaves for posterity a monumental memory of her ignorance, and lack of prudence and correct vision of reality, which Lenin unintentionally recorded when writing:

“Calling Polish independence a ‘utopia’ and repeating this ‘ad nauseam’, Rosa Luxemburg exclaims ironically: Why not raise the demand for the independence of Ireland?” (Lenin; Ibid.)

Two years after such words were written, the Easter Rising of April-1916 was the beginning, unfortunately tragic, of the independence of Ireland (which – to Lenin’s admiration – was even ahead of the October Revolution-1917); and other two years later would come the “impossible and utopian” independences of Finland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. Independence from the Russian Tsarist Empire that the new Russian Soviet/Bolshevik Empire attempted to reverse, especially from 1939-40, following the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the USSR – the Hitler-Stalin pact – and its secret protocols for the sharing of Eastern Europe: new repartition of Poland and Winter War against Finland in 1939, and annexation in 1940 of the three Baltic States (the “Baltic territories”, as they are called by the current Russian Kagebist/Putinist Empire).

The struggle of the Peoples for their national freedom is the greatest revolutionary force of History. Imperialism is the class struggle at the international level. The right of self-determination of the Peoples: right of unconditional and immediate independence against imperialism, does preside over and subordinate the whole problem of violence, peace and policy in general. Without the right of self-determination of Peoples: “first of human rights and prior condition of them all”, the world peace, the human rights and the democracy are only words in the panoply of ideological mystification updated by modern Nationalism, totalitarianism and imperialism.

II

In the opinion of Antoine Rivarol, “the French language is the universal language”. According to Druon, “it seems that no other language has aroused so much love, fervour, adherence and devotion towards itself”. “It is the most beautiful language in the world”, there stated the charlatan, smarmy and philologist Léon Zitrone before an approver, unanimous and delighted parterre of aesthetes and linguists, gathered – so the French do believe it – in the most beautiful Country in the world, in the most beautiful City in the world, and in the vicinity of the most beautiful Avenue in the world. The French “confess that they are not gifted for languages”; but the confessions of the French about this limitation always hide the belief in their own superior intelligence. Indeed, why learn? “While we are awaiting the happy day when the whole world will speak French”, as Zola said... The problem is that the French, the same as the Spaniards, are not content with just waiting.

However, what most characterizes French Nationalism is not the conviction of the superiority of its race, its language, or its culture. Obviously, this conviction is the very banality, present in all the “great” Countries of this world and among not a few of the smaller ones. They all do believe themselves to be superior to the others; do therefore claim particular rights that correspond to this superiority; and when – baffled – they find that some do not share this belief, they are then led to adopt the “defensive and of strict justice” measures that are to be imposed so as to remedy the resulting intolerable state of affairs.

Now then, what does characterize the French Nationalists, and makes them a unique case in the History of Humankind, it is not exactly that they believe to be superior: it is that they believe that the others believe it too. The Anglo-Saxon Nationalist is uneasy about being “respected without thereby being loved”. The Spanish Nationalist curses the Black Legend and the French, the English, the Jews, or the Freemasons “who hate and denigrate Spain”. The German Nationalist is not anymore amazed at the role of villain that is reserved to him since the Franco-Prussian War; finally, he does not care about it or he gets adapted: he “knows” what he is worth, and he does make it know in his own way. Instead the French Nationalist, for his part, believes to be the object of universal and boundless admiration and envy. His surprise and outrage are but greatest when he discovers that there are through the world people perverse enough so as not to see him as he sees himself.

Too imbued with the superiority that they attribute to themselves, as to be able to perceive themselves hated, the French cannot conceive that the whole world does not admire them, envy them and love them: even the Countries that they have conquered and colonized. They are unable to understand that there may be normal people who do not want to be or become French; this is why they are unable to foresee and “prepare” the national liberation movements, which they always deal with through violence at all costs. They have for the Spaniards the same feelings and the same contempt that the Germans have for the French, the Gypsies and others; but they also believe that they are loved by the Spaniards. They have for these ones “the condescension, sympathy, kindness, affection and amused admiration” that the lords, the masters and the colonialists have always shown towards their inferiors: the servants, the slaves and the colonized.

France: the French Kingdom-Republic-Empire, refers to the primitive People and Kingdom of the Franks increased with the successive “acquisitions, annexations, unions, reunions and accessions”, which were the result of the continuous wars of aggression, conquest and expansion waged against all the small surrounding States of the Mainland and adjacent Islands, which founded its Empire: the State “of France and of Nabarre” until 1830, in which universal and French are identified. In it, the war and terror smashed ALL strategic opposition. The monopoly of violence and Terror became absolute. In consequence, the French Government faces all the problems: political or individual, by the immediate resource, without hesitation, limits nor mitigation, to armed repression. This procedure has repeatedly failed during the preceding century but it continues to be applied since it is the only one that responds to the nature of the régime.

The French People passed from feudalism to absolutism “brutally forced by corruption and by the use of appalling cruelty”:

“Throughout all this period, it was regarded by the other Europeans as the slave people par excellence, the people that were at the disposal of the regnant King like cattle.” “During the Fronde and under Mazzarino, France, despite public distress, did morally breathe. Louis XIV found it full of brilliant geniuses that he recognized and encouraged. But at the same time, he continued, with a much higher degree of intensity, Richelieu’s policy. He thus reduced France, in a very short period of time, to a state morally deserted, not to mention an atrocious material misery.” “The régime of Louis XIV was already truly totalitarian. Terror, denunciations, ravaged the country. The idolatry of the State, represented by the sovereign, was organized with an impudence that was a challenge to all Christian consciences. The art of propaganda was already very well known, as it is shown in the police Chief’s naïve confession to Liselotte [of Bavaria] concerning the order not to let appear any book, on any subject, which did not contain the exaggerated praise of the King. Under this regime, the uprooting of the French provinces, the destruction of local life, reached a much higher level.” In the conquered Countries, “for which the French were foreigners and barbarians like Germans are for us”, the French did apply “terror, Inquisition and extermination”. (Simone Weil; ‘The Need for Roots: prelude towards a declaration of duties towards mankind’, 1952.)

The French Revolution produced the prototype of modern totalitarianism and dictatorship. It consisted of the reduction and submission of the legislative and judicial bodies, and of the “development and consolidation of the ‘executive power’, of its bureaucratic and military apparatus”:

“‘This executive power, with its enormous bureaucratic and military organization, with its vast and ingenious state machinery, with a host of officials numbering half a million, besides an army of another half million, this appalling parasitic body, which enmeshes the body of French society and chokes all its pores, sprang up in the days of the absolute monarchy, with the decay of the feudal system, which it helped to hasten.’

“The first French Revolution developed centralization, ‘but at the same time’ it increased ‘the extent, the attributes and the number of agents of governmental power. Napoleon completed this state machinery’. [...].

“‘... Finally, in its struggle against the revolution, the parliamentary republic found itself compelled to strengthen, along with repressive measures, the resources and centralization of governmental power. All revolutions perfected this machine instead of smashing it. The parties that contended in turn for domination, regarded the possession of this huge state edifice as the principal spoils of the victor.’

“To divide the spoils, to install oneself in the lucrative posts, to share the administrative sinecures; this redistribution of the ‘spoils’ was made from top to bottom, across the country, in all the central and local administrations”. (V. Lenin, ‘The State and Revolution’. Quotations taken from K. Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’.)

The classics could not imagine to what an extent these numbers and realities would become ridiculous, placed by the side of those currently developed and established.

“Two are the institutions most characteristic of this State machine: the bureaucracy and the standing army.” Both are united “by thousands of threads” to the classes that hold the power and the wealth in the civil society. The union of industrial and banking capital does result in the monopoly of the financial capital, “a financial oligarchy that enmeshes in a tight network of relations of dependence all the economic and political institutions without exception”.

The constructivist organization of the political power, the unheard-of centralization and the functional and territorial concentration of the State, the absence of general and territorial separation of powers, the sacrifice of human rights and individual freedoms, the civil society as a passive dependency of an arrogant and all-powerful administration before which there is no possible reply or defence, the servility, corporatism and corruption, and the formal law in the service of the real law: here are the elements that constitute the daily reality of French society, and that an immense ideological enterprise of propaganda, intoxication and mystification did conceal and idealize by exalting instead “the homeland of human rights, where poor and rich, mighty and weak, are equal before Law and Justice, and where the law is the same for all” etc.; functional stupidities that the slightest everyday experience is enough to debunk.

The idolatry of the State, which had germinated with the absolutism of the Ancien Régime, reached its peak with the Republic, which in its turn had ended with the traditional absolutism. “The nation did replace it. The nation, that is: the State.” “But for them, France was not the sovereign nation, nor the King; it was the French State.” It was only the State: totalitarian and founded on the Terrorist and proto-fascist Dictatorship of the municipal and colonial Committees of Public Safety of the “New Régime”, which was finally integrated and developed in Bonapartism and bureaucratism.

“The parliamentary coup had become a military coup, and the strong man was now Bonaparte: ‘The Revolution’ Bonaparte said ‘is over’. And then he added: ‘I am the Revolution’. ‘The Revolution is safe on my watch; I am the product of the Revolution myself.’ First Consul, First Consul for life with near-dictatorial powers... a king in all but name. [...] Launching a series of sweeping political, economic and legal reforms, he laid the foundation for a new France. [...] All of French society came under his gaze. He set in place a strong, centralized Government with a tightly structured, far-reaching bureaucracy. [...] He ruled with an iron hand, crushing anyone who dared speak out against him, turning the parliament and free elections into a farce. [...] Bonaparte’s France was a police State, with a vast network of spies. ‘You go to a salon, there is a spy; you go to a brothel, there is a spy; you go to a restaurant, there is a spy, everywhere there are spies of the Police: everyone listens to what you say. It is impossible to express yourself unless Napoleon wants you to. The press is under his thumb: he controls the press. There were 60 or 70 newspapers in Paris in 1799, and there will be only four in 1814.’ [...] He was as powerful as any of the Bourbon kings who had come before him. All he lacked was a crown. Now he decided he wanted one. [...] With the Pope sanctifying the coronation of Napoleon as Emperor, it was God who was confirming that the changes that had taken place during the Revolution were forever established.” (D. Grubin; ‘Napoleon’.)

In “France” and in “Spain”, the transition from the absolutism and the oriental despotism to the “modern” imperialism of the New Régime was carried out by seeking that, through the fraudulent manipulation and the falsification of the new principles of “the revolution, the human rights, the social contract and the national sovereignty”, there might be achieved the means of attributing new and immaculate “democratic legitimacy”: past, present and future, to the conservation and development of the work of the Ancien Régime. All this by concealing, completing or supplanting the real foundations of the historical, political and social reality, namely: the crimes of war, against peace and against humanity, the general economic plunder, and the systematic enterprise of destruction of Peoples, Nations and States by the French-Spanish imperialistic Nationalism.

So, it was first and foremost an effort to hide the foundations of the imperialistic régime, imposed through centuries of violence, war and military occupation, terrorism, repression and deportation. It was therefore about a question of distorting and ruining, in theory and in practice, the international right of independence, free disposition or self-determination of all the subjugated Peoples: first of fundamental human rights and precondition of them all; a right without which the purported “freedom and democracy” invoked by the legists and propagandists in charge of the manipulation are but ideological farces at the service of imperialism. It was and it is the priority task of the ideologists and politicians of the Nationalist Parties in power.

The un-temporary, trans-temporary and inter-temporary continuity of the Empire is teleologically founded by extension, projection or retroyection of its essence: either forwards or backwards. The “democracy” refers to the “legal voting within the State of right”. The “State of right” refers to “the rule of law”: a law that they have established so as to be endured by those who have been trapped inside the imperial “nation”. The imperial “nation” refers to the historical and social mythology by begging the question, and back again to square one. The tricksters of the imperialistic Nationalism do tirelessly practice the ideological escape in (a vicious) circle.

For the national concept “of a Tatar origin”: imported and functionally adopted and adapted by the ideologists of the French imperialism, the historical consciousness of the dominant Nationalism is fabricated by an appropriate functional and tautological combination of memory and oblivion. The ideologists of the Spanish Nationalism took it, just as it is, from its French translation, limiting their contribution to the supplementary dose of metaphysics and traditional mysticism that the local ideological market did need. “France is not God”, admitted the “critical” – albeit Nationalist – Christian commentator of the history of France, Simone Weil; but “Spain is a divine fact”, “a thing as if from God”, according to some Spanish theologians and politicians, who do not fear blasphemy or heresy when they serve their Empire as supreme and absolute value. Civil, military or ecclesiastical prophets and witnesses have neither been lacking nor lack to certify it.

This is precisely what some “eminent” theorists established as the basis of their artificial “Nation-state” product of imperialism, namely: “an appropriate combination of memory and oblivion”. Renan puts it transparently:

“The oblivion and – I would rather say – even the historical error [well understood: the deliberate and systematic distortion/falsification of history] are an essential factor for the creation of a nation; and thus, the progress of historical studies is often a danger for the nationality. [...] Now then, the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common [even if it consists of some being criminals and executioners, and others their victims], and also that they all have forgotten many things.” Etc. (E. Renan, ‘What is a nation?’; 1882.)

That’s right: the “nation” in Spanish and French style does certainly need the subjugated Peoples to forget how much they have “in common” with it. Its imperialistic and terrorist State: which did unilaterally and criminally launch the aggression when it suited to it and imposed with violence the destruction of the State and the fundamental and inherent human rights of the subjugated Basque People, once the war has been won, declares “peace” also when it suits to it, imposes its own law of the strongest: its positive law (‘might is right’: ‘the laws that the victor lays onto the defeated, and along with them our language’, as Nebrija explained it to Queen Elizabeth I of Castile in the Prologue to his Grammar), exacts acceptance of the new status quo which it calls “coexistence”, and does in this way expects that the opposition: unarmed and terrified (and finally incapable and/or corrupted), will forget its monstrous crimes against innocent and defenceless children and elderly people, women and men, and that it will accept the situation resulting from the wars of aggression and conquest, the bombing of towns and villages, the harrowing oppression, discrimination and exclusion of the subjugated People, and the exile, confiscation, looting and genocide; all of which its metropolitan Agents and indigenous Collaborationists will now call “democracy and ethical fundamentals”.

In short, once the traditional alibis and wiles that “justified” the imperialism upon the “divine, ecclesiastical, human, natural, historic, dynastic, dogmatic and other laws” were exhausted, the ideologists of the French “revolutionary” constitutionalism and those of its Spanish imitator (who sought the ideological means of preserving in the new situation the achievements of the previous work of absolutism and Asian despotism) did contrive to attribute the new and immaculate foundation that they were seeking for the New Régime, upon the continuation of the Ancient Régime and through the recuperation, forgery and adaptation of the concept of “nation”.

The State “will try to give their subjects the feeling of belonging to a community of which it will necessarily assume the direction: thence the creation of the nation”. “The very word ‘nation’ had changed of meaning. In our century it does not any more appoint the sovereign People but the whole of populations which recognize the authority of a single State; the architecture formed by a State and the country dominated by it””; once the procedure by which that domination has been reached has been conveniently “forgotten”.

Finally, the ideologists of the Spanish imperialism had to resort to the variable and multiform myth, made dogma and axiom, of the “nation” to French style. The “nation” at French-style does precede and escape any historical and sociological consideration; this being a second and derived question for the dominant ideology. 

With the “nation” to French style: “pure myth and dogma, introduction of the Holy Trinity in the political science, metaphysical construction foreign to the concrete reality, pure fiction devoid of sense once the historical circumstance that originated it had disappeared”, the history and the sociology are dogmatically and mythologically established, “tautologically” deduced by simple truism, developed by extension, projection and retrojection, and proved by begging the question. The concept of “nation” contrived for this purpose recuperates that term, while replacing the real concept of Nation so that it may adjust to what is desired. And if – as it is the case – the concept does not correspond to reality (and while the latter is being transformed by the republican or monarchical terrorism), a new concept that corresponds to it can be manufactured in the meantime. Not even so have Spaniards and French managed to make the trick work.

The sole object and ‘raison d’être’ of this operation: which established the new ideological paradigm of the French and Spanish imperialistic Nationalism, was – and still continues to be – to create a purported “national and democratic reality” that could conceal, falsify and supplant the political, historical and social reality of the “new” imperialism, that is: its origin, continuity and foundation that had been established in the Ancien Régime, and that at the same time would cover up the bureaucratic and military dictatorship; to attribute a “national” basis to an artificial political reality devoid of it; and to justify the military and nationalist bureaucratic dictatorship. It was thus ensured the ideology of the transition from the Ancien to the New Régime, while the republican (or monarchical) Terrorism and constructivism dealt with the practical transformation of the reality so as to adapt it to the real project: the permanent, immanent and underlying project of the model nation of “the French model nation” (or its “Spanish” imitation), over which Marx had ironized:

“‘Yesterday’ – Marx wrote on June 20, 1866 – ‘there was a discussion in the International Council on the present war. [...]. The discussion wound up, as was to be foreseen, with ‘the question of nationality’ in general and the attitude we take towards it. [...]. The representatives of ‘Young France’ (non-workers) came out with the announcement that all nationalities and even nations were ‘antiquated prejudices’. [...] The whole world must wait until the French are ripe for a social revolution. [...]. The English laughed very much when I began my speech by saying that our friend Lafargue and others, who had done away with nationalities, had spoken ‘French’ to us, i. e., a language which nine-tenths of the audience did not understand. I also suggested that by the negation of nationalities he [Lafargue] appeared, quite unconsciously, to understand their absorption by the model French nation’.” (Quoted by V. Lenin in ‘The Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, 1914)

But attributing a misleading “national and democratic” basis to a structure of domination that manifestly lacked it, presented still major difficulties than adhering to the traditional foundations: based on the conquests blessed by the ecclesiastical-dynastic-religious mystification, and imposed on States that were nevertheless formally maintained as different. That is why the real national consciousness: whether permanent, apparent or underlying, of the dominant Governments and Countries (which resists well to the hollow or delirious extravagances of its illusionists), cannot be frankly admitted nor formally shown; which produces the ideological splitting as we are going to see below.

The entire ideology of modern French and Spanish imperialistic Nationalism, for over two hundred years, consists in the effort – significantly repetitive – maintained by a false, sick or miserable consciousness: inherent in the bad faith, and bent on avoiding or distorting the terms of a problem that has no theoretical solution. Of course, the painful and always failed search and recuperation-mystification of ideas, for their adaptation to the reality of imperialism, allowed to gain time while the imperialistic violence, terrorism and constructivism did in the practice adapt that reality to the permanent and underlying vulgarity of its ideas.

To get the impossible notion – because of its being contradictory – of the “nation” that combines the postulated national unity and consciousness of the imperialism, along with the reality of the subjugated Peoples, is the always failed task of professional ideologists of the imperialism; is the eternal and revealingly fruitless search for a faked and lost identity. With a null success rate, judging by the dedicated, untiring, persistent, one and multiple productions of its apologists. This leads to a clash between their authentic national consciousness and the ideologically created fiction. The national and political conscience corresponding to the imperialism of Spaniards and French unfolds thereby in real true conscience, on the one hand; and false – bad – conscience, on the other. They both accumulate in the dominant ideology. But, as a result of that accumulation and clash, the national consciousness of the French and Spanish imperialism does necessarily result in a miserable, sick or painful conscience, dissociated and guilty; in an aggregate and a combination of ignorance, falsehood, cynicism, hypocrisy, lies and bad faith, unable to assume the real content of the underlying social and historical reality. A dual consciousness whose components: formally contradictory but ideologically operative, do complement, alternate or follow each other depending on the circumstances, the cases and the needs of time and occasion.

In the ideological complex established by the imperialism, the effective and operational concepts of Nation, State or Law: of the most stable classicism, are assisted and concealed behind the ideological illusionism with which it is intended to hide and serve the reality of the Empire according to the legitimacies of each epoch; and both elements coexist in the dominant ideology. Thus the modern myths constituent of the Nation and the State: “equality”, “human rights”, “free citizens” etc., did replace the ancient ones: Papal Bulls, “divine and dynastic laws” etc., and the real history and society disappeared. The retroyection replaced the historical memory of the Peoples; and the prefabricated symbols and representations supplanted the sociological knowledge. In the resulting vacuum emerges the ideological production of the Nation’s model: functional, ideal, fantastic, imaginary, romantic, abstract, mystical, dogmatic and retro-activated, which is required by the conditions of the “new” imperialism.

In the topsy-turvy ideological world of imperialistic Nationalism, the idea, the symbol and the representation dominate and replace reality. For Spanish and French Nationalism, the national essence precedes the existence; but, in the absence of a real existence that corresponds to the essence, the essence itself turns to be metaphysically indeterminable and indefinable. The idea of “nation” is destroyed and built beforehand so that it can correspond tautologically to the forced exigency of the respective Empire. However, legions of well-paid Nationalist ideologists: obsessed with achieving an illusory and formal concept of “nation” that meets those requirements but at the same time does not correspond to the conquered Peoples, have not been able to still find the miraculous and presentable idea that comprehends or masks the reality behind the truism, despite its strenuous efforts to dispose of, select and accumulate the notes that allow it.

Swarms of “intellectuals” and ideologists seek tirelessly and discuss vainly in search of an identity that doesn’t exist, in the daunting task of discovering the miraculous idea that corresponds to the reality of the Empire and that at the same time conceals it. It’s already two centuries ago that the research is being continued. After two hundred and thirty years of the unilateral proclamation (1791) that “The Sovereignty is one, indivisible, inalienable and imprescriptible. It belongs to the (‘French’) Nation,” the investigation and imposition of that forcible national identity remain still of the utmost topicality. But it’s the characteristic of the hopeless “theories” not to satisfy even their own parents or addicts. The repetitive effort of each new candidate, the incessant repetition of such attempts so as to “improve, clarify or complete” the work of the predecessors: consequence and exponent of their inevitable failure, are revealing.

Countless Spanish and French “biologists, linguists and historians” subordinate the truth and the simple or scientific knowledge to the imperialistic and fascist propaganda. They sacrifice the method, the scientific facts and data whenever it suits them. They cover and falsify the origin, nature and foundation of the régime they are serving to.

Spanish and French “sociologists and jurists” have not yet “discovered” the real foundation of their grotesque Constitutions, nor penetrated “the great mystery of Law”, nor even learned the role of imperialistic-totalitarian violence (i.e.: exercised for the violation of the fundamental human rights of the Peoples that they maintain subjugated) of the political régime which they serve to. When they claim “the consideration that their scientific merits make them creditors to” they claim to play and win all at the same time: the same as the régime that does produce, use and finance them, they want to play at the same time to fascism, imperialism, military occupation, freedom, non-violence and democracy.

The Spanish “historians”, which accuse the “autonomous” local Administration of their own “government” of falsifying the history, are the same that did never discover who razed Gernika to the ground. And if they did, they took good care about it and avoided accusing the undefeated Caudillo of falsifying history in simultaneous version; meanwhile, the terrified eyewitnesses answered (to whom even dared to ask questions): “rumour has it that they say it must be said that they have been the Red”. If they do this with contemporary history and in the eyes of the whole world, anyone can deduce what they have done and what they are able to do with modern or medieval history.

The imperialistic Nationalism has insurmountable difficulties to invent a presentable form of its own identity idea of “nation”, and the barren efforts and ugly results of its ideologists and legislators do but confirm the intemperance of the effort: there is no doubt that without the categorical nationalist imperative, without the need of ideologically dominate the occupied Peoples, and short of pre-established ideological objectives, no one would apply to the unrewarding task of substantiating such historical and social mystification, nor anyone would take it into his head to embark on such a caravel.

In any case, no one is really thinking about founding – no one could found – in such a way a genuine national consciousness. The effective idea of “nation” that founds the Spanish and French national consciousness, and that operates really on it, is extremely simple and traditional. It refers to the idea of “the national, racial, linguistic and cultural unity” that has been artificially and falsely illustrated, verified and fixed from early childhood: by means of the abstract one-colour paintings of murals and maps (with the Peninsula painted all in yellow, or “the Hexagon” painted all in pink), within the walls of the civilian, military and religious schools and the other centres of ideological conditioning and intoxication of masses. Those simple graphic fetishes: which precede the laws of the civil code or of nationality, have done in favour of that idea more than all the auxiliary products of the Nationalist ‘intelligentsia’.

In its purest form, or corrected and underpinned by A. Towianski and E. Renan (to be extended also to the Frenchified/Hispanicized allogenous: the Renegades “voluntarily” incorporated and adopted by the “model nation”), that idea of imperial and imperialistic “nation” is common to Nebrija and to Cardinal Cisneros, to Sarkozy and to Valls, to Ortega y Gasset and to both Primo de Rivera, to General Franco and to General De Gaulle, to Cardinal Gomá, to the military Bishop Sebastian and to their godfather Pope Wojtyla, to all the Spanish and French Fascists (whether in the traditional version of the Movement Party, or in that of the Spanish National-socialist workers’ Party-PsoE), to Domenach, Taguieff and to Lanzmann, to Aznar, Gonzalez, Redondo and to Zapatero, to General Galindo and to the last Civil Guard.

III

The dominant ideology has designed an original historical chronology in which time – as war and peace – begins, ends and stops as it suits better to fascism and imperialism. For the ideologists of imperialism “what matters is the future, and not the past”; but the history, the past, the present and the future that they speak about, do in each case and circumstance begin and end depending on and when the political power decides it so: that’s what political power is for! The French “revolution” and the Spanish “transition” did supposedly imply according to them “page pass, starting afresh, a clean slate, tabula rasa, zero point of the political process”; but they understood that this did not mean the annulation but the confirmation and intangibility of the foundations of the “Ancien Régime”. The “zero point” does always start for imperialism from the endorsement, recognition and acceptance of all the past and the present of its criminal conquests.

To carry out their conquests, the conquerors have never submitted to or have met other requirements than those which they themselves have imposed through war and monopoly of violence. Imperialism does “naturally” destroy the Peoples, their freedom, their identity, their racial, linguistic and cultural characters; if such results did not occur, then there would be no imperialism nor any imperialistic problem to solve. If imperialism did not attack the integrity of the oppressed Nations, then there would be no imperialism or need to oppose it. If imperialism did produce liberty, national, linguistic, cultural and economic development, then imperialism would not be imperialism, and there would not be so crazy a People as to reject the benefits of such a régime. However this obvious reality does apparently exceed the capacity for understanding of the imperialists, and it still remains to be explained for them why then there occurs the problem, that is: why the subjugated Peoples insist on fighting the imperialistic Nationalism, and on rejecting the imperialistic “nation” and “national consciousness”.

The explanation that the ideologists of imperialism do propose, lies precisely and “logically” in the mental or, at least, ideological alienation of the subjugated Peoples. But the ideologists of the French-Spanish “Marxism”: which do tirelessly denounce the “idealism and fetishism” of the others, must still explain the material and social – not to mention the moral – foundation of their domination and their ideas among the subjugated Peoples (imposed as a result of aggression, war and military occupation), rather than turning upside down again infra-structure and supra-structure by means of ideology, as their conquering ancestors did on blood and fire.

However, and on the contrary, it is to the subjugated Peoples: that have been deprived of freedom and endure the political, ideological, economic, demographic, cultural and linguistic consequences of the foreign domination, to which with unheard-of impudence such ideologists demand the fulfilment of conditions of national perfection and integrity that precisely the imperialism has destroyed; conditions that imperialism has never fulfilled and that it has destroyed where they existed. The legitimacy of the opposition to imperialism is so conditioned – according to the requirements of the “Marxist” theorists of French-Spanish imperialism – to the absence of consequences that are inevitable and inherent in the imperialism itself.

Yet, to disqualify the opposition to imperialism due to the consequences of imperialism; to a lack of fullness of the national characteristics that the imperialism has destroyed, that is: due to a lack that is a consequence of the action of imperialism on the subjugated Peoples because of their having been deprived of freedom and having suffered its economic, demographic, cultural and linguistic consequences; and to “demand”, in short, such national perfection and integrity that precisely the imperialism has destroyed, it is the same as demading, as a condition to oppose to it, that imperialism has not existed. Which, even though it is an impossibility and a logical absurdity, it’s perfectly consistent with the ideology and the action of imperialism, which – as already explained in Chapter IX ‘Imperialism, fascism and ideology’ – could not care less about these issues.

Even more, the division of labour between the different fascist ideologists – in use of their violence monopoly and their one-way freedom of expression, historically acquired – allows them the simultaneous and complementary “disqualification” due to different and even contradictory reasons. Indeed, the history of imperialism and colonialism shows only too well the eminently variable and instrumental characteristics of their “arguments”; and thus, it has been claimed that if the colonized are coloured, “the Nation, Freedom, Democracy and right of self-determination” have as a condition of existence and validity the fact that their owners should be white; but if the colonized are white, then the above principles have as a condition that they should be black or uncoloured. If they are farmers, they should be “modern” proletarian or bourgeois; but if they are middle-class bourgeois or proletarian, then they should be nomads, peasants or farmers. If they are pagans or heretics, they should be Vaticanist Catholics; and if Vaticanist Catholics, they should be “Marxist-Leninist”. If they are peaceful or helpless, they must demonstrate their viability, their life force and their capability to impose themselves by means of violence and war, just the same as the great historically dominant Peoples do; but if they resist (however faintly they may do it), then they should renounce “to all violence wherever it may come”, it is: they should accept the others’ monopoly of violence. If they invoke multi-centennial Peoples, States and rights, they should forget the past and look ahead for the present and the future, which are what does count; whereas if they look ahead and claim the current right of self-determination of all Peoples, then it turns out that they should respect the foundation of “a social and political community that roots deeply in a thousand-year-old History” (as it is written and falsified by the agents of the National-imperialism and fascism of France and of Spain), that is: hiding and denying that such History consists of centuries of aggressions and conquests; and affirming instead that the borders imposed through imperialistic aggression, occupation, dismemberment and annexation of our People and State must be accepted.

The fact that, for the imperialistic standards, the subjugated Peoples be “disqualified” – in succession or even simultaneously – for being pagans, schismatic, Orthodox or Muhammadans, peasants, bourgeois, fascists or communists; or because of their racial, linguistic or cultural, economic, geographic, demographic or political “deficiencies”, this depends only on the circumstances: should the Peoples were or had been otherwise, this is a question that in no way has affected or will affect the imperialistic determination to finish with them. The fact that its ideologists manage to deceive with this rubbish a defenceless population, their accomplices (i.e.: their allies or victims who form the Pnv-Eta liquidationist bureaucracy and its satellites and auxiliary branches), and their prefabricated services of the local “autonomous” Administration, it does in itself indicate the effects of the ideological intoxication in the conditions of imperialism and fascism. And that it be necessary to deal with such stupidities and absurdities, indicates already the state of mental alienation of a society victim of imperialism.

Today the “impediment” most used by the imperialistic propaganda, when it comes to denying or questioning the existence and rights of the Basque People settled in its own historical Territories, is the presence in our Country of the Spanish colony implanted by the great colonization of the years 50 and 60 of the past century. Yet, such immigration had not arrived in the previous years or centuries, and its absence did not prevent either the permanent aggression against the Basque People and its State or the ideology at the service of that aggression; nor would it prevent them now, should the current situation be not so. Certainly, some of the most used data now to discuss/deny the existence of the Basque People did not certainly occur in 1950, 1936, 1834, 1812, 1795, 1789, 1620, 1512 or 1199; however the war, occupation and terror did not stop then for that reason, nor did they wait for those data to occur so as to carry out the attacks. Only the last “naïve” persons can still believe that the Spanish and French imperialistic Nationalism would cease to be so, and that it would change its attitude towards the Basque People and its State the Kingdom of Nabarre, if present days’ data: whatever they may be, were different from what they are.

The question is, purely and simply, that the “general ideas” that – according to the imperialistic ideology – establish what should be understood by “People”, “Nation” or “right of self-determination”, will never correspond to the subjugated Peoples, since those ideas are manufactured, modified and recuperated so that they may not quite correspond to them, and they are corrected if they do. Even their alleged correspondence with the own Spanish or French model is an affirmation as empty as any truism and begging the question, which their imperialistic “nation” and “national conscience” are based upon.

In any case, any condition that was satisfied in this respect would only result in the functional change, that is: the increase in the conditions required by the ideological agents of imperialism. If the same conditions that French-Spanish imperialism requires to its preys – for their realization as a People, Nation or State agents of the right of self-determination – were adopted as universal standard and were applied to everybody, then there would be in the world no Country or independence left, able to pass the proof; there would not be left in the world a Nation or State without being disqualified, France and Spain at the forefront. Conversely, if the current characteristics of the Basque People – whose value as national signs the imperialists deny – were those of the Spanish and French Empires, or of any other, such characteristics would be the ideological basis for their own formal concept of Nation. The national essence and existence of Spain and of France contradict all the conditions and incorporate all the “flaws” that they respectively demand and attribute to others; without all that affecting the determination of their ideologists, who prefer to divert the view and attention of their victims toward the problems of the others.

Imperialism does not intend to deal scientifically or democratically with the Peoples’ issues. Whatever may be the disguise it uses to cover up, under the protection of its monopolies of violence and mass propaganda, its sole aim and raison d’être is the Nationalist domination and the destruction of the democracy, freedom and existence of the subjugated Peoples. The propaganda of today’s Nationalist imperialism is relatively and formally different from it was a hundred years ago, from that of the 1930s and of the sixties; but its method and basic objectives have not changed in the least. What the Spanish and French parties and ideological-political agents do now spread in the occupied Territories of the Basque People and its State, the Kingdom of Nabarre, is what their propaganda has always spread: in Cuba, in Algeria, and in every Country where the Spanish and French imperialistic Nationalism has left its nasty mark. Namely, the oppressed “populations” (never Peoples): wild, bloodthirsty, aggressive, xenophobic, devoid of reason, incapable of progress savages, races, languages and cultures of inferior type, are doomed to be subjugated, plundered, exploited, assimilated and destroyed by the superior races, bearers of culture and civilization.

“The colonial policy is a daughter of the industrial policy. [...] The foundation of a colony is the creation of a market of outlets. The colonies are, for the rich countries, a capital investment of the most advantageous. France, which is brimming with capital, [...] has an interest in considering this side of the issue. The colonies open to the French country unlimited markets. But for this economic purpose to be reached it is necessary not to be contented only with simple commercial facilities. [...] Gentlemen, there is a second point, a second order of ideas, which I must also deal with [...]: it is the humanitarian and civilizing side of the question. [...] Gentlemen, we must speak more loudly and more honestly! We must say openly that indeed the higher races have a right over the lower races. [...] I repeat, that the superior races have a right because they have a duty. They have the duty to civilize the inferior races. [...] Can you deny, is there someone who can deny that there is more justice, more material and moral order in North Africa since France has made its conquest? [...] In the history of earlier centuries these duties, gentlemen, have often been misunderstood; and certainly, when the Spanish soldiers and explorers introduced slavery into Central America, they did not fulfil their duty as men of a higher race. But, in our time, I maintain that European nations acquit themselves with generosity, with grandeur, and with sincerity of this superior civilizing duty.” “If France wanted to remain a great country capable of exercising on the destinies of Europe the influence that belongs to it,” it had to “carry, everywhere where it can do it, its language, its costumes, its flag, its weapons and its genius”. “Nowadays they are the Continents which we are annexing, it’s the vastness which we are sharing.” “All the plots of the France colonial dominion, all these remains must be sacred to us.” “It is essential to establish colonization on domination”, claimed Jules Ferry in the Chamber of Deputies in July-1885.

The humanist-republican-opportunistic-socialist Jean Jaurès did admire Ferry: “this remarkable man” “who for 30 years had been moving sharply the centre of gravity of France towards distant countries”, and who was aimed at nothing less than to “organize the world without God and King”. (Meanwhile, in the Commune, “as Mayor of Paris during the siege, he got out a fortune from famine by means of shenanigans”, pointed out Marx.)

Consequently, “this remarkable man” declared to the Chamber, as early as in 1881: “We have sent to the South imposing forces, in order to reduce the Arab populations, the Arab spirit, using the only demonstration that they understand: that of force. We wanted to show these barbaric and rebellious tribes what is a French army”. It would take too long to describe here how the demonstration was made. “The French, in a few years, have committed more cruelties than the Turks in two hundred years”, had said Deputy Roger to the Parliament already in 1834. And as early as 1847 Tocqueville reported: “Around us the lights have gone out, the recruitment of men of religion and men of law has ceased; that is, we have made the Muslim society much more miserable, much more disorderly, more ignorant and more barbaric than it was before they knew us”. (Report on the draft law on extraordinary credits requested for Algeria, 1847.)

The imperialistic ideologists do not only deny the existence of the subjugated Peoples: they also need to alter and split the own idea of the dominant Nation; consequently, they formally sacrifice, disguise, falsify and dissolve the national idea of Spain and France. Spain and France are to be what it is needed in order that the others cannot be. This is how the Spaniards have atomized and disintegrated their own territorial structure in numerous “autonomous regions”: thus jeopardizing their own viability as a nation, because of the need to devalue and neutralize the authentic international right of self-government or self-determination of these Peoples and States that they still keep subjugated within their imperialistic borders. With this “trick”, the international right of self-determination or independence of all Peoples: contradictory and incompatible with imperialism, is thus apparently annulled/replaced; while placing in its place and at the same level as a substitute the false internal “autonomous government” of their own “autonomous regions”.

That’s to say: the imperialistic Nationalism understands that it can pursue its criminal ends and exercise its “rights” through war, conquest and the monopoly of violence, in violation of the fundamental human rights and – above all – the international right of self-determination or independence of the Peoples that it attacks, and that this is already untouchable; but that, instead, these Peoples that it has submitted under its domination can only pursue their lawful ends and exercise their rights – which is regarded and named as the sole “nationalism” – through the submission to the conditions and limits set on them by the imperialistic régime. It’s this way as the imperialistic Nationalism understands “the right” that everyone has: “including the nationalists” from the occupied Countries, to exercise and pursue their own rights. That is: it is the “right” – that’s to say, the obligation – to behave as the dominant nation wants them to.

Or, put another way: imperialism pretends that the rights of the People it has occupied “are to be respected without prejudice to the constitutional unity”, that’s to say: subjected to the INTERNAL (domestic) law of the occupying nation. Yet, given that the occupied People and State are not part of the occupying nation and State but “have, under the Charter, a status separate and distinct from the territory of the State administering them” [UNGAR 2625 (1970)], hence it follows that the fundamental rights of the subdued Peoples and States – and first and foremost their INTERNATIONAL right of self-determination or independence – are EXTERNAL AND INCOMPATIBLE with the criminal imperialistic “right” of the occupying nation and State, and therefore have NOTHING to do with nor are subordinated to its domestic positive law.

The refusal or failure to recognize the occupied Nations and States that they keep occupied prevents Spaniards and French from openly recognizing and assuming their own real national consciousness. Therefore, whether it be as a consequence either of the definitive freedom of the Peoples that they are subjugating, or of the definitive national liquidation of them, this dilemma: either National Liberty of those Peoples, with its consequence of real democracy and general progress; or the maintenance of imperialism and its crimes, with its consequence of structural and general systemic morass, is fatally established for Spaniards and French as a condition for the freedom of their own national idea: which is held as a hostage of their imperialistic Nationalism, and also as a condition for the recovery of the reality of their own history, which they hide to themselves because it reveals to them the denied reality and history of the Peoples and States that they keep oppressed.

Without the need to ideologically fighting the national Resistance of the Peoples, and of hiding the reality of imperialism, the simple and authentic concept which founds the national consciousness of Spain and France would appear without misunderstandings and disguises, and without splitting of their national consciousness by the effect of the interaction between the ideology of reality and the ideology of illusion; with the subsequent saving of the extravagant and deliquescent metaphysical rhetoric that the propaganda and psychological warfare of the imperialistic Nationalism do impose: whether in Madrid or Paris, Ankara, Moscow or Beijing.

That’s why, when and where it was necessary, the imperialists who were fundamentalist National-Catholics turned into schismatics (or “Marxist-Leninists”), as they had already announced that they would do, and are ready to turn themselves into anything else if their true and permanent National-imperialistic values and objectives make it necessary. The Spanish “Republicans and Socialists” have already turned themselves into legitimist-constitutionalist monarchists of the Francoist monarchy, bourgeois reformists, and anything that the Spanish imperialistic Nationalism needs.

The “contradictions between the constitutionalist Parties” do not deceive anyone. Depending on how it sees that things are going around the world, the Spanish Nationalism invokes the principles of National-catholicism, National-syndicalism, National-socialism, Falangism, Fascism, Socialism, Castrism or Marxism-Leninism: in succession or all at once; and passes from the German Empire to the Soviet Empire or the American Empire with the same ease. Fascists and imperialists are ideologically superior to all in matters of policy, morality or law: they have all the principles that they need, and they are everything that suits them. The fascist leaders possess in the highest degree the institutional cynicism and hypocrisy, which allow them to face without any shame the public opinion prefabricated by the monopolies of violence and propaganda.

IV

The “history” with which the ideologists of imperialism and fascism describe the real history is not a branch of the social sciences; it is a never-ending story of falsehoods and lies, ordered to the glorification and exaltationof Terrorism, Nationalism, Imperialism and Colonialism, where science and knowledge are always subordinate to totalitarian propaganda, censorship and repression.

It’s clear that with this form of presenting history: certainly pleasing to every current imperialistic and totalitarian régime, the idea of any reparation or retribution of crimes is unnecessary. For imperialism, the only thing to do is follow Renan’s model: “Now then, the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they all have forgotten many things”. Yet, of course, the subjugated Peoples – and eventually the metropolitan democrats-resistants – do not have to forget anything or reconcile with the despotic-Asiatic oppression; what they have to do is combat imperialism and fascism, affirming the right of free disposition – that is, of independence – of the Peoples oppressed by the imperialist régime. And, for their part, the Fascists and Renegades do not need any “reconciliation” either, since the past and the present are the criminal enterprise of domination which they are vitally identified with, and to which they have never renounced or will renounce: the enterprise of a criminal Nationalism-Imperialism, which they sustain and that sustains them.

According to the imperialistic ideology of service, in its ideal and imaginary State the political relations and forces are constituted and developed according to “natural” processes. The political geography is superimposed on the physical geography; the State and its law are presented as “natural” ties; and even the armed forces that constitute the political frontiers become “guardians” and, finally, appear as a simple extension of the “natural borders” and mingle with the mountains, trees, rivers and people that, according to the location and conventions, form them. Thus, the borders would not be political but “natural” constructions. The Pyrenees are a “clear natural border” whose essence and quintessence have notwithstanding been decanted, fixed and determined by the war and the occupation; in spite of it, “on both sides of the Pyrenees there are Catalans, and especially Basques”. The Bidasoa River is an “evident natural border” in Behobia; but evidence and naturalness are broken and do abruptly cease to be so about 190 meters before reaching the Bridge of Endarlatsa.

With the “natural” borders and political facts there occurs the same as with the “natural law” in general: everyone finds in them that which he himself has brought in beforehand. No wonder that French Nationalism has always resorted to such foundations, at least since the other justifications began to show signs of ideological depletion and failure. The Spanish Nationalism has made it still easier to itself: Spain is not only the land of Holy Mary but it is also the favourite habitat of the “natural law”, the “ius-naturalist” reserve of the Western World and of all humanity. All of which is a complete forgery, as we are going to see next.

The learned canonist and Pope Innocent IV, that in 1252 promulgated the Bull ‘Ad extirpanda’ in which he legitimized and regulated the use of torture by the Inquisition as a means to obtain the confession of the heretics (who were to be treated as criminals and be forced to make disclosures “as thieves and robbers of material goods are made to accuse their accomplices and confess the crimes they have committed”), and that decreed death sentence for the relapsed heretics (who, hypocritically, were “delivered to the secular arm” for the execution of their murder, and so the Church kept its hands washed like Pilates), did also confirm that he, as Vicar of Christ, could make non-Christian Peoples accept his dominion unless they submitted to the divine mandate of the papacy and received the preaching of the Gospel. This was the established ideological-mental context – theoretical yet very real – when the Council of Constance was convened, in whose varied agenda included the objective of putting an end to major conflicts, among which there was the one that the Teutonic Knights kept with Poland and Lithuania.

As it is well known, the Council of Constance (1414-1418) ordered the burning at the bonfire of Jan Huss together with his writings the 6th of July of 1415, and that of his disciple Jerome of Prague a year later, both previously “interrogated”, tortured and condemned as heretics. But apart from this, during its sessions there occurred a fact of a great theoretical significance whose importance was to go unnoticed for that audience, beyond from causing probably its astonishment at the thesis presented by the representatives of Poland.

The eminent Polish jurist Paweł Włodkowic, who precisely since 1414 was rector of the University of Kraków, had been sent to the Council along with Stanisław of Skarbimierz, (the latter author of ‘De bellis justis’, “About just war”: first work dedicated specifically to this issue; and of ‘De rapina’, “About robbery”) as members of the delegation charged of defending Poland’s interests, to the object of getting that an end was to be put both to the Crusades that the Monastic State of the Teutonic Order waged against Lithuania, allied of Poland, as well as to the forced conversions of the Baltic pagan Peoples. In the development of his mission before the Council, Włodkowic scandalized the audience by criticizing the Monastic State for its wars of conquest of native non-Christian Peoples in Prussia and Lithuania, and by therefore questioning the legitimacy of this policy of aggression that until then had been carried out with the blessings of the Church.

A forerunner of modern theories of human rights, this polish author pioneered the notion of peaceful coexistence among Nations. In this regard, he delivered to the Council his thesis about the (purported) power of the Pope and the Emperor on non-Christian Peoples: his ‘Tractatus de potestate papae et imperatoris respectu infidelium’ (Treatise on the Power of the Pope and the Emperor regarding Infidels). In it, he drew the thesis that Pagan and Christian Nations could coexist in peace. And facing him was raised the accusation presented by the Teutonic Order, that Poland was harbouring and actively defending Pagans: a pretext for Teutonic expansionism on the indigenous Baltic Peoples of Prussia and Lithuania that, after the conversion to Christianity of Jogaila of Lithuania in 1386 (hereinafter Władysław II Jagiello of Poland), was formally false, although the Teutonic Knights continued to use it.

As a result, the Council did reject the Teutonic Knights’ request for a new Crusade, and thus the criminal interests of their Order were ignored. In fact, that meeting meant a point of inflection in the Teutonic aggressions. Not so much because the “council fathers” were convinced by the advanced theories of that representative of Poland (which naturally they could not and would not understand and much less accept, should perchance they did not deem them depraved enough as for making its author keep company with Huss on that afternoon of July-1415) as because the fact that five years earlier, in 1410, Władysław II, at the head of a Lithuanian-Polish coalition, had inflicted on the Monastic State the tremendous and decisive defeat of Grunwald (or of Tannenberg, in German historiography), one of the greatest battles of medieval Europe, of which the Order could never recover; and therefore the Church was no longer so sure about who was going to win.

Unfortunately, after the victory of Grunwald, Władysław II was delayed a few days in the pursuing of the vanquished and in the sieging of Marienburg: the capital and imposing stronghold of the Teutonic Knights, giving them time to reorganize, resist the siege, and prevent their total expulsion from those lands that they had usurped a hundred and eighty years earlier to the original Prussian and Lithuanian Peoples through Bulls, “crusades” and conquests east of the Elbe River under the pretext of the “conversion of those pagans”: the ‘Ostsiedlung’ or East settling. In this way, the fundamental work: to expel the Teutonic armies and occupying forces, remained undone, and this allowed the Monastic State to consolidate and  be able to continue under various Germanic political-military structures that were self-named with the choronym “Prussia”, borrowed from the indigenous Baltic Prussian Peoples that those Germanic invaders had subdued and that did finally exterminate. (Thus were created the Prussian Confederation, the Royal Prussia or West Prussia, and Ducal Prussia/Kingdom of Prussia or East Prussia.)

In this way it became possible that, “all naturally”, those German settlers did not integrate into the Peoples – mainly Polish and Lithuanian – they had settled among but continued within them as refractory organized Germanic bodies under the protection of their occupying armies, which after being defeated had not been definitively expelled. They did it first around the aforementioned Marienburg, and then – once in 1457 it was ceded to Poland in exchange for money during the Thirteen Years’ War – around Königsberg; which was a constant source of misfortune: of pretexts for wars and of wars that reach World War II.

After the end of World War I, it could be seen that it had been of no use for the European “leaders” the lesson of the horrific carnage in the Great War, and in 1919 the Treaty of Versailles made the grave mistake of allowing the continuity of the previous colonial situation, which would once again bear its venomous fruit in the next World War. This is how there spoke Count of Brockdorff-Rantzau: Minister for Foreign Affairs of the “new” German Realm, to the Paris Conference – prior to the Treaty of Versailles – in setting out his “reasons” for opposing the Draft of Peace Treaty that ended World War I (while setting the conditions for the Second one). According to him (as Hitler himself would repeat a few years later), the Peoples' right of self-determination: falsified and presented as the “celebration of a plebiscite or referendum” under the conditions of military occupation and century-old colonization, was the mechanism for legitimizing and expanding Germanic colonization:

“The right of self-determination of nations must not be a principle that is applied solely to the prejudice of Germany, it must rather hold good in all States alike and especially be also applied where populations of German race wish to be united to the German Empire. [...].

“[Despite this, the Draft of Peace Treaty provides that] Almost the entire province of West Prussia with the exception of a few districts (Kreise) in the East and West is to be annexed to Poland. Even a portion of Pomerania is to be torn away from Germany without the slightest ethnographical justification. [Yet] West Prussia is an old German territory; the Order of the Teutonic Knights has stamped it for all time with German character. [...]. The cession of the greater part of West Prussia would completely separate East Prussia from the German Empire. [...].

“[Similarly] East Prussia, with a German population of about 1½ million, is to be separated bodily from the German Empire and, economically speaking, is to be delivered completely into the hands of the Poles. It is bound to become impoverished and accrue eventually to Poland. Germany can never allow this.

“In Southern East Prussia the presence of a population whose mother tongue is not German is given as a reason for demanding a plebiscite in this region (Articles 94 and 95). This region is nevertheless not inhabited by an incontestably Polish population. The fact that in isolated localities a language other than German is used cannot be taken into consideration, for similar cases are to be observed in the oldest State units: the Bretons, the Welsh and the Basques may be mentioned. The present boundaries of East Prussia have been established for about 500 years. [...]. This population has, aside from a group of foreign agitators, never expressed a demand for separation from Germany, and therefore no reason exists for changing the governmental and economic circumstances of this territory.” Etc. [‘Papers relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, The Paris Peace Conference, 1919’. See this issue discussed in more detail in the text: “‘Gure Esku Dago’, or the falsification of the right of self-determination (II)”, published on this page on 20-March-2021.]

As it’s well known, all these regions and populations “stamped for all time – as if they were cattle – with German character” by the Teutonic imperialism and colonialism, nowadays form happily part of the Peoples which they belonged to: Czechs, Poles or Lithuanians; except the region of Königsberg/Kaliningrad, in that so-called East Prussia, which after World War II “belongs” to Russia by “right” of conquest. Apart from that, it’s striking the veiled warning addressed by the German Minister to the opposing countries of Germany at the Peace Conference (that is to say, England and France), which he confusedly and without mentioning them refers to as “the oldest state units” and to which, after immediately and surprisingly indicating: “the Bretons, the Welsh and the Basques may be mentioned”, he reminds them of their own domination over those Peoples and States (a reality extendable to Spain), so as to thus justify Germany's similar “right” to maintain its “old” conquests in Prussia.

As for the ancient Prussians, they were subdued and liquidated; which, by the way, was the expansionist design of the Polish Duke Konrad I of Masovia. Who, always repelled by them, ended up asking the Emperor and the Pope to proclaim crusades against them; and the Teutonic Knights, to come to his aid. Everything else came from it. The suffering that the Teutonic Knights caused to the Peoples they did assault, and that their own successors finally received in Bohemia-Moravia, Poland, and “Prussia”: by enduring after World War II the greatest ethnic cleansing in history, is unspeakable. Starting on 1945 May the 10^th and with “the advent of peace”, between twelve and fourteen million German settlers were expelled from those lands that their ancestors had usurped with false and wicked titles that ceded them “to eternal and absolute ownership” [Golden Bull of Rieti: ‘Pietati proximum’, 1234], stripped of everything overnight, and more than half a million were murdered: simply for being German and speaking German in the “wrong” place and moment. All this under the “distracted” gaze of the Allied victors, and the rejoicing of the Georgian Renegade and – to the disgrace also of the Russian people – Russified Stalin and of his gang of criminals at the head of the “new” Russian Empire at that time “Soviet”: Hitler's treacherous ally for the repartition of Eastern Europe; which, after Poland’s repartition with the Nazis, had immediately done, already since 1940, its particular ethnic purge of Poles in the Katyn forest. These are the misfortunes that the criminal imperialistic and colonialist Nationalism does inevitably entail.

But returning to the aforementioned Polish author Włodkowic, throughout his political, diplomatic and university career he expressed the view that a world guided by the principles of peace and mutual respect among Nations was possible; and that the heathen Nations had the right to peace and to possession of their own lands without being besieged and invaded under the pretext of their paganism, as Lithuania – an ally to Poland – had been and was being to, at the hands of the Teutonic rapine. Yet, and unfortunately, imperialism is not likely to be stopped only by well-intentioned theories, if in addition they do not involve real forces capable of an ideological and political – and eventually military – resistance of a strategic level, according to historical moments and specific situations.

In those days, the refusal to admit any tolerance on different theological options (which is the meaning of hairesis, hairetikos: heretic) was total on the part of a hubristic and all-powerful Church. At that time it could not even imagine that there would come a time when its totalitarian power would be questioned and evicted from entire Countries, and the Council of Constance proved it by burning at the stake whoever would have dared to oppose it through the formulation of different theoretical options: impeccable and charitably Christian though they were, and whether he was alive (Jan Huss and Jerome of Prague) or dead (sentence ‘post mortem’, to be burned at the stake, handed down against the remains of the English reformer John Wyclif who had died without charges in 1384). It little mattered that this provoked uprisings and disasters: the five Crusades (1420-34) convened by Pope Martín V against the Hussites: the Czechs of Bohemia followers of Huss, began shortly after the First Defenestration of Prague (1419); and, although they were subjected, the protest that they made (‘Protestatio Bohemorum’, condemning the execution of their spiritual leader in the harshest terms), and the subsequent repression against them, would have a continuity in the Reformation that was carried out by those people also known as Protestants, and in the wars of religion that ravaged Europe since 1524.

As it is known, the ideological-political instruments that the Church issued (Bulls, Excommunications etc.) were always destined to reinforce the position of the apparent winners, of the powerful aggressors who did support the Church itself: whether they be Teutonic/Germanic in Lithuania and Bohemia, or French/Spaniards in Occitania, Al-Andalus, America and Nabarre. For all of them, there were Bulls that justified and reinforced their domination over the weak, whom the Church did help to oppress under the pretext of heresies and even non-existent heresies, as it is the case of the Kingdom of Nabarre, and who were not even recognized as holders of rights.

On the contrary, those ideas of peaceful coexistence between the Nations, no matter at all what their religion might be, which were advocated by the School of Krakow: impeccably Christian and presented to the Council of Constanza by Włodkowic-Skarbimierz, were simply ignored and forgotten. They would re-appear more than one century later, after Luther’s Reformation, as if they were original; however, they would do so in form and content already recuperated by and made compatible for the Counter-Reformation of the Catholic Church and for the power established on the dominated Peoples by its ally, the Hispanic-Catholic Monarchy, in the so-called “School of Salamanca”

Under such conditions, the so-called “Law of Nations” (ius gentium), the “International Law” and the concept of “cause of just war” of that school (“There is a single and only just cause for commencing a war, namely, a wrong received, which is to be responded proportionately.” Therefore a war was not lawful because of the “diversity of religion” or for “the desire to widen the Empire”. Francisco de Vitoria; De iure belli, 1539) did not alter the situation at all or make revise the null and void and wicked titles wielded by the Hispanic Monarchy for the conquest, looting, destruction and “incorporation” of States: whether they be “infidel” (Al-Andalus), pagan (America, through the Bulls of Donation or “Alexandrine” of 1493, which the Pope Alexander VI granted at the request and convenience of the Monarchy), or Christian (the Kingdom of Nabarre, through other Bulls granted in a similar manner in 1512-13 by Pope Julius II); nor did they prevent either the continued exploitation, oppression/enslavement and genocide of their Peoples: the effective result that was attained, despite the label of progressivism that was attributed to that School.

In fact, after hypocritically “calming” his own conscience with the first part in which he presented the unjust titles for the conquest of America (‘First re-lection on the Indians lately discovered. On the non-legitimate titles whereby the Barbarians of the New World could come into the domination of the Hispanics’, 1538-39), the mission of the Dominican friar Vitoria consisted in finding “legitimate arguments and titles” in favour of the Powers which he had a duty to: the Hispanic-Catholic Monarchy and the Church, so that the actions of them both on other States could be justified. Shameless, specious, pretentious, hypocritical and cynical arguments, based on an intractable and self-interested Christian fanaticism, and on Hispanic-centric racism and superiority/holiness on which we cannot extend here. The following quotation will have to be enough for it:

“[...] However, what Vitoria actually did was to strengthen the justifications for the Spanish empire by basing them on both Papal grants of religious obligations and the ‘universal obligations of a Euro-centrically constructed natural law’. Under Vitoria’s reasoning, New World native peoples were required to allow the Spaniards to exercise the rights of the natural law of Spain, which included rights to travel, to engage in free trade and commerce, to take profit from items the natives allegedly held in common [i.e.: ‘Spain’s natural law rights’ consisted in being able to move freely through others’ countries and in extracting/stealing raw materials and especially precious metals that belonged to the natives but that – very conveniently – were declared ‘held in common’ by Vitoria], and to send missionaries to preach the gospel. Vitoria’s conclusion, which would have greatly pleased the King, was that if the infidels violated any of these rights and obligations of the natural law [as he himself established it], then Spain could protect its rights, ‘defend’ itself, and fight a lawful and just war against the natives.

“Consequently, while Vitoria apparently rejected both the sole authority of the Pope to grant Spain rights in the New World and the Doctrine of Discovery rationale in the first two steps of his analysis, the third step created an enormous loophole for Spain. His argument that natives were bound by the Euro-centrically defined natural law rights of the Spaniards was an ample excuse to invade and engage in ‘just war’ against any native nations that dared to oppose the Spaniards. Thus, Vitoria limited the natural law freedoms of American Indians by allowing Spain’s natural law rights to trump native rights. The legal regime envisioned by Vitoria was just as destructive to native sovereignty, property, and human rights as the earlier definition of the King’s authority based solely on Papal grants.” (Robert J. Miller & Lisa LeSage & Sebastian López Escarcena; ‘The International Law of Discovery, Indigenous Peoples, and Chile’.)

The “school of Salamanca” was totally subordinated to and at the service of the established despotic powers and of the Catholic Counter-Reform, which a few years later would be fixed in the Council of Trent (1545-63). Its theoretical “contribution”: referred to genuine thesis and principles of international law that had been exposed one hundred and twenty years earlier by the aforementioned authors of the School of Krakow, consisted of their plagiarism, recuperation, manipulation and forgery in the service of the pontifical hierocracy/theocracy, and of the Asiatic despotism of the Emperor and the Hispanic-Catholic Monarchy, and it was destined for the strengthening of the Counter-Reform, the universal oppression of consciences, the subjugation of free Peoples, and the destruction of their States. All this upon the affirmation of a purported “natural law” that, through Vitoria’s manipulations, had been transformed into an instrument that, by Pope’s concession, allowed the Hispanics to do all that these Powers wanted to, and in particular “the rights to travel, to engage in free trade and commerce, to take profit from items the natives allegedly held in common, and to send missionaries to preach the gospel”. How could they refuse in the face of such kindness and generosity? Here are robbery, genocide and heinous crimes against Humanity perfectly justified and sanctified!

Faced with the truly tolerant and democratic spirit of the Krakow School, the ideological manipulations and forgery of the “school of Salamanca” did provide the theoretical foundation on which there was based the classical “international law” that from that moment the European Imperialistic and Colonialist Great Powers did establish in order to plunder the entire World, upon its wicked affirmation of the legitimacy of the “Doctrine of Discovery”, the “right of conquest”, and of their jus ad bellum, jus in bello, jus post bellum. This is: the affirmation of their absolute and terrorist right for the robbery and the murder by means of the war, in the war and after the war.

and V

It is known that an established political power: largely because of the mere fact of being so, appears to be obvious, necessary and “natural”. Its political base and structure seem to be endowed with a social-geological and pre-political “reality” that “escapes” to the properly historical, sociological, political and juridical knowledge and activity. In that context, the “pieces of evidences” offered by the social sciences are presented as clad in the same “objective necessity” that would be postulated if it was about or if they were natural sciences.

Therefore, the ideology of that power tries to represent the policy – like the production and exchange of goods – “as if it was locked in natural, eternal laws independent of history”. “That is to say, the organs of power or organized violence harmonize to such an extent with the (economic) laws governing men’s lives, or seem so overwhelmingly superior, that men experience them as natural forces, as the necessary environment for their existence. As a result, they submit to them freely. (Which is not to say that they approve of them.) (Georg Lukács; ‘History and Class Consciousness’.)

Yet, apart from illusions, hallucinations or ideological conjuring tricks, the dominant State – with much more reason the imperialistic State – “by no means constitutes ‘man’s natural environment’ but merely a real fact whose actual power must be reckoned with, but which has no inherent right to determine our actions”. “It should be treated, therefore, purely as a power structure which has to be taken into account only to the extent to which its actual power stretches. On the other hand, it should be subjected to the most painstaking and fearless examination in order to discover the points where this power can be weakened and undermined. ‘This strong point, or rather weak point in the State is the way in which it is reflected in the consciousness of people’. Ideology [underpining that imperialistic State] is in this case not merely a consequence of the economic structure of society but also the precondition of its smooth functioning.” (Georg Lukács; Idem.)

As it happens with any enterprise of aggression and domination against the freedom of Peoples and the integrity and independence of their States in general, there is no theoretical or scientific problem to establish the historical and sociological nature of the Basque People’s imperialistic subjugation. This People, with a quite more ancient and characterized personality than that of its greedy neighbours, has shown throughout its whole existence the constant concern for its freedom. “A fierce independence had always been the distinctive sign of the Basques since their appearance in History”, acknowledges Atkinson. It was more than what the Spanish Asiatic despotism, the French absolutism, and the Pontifical totalitarianism could tolerate. It’s by means of the more determined violence that this freedom has been torn from them by these newcomers, who did not and do not stand freedom for themselves; much less for the others.

For these predatory Nations, it is necessary that the Basque People disappear as soon as possible and by all means. Being its existence accursed, it is even necessary that it has already disappeared ideologically beforehand; it is necessary that it has never existed, so that France and Spain can exist in their purported essence, which precedes and transcends history and society.

Hiding and distorting the reality is a normal objective of all totalitarian ideology. In order to liquidate the Peoples, it’s very necessary to liquidate their historical memory and all knowledge of themselves. Day after day, for decades and hundreds of years, the monopolies of propaganda and indoctrination, the “Public Services” and the “National Education” (from Kindergarten to adulthood): sheltered from any contestation and from all critical action, have been creating the political consciousness of the subjected populations. It would obviously be impossible to enumerate the incalculable sum of rubbish, lies and pieces of nonsense that an ideology of this ilk has been able to convey to those populations, while occupying all the ideological and even mental space, in a form to prevent that any opposition can be expressed. It’s this way as the imperialistic totalitarian State has been established by means of ideological violence in the idea, after having been prepared and imposed by the weapons in the fact.

When Louis XIV of France and III of Nabarre, at the peak of his power, ordered to destroy – or to re-copy while “making cuts” – the archives that referred to the peasant uprisings of the “Great Century” and to their relentless repression, he was producing in that way the official historiography, of which Pórshnev denounces the teleology and retrojection at the service of the hegemonic myth of the French great bourgeoisie under the absolute Monarchy. At the same time, he was accommodating the history to the patterns, prejudices, postulates and “axioms” that serve the Nationalism of that same social class and its imperialistic State. It’s true that the Soviet school of history has not fallen back from this type of operation either; and it has already done, in terms both of teleology and retrojection, as much as the “bourgeois science” as a whole. If we take into account that the USSR did formally begin its existence in 1922, the work of A. Rybakov in eleven volumes titled: ‘History of the Soviet Union from Antiquity to our days’, will probably remain forever as the greatest monument to the ideological manipulation of history through retrojection of a de facto reality. (We should be grateful to Espilondo for having dared to denounce, in the 21st century, the misdeeds of a “Basque bourgeoisie” that has not been invited and is not reducible to the Moscow academic soup.)

For its nationalist ideology, the French “nation” is God and the French State is its prophet. Law, moral and all power do come from it. Outside of it there is no salvation. After having exhausted the resources of the divine, natural, historic or other laws to justify its domination, the ideology of the French-Spanish imperialistic Nationalism raises, in the first place, the “modern” concept of “nation”; and next, the democratic and non-violent foundation of the régime thus constituted. Well understood, these “facts”, these notions and these values are constituted in an irrational, pre-logical and para-logical form, without any need of having to present the slightest justification/demonstration.

The “demonstration” is established, in the best of cases, by leaning on and on the basis of what is intended to be proved. Furthermore, what’s the use of demonstrating? It should be demonstrated what can be doubted or called into question; but who could cast any doubt on “the evidence”, that is: the set of dogmas, myths, beliefs, postulates and axioms constructed and transmitted by the total power? “The Republic one and indivisible by petitio principii”, which Larzac talked about, is not worth any more than the myth of the “nation”; but in spite of all, it has remained in use as well as this one. The effective presence of the institutionalized political power and its “pieces of evidence”; the images, the complexes, the intuitions and emotions, the symbols, the custom, the prejudices and the conditioning of masses: imposed along the centuries through outrageous violence and by the monopolies of propaganda on a terrified and powerless population, are sufficient to make all of it operational. (The mystical and essentialist identity of the established Power is increasingly devoid of any confessable history and sociology.)

The fetish-map hanging on the wall of all the schools of “France” and of “Spain” has done more, to found the “national conscience” since childhood, than all concrete or abstract knowledge. It is in order that the hexagonal “representation” of the French Empire may continue to poison the consciences, that the French Nationalism is still crushing the Peoples and exalting as glorious facts and heroes the crimes and criminals like Napoleon who founded it. And it is to avoid that the “representation” – compact, despite the Portuguese “bite” – of the Spanish Empire was “dismembered”, that General Franco triggered the great slaughter of the real Peoples, and organized the terrorist and totalitarian régime that has become their prison. His last words, both in his political testament (according to an appalled reading of it that “the Butcher of Malaga” made on television as breaking news of his death), as well as those ones that the Bourbon appointed by him “with the title of King” has recognized – in a recent interview to French TV – as having been received from him on his deathbed, did obsessively urge to the “maintenance of the unity of Spain”; a fact that for the French Nationalism is no doubt far more important to be carved in the public opinion, without having any importance the corrupt and disgusting personal and public life of the interviewed subject.

It would be illusory to believe that the simple reminder of the historical or sociological facts could change much. Sometimes, Nationalist academics have themselves become aware of the nature and horrors of the conquests, and of the material and moral consequences of the totalitarianism and expansion of French and Spaniards on the other Peoples, their culture and civilization. Simone Weil has perceived well the proverbial cruelty and atrocities of the Kingdom of France’s armed forces; the Crusade that has associated the ‘Roys de France’ and the Popes to bring terror, massacres, Inquisition, bonfires, devastation, extermination and ruin to the Languedoc; the annexation of Brittany, which – performed against all law – has plunged it into despair; the destruction of the State of Burgundy; the aggressions and wars of conquest of Flanders, Alsace and Franche-Comté; or the consequences that, in return and under the form of Napoleon, have come from Corsica “after having conquered, colonized, corrupted and rotten the people of this Island”. (A misfortune, by the way, similar to that which – having subjugated Georgia – also came to Russia in the form of the “Russified allogeneous” denunciated by Lenin, with characters such as Stalin and Beria.)

“The Peoples do desperately resist the conquest”, she tells us. She has explained the relationship between conquests and corruption, and the appalling repression within a Kingdom whose People “was viewed by the other Europeans as the quintessential slave People, the People which was at the mercy of its sovereign like cattle”. She has perceived the terror, famine, massacres, deculturation, boredom, dismal uniformity and humiliation caused by that State. She has described that State, “which is identically that inhuman, brutal, bureaucratic and police State”; this machine “that, as Marx says, not only has survived through all the changes but has been perfected and enhanced by each change of régime”. When the revolutionaries got rid of the Ancient Régime, while retaining its ill-gotten “gains”, “the national sovereignty appeared manifestly as an illusion”.

According to Weil, “The past is but the history of the growth of France, and it is accepted that this growth is a good in all respects.” “The conquests that it has made and lost may – strictly speaking – be subject of a certain questioning, like those of Napoleon; but never those that it has made and kept.” However, this is exactly what she does herself next: her humanistic-mystic-spiritualist vision is finally resolved in an indignant, romantic, pretentious and chauvinistic apologia of the French Nationalism; an apologia dedicated to the sacralization and exaltation of the French State and of its “universal” mission, inseparable from the criminal fait accompli and from the imperialistic denial of the Peoples’ freedom. So much it is so, that at one point she thinks it necessary to stress that, anyway, “France is not God”. Here is something that is reassuring for the rest of the world!

Actually (as it was already shown in the chapter on “imperialism and ideology”), those are apologetic ideas in which their propagandists themselves do not believe or do not already believe: their policy and even their own statements do prove it widely. The romantic tales and the functional lies about the non-violent nature and civilizing mission of the régime that – through permanent military occupation – France and Spain have established on the Basque People and its State: the Kingdom of Nabarre, have their limits in the very structure of class domination and production/exploitation, of which their imperialistic Nationalism is the international form.

No modern totalitarian order could survive if its leaders would truly believe and – above all – put themselves into practice what their ideologists do invent and preach for the others to believe it. The Spanish and French National-socialists, and their “left-wing” offsprings, are currently the groups that, under the protection of their occupying armies, are responsible for developing and implementing the most elaborate ideology that can preserve the imperialism of France and of Spain, and abort the plague of the Freedom of Peoples.

The hatred of the subjugated Peoples: exacerbated by their Resistance, is only calmed down through the fury and revenge of the repression; is only satisfied when the last castle has been ruined and when the last factors or symbols of freedom and identity have been destroyed or reduced to folklore or archaeological remains: hunting trophies of the imperialistic and fascist invaders that they can next incorporate into their falsified and miserable “nation” and “national consciousness”. In this way, and in the exasperated and impatient waiting for the full collapse of the democratic opposition, there continues and is intensified the campaign of harassment and demolition of all Resistance to imperialism and fascism.

Only the immediate and total exploitation of the monopoly of criminal Violence can destroy: in one go and irrevocably, the social base of the problem and, along with it, the freedom and independence of the subjugated Nation and State, the fundamental human rights, and the democracy and the right of self-determination and legitimate self-defence of all Peoples. In their search without alternative for the final solution, the “great” imperialistic and genocide States – in our case France and Spain – will have to make new efforts and commit new crimes, before finishing once and for all with the accursed species of free Peoples on planet Earth.

(From ‘Euskal Herria and the Kingdom of Nabarre, or the Basque People and its State, against French-Spanish imperialism’.)

*

In the face of the imperialistic Nationalism of Spain and of France that is subduing our Country, the Movement of National Resistance and Salvation of the Basque People is constituted upon the affirmation of two fundamental principles that, based on the important ideological, juridical and political vector that represents the international law, do express and enable the union of all the progressive and democratic sectors of our People. These two principles are:

1/ Affirmation of the international right of self-determination, FREE-disposition or national independence of the subjugated Basque People/Euskal Herria. A right that is original, fundamental, customary, inherent, immediate, unconditional, continuous, permanent, inalienable, un-renounceable and indefeasible to all Peoples subjugated under an imperialistic and foreign régime, and “cornerstone of democracy”; that is the same thing as their immediate national independence against/in front of any foreign domination or interference contrary to their national freedom; that has been recognized – not constituted – in the United Nations’ Charter (Article one) and International Law: through numerous and relevant Resolutions of its General Assembly, as THE FIRST OF FUNDAMENTAL HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE PRECONDITION “AS IMPERATIVE FOR THE FULL ENJOYEMENT” OF THEM ALL; and whose corollary and practical application consists, as an inescapable requirement for its realization, in the exigency of an UNCONDITIONAL AND IMMEDIATE withdrawal of all the occupying forces and of the entire imperial-colonialist subjugation apparatus of the occupying Powers: France and Spain, OUTSIDE the historical Territories of the Basque People and its State; and

2/ Affirmation of the continuity, validity and actuality of our own State: the Kingdom of Nabarre, successor of the Kingdom of Pamplona – “the Kingdom of the Basques” – constituted upon a confederation of Vasconic Republics, Counties and Lordships historically and freely gathered around it, and internationally recognized for a thousand years; which remains the only State of the Basque People, which it has never renounced to nor has ever admitted or recognized any other. Its necessary consequence implies the constant and incessant NON-RECOGNITION AND DENUNCIATION of the occupying States: the “Kingdom of Spain” and the “French Republic”, and of their totalitarian régimes of military occupation as criminal, imperialistic, colonialist and fascist.

Simultaneously, it is necessary to maintain a TOTAL BOYCOTT to any collaboration with those who, because of their rejecting in theory or in practice one or both fundamental principles mentioned above, do objectively form part of the imperialism; especially the social-imperialists of sundry feathers who, disguised as “progressives, socialists, communists” etc. (in any of their splits or fashions), do wield “arguments” with those false “progressive” labels in order to refuse to immediately denounce the French-Spanish fascist régime of military occupation of our Country; which is tantamount to supporting it.

Unquestionably, those among us – whatever their origin, surnames or purported ideology can be – who refuse to totally or partially assume these principlesthat affirm our national rights and that do instead affirm the “right of imperialism” and of military occupation on our People and State, are absolutely unmasked as the imperialists and fascists they are: supporters of the continuation of the imperialistic military occupation of our Country and State by the Kingdom of Spain and the French Republic. Now then, what collaboration can there be with these agents? Can anyone honestly and sanely believe – unavowable interests or insane hallucinations set aside – that it is possible to make an anti-imperialistic policy with the help of imperialists and fascists? Clearly not.

Therefore, as long as the French-Spanish imperialism does not withdraw from our Country its occupying forces (since they CONSTITUTE the essential and fundamental element of its strategic device of domination, without which its entire system collapses), and since it is not possible to carry out an anti-imperialistic policy together with the fifth-columnists and agents in the service of that French-Spanish imperialism infiltrated among the subjugated People, the corollary and practical application of these principles implies maintaining a TOTAL BOYCOTT:

– to any collaboration with any individual or collective person who, in whole or in part, in theory or in practice, does expressly reject – or refuses to publicly assume – one or both fundamental principles mentioned above, because that person does objectively – some of them even in an open and confessed form – form part of imperialism; and

– to any participation, both in the institutions of the French-Spanish imperialistic, colonialist and fascist régimes and especially in their juridical monopolies or “parliaments”: French Parliament and Spanish CortesGenerales (established over the centuries through military occupation and the Monopoly of criminal Violence and the Terror of war andState, and countless and imprescriptible constitutive crimes), whichcriminally violatethem since theirreal and primary constitution and that do expressly and constitutionally – forgive the repetition – deny them by their formal and secondary “Constitution”; as well as in their totalitarian “general elections” that “legitimize” all this.

Therefore, it is necessary to denounce in the strongest terms the Pnv-Eta mafia-liquidationist bureaucracy, as well as its satellites and auxiliary “social and cultural” associations that provide them cover and do above all avoid condemning it. All of them are purportedly and falsely patriots who for more than forty years now are recognizing the occupying states: the Kingdom of Spain and the French Republic, and their criminal, imperialistic, colonialist and fascist totalitarian régimes of military occupation, as the régimes and “the States” of their own, non-Nationalist, non-violent, legitimate and democratic.

The Basque People is doomed if it is not able to understand that these bureaucracies and their indigenous auxiliaries constitute, for almost half a century, a deadly trap, since they are the local disguise and the support that make it possible the continuity of the French-Spanish criminal, imperialistic, colonialist and fascist régime of military occupation that they all call “democracy” etc.; and that the first task for its own liberation consists in getting rid of these bureaucracies.

The Basque Movement of National Resistance and Salvation calls on the Basque People to denounce and unmask these bureaucracies of traitors and impostors: agents of the French-Spanish régime of military occupation, whose life consists in getting or aiming to get to be paid from the general budgets of the occupying States, therefore with the taxes of our People, in exchange for betraying and integrating it into the totalitarian States of Spain and of France. And for this, it is necessary first of all to stop voting them through a TOTAL BOYCOTT to the totalitarian Spanish and French “elections”.

RIGHT OF SELF-DETERMINATION OR UNCONDITIONAL AND IMMEDIATE NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE OF THE BASQUE PEOPLE / EUSKAL HERRIA!

KINGDOM OF NABARRE: THE STATE OF THE BASQUE PEOPLE / EUSKAL HERRIA!

Army of occupation not even with music!

Spain not even with a republic! France not even with a monarchy!

TOTAL BOYCOTT OF THE IMPERIALISTS AND FASCISTS, AND THEIR RÉGIME OF MILITARY OCCUPATION!

AWAY WITH THEM!

LONG LIVE THE FREE BASQUE PEOPLE!!!