Nationalism and National-socialism

                                              Nationalism and National-socialism

(Text initially published on January-2021, the 17^th.)

Iñaki Aginaga

(Translated from the original in French by F.C.)

The new offensive of the Spanish Nationalism in the occupied Basque Territories is due to well-defined causes and circumstances. The ruling class considers that:

1/ The plan of adjustment and stabilization of the Francoist régime has been made in its broad outline.

2/ The risk of fracture of the Spanish society has disappeared: the former opposition joined the winners, and it only aspires to become a useful tool and get their fair share in the butter dish.

3/ The “Basque problem” is under control, by having managed to maintain the national Resistance at an infra-strategic level thanks to the direct or indirect, bought or recuperated cooperation from the conglomerate Pnv-Eta.

4/ Yet, the national opposition and consciousness the Basque People have not disappeared or even diminished, “as they should have done”, under the monopoly of violence, the State repression and Terrorism, the psychological conditioning, the economic subordination, the administrative corruption, the “autonomic centralization”, and the exasperated repression of all freedoms and above all of the fundamental right of free disposition or self-determination of all Peoples: first of fundamental human rights and precondition of them all.

5/ Even though the current absence of strategy and of a political class does condemn the democratic opposition in the occupied Country to inefficiency and to an ersatz of political resistance, however, it should not be excluded that a new situation might occur and modify the existing distortion between social base, political class and strategy, modifying by that same reason the established rapport of forces.

6/ Therefore, the conditions of possibility, necessity and absolute urgency are thus gathered for setting down the new offensive designed to break the kidneys, before it is too late, to the forces of freedom that the war and the dictatorship of General Franco and his heirs have failed to eradicate.

However, what here attracts our attention is the behaviour of the French Nationalists, who have immediately followed closely their Spanish allies. The Spaniards do despise and detest the French. The French do despise too much the Spaniards so as to detest them. (They even come to believe that they love them, and that they are loved in turn: a usual syndrome of the races, peoples or classes of lords and aristocrats towards their inferiors, slaves and servants.) But their common goal: the liquidation of the Basque People, does force the Spaniards and French to overcome their mutual distaste and to collaborate. In this regard, we will focus specifically on the attitude of the French National-socialists/communists.

I

“I am anti-nationalist, in the same way as others are anti-capitalists. As Jaurès said, in my opinion, nationalism carries in itself the violence as the clouds carry the storm. There are no hard or moderate nationalists: there are but nationalists, and that’s all, and it is necessary to isolate them. Nationalism is the plague of the Basque bourgeoisie. I do not deny these people the right to think differently; I denied them the right to violence. He who takes a weapon known the risks: let he accept them and that’s all, and let he not send people to cry or to demonstrate. They will claim themselves of left but they ally with the RPR. They make me explode with laughter. They are but nationalists and that’s all.

“We must not forget that Hitler came to power by democratic means. The municipalities are the base of democracy and of the republican institutions. The nationalists enter the municipalities to pervert the foundations of French democracy, to question the unity of the Republic and the republican pact. If they chose their own list, in the respect for democracy, I would agree. Why not, if it is to defend the values of the left? But I do not believe that this is the purpose of the nationalists. (!) But today there is a danger if these people come into the democratic institutions that they deny. I would like to see if these people come on the 11^th of November to the stones of remembrance; if they stand to ‘attention’ when the three colours of the French flag go up to the mast, to the strains of the Marseillaise; if they bow before those who fought for the French Republic.

“I have always made the choice of loyalty to democratic values, of the permanent contact with the land and of a sincere talk. It also consists in making the choice of certain political ethics. In clarity, always in clarity. The political life must be clear. I reject the double talk. We condemn the alliance of nationalists and the resulting majority. We do not accept the electoral commitments and the double-talk of someone. When I see the RPR and UDF candidates with the nationalists, I see unnatural alliances therein. When it has gone astray, in making an alliance with the PNV and the abertzales [sic], the right has side-lined the republican principles and played to the sorcerer’s apprentice. Many of you are worried therein. [Cfr. Maitia: ‘Dei berezi bat luzatzen die abertzaleei, elgarrekin lan egin behar dutela geroari buruz’. That is: We’ve made a special appeal to the Basque patriots, since we must work together for the future’.]

“If you want absolutely to national level that all the decision-making powers are concentrated in the hands of the single Party of Chirac, then trust your future and that of your loved ones for 5 long years in the sole hands of Chirac and of his single Party. On Sunday 16th of June, you have the opportunity to break with this anti-social and anti-democratic logic by voting: Espilondo.” (A few days later: “The first round of the presidential election has plunged us into anxiety. Many of you have no doubt been like me surprised and appalled by the threat of extremism and intolerance that it was made to hover”. Logical – and practical – conclusion: “Concentrate votes in favour of the right”.)

“I am disgusted by such remarks. [It’s about remarks and wall-posters denouncing Espilondo as anti-Basque, and as Fascists with the swastika the agents of the French-Spanish Nationalism.] While the threat of extremism from the National Front (FN) is raising, this label makes me think in one of the darkest periods of our history during which some spoke of anti-France and anti-French. I can only but note this irrational rising of the hatred towards the other. We must be wary. We must beware of those who spread ideas of hatred. Our constituency is being the witness of multiple facts, contrary to the republican values, committed on behalf of a certain Basque nationalism. These facts sow division, conflict and hatred among us. What a mess! I like to say that I am ‘certain to be Basque and proud to be French’. Rather let’s work, together, for peace, for brotherhood and for a bold and of quality cultural action. [In other words: French.]

“The Basque Language will make progress when it will no longer be under the heel of the nationalists: the Basque Language should not be sequestered by anyone. [Cfr. Sarkozy: ‘Remember this: the more the Basque Language will be kept away from policy, the better it will be maintained’.] The Basque has disappeared because people couldn’t find it any value. Some say that speaking in Basque was penalized; yet my parents had a store in Mauléon and there everybody spoke in Basque as they wanted. Equality requires a language that everybody knows. Saying that the Basque should be in the Public Services shows a clear political connotation. Shall it be saved by teaching? Latin and Greek are taught and you see what state they are! I am absolutely contrary to the formalization of the Basque Language. In addition, this would change nothing. Are we going to put in Anglet an official who speaks Basque for ten wretched Basques? A solution might be to massively compel people to speak it; but I fear that behind these measures would hide the nationalist objectives. I do not agree with enclosing the Basque in a community ghetto. The National Education has proved to be very open. Seaska [association of Basque schools] does not accept it because it plays with a political perspective.” (Perchance the – French – “National Education” and Espilondo himself do not have it? The imperialism has another political vision, of course, which seeks to liquidate the Language of the occupied Country.)

Thus speaks Espilondo, spokesman, theoretician and representative of the French ‘socialist’ Party (PsF) and of the Nationalist “plural left”, as also do its Nationalist ecolo-communist allies. Why not, if it is to do well?

“Although” of a Basque origin, the new local theorist and designated spokesman for the PsF is not, or is not any longer, a lout or an ignoramus. In assuming with all the consequences the Nationalism and culture of the dominant Nation, he has not simply behaved as a wise and careful person, concerned about his future: he has also become a cultivated man, he has read books and everything, and – of course – he knows his classics like the back of his hand: the great classics of the French National-socialism. We will come back again on the texts “by Jaurès” and on the rest.

His colleague Labarrère adds: “The Ps condemns terrorism of all origins. It’s necessary to deal with the Basques. If they are given a Department, they will do its Prefect in. The broadest democratic path allows the expression of everybody through the right to vote”.

If the PsF got stuck to the line of the Spanish PsoE: which is mingled with the Francoist ruling party, the French ‘communist’ Party (PcF) could not lag behind those who formerly it considered as social-traitors and social-chauvinists of the PsF, of which it had adopted – surpassing them – all the most reactionary ideas. But, in order to found and justify its unrestricted support to French imperialistic Nationalism and State Terrorism, its bureaucracy could not, however, refer to the “texts” of the bourgeois social-opportunist Jaurès, not even extrapolated, diverted and forged by Espilondo. Even less – and for good reason – to the always troublesome and now not very commendable authority of Lenin.

“The communists do strongly condemn the terrorism, the killings, the extortion committed by Eta. During the summits held in Biarritz and Nice the Basque nationalists have engaged in unacceptable violence, especially desecrating the monument to the dead of Anglet. The nationalists refuse to condemn the acts of Eta. The nationalism is a danger. The nationalists, here as elsewhere in Europe and in the world, aim to turn the other into a foreigner, an enemy. In this way, there would be on the one side the ‘pure’ Basques, who adopt the independence project; and, on the other, the rest (including Basques among them) who are destined to be targets. It’s in this that nationalism is dangerous because it is akin to fascism. The independentists are not of left; they are of extreme right-wing. Therefore, we denounce the dubious alliances among the nationalists and the mayors of the right. With Camblong is worse than with the right. The communists will continue with many others to fight against nationalism and terrorism. They will remain acting for peace, for a happy Basque Country, for the promotion of the Basque culture as a whole (Language, sports, culinary etc...)”, says the PcF, an always incorruptible enemy of the freedom of Peoples. (We will come back to it, also.)

Now that the collection of favourite insults of the PcF against its political adversaries: “the dancing bears, the jackals, the disgusting, nauseating and repulsive hypocrites, the rabid dogs, the nasty reptiles, the viscous rats and the lustful fascist, social-democrat and trostkyst-boukharinist vipers” etc. do no longer make to the case, the PcF is concentrated on the Basque “nationalists”: a foreign body liable to polarize the exclusive, rabid and xenophobic Nationalism that has always inspired and vitalised the French colonialism.

And when the French national-environmental movement has joined the coalition, it also knew where it was getting involved. Ecology and French nationalism are now the same thing: there’s no place for the freedom of the Peoples in the fascist ecosystem.

II

The contribution of the Renegades (the “Russified allogeneous” which Lenin referred to when he wrote: “it is common knowledge that people of other nationalities who have become Russified over-do this Russian frame of mind”), who are supposed to know “how the land lies” and “make themselves noticed” in this regard, is also patent in all times and in all occupied Countries. Yet, these submissive and venal Converts, Neophytes and Renegades of all shapes and sizes go always still further than their teachers and models in the tasks assigned to them.

“The Russified allogeneous – Lenin continued to say of the criminal ‘Georgian communist’ tandem formed by Stalin-Ordzhonikidze that crushed the Caucasian Republics – “does dismissively drop accusations of ‘nationalist-socialism’, when he himself is a real and true ‘nationalist-socialist’, and even a vulgar Great-Russian bully”. And the Frenchified or Spanicized allogeneous does carelessly fling about accusations of “nationalism” against the nationals of the oppressed Nation, whereas he himself is not only a real, a true French or Spanish Nationalist, but also a brutal oppressor in the service of the imperialistic Nationalism of those dominant Nations.

The contempt and hatred: completely natural in the case of the Nationalists who dominate the oppressed Peoples, are even reinforced in the case of the Renegades because of the grudge and specific complexes and implexes of their own psychology. Passive contempt and self-contempt are the adaptation adopted by the colonized in the face of the colonizer’s contempt. For the imperialistic mentality, the “portrait of the colonized” is the portrait of the colonizer in negative, and the colonizer is the reverse positive of the colonized.

Now then, following A. Memmi: “The first attempt of the colonized is to change of condition by means of a change of skin. A tempting and very nearby model is offered and imposed to him: precisely that of the colonizer. [...]. The first ambition of the colonized is to match this prestigious model, to be like him up to disappear in him. [...] The love for the colonizer serves as a basis for a set of feelings ranging from shame to self-hatred. The excessiveness in this submission to the model is already revealing. [...] The colonized does not only seek to enrich himself with the virtues of the colonizer. On behalf of what he wants to become, he desperately persists in his impoverishment, in the uprooting of himself. [...] The crushing of the colonized is included in the colonizing values: when the colonized adopts these values, he adopts the inclusion of his own condemnation. In order to get liberated – leastways so does he believe it – he accepts his getting destroyed. The phenomenon is comparable to the Negro’s negro-phobia, or the Jew’s anti-semitism”. As a result of it all there turn out “the stubborn effort of the colonized to overcome the contempt that there bring to him his own retardation, his weakness and – he finally does admit it – his alterity; the admiring subservience; and the careful concern applied in order to get confused with the colonizer, to dress like him, talk like him, behave like him”. (Albert Memmi; ‘Portrait du colonisé, précédé du portrait du colonisateur’, 1957.)

To his (or her) misfortune, and inevitably, the position of a Renegade is always incomparably more precarious than that of the imperialistic Colonizer. For this latter, to prevent the loss of the dominated Country that is implied in its independence is not an absolutely vital necessity, since he always has his own Country which he can return to; whereas the Renegade does absolutely need the submission-liquidation-destruction of his own Country, because its salvation through the independence will leave him completely without arguments with which to “justify” himself, as well as without a place in the world where to move, in which he may not be forever a stranger and a Renegade.The full-blooded Spanish or French Nationalist starts from a “positive” sentiment towards “the power and greatness” of his Country; which induces in him a negative feeling of contempt and hatred towards the dominated People that he perceives as an obstacle or a resistant body against his “own development”. Instead, the Renegade starts from a negative feeling towards his Country of origin, from which derives a “positive” sentiment towards the “superior” People, capable of uprooting him from his miserable roots; also pulling up, for greater security, roots and earth. The Nationalist of French or Spanish stock is in the first place French or Spaniard; anti-Basque, by way of consequence. The Renegade is above all anti-Basque, and then Spaniard or French. In fact he would become anything else, provided that any Power would seem to him capable of destroying that Country of origin whose liquidation is to him a necessary condition of cultural, psychological and sociological normalization, justification and recuperation.

“Gilbert Folliot, cautious: The king’s friendship for Thomas Becket is dead, Highness?

“King Henry II: Suddenly, bishop. A kind of heart stop. [...] I hate Becket, bishop, now. Between this man and me, there is nothing more in common than this beast ploughing at my belly. I can’t stand it anymore. I have to let go of it. But I am the king, [and] what has been agreed to call my greatness embarrasses me: I need someone. [...] Sometimes we make mistakes with men, bishop. I, too, have been wrong. (He suddenly shouts: ) O my Thomas!

“Gilbert Folliot, cries out: You love him, Highness! You still love him. You love that mitred pig, that impostor, that bastard Saxon, this little thug!

“King Henry II jumps on him, shouting: Yes, I love him! But that’s none of your business, priest. I have confided to you only my hatred. I'm going to pay you to get me rid of him, but do never tell me anything bad about him!” (Jean Anouilh; ‘Becket, ou l'Honneur de Dieu’, 1959.)

The hatred, so apparent and characteristic in the Renegades, is the result of resentments, disappointments, frustrations, Oedipal or others complexes which the Country of origin is made responsible of. “The physical aggression and the will to destroy are not the only answer to frustration but one of the possible answers, and perhaps the spontaneous one.” “There is a mechanism of behaviour quite different from aggression. It is hatred: that ugly little brother of the great love.” “Probably, it is not possible to really hate but there where one has loved and where, despite all the denials, one still loves.” “A remarkable phenomenon, generally little known by laypersons, which is called ‘emotional ambivalence’. One of the manifestations of this ambivalence is represented by the very frequent coexistence, in the same person, of intense love and violent hatred. At this observation, the psychoanalysis adds that these two opposite feelings frequently rely on the same object.” “[T]he primitive psyche is in the strictest sense indestructible.” (S. Freud.)

It’s not but in an inappropriate manner that certain ones do with this regard use terms such as “collaboration-collaborationist”. Bonnard, Bousquet, Brasillach, Brinon, Bucard, Céline, Cousteau, Darlan, Darnand, Déat, Deloncle, Doriot, Drieu, Gaucher/Goguillot, Laval, Luchaire, Pétain, Rebatet, Suarez and many others have been collaborationists, and proud to be it; many of them, intimately convinced that their politics were righteous. They have also legitimized and reinforced the foreign military occupation, and participated in the repression of their own Country; yet, they never claimed it to be a democratic, non-Nationalist and non-violent régime. Nor did they ever try to dismember their Country for the benefit of neighbouring States, as the “Basque” Renegades do. They never wanted to annex it to the Reich. They thought and even said that they knew and could handle and mislead the occupants for the benefit of France, in order to preserve the French Empire under the German Protectorate.

They never said that the French were Germans, or that the Germans were in France “French with a different sensibility”; nor did they say that their National Socialist German Workers’ Party was in France a Party as French, legitimate and democratic as the others. They never qualified the German Language as Language of the Republic, nor the French dialect as a regional Language, part of German heritage. They never forced the children in schools to sing “Deutschland über alles” in tribute to their ancestors the Teutons, before the monuments to the glory of the Wehrmacht. It would be to do them an affront to equate those French Collaborationists along with the Basque Traitors and Renegades who, in the occupied Territories of the Basque People, make a career by deliberately and in all consciousness striving in the pure and simple liquidation of their People of origin, and in the acceptance: as if they were their own ones, of the dominant Nations’ Peoples and Parties; as the indigenous members of the liquidationist Pnv-Eta bureaucracy and of the French-Spanish National-imperialistic parties are doing. There is no need to mix genres, placing Collaborators and Renegades in the same basket.

III

What Espilondo, Maitia, Borda etc. are saying here and now; what the monopolies of the media are spreading nowadays, sheltered from any possible reply, is the same thing that the traditional National-socialism has always said: it was heard everywhere where the French and Spanish imperialism had led its criminal enterprise against the freedom of Peoples. It did especially occur so when the “left-wing” Parties fulfilled their specific mission, going until the end of the tasks that the official right and extreme right did leave in so good hands. As it is known, everywhere the nationalist “left” has managed to take the leadership of the repression and war against the “nationalism” of the others, that’s to say: against the freedom of the Peoples that had fallen under their yoke.

Since the decomposition of the oriental despotism in Spain under the blows of the French invasion, the Spanish ruling class strives to follow the French model; but the trends and initiatives of the Spanish nationalism against the Basque People and State are followed more closely every time by their allies in the North. So, even though in the Morocco of the European imperialistic expansion the Spanish imperialism played the role of a subtenant of French imperialism, yet it is here in our Country where the French colonialism plays the part of a poor relation of Spanish colonialism, of which it assumes the complementary role and to which it provides the ancillary services of repression, propaganda and the logistical support; glad enough to pick up the fallout from a so glorious enterprise.

Following the initiatives of the Francoist power, the French imperialistic Nationalism “of left” has shown again its true nature; what basically does not imply any innovative contribution. French Ministers and journalists repeat like parrots the last fascist and xenophobic findings that they have just listened or read in the Spanish Ministers and journalists. There can be easily recognized, in the insults, lies or paralogisms of the Nationalist clique of Anglet, the favourite ideological themes and methods of the Nationalist clique of Ermua: both of the official Francoist party, as well as of its National-socialists. It is always the same vomit.

From any side that these concepts are taken, regardless of how we look at them, their only univocal, active and significant element is the French-Spanish Nationalism, is the demagoguery and the petit-bourgeois jingoism at the service of the State imperialism of the nationalist big bourgeoisie. It is first and foremost about an effort to hide the foundations of the imperialistic régime imposed through centuries of violence, war and occupation by means of war and State Terrorism, repression and deportation. It is about distorting and ruining, in theory and in practice, the fundamental human right of free disposition or self-determination of all Peoples: first of human rights and prerequisite for all the others, without which freedom and democracy are ideological farces at the service of imperialism. It is the priority task of the ideologists and politicians of the nationalist Parties in power.

The nationalist-imperialistic ideology is not aimed towards truth or knowledge but towards domination over Peoples and the disappearance of free persons. The more stupid are its patients, the weaker and more submissive will be. It is enough to verify the extent of the damage caused on a public opinion without defence, to measure the frightful effectiveness of the services of monopolistic conditioning of masses. To transform the persons into servile, submissive and dependent puppets with blunt and conditioned political reflexes; into social and mental alienated with lobotomized, washed, emptied, refilled and recycled brains, is the goal of the imperialistic system of ideological conditioning.

Always equally misleading and dishonest, deliberately faked and manipulated, the new wave of nationalistic propaganda is aimed at deceiving the patients under the protection of the State monopolies of violence and ideological intoxication of masses. There is not matter for wonder or pretext for scandal: the Nationalism-imperialism has nothing to do with any kind of ideological “honesty”. Imperialism is a criminal enterprise of nationalist domination against the freedom of Peoples, established and maintained through violence, which is realized also ideologically, including confusion, falsehood, concealment and slander. French Nationalists “of left” have gone down this road as far as it is possible to go. They have exceeded the usual techniques of their official “right”. They have adopted and adapted the nationalist propaganda of the Spanish Francoist official Party and of its National-socialist cronies of the PsoE.

The imperialism cannot show in front of everybody the true nature of this power, the origin and foundation of its “legality” and of its “legitimacy”. It must conceal and distort the reality, the sources, the purposes and means of the nationalist domination system in the occupied and annexed territories; and the root of the problems of which it is the cause.

The power established by means of war, Terrorism of war and State, and the law of the strongest cynically affirmed as “the Law”; through military occupation, criminal conculcation of the fundamental and historical rights, and contempt for the international right of self-determination of Peoples (first of human rights and precondition of them all); and through aggression against the integrity and independence of legitimately and historically constituted States, destruction of their national characteristics by means of violence and import-export of populations, and seizure on economy and culture: all these are the historical and sociological facts which are the base of the current political system of imperialistic occupation, and which condition and order all its forms. Facts that the nationalist ideology cannot assume and that it must necessarily snatch from the consciences.

In their place, the imperialism must make enter and take root in the consciences the idea of the dominant Nation one and unique; the democratic, non-violent and non-nationalist origin and foundation of the colonial occupation; and the legitimacy of the State which is its perpetrator and beneficiary. It must reduce to nothing, already in idea, the subjugated Nation and State; present the democratic resistance of everybody who do not grovel under the imperialistic Nationalism as fascist, aggressive, violent and nationalist; and discredit and defame all that’s left of freedom, dignity and spirit of independence in the oppressed People. A heavy task, even if everything is possible there where the monopoly of violence establishes and ensures the ideological monopoly!

The indoctrination of the society is nowadays much more effective since knowledge, science, culture, education, information and communication: administratively repressed and oriented, have been merged in only one reality with the propaganda and psychological conditioning of masses at the service of the interests of the Government; since its ideologists and official-agents do harp on about the unique and exclusive thinking, while any criticism and any objective data are excluded by violence, fear, ignorance and corruption; and since the alleged opposition takes care of saying what the power wants to.

The administrative monopolies strive to occupy and saturate the audio-visual space, and to produce the noise and clouds of smoke that interfere or make it impossible any information likely to facilitate the awareness of the population on the real issues and true responsibilities. The conditioning of the masses must also cloud and stun the consciences, and prevent that any independent and critical thinking may be expressed: so convinced are its proponents of their own (theoretical) inability to deal with the most basic historical and political truth. Its action tries to block up the holes through which a rest of information and knowledge could infiltrate, even the most immediate and elementary, on the reality of the power that the French Nationalism, with the invaluable help of its Spanish partner, exerts on the Basque Nation.

“For well you know, we of the off’ring side / Must keep aloof from strict arbitrement, / And stop all sight-holes, every loop from whence / The eye of reason may pry in upon us.” (W. Shakespeare; King Henry the Fourth, Pt. 1.)

Certainly, if the Nationalists speak and act this way it is because they can do it and because they cannot do otherwise. Of course they would prefer not being “obliged” to act in that way. They would prefer being able to ideologically found their domination over the free adhesion of populations and in respect for the right of self-determination of Peoples. They would like to establish the idea of their national Empire on the authentic history and sociological data, rather than on irrationality, myths, deceitful justifications or petitions of principle with which they have stuffed defenceless populations by force. Of course they would prefer to use persuasion, dialogue, rational discourse and true words: elements which at all costs they must avoid, rather than imposed monologue and ideological and political terrorism, which they cannot do without. But it happens that the imperialistic system is a whole, and its defenders are serious people who don’t indulge in wishful thinking on their part nor have any option to do this, because they know what all of it is about: without the political, economic and ideological monopolies, which they have endowed themselves and have imposed on the others, goodbye to their domination. After years and centuries of monopoly of the means of violence, intoxication, indoctrination, propaganda and brain washing, French and Spanish Nationalism cannot confess to the Peoples what it really is and of what its power is truly made of.

The slanders, insults, defamatory purposes: which the nationalist agitators are increasingly forced to use, are geared primarily to take the initiative and bring the ideological offensive on the ground of the adversary; and to distract so as to deflect the attention of the public opinion from the bottom of the problems. The nationalist agitators’ provocations intend to deflect the democratic resistance from its actual tasks, and to secure, neutralize and use the adversary. For getting it, their superiority of numbers and means, their simple ideological mass and even the weakness and stupidity of their thinking, are increasingly more efficient advantages against defenceless populations, stunned by centuries of one-way propaganda.

If we have – notwithstanding – reproduced this collection of insults, lies, infamies and usefully stupid comments, characteristic of the fascist and imperialistic propaganda and ideological terrorism, it’s first and foremost because they do remarkably uncover the hatred of the Basque People, of the national freedom and democracy, and the total disregard of the historical, sociological or political truth that the nationalist Parties do propel. For them, it is about proceeding to the conditioning of their real, actual or virtual clientele; and about channelling and developing the hatred, aggression and xenophobic and chauvinist reflexes against the Basque People.

Propaganda and psychological warfare, ruin of the historical memory and the collective conscience of Peoples, dogmatism and obscurantism, destruction of reason, distortion, confusion and perversion of the language and concepts, annihilation of the critical sense, brain conditioning and washing, indoctrination, cramming of the skull, and ideological intoxication of masses, do form a whole inherent to the imperialistic ideology in which neither element is superfluous. It’s the expression of the social domination and of the monopoly of violence gone onstage.

Without “the appalling machine, the appalling imposture and the appalling lie” thus developed, the theoretical and practical liquidation of the right of free disposition or self-determination of Peoples could not be possible.

IV

“I am anti-nationalist”, Espilondo says. Playing deliberately on the desired ambiguity of terms and concepts, in order to make the transfer of the imperialistic Nationalism crimes on the account of “nationalism” of the colonized: here is what the dominant ideology has been reduced to. So as to achieve this, Espilondo is not disturbed when it is about to deliberately distort the texts of Jaurès – which however are unambiguous – insofar as it allows him to support his French Nationalism and his bascophobie. This is how he understands his “choice of a certain political ethics”. As it can be seen, and despite having at their disposal the monopolies of all means of violence and propaganda, Espilondo, his Party and their clientele must needs be short of ideas to justify their aggressions since they have to use such procedures. They also must needs be convinced that the work of deculturation and stultification of the defeated has reached the needed level to make them swallow anything.

If by ‘nationalism’ in the strict sense (i.e. the imperialistic Nationalism) we understand the denial of other Peoples’ rights, as well as the propaganda and faits accomplis against their freedoms and – in the first place – against their right of free disposition, self-determination or independence, then Nationalism is certainly incompatible with freedom, human rights and democracy. Now then, in this sense, it is clear that such a thing: “Basque Nationalism”, it does not exist. On the contrary, the French and the Spanish Nationalism do exist in that sense, and they have been, for centuries, at the top of world imperialism. If they are not so anymore, it is not because French and Spaniards have ever voluntarily resigned that position but the “guilt” of it is up to other nationalisms, which have in their turn become stronger than them.

But if, quite to the contrary, by ‘nationalism’ is understood the defence of the subjugated Peoples, of their liberties and – in the first place – of their right of free disposition or self-determination: first of fundamental human rights and prerequisite of them all, according to International right, then any free and democratic society is founded: ideologically and politically, in this way. That is, if those who want to liberate their Country, their Nation and their State from imperialistic domination are also “nationalists”, then those who invade the Countries and States of other Peoples, denying them the fundamental right of national free disposition, are Nationalists in the highest degree.

In other words: if ‘nationalism’ means any kind of factual or ideal affirmation and incorporation of the own national realities, then everybody is “nationalist”, and it cannot be seen how it could be otherwise. “The international culture is not a-national”, confirmed Lenin, who had never known anyone who spoke “socialist” instead of Russian, German or other current languages, and he – no doubt – didn’t expect to find it, and with good reason.

Lenin said and repeated that it was necessary, in any situation, to make the difference between “the nationalism of the oppressor nation, and the nationalism of the oppressed nation”. Of course the French or Spanish nationalist “left” is not Marxist-Leninist: we would split our sides out of laughing if they claimed it so. They are located, from the beginning, on the side of the Nationalism of the nation that oppresses, and against the “nationalism” of the oppressed nation:

“In my writings on the national question I have already said that an abstract presentation of the question of nationalism in general is of no use at all. A distinction must necessarily be made between the nationalism of an oppressor nation, and that of an oppressed nation; between the nationalism of the big [that is: imperialistic] nation, and the nationalism of the small nation.

“In respect of the second kind of nationalism, we, nationals of a big nation, have nearly always been guilty, in historic practice, of an infinite number of cases of violence; furthermore: we commit violence and insult an infinite number of times without noticing it. It is sufficient to recall my Volga reminiscences of how non-Russians are treated; how the Poles are not called by any other name than Polyachiska, how the Tatar is nicknamed Prince, how the Ukrainians are always ‘Khokhols’, and the Georgians and other Caucasian nationals always ‘Kapkasians’.

“That is why internationalism on the part of oppressors or “great” nations, as they are called (though they are great only in their violence, only great as bullies), must consist not only in the observance of the formal equality of nations but even in an inequality of the oppressor nation, the great nation, that must make up for the inequality which obtains in actual practice. Anybody who does not understand this has not grasped the real proletarian attitude to the national question, he is still essentially petty bourgeois in his point of view and is, therefore, sure to descend to the bourgeois point of view. [...]

[...] It is another thing when we ourselves lapse, even if only in trifles, into imperialist attitudes towards oppressed nationalities, thus undermining all our principled sincerity, all our principled defence of the struggle against imperialism. But the morrow of world history will be a day when the awakening peoples oppressed by imperialism are finally aroused and the decisive long and hard struggle for their liberation begins.” (V. Lenin; ‘The Question of Nationalities or “Autonomisation”’. Taken down to dictation in shorthand by his secretary Mariya Volodiceva on 31-XII-1922.)

Imperialism, in the Leninist sense, is not perhaps the highest stage of capitalism; but imperialism, in the strict sense, is certainly the extreme degree of Nationalism: the imperialistic Nationalism. Nationalism and totalitarianism, in general, are conceptually and sociologically inseparable.

The inter-nation, the inter-nationalism, implies the nation: there can be no inter-nationalism without nations, denying the nations and their rights; which is the fundamental position of the imperialistic Nationalism. All ‘anti-nationalism’ is correlatively nationalist. One cannot deny a nation or a ‘nationalism’ without affirming and opposing against them another nation and another nationalism. In condemning ‘the nationalism’, what the French and Spanish Nationalists do condemn is actually the defensive nationalism of the oppressed nations, which is an obstacle to the imperialistic Nationalism of themselves. French (and Spanish) Nationalism: since it posits its model Nation whose role is to rebuild the world in its image, is incompatible with any inter-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 Franceis 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 of Engels to Marx; London, 7-September-1870.)

“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.)

“‘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; ‘The Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, 1914.)

Thus the French Nationalists, the same as the Spanish Nationalists, do reject in theory and in practice the right of free disposition of the Peoples. Now then, without fundamental human rights, there is no democracy. There is no democracy, but imperialism and fascism, there where it is denied the right of self-determination of Peoples: first of fundamental human rights and precondition of them all.

However, for the French-Spanish monopolies of imperialistic propaganda it is “the Basque nationalism”: “the plague of the Basque bourgeoisie”, that threatens freedom, democracy and world peace. According to them, having the French and Spanish bourgeoisies been from always immune to this type of illness, French and Spanish Nationalism does not exist. (There would certainly be, on the contrary, a “nationalist” Basque bourgeoisie; a surprising fact in a Country where the elites and the people: having renounced their identity according to the ideologists of the imperialism, would have freely joined centuries ago the French and Spanish Nationalism.)

A unique global society would have the same objective content as that of a nation in a characterized multinational society, even though the word and concept of ‘nation’ did not already or any longer exist due to the lack of a correlative national diversity; just as the objective qualities of the matter would be the same that they are although, in the absence of diversity, the differentiated concepts and words thereto had disappeared. A human society devoid of such characters is something that does not and cannot exist, no more than a body without dimensions. Of course, the imperialistic ideology has never retreated before the hypostases and other paralogisms of which it could take advantage to deceive the Peoples and incorporate them into the model-Nation, “universal and non-nationalist”, that’s to say: imperialistic.

A unique global super-State would, in any event, be always a State; it’s only that in such a case the inter-State policy and right would not exist due to lack of concurrents. (Such a right does no longer exist, if the World right is considered as a simple part of the State right. Strictly speaking, a State does not have and cannot have “exterior or foreign” policy or right. The political “interior” of the State and its right is the dominion which it submits to itself. What is exterior to the State is not either policy or right of the State. So, what is policy and right of the State could not be exterior to it; which makes that the “interior” policy and right do also disappear, due to the lack of a correlative “exterior”. The political and juridical relationships can be external or internal with respect to a partial domain of policy or right; yet, they cannot be so with respect to the policy and right of the States as a whole.)

Cosmopolitanism, globalism, is either a form of imperialistic Nationalism or a form of multi-nationalism. The supporters of the “a-national overcoming” are, in reality, National-imperialists trying to mask their Nationalism at the expense of the others. French Nationalists proclaim it without ceasing: “the French is cartesian”.

V

“There are no hard or moderate nationalists: there are but nationalists, and that’s all, and it is necessary to isolate them”, is currently a watchword of the French and Spanish Nationalists against any hint of resistance to imperialism. This new appeal of the Nationalist “left” is, no doubt, a small novelty: such as it appears to be, its formulations bring considerable progress, a significant innovation that it’s a pleasure to underline, and a relief certain for a reassuring future. Since the historic mission of the nationalist Parties “of left”, in the Basque Country and elsewhere, has always consisted in distorting the play and scrambling the cards; in confusing, perverting, diverting, recuperating, exploiting, corrupting, penetrating, dividing and – finally – ruining the democratic resistance of the movements for the liberation of Peoples, the fact of being able to do without them by their own choice will certainly be great and pleasing a progress.

At the time of the imperialistic war of 1936, the “collusion between the reds and the separatists”: so often vilified and condemned by the propaganda of the fascist Crusade, it was not instead sufficiently denounced and fought by the Parties of the nationalist “left” of Spain and France; this is the least that could be said. Given that “the firmness and rigour, the sense of clarity and isolation” against the Basque movement of resistance – which are the most notable contribution of the present French nationalist “left” – were clearly missing at that time, their predecessors were forced to “reconcile” the demands of the war against fascism with the concern to prevent the establishment of independent States ‘de facto’ or ‘de iure’ in the Basque Country and in Catalonia; which resulted in real sabotage of the fight against Fascism.

Once the victory of General Franco was thus secured, all Basque Resistants remember the too long times in which it was not possible to walk down the streets – not even stay at home – without having to deal with the commandos, transvestites, leeches and limpets of the Spanish and French Nationalism “of left”: all of them brimming over with understanding, sympathy and tempting promises for the Basque Country, whose freedom “had as a prerequisite the fall of Franco, the democracy or the socialist revolution in Spain and France”. The freedom of the Peoples: the foundation of Democracy, was always “recognized” by them – that is, relegated – as an accessory, eventual and delayed.

In reality, the purported “priority fight against Franco, for democracy and for socialism” of the Spanish and French social-imperialists did badly hide their denial of the right of free disposition, self-determination or independence of Peoples, and in fact, it aimed to recuperate and destroy their struggle for the national freedom. The maintenance, at any price, of the annexations to the benefit of the imperialistic States, was always for them the immovable foundation of any “democratic” political project; which resulted in the sinking of the struggle against Francoism and for democracy, in the interest of the “national reconciliation” and the continuity of the fascist political acquis. We know what has happened, with this game, also to the “democratic, socialist or communist revolution”. (The French Nationalist “left”, from there, has been liberated. Now it can already, openly, ally with the right-wing and “left-wing” French and Spanish Nationalists against the true enemy: the Basques.)

There have been, however, naïve fellows so as to allow being caught in those tricks, smartasses so as to collaborate, and renegades so as to sell themselves: at an individual, bureaucratic or corporate level. It is now sixty years that the Pnv has no other political or ideological line than that which is marked to it by the PsoE and the traditional Francoist Party. Similarly, it is as much time that its corollary, the Eta, has often been permeated in all impunity by the individual and collective agents of the Spanish and French nationalist Parties. The “fellow travellers” this way appointed have fulfilled the mission that had been assigned to them for the benefit of the “democratic front of left” with the imperialism, and of other reactionary fancies of a similar ilk. In these circumstances, the “dualists” traps on “the democracy, the socialism and the national question”: voluntarily accepted, endorsed and passed by the Pnv-Eta liquidationist group – have produced collaborators, deserters and defectors in chain, and caused damages difficult to over-estimate.

Now then, after forty years this tactic has lost its effectiveness. The results of the Spanish intra-totalitarian “transition” are but too obvious. Spanish and French nationalists have been able to finally indulge in their inclinations and natural affinities against the freedom of the Peoples and, in particular, of the Basque People. The Nationalism of the PsF has reached too obvious peaks. The former PsoE is no more than the milling of the Spanish Falange, which had invested in it its remains in the sixties. Finally, international agreements between National-socialist Parties and Governments (in Paris, in Madrid or in Latché) have opened the eyes of many, and their unequivocal consequences have reduced, if not eliminated, the room for manoeuvre. As for the PcF, it is no more than a shapeless waste that is desperately trying to re-float itself by snatching clientele off the official extreme right-wing by means of an unprecedented Nationalist outbidding.

The “naïve” who thirty years earlier had welcomed “the arrival of the left to power in Spain and in France”: an arrival “that opened new prospects of freedom for the Basque People”, have been unable to explain or conceal the reality. They have either become (relatively) reluctant to the nationalist seduction of the Spanish and French “left”, or have moved openly on the side of imperialism. All those who – out of ignorance, naivety, or bad faith – have taken part in these manoeuvres are thus confronted with texts and attitudes that they will not easily be able to misrepresent.

It must be pointed out clearly, not to be confused about the predictable results: if the “alliances” with the imperialism seem now to go through a difficult moment, it is not as a result of any kind of self-criticism or “revisionist” alteration at all, realized by the groups with Basque labels that have been involved in there, but as a result of the initiative, strengthening and aggressiveness of the occupation bodies and of the French Nationalist Party; all of them already convinced that, with incompetents and “wretched” of this kind, any relationship other than pure and hard repression is as useless as harmful: “it is necessary to isolate them”. (There again, it is also the opinion – often still more entrenched – today widespread throughout the world.)

However, suffice it to hear the lamentations from those hopelessly gullible over the “incomprehensible betrayals and unnatural agreements”; suffice it just to observe their expectations and requests, and no doubt will be permitted about their willingness to continue or return on the same track, as long as their beloved masters leave them still the possibility.

Anyway, it should also be noticed that the unity of the Basque Nation and its problem is such that the defectors do not adhere either to the French Nationalism or to the Spanish one, but become ardent supporters of both at the same time.

VI

“I am anti-nationalist, in the same way as others are anti-capitalists”, Espilondo says. This “socialist” is not anti-capitalist, as others are. So what is then Espilondo? It is clear that he cannot proclaim himself pro-capitalist or social-capitalist: that would not do enough “socialist” or “communist” enough. But neither can he call himself anti-capitalist as others do, unless a burst of roaring laughter assured. Espilondo opts for saying “non-anticapitalistic”: two negations which are worth for an affirmation in the “plain talk of truth and in clarity, always in clarity”. So much clarity is blinding.

National-socialist and National-communists (the PsF-PcF group) call themselves “non-nationalists, anti-nationalists, anti-terrorists, non-violent, non-anticapitalists”. But which is, in positive, their political content? In fact, this negativistic inflation, this flood of adversatives, these formalist escapes and refusals are not innocent or devoid of meaning. They reflect the discomfort and incapability of the Nationalists to define themselves; their refusal to appear in public as they really are. So the Nationalists will hide under negative and periphrastic formulas. They will be “non-ists”. Since they cannot confess as the National-imperialists and social-chauvinists that they are, they will be “anti-nationalistic and non-nationalists”. But what are actually those self-declared anti-nationalists and non-nationalists that are supporters, agents and beneficiaries of French imperialistic Nationalism? They say to be “non-violent and anti-terrorists”. Now then: what are the non-violence and the anti-terrorism of the supporters, holders, agents and beneficiaries of the monopoly of State violence and terrorism? They make us explode with laughter.

The French Republic is founded on the – illicit – acquisitions of the Ancien Régime, whose foundation and structure were nonetheless preserved and developed in the “Revolution”. The Terrorism of masses and the crimes of war, against peace and against humanity, which horrified the world, were the means that founded the republican Dictatorship: the first trial of a modern totalitarian régime and a model for all the others. In the name of progress (and it’s here where lies its greater originality: the inspiration for all contemporary totalitarian ideology), the French Republic inaugurated Dictatorship and Terrorism cross-dressed of freedom, human rights and democracy; imperialistic Nationalism, under the cloak and falsification of universalism, equality and free-disposition of Peoples; warmongering, aggression and pillage, under the rhetoric of fraternity and pacifism; ideological fanaticism, under the guise of science, enlightenment and republican religion; the deification of the State, on the pretext of secularism and civic morality; and colonialism, disguised as humanitarian civilization and progress.

The French Republic did continue and push: to its utmost end and on all Continents, the policy of aggression, plunder and conquest of the Ancien Régime. Nowadays, proclaiming oneself “republican” – as well as “socialist, communist or leftist” – might still serve for some special occasion (particularly in order to deceive the subjugated Peoples), but this is not a democratic label. Democracy is the political power of the People, and is based on the effectiveness of fundamental human rights. Everything other than this is a mere forgery.

The “Revolution” did liquidate: by means of the criminal violence and contempt of all its fundamental rights, what remained of the historical freedoms of the Basque People. The Republic did introduce here among us the dictatorship of the Parisian clubs, the guillotine, the terrorism and the deportation of masses. It was the “republican Corsican” Bonaparte who did attempt to re-establish slavery in Haiti, and who – roundly defeated – took avenge by crushing his natal island under the Terror. It was he who restored slavery and who did relaunch French expansionism, war, Terrorism and looting throughout Europe; he, who founded “the Republican Empire” and who did push to the extreme the liquidation of the popular-democratic institutions – along with the strengthening of the totalitarian structures – that co-existed in the Ancien Régime. (Even the “Departments with a Prefect”, which today ask here the “moderate-opportunist-realistic-possibilist-minimalist Basques”, are the consular contribution to the “republican” institutions.)

In terms of imperialistic Nationalism, the French Nationalists “of the left” do not at all yield with regard to the French Nationalists “of the right”. It is under “socialist” and “leftist” ideology and labels the way as the French Parties have relaunched, served, carried and financed the enterprise of expansion, domination, plunder, repression and terrorism of the Republic against the freedom of Peoples. (Apropos of this also, we will come back again about Ferry and Jaurès). The French National-socialists had a decisive participation in the great carnage of 1914: a result of the Sacred Union and of the war: “imperialistic on both sides”. The French National-socialists have always allied themselves to the traditional right-wing (before and after the ruin and the restoration of the III Republic), and did wholeheartedly participate in the colonialist burst of Suez.

It has been the “Alsatian socialist” Ngaelen who “made of the electoral fraud an institution of the State”. It was the “leftist” Government of Mendès-France which led the terrorist “sweep” advocated and ordained by the “leftist” Minister Mitterrand (“balayez-moi tout ça!”) against the struggle of national liberation of the Algerian People; and it was this latter who very consistently took advantage of the power to inaugurate the policy of open collaboration with General Franco against the Basque resistance by suppressing (1954) Radio Euzkadi: a modest prelude to the coordination of the National-socialist French Government with the Spanish fascists for the intensification and spread of State Terrorism in the Basque Country. There was nothing more “socialist and communist”, nothing more republican than the ferocious nationalist and colonial repression of the “socialist” Government chaired by the “socialist” Guy Mollet, held through torture and murder (“summary executions”) by the gauleiter Governor General-Resident Minister “socialist” Robert Lacoste (1956-8) against the Movement of independence of Algeria. (Vid. P. Aussaresses; “Services Spéciaux”.)

The full powers for the French army of colonial occupation in Algeria were requested and voted by the French national-socialists and national-communists, which led to its maximum level the terrorism, torture, and racist reprisals against defenceless men, women and children. (There has been, it is said, French “communists” “who have cried for it”; but it is in Algeria itself where the indigenous populations have had to suffer and mourn the consequences of the terrorist, nationalist, “socialist and communist” French racism.) And it was not something new: it was the republican genocide in the Vendée which the Bolsheviks took as an unsurpassed model for the murder of masses of the Russian peasantry.

It was the “Georgian communist” Ordzhonikidze who crushed the Caucasian Republics, and the “Ukrainian communist” Khrushchev who crushed Ukraine, under the dictatorship of the “Georgian communist” Stalin; just as the “communist” Kagevist Putin has deported, massacred and terrorized Chechnya and its neighbors, with the blessing and the declared complicity of the new world hegemonic Power and other Western “democracies”.

Mussolini and Hitler did also declare themselves “socialist” (they were so not less than many others who boast of it), and it is thus as they seduced the nationalist working masses to reach power and establish the Spanish Nazism: always protected and preserved afterward by the Germanic institutional continuity, whose terrorist raids crushed Durango and Gernika beneath the bombs. They have been President Mitterrand and his national-socialist Ministers those who have signed the unconditional cooperation of the French republicans with the Spanish monarchical-Francoists–Falangists-socialist; those who have pushed, reinforced and developed the repressive strategy further than it was ever done by their accomplices and predecessors of the official “right”. They have been those who have wanted the pact at the Summit in Latché, and the wave of terrorist killings which broke out as a consequence on the Basque coast. It is with the Spanish Nationalists and fascists heirs of Franco with whom the French national-socialists have been teamed up to organize the repression against the freedom of Peoples. We’ve all observed on Spanish television the stern and sharp gestures of the formerly “Trotskyist” Jospin, addressed to his neighbour the Francoist Spanish Minister of the Interior, in order to approve and encourage the policy of repression and terrorism in the Basque Country, and to repudiate any (imaginary) attempt of appeasement. It is by the same means as the joined Nationalists, of all tendencies, have consolidated the colonialism in the “French” territories of the Antipodes.

Corruption and businesses, which are everywhere, are nevertheless the “natural” specialty of the nationalist “left”. The French National-socialism is founded on “the values of the Republic”; but the Republic is a bourgeois Nationalist, imperialistic and colonialist State, founded with the unreserved support of the national socialists: which is quite different and much more than the simple electoral complicity with the nationalist plague of the French bourgeoisie. The union with Le Pen did not bother them, “since it was to do well”, as Espilondo says. Espilondo and his French Nationalist Party have voted so as to give an overwhelming presidential majority and leave free hands for five years to the Party of the “traditional right, the last resource of the freedom”, without occurring that the presence of the “Basque representatives” in that same enterprise raises any problem on one side nor on the other: “why not, if it is for doing good?” The “doing the good” being identified with the repression of the Peoples by the French imperialism: a joint undertaking of all the French Nationalists.

The French national-ecologists have also voted in favour of the last atomic polluter of the Pacific, heroically sacrificing nature and persons for the benefit of the nuclear “deterrence”. There has not been any error in these decisions. It could not be seen there a shade of unnatural alliance: they proclaim themselves of left, but they vote in a completely natural form for the traditional “right” (the only one that there is) and ally themselves with the Spanish Francoists. As Jaurès did not say, they are but Nationalists and fascists, and that’s all.

These are not petty offences, minimal infractions or misdemeanours. These are crimes of common law: crimes of war, crimes against peace and crimes against humanity whose suppression is the very basis of International Law. If the holders of such record could be able to a sense of decency, when it is spoken of freedom and of dignity, of democracy, of human rights and of nationalism, they could not but close the mouth except to confess their crimes and their responsibilities. But the political infamy is accompanied here by the complete lack of shame. Convinced as they are that nothing can at present hinder their domination; that the reign of a collective stupidity has been fully established by their care, they are now “these people” who call nationalists, fascists and terrorists to the victims of their misdeeds. We must remain vigilant in front of them; all the more so because their perpetrators have always disguised them behind a caricature of freedom and democracy. The total identification of “these people” with the Spanish fascists and the new international backlash makes them even more dangerous, if this can be possible.

When speaking of Nationalism, Violence, Terrorism and Fascism, there are no French (or Spanish) Nationalists of right or of left, patriots and anti-patriots, civilians and ecclesiastics, violent and peaceful, militarists and anti-militarists, conservative bourgeois and revolutionary workers. There is but a French (or Spanish) Nationalist Party; there are but Nationalists, who have all of them adopted the values and goals of the chauvinistic fundamentalism, heir of the totalitarian French absolutist prototype.

The French constructivist-absolutist idea of “Nation, national identity and State”, being what it is, there is no other way-out for the annexed Peoples than their complete liquidation, and within it those Peoples’ denial is total. Perhaps the Spaniards may try to dizzy and deceive their dominated subjects with their “pluralism”, “autonomy” and other similar crap; yet certainly not the French.

VII

In the PsF there is no difficulty in doing the amalgam among “Basque nationalists” and Hitlerians. Taking into account the participation of some groups with Basque acronyms in the French “democratic elections” Espilondo thinks of Hitler, who – according to him – would “have come to power by a democratic way”: a commonplace as equivocal as apologetic.

And for the PcF – we’ve already seen it – “the nationalism is a danger. The nationalists, here as elsewhere in Europe and in the world, aim to turn the other into a foreigner, an enemy. In this way there would be on the one side the ‘pure’ Basques, who adopt the independence project; and, on the other, the rest (including Basques among them) who are destined to be a target. It’s in this that nationalism is dangerous because it is akin to fascism. The independentists are not of left; they are extreme right-wing”.

The Spanish fascists, heirs of the oriental despotism, of the military dictatorships and the Francoism, disciples, allies and creatures of Hitler and Mussolini, turned meanwhile into a model of democracy for the PsF, the PcF and the new Europe, do not deprive themselves at present in calling nazis the Basque democrats who had been crushed under the bombs of the Axis in the service of the imperialistic terrorism; which – by the way – had happened even before the German National-socialists and the “pure” French National-communists did among themselves conclude non-dubious alliances on the backs “of the others (including Basques among them), who were destined to be targets” of their bombings and therein doomed to be wiped off the map.

Coming from the PcF, the curious expression “nationalism is akin to fascism” does not concern, of course, the French imperialistic Nationalism but the Basque democratic movement against imperialism. Thus formulated, this “kinship” is the sign of a surprising restriction, restraint and moderation on the part of the PcF. It’s as if a remnant of decency, of embarrassment, as if a shadow of a sense of honour that was not suspected in them, would still prevent “these people”: unfailing supporters of the wars, the Terrorism and the colonial repressions of the French Nationalism, from following up to the end the propaganda of their Francoists allies. It is to be hoped that these inertias, these reluctances and these equivocal kinships will be quickly overcome in favour of the firmness and clarity in the outright condemnation, which are a declared requirement of the nationalist Sacred Union. (Maybe we are there before a moment of weakness, unworthy of the history of the PcF.)

According to Baguez, “the French communist Party wishes to reaffirm its fierce opposition to any form of violence and terrorism. It reminds us that the origins of this violence are external to our Country, and that the solutions cannot be but political”. We believe to be dreaming. If the PcF is contrary to any form of violence and terrorism, then, since it has betrayed those principles throughout its history, the ideology and policy of the PcF are renegades or impostors sold to the French and Spanish fascist, nationalist and imperialistic bourgeoisie. Or else it occurs that, since the country of the PcF is France: whose power was established – as they claim – without violence and terrorism; and since the origins of the violence lie abroad, and not in France, the political solutions have nothing to do with the right of self-determination of Peoples applied to France. It’s not worth a further comment on this nonsense: it is difficult that they themselves may sincerely believe this propaganda; but if they do, then it is evident that they are in full delirium, perfectly functional for the objectives of imperialism.

There is no more recurring issue among sociologists, political scientists and ideologists than that of the differences between communism and fascism. This is not the place to deal with it. On the other hand, with regard not to this problem in general but to the difference that there is between French national-communism and fascism, that issue has long since been clarified: there is none. Their relationship is not of kinship but of mere identity. Of course, the PcF “does” locate itself to the left of the FN; but its nationalist theory and practice, its attitudes about the suburbs, about the European Union and about the imperialism in general, do place it to the right of the official nationalist and fascist extreme right. Nothing new about it, of course: the “communists of Anglet” are not different from the “communists” of Sidi-Bel-Abbès, who had already got noticed, within and from the beginning of the III International, in openly opposing their nationalist, colonialist and racist positions to the right of self-determination of the Peoples. The French “communists” are not of left, they are of the extreme nationalist right.

“The Basques are fascists”, had already proclaimed on the French television Cohn Bendit, the most notorious “leftist-revolutionary” representative and European parliamentary member of the “green” movement.

VIII

“Therefore, we denounce the dubious alliances among the nationalists and the mayors of the right. With Camblong is worse than with the right”, Espilondo says. The PsF and PcF do now condemn the “doubtful electoral alliances and the electoralist compromises” among the French – Nationalist – “right”, and the (Basque) “nationalists”; alliances and compromises that could replace the – non-doubtful – compromises and alliances undertaken for the benefit of the no less Nationalist French “left”. Compromises and alliances condemned in their turn – as it should be and with the corresponding inversion of the terms – by the French nationalist “right”.

It should be noticed that, in all these perverse, diverse and complementary couplings, it is the Basque “nationalism” which is the accursed and condemned element, whose alliance is alternately dishonourable for the components of the French Party, and never the other way round.

These reproaches and these homages from the Nationalist “left” to its “right” (but nonetheless French), and from the Nationalist “right” to its “left” (but not less French), show once more than the true alliance, or more exactly the identification: not only formal and electoral but permanent, fundamental and strategic, is that of the French Nationalist “left” with its Nationalist “right”; is that of the Nationalist-Imperialistic Sacred Union that exists between the Nationalist bourgeoisie and its militaristic and predatory State, and the French social-imperialistic “left”, against the Peoples’ freedom and democracy in general. It is also the alliance – of which the French Nationalism cannot do without – with the Spanish State and the Francoist forces in power.

History shows and comes back to show again that democracy was always subordinated by the French “left” Nationalism to the maintenance and strengthening of the French imperialistic “institutions of the Republic”.  The whole history of that Republic shows the role of the plebiscites and elections at the service of what Marx described as “this immense military and bureaucratic organization”. This real power “was established at the time of the absolute monarchy”. “All political revolutions have done but improve it.” “The hollow and sacred word ‘republic’” (“and what arepublic!”),  of which Engels talked about, was used to camouflage it.

As for the “republican socialism”, as Guesde said to Jaurès: “Your error lies in your conception of a socialism that has nothing of socialist in it: you make come out your socialism from the Republic, while we make it emerge from the capitalist evolution”. “Your method is the nationalism under a more dangerous form than the other one!” “The day in which the Millerand case would become a general fact, we should have to say goodbye to any internationalism and become the nationalists that neither you, nor I, will ever tolerate to be.” But the new Party, unified in 1903, and Guesde himself, did not take long in succumbing to that error that he had mentioned. (We will return also about all this.) Now then, if perhaps it was this the case in those days, nowadays the issue is no longer about electoral, presidential or parliamentary cretinism: currently, these people know very well what they are doing, and what they must not do in order to be able to participate in the real power where it is located.

It’s not the official “extreme right” that is the priority enemy of the nationalist “left”, since the formr is an always possible ally against the true priority enemy, the only one that the nationalist “left” does not support: the resistance of the oppressed Peoples against French imperialistic Nationalism. It’s not the FN that has brought the extremism, the intolerance and, above all, the Nationalism and the bureaucratic-administrative-military power in French policy. All those realities have always been established in it much better there than anywhere else, with the exception of the Spanish model.

“If you want absolutely to national level that all the decision-making powers are concentrated in the hands of the single party of Chirac: then trust your future and that of your loved ones for 5 long years in the sole hands of Chirac and of his single party. On Sunday 16th of June, you have the opportunity to break with this anti-social and anti-democratic logic by voting: Espilondo.” A few days later: “The first round of the presidential election has plunged us into anxiety. Many of you have no doubt been like me surprised and appalled by the threat of extremism and intolerance that it was made to hover.” Logical (and practical) conclusion: “to concentrate the votes for the right”.

National-socialist and National-communists (the same as “some Basque nationalists”) have therefore voted and made people vote for Chirac, trusting their future and that of their loved ones for 5 long years in the sole hands of Chirac and of his Party. The electioneering and opportunistic alibis have thereby shown that they have no political alternative to the traditional right. The “left” that has supported Chirac “to counter Le Pen” (which means to support the real danger against the imaginary threat), has given to the official right a base of 82%: much more than what it would have had by itself; it has made the voters fall in the concerted trap of the institutional reaction, and this for well more than five long years.

The French Nationalists who call themselves “of left” have voted for the official right, which – thanks to them – will have an overwhelming majority to oppress the Peoples. The actual result is that the “democratic” Parties will be able to do the policy that the FN is not able to do alone; and that the official right is going to impose with the blank signature of the so-called Parties of the left and “popular” support ten times more important. There is no place for wonder about the electoral union “against nature” of the outgoing majority and the official right: it is something completely natural. “In order to save the democracy and the Republic”, the social-communist Nationalists have voted to restore the President weakened, worn out, discredited and committed to nuclear tests and business of all kinds; and – of course under the promise of fierce and intractable reversions in the next legislative elections – have given an absolute majority and their parliamentary support to the presidential right. (Subsequently, they continued to “denounce the threat Le Pen” in order to bring the reality of Sarkozy: an ambitious and pretentious careerist as his predecessors and successors, without any other mission or ability than that of thoroughly exploiting the resources of violence that the totalitarian Nationalism puts at his disposal.) They will say to be “of left”, however they are but Nationalists of right, and that’s all.

Well understood: the nationalist “left” has not “allied with” the official “right”, since an alliance is a relationship between different political entities. What it has done has been to incorporate, confuse with the “right”: it has disappeared in this nationalist bosom where it was born. If “splitting into halves is the greatest pleasure for a cell”, meeting, assimilation, confusion and entropy are the totalitarian passion of the French Nationalists.

The FN is the result and product of the nationalist-totalitarian policy of the official right and “left”. It’s not the “rise” of the FN which pushes back the French “left”; it’s the non-existence of the French left that allows the “rise” of the FN. The FN doesn’t come out from the classic “right”, no more than Italian fascism and German National-socialism did it so; quite on the contrary, all of them have invoked in their origins the “leftist” National-unionist populism.

The extremism and the intolerance, whose threat – as he says – does worry, surprise and appal the Nationalist Deputy, are much more than a threat and much older than the electoral “rise” of the FN. In fact, there is no need of an exceptional penetration for remarking that the FN is at the same time a complementary and auxiliary trend, a shoehorn, a revealer, a scarecrow, a means of pressure, a conditioning factor of the nationalist opinion, a provider of ideas, an alibi and a reference that allow the real nationalist right to be placed, displaced or replaced “in the centre and to the left” of the conventional political game-board. How could the RPR, the PsF or the PcF be to the right or to the extreme right, since the FN is already there? The FN is the way of camouflaging the real right and French Nationalism in general. It is also for that purpose that it has been invented.

The “official extreme right” is the functional complement of the real right: the reference to locate the real right “in the centre and the left”; it’s the suggestion and proposition of the values, aims and measures that will be adopted – with a very superior efficiency – by “the moderate right and left”, once they have been recuperated and “bleached” by their new backers. The result of the “defeat” (that’s to say: of the success of its real function) of the “official extreme right” is the establishment of a régime “of right” more empowered than ever by a greater majority than ever; a régime recognized and legitimized by the purported opposition of its puppets of the “socialist-communist-ecologist left”, with the French Nationalism and chauvinism as a single discernible axis of shared identity.

It’s enough to see the climate and manifestations of spontaneous affection that they all show after the “victory of the Nation over the extreme right”, to verify that nationalism is its main engine. Should the traditional right had not kept the nationalism, would not have made a sacrifice and have mobilized itself in its favour the traditional “left”, which is able to “give up” all its rhetoric and populist “principles” – but not its own nationalism – and to ally with everyone on condition that everybody remain firm against the common and priority enemy: the Peoples which claim their freedom, their inherent and inalienable right against the French or Spanish imperialism.

The policy of the nationalist “left” resorts to the “fear of the worst” as a means of getting the mobilization of popular masses; but the fear of the worst does not pave the way for the democratic forces, it paves it for the fascist and National-socialist reaction, as so many historical examples have shown and demonstrated. The current Francoist régime (that the French nationalist “left” has for ally and model), after having taken the power eighty years ago and in order to keep it in the future, does no longer need to mount a new fascist Halloween for the Spaniards: if the fascism that they already have – and have never ceased having – does not scare them, it cannot be seen well what “extreme right” they should fear from now on.

Finding feeble pretexts “of left to defend the democracy”, by making the policy of the extreme right, is the real function of the French petit-bourgeois national-socialism. They’ve just shown once more that the French nationalist “left” is but an appendix of the imperialistic official right, for to deceive the Peoples. Between FN, Rpr, PsF and PcF there are no substantive differences. There are complementary or tactical functions, formal differences, and diverse interests regarding access to the butter dish. The official right does what the official extreme right could not do itself; and the official left does what the official right could not do alone.

They are, as they say, “restless, surprised and terrified by the threat of extremism and intolerance” that the new situation shows; but when there have been assumed the values, theses, aims, methods and – first and foremost – the nationalism of the traditional right; when is made the fascist and nationalist policy of the traditional right, one simply forms part of the “new” integrated nationalist right, in complementary and symmetric functions of those covered by the “extreme right”.

The “left-wing” Nationalists do not act as they do by mistake. They act as they do because that behaviour corresponds to their real objectives, and the thing does not come from today; although the new world order does impulse its amplification. When “democratic, of left, socialists and communists” Parties do now lead – in close collaboration with their Francoist or neo-falangist cronies of the PsoE – the suppression of the freedom of Peoples (the same as they did before lead the infamous war and the fierce and bloody repression in Algeria and other Countries against their miserable and semi-illiterate peasant populations, the product of the colonialism); when “to save democracy and stop the fascism” they vote to the protagonist of the French nuclearization of the Pacific, those who still are making illusions in this regard are people who truly have no remedy. It is not in the polling stations of imperialism and fascism where gloves on the hands and tweezers for the noses are needed, when it would be enough simply not to approach them; it is the presence of imperialistic Nationalism and fascism throughout all public life which makes it necessary everywhere the use of masks and anti-gas kits against the nationalist plague.

When one makes the policy of the right, there is no place for wonder if the voters do now and then realize it; and if – once they’ve taken notice about it – they prefer then the safe and without makeup values of the official right and extreme right, rather than the transvestites of the nationalist right “of left”. Anyway, these ones can always expect that at some point the official right will have again the need of the official “left” to pass the atomic tests, the “social” measures or the colonial repression, because the alternation suits to them better than the cohabitation for a happy and satisfactory burden-sharing. The electoral manoeuvring of the real right has given the real outcome for which they’ve been planned. Well played, old fox.

If the democratic forces are real, they manifest themselves with their own strategy in the whole range of the struggle of the popular masses. They are not at the mercy of the electoral (or of other kinds) vicissitudes. If there truly existed a strategic force of the left, these “tactical” pretexts would not make any sense for it. Ignoring this is not a mistake, it’s not even a confession of impotence: it’s a confession of non-existence, of which its authors – with the help of bad faith – perhaps do not realize quite well. From the presidential debacles to the parliamentary defeats, they all are the announced hauls and wanderings of an unavoidable drift.

“Realistic-opportunistic-possibilist-minimalist radical and moderate” bands: which display Basque signs of identity, have got fused and confused once more with the French Nationalists “to save the democratic values and push back the nationalism and fascism”, thus composing the established power, that is: the power that – with the support and guarantee of the former ones – will fall without brake nor measure on the Basque Country that they say to be representing. The French “left” and its departmentalist partners have in common to be fictions whose actions highlight their non-existence. Their only meaning is the recuperation and deviation of the Peoples’ strategy of liberation.

The realistic-possibilist-minimalist-opportunistic-electioneering ensemble Pnv-Eta has long since discovered the absolute trick to “win elections”, whose objective and subjective political conditions did impose and announce: since before they were held, the pitiful results that this ensemble has obtained. The trick to achieving this is simple: it’s enough to present a French program that will not frighten the French Nationalists, who are the real electorate and who will vote for us as soon as they see that we are basically as good French Nationalists as themselves. It’s enough to distort and “departmentalize” [by turning it into a French “department] the right of self-determination, with the crazy hope to make it thus acceptable to the dominant National-chauvinism. It’s enough to bet at the winning French Party, whose candidates thus become “ours”: ‘Nahiz ez düdan esküin bozkatzeko üsantxarik, ezkerreko binagre nahasi hori beno nahiago nüke hor esküineko ardo sano bat’, says Davant. [“Even though I‘m not in the habit of voting to the right, better than that muddled vinegar on the left I would rather take a good wine of right.”]

Thanks to this amazing pass of conjuring, of which “the facts have demonstrated its efficacy”, those who voted for the PsF – thus “obtaining” deputies of the PsF and even “a European parliamentary and a woman, to boot” – had also the leisure of seeing their representative-president interrupt the course of a parliamentary intervention to remind the culprit (who was then speaking), the entire Assembly and the whole Europe that “the Basque People: that does not exist” [Le Pays Basque, ça n’existe pas]. The same procedure has allowed them, “so as to save democracy in the Basque Country”, vote now the Nationalist party of Chirac, Debré, Toubon, Pasqua, Sarkozy and Co.: real and current expression of the denial of Peoples’ rights and of Peoples themselves, unconditionally supported by the French National-socialism in full. They have obtained nothing less than a President of the Republic and, therefore, an absolute presidential majority in Parliament. Where will stop their triumphs, to the extent of their ambitions?

However, “we must not forget that Hitler came to power by democratic means. The municipalities are the base of democracy and of the republican institutions. The nationalists enter the municipalities to pervert the foundations of French democracy, to question the unity of the Republic and the republican pact. If they chose their own list, in respect for democracy, I would agree. Why not, if it is to defend the values of the left? But I do not believe that this is the purpose of the nationalists. But today there is a danger if these people come into the democratic institutions that they deny.”

Now then, according to this, whether the Basques make abstention in the French “elections” or participate in them, which “proves”, in all cases, their “undemocratic” behaviour. Because thereby they are putting in danger, they can pervert and destabilize “the democratic institutions of France that they deny, and the unity of the democratic Republic, founded for centuries on the will of the people”.

“I have always made the choice of loyalty to democratic values, of the permanent contact with the land and of a sincere talk. It also consists in making the choice of certain political ethics. In clarity, always in clarity. The political life must be clear. I reject the double talk. We condemn the alliance of the resulting majority and the nationalists. We do not accept the electoral commitments and the double-talk of someones. When I see the RPR and UDF candidates with the nationalists, I see unnatural alliances therein. When it has gone astray, in making an alliance with the PNV and the abertzales [sic], the right has side-lined the republican principles and played to the sorcerer’s apprentice. Many of you are worried therein.”

It is understandable the concern of Espilondo before the irregular, unfair and dishonourable tactics of those unwanted voters that have the impudence to vote the candidates of the French joint left and right, diverting to their advantage whether perhaps not the letter of laws, at least their Nationalist and republican spirit. They are especially his integrity, “his choice and his sense of ethics, of the sincere, true and clear talk”, which are shocked, offended and injured. It is “his rejection of the double-talk”, and his attachment to the unique and monopolistic, nationalist and fascist speech, that feed his indignation.

People who vote for the RPR, PsF and PcF candidates have always been considered French nationalists. Now some of them, of course, claim to be “Basque nationalists”, but who will believe them? Will it be necessary for them to claim themselves as French nationalists so that they are unmasked and denounced as Basque nationalists infiltrated the in the republican network? Then, whom to trust? Espilondo himself could very well have been infiltrated for a (very) long-range operation. (The historical examples are not lacking; although they are almost always located on the side of the police provocations and the official intelligence, espionage and counterespionage services, whose agents have often arrived at not knowing themselves what side they stood. Normally the oppressed classes have not had the means to do so, and in general, they’ve “become” too ignorant for that.) But, in the absence of reliable evidence and criteria, shall it be necessary then to judge in conscience, to one’s best knowledge and belief? Or perhaps shall it be necessary to persist in the witch-hunt, under the inquisitorial opinion that “it’s better burning alive one hundred innocents rather than leaving escape a single culprit”?

But in this case, there is no reason to be worried, because Espilondo has the solution: “I would like to see if these people come on the 11th of November to the stones of remembrance; if they stand to “attention” when the three colours of the French flag go up to the mast, to the strains of the Marseillaise; if they bow before those who fought for the French Republic.”

Fortunately for the democracy, “these people”: despite their shameful and odious cheatings, their lack of scruples and the illusions that some of them have about using for their own purposes the “democratic elections” that are imposed on them – have failed in their attempt to derail the insight of Espilondo, much too clever for that. He has at his disposal, to unmask the ignoble Basque nationalists and defend the non-nationalist Republic, criteria almost as infallible as those that were available for Delancre to defend the monarchy, by unmasking the witches and possessed of “France and Navarre”.

Crucifix, holy water, pins, nippers, boots, irons, fire and other proven revealers of the Royal Justice have been advantageously replaced, thanks to the republican Espilondo, by the vision of the three colours going up to the mast, and the audition of the Marseillaise. If, subject to such a treatment, the patients have a pale complexion, foaming at the lips, lost eyes, the members with convulsions, among other manifestations of characterized discomfort, there should be no doubt: “these people” who so slyly claim to be Basque nationalists are truly Basque nationalists, and not French Nationalists.

IX

“I do not deny these people the right to think differently; I deny them the right to violence. He who takes a weapon known the risks: let he accept them and that’s all, and let he not send people to cry or to demonstrate”, writes Espilondo. The PcF reinforces it: “The communists do strongly condemn the terrorism, the killings, the extortion committed by Eta. During the summits held in Biarritz and Nice, the Basque nationalists have engaged in unacceptable violence, especially desecrating the monument to the dead of Anglet. The communists will continue with many others to fight against nationalism and terrorism. They will remain acting for peace”, etc.

The French Nationalists, like the Spanish ones, condemn “all violence wherever it can come”. Yet, in condemning “all violence”, the Spanish and French National-imperialists are in fact pointing to the “violence” of the others, which is an obstacle to their own violence. The “rejection of all violence” thus proclaimed is nothing else but the assertion of the monopoly of violence for the French and Spanish Nationalism-imperialism.

Making the narrative of the acts of violence carried out by the Spanish and French Nationalism throughout the world would be an impossible task. And it’s not there about a past simple or simple past but about the constituent of the current political relations. The French Empire, here and elsewhere, has been obtained and retained by means of violence, that is: through criminal violence. It is not possible to condemn the latter without condemning the Empire itself, which is the result of it. It is not possible to preserve the Empire without assuming, recognizing, approving and claiming the relationship of criminal continued violence that is its constituent. In fact, it is not possible to justify and maintain any State, democratic or not, without approving and supporting the permanent relationship of violence: whether it be legitimate or criminal, which constitutes it and which it has been constituted upon. If the dominant ideology has brought the populations at the level of stupidity or confusion required to make them believe that French policy is not violent, and that it is not Nationalism either, this already demonstrates by itself the unprecedented reach of the State monopolies of violence as well as of the various monopolies of ideological conditioning and intoxication of masses.

As regards ‘terrorism’, the days and the centuries “that have built France” are full of it. It’s in the Revolution that the name was coined, whether not the thing. The Terror has been exalted and imposed as a Republican form of Government. The bolshevik dictatorship itself was at the school of Terror of the French Revolution and the Commune, as it was revealed by its authors when they stated their declared concern not to repeat the same mistakes that had been committed by those predecessors by leaving things half done.

For the dominant ideology, the terms of violence and terrorism mean what, depending on the case, the established power decides that they mean. They do not have an unequivocal meaning. They correspond to an amalgam of diverse meanings – formally contradictory but ideologically integrated – that do follow to one another, accumulate or combine according to the requirements of the propaganda, the psychological warfare and the political practice.

In this way, the imperialistic and fascist ideological technique in connection with violence plays upon several aspects: formally contradictory but integrated into an amalgam as confusing as ideologically functional. In the first place, “there comes” the ‘play’ based on “the rejection of all violence”, so as to proclaim the non-violent purity of the régime. This allows the fraudulent and misleading recuperation of positive and negative notations and connotations, in order to influence the emotional and affective reaction of the social groups fearful of violence: historically punished, weakened or infantilized. Next, and if in an ensuing theoretical debate the inconsistency between that proclaimed non-violent purity of the régime, and the reality of political institutions – therefore constituted by violence – is perchance revealed, this leads the theorists of imperialism to an eventual tactical retreat on a second line of defence of their position, formally inconsistent with the first one. “This is not what we meant”, they reply. (But anyway they say it, as long as they see that it works. And they will say it again as soon as another person will give signs of stupidity that could make of him a new ideal victim, or when the public monopoly of repression and conditioning of masses will ensure the lonely expression of the régime’s theorists.)

Forced into this tactical retreat, the ideologists of the imperialism resort then to more narrow and qualified ideas of violence: ‘good violence’ against ‘bad violence’, ‘defensive violence’ against ‘offensive violence’; being the ‘good violence’ always theirs, and ‘the bad’ one being that of others. As already indicated, this is in formal contradiction with the initial “rejection of all violence”, from which they had started, and of their correlative basic statement, namely: that “all violence is inherently bad”, since if there is good violence, then “NOT ALL” violence is bad. Faced with this difficulty, the new “solution” which they are forced to consists in unfolding and splitting the terms and concepts so as to hide the essence: ontologically and materially identical, of all violence.

Down in this way, the terms ‘coercion and force’: coated with a positive connotation thanks to the ideological conditioning, do correspond to and are those used when it comes to naming one’s own violence, which is so good that it is not nor is even called ‘violence’. These terms: ‘coercion or force’, thus remain “differentiated and opposed” to ‘violence’, of a negative import, which is and corresponds always to what others do. With this, one can resume the starting point, namely: “the rejection of all violence”, since – by a decision-making designation – ‘violence’ is and is called solely what the others do against oneself, not what one does against the others. Disappeared even the name that remembers the State’s monopolistic violence, we are informed next that: “the right is force”; “the Government will pursue terrorism with all the force of the rule of law”; “in Corsica, the Government of the Republic will oppose violence by the full force of the rule of law” etc

It is, above all, a question of preventing the true and unique question from being displayed before the people, namely: whether the ‘violence/coercion/force’ (different terms for designating the same material reality), as well as the legality or juridical expression that is underpinned by that material reality of violence, are being applied in the defence of the fundamental human rights and first and foremost of the right of free disposition or self-determination of Peoples: first of fundamental human rights and the precondition of them all under International Law, in which case they are a legitimate ‘violence/coercion/force’ and legality; or, on the contrary, they are applied in the violation of those fundamental rights, in which case they are illegitimate and criminal ‘violence’ etc. and legality. As it is “logical”, all this is hidden by the ideologists of imperialism.

Finally, and through a practical, technical and strictly legal approach, those ideologists and legists determine by a decision-making construction the term and concept of political violence, which from that point on are identical to those of ‘terrorism’.

According to this, it is “terrorism” any real or virtual opposition to the French Government; it is not so what the French Government is or does. A super-extensive interpretation, established using the criteria of analogy, responsibility, result and social situation: formulated and implemented primarily by the totalitarian régimes of the pre-war, makes that the offence of “terrorism”, under the impulse of the current crisis of international order and disorder, has become the only (political) offence by incorporation and assimilation of all the others. “It” is thus avoided, through the empty – though without recourse – evidence of the truism, any problem of qualification or imputation.

In this deliberate formal incoherence of the ideas concerning violence and terrorism there can be seen the classical opposition between “the ideology of reality and the ideology of illusion”; an opposition that is developed through the “division of labour between the ideologists of the reality and the ideologists of the illusion”, and that corresponds, organically, to the “opposition” between the monopolies of violence, on the one hand, and the monopolies of propaganda, ideological conditioning and psychological warfare, on the other.

When the Municipal Council of St. Jean de Luz, under the (RPR) direction of the – French – Nationalist Lord Mayor Larramendi (unofficial elected of the Pnv), “condemned all violence wherever it comes”, asking “accordingly” to the Minister of the Interior the sending of police reinforcements, it was evident that it was not possible to go further in the field of ideological mystification and irrationality. It has been necessary to wait for the coming of contemporary Nationalism to achieve this degree of formal, though functional, stupidity. And the successor (also RPR) of Larramendi in the Mayor’s office assumed without any problem her municipal non-violent function along with the accumulated charge of Minister of the non-violent War, with the atomic weapons of mass destruction as a fundamental non-violent weapon; without thereby causing any eddies in the Consistory.

After a – no doubt – tight study of the means of “defensive” war: from the Great Wall to the Long Walls of Athens, from the Maginot Line to the Star Wars, from the soldiers of the Year II to the War in the Vendée, from the Swiss Popular Army to the strikes of 1915; after having gone beyond too Prussian considerations on the reports between the attack and the defence in tactics and in strategy, and on the national, geographical, economic, technical, moral or humanitarian conditions of the people’s armament; and after having gone beyond Jaurès himself and his Army of the people, the modern French Nationalism has decided in favour of the governmental-professional Army strictly defensive, deterrent, peaceful and non-violent, of which the atomic “force de frappe” is the fundamental means.

Of course, it is not a question about using the atomic weapon, it is only about scaring. The services of ideological illusionism expect that the candid and non-violent souls will want to believe them when they say so, while they also expect that “the enemy” will not believe them, because if he believed them, then the strike/“task” force (force de frappe) would not be worth a pepper while being devilishly expensive. A weapon is not a weapon without the willingness to use it as a weapon, and it has not any deterrent virtuality without the credibility in this willingness. From a deterrent point of view, it’s better a non-existent willingness but well displayed, than a real willingness but disavowed. Once again: the double speech, formally contradictory, is however ideologically profitable, so it seems.

In any case, the supreme weapon of terror is approved by the unanimity of the French Nationalists “of right-wing and of left-wing”, lay or clerical, who as for the rest do not hesitate in condemning all violence wherever it comes. (The terrorist exception is without a doubt inseparable of the cultural exception and all other exceptions of which benefits the French nationalism, itself exceptional in its whole.) The nationalist “left”, so sensitive and opposed to all forms of violence coming from the others, has perhaps had serious problems in accommodating inside that unanimity; but now its adaptation to the supreme weapon is already a done deal and by the latest news it seems that its leaders and supporters are doing well. On the other hand – a reassuring fact – the Ministry of (non-violent) War has long ago disappeared to leave the site for the Ministry of Defence: any temptation of offensive war is now ruled out – as it seems – of the French national emotions. (We know for sure, in any case, that France does not intend to trigger a nuclear attack against the United States or Russia.)

However, the French Government requires relentlessly the renunciation to all violence in Corsica, as it before did so in Algeria, Madagascar or Indochina, while reinforcing unceasingly its own monopoly of violence on the Island conquered and occupied by fire and sword. Meanwhile the Marseillaise, criminally protected, is still urging to soak the soil with the impure blood of the others.

On their part, the Bishops of France have solemnly proclaimed in a pastoral letter not only the right but also the obligation of the French people to use nuclear weapons “if necessary”. (In these things the ecclesiastical morality is very demanding, and its casuistry extremely strict: one should not, just like that, for nothing or for sheer fancy, let go of bombs whose sought capacity and initial objective officially confessed was – for those who do not have an idea very clear of what “strike force and weapons of deterrence” means – to liquidate in a few hours fifty millions of human persons of all sex and condition.)

As a result of such an episcopal position, even Toulat had to interrupt his series of articles in denunciation of violence and exaltation of non-violence, prompted by a sudden, urgent, pressing and opportune need to tackle a new thematic suite about the Immaculate Conception. It has not been the case for the Prelate of the Lower Pyrenees: he condemns without nuances and with the utmost firmness all violence wherever it comes, apart from that of the French (and Spanish) monopolies of violence in the occupied territories of the subjugated Peoples by the French (and Spanish) imprialism. He condemns the attempts, but asserts the necessity and legality of the French repression forces, of French police, of French “Justice”, of French prisons. Msr. Moleres dislikes the small bombs, he only likes the large bombs: nukes if possible, but always used by the French Army in the service of French Nationalism.

With regard to terrorist “attempts”, the nationalist “left” has made it a speciality, largely beating the “right” in this game: from the exploits of New Zealand and New Caledonia to the agreements of Latché and their aftermaths. Their treatment by the intoxication services of the social-chauvinistic Government has not bothered despite all the deep ethical sense of Espilondo, nor his uncompromising choice of a true and clear speaking. And yet, these “very Special Services” (vid. P. Aussaresses; ‘Services Spéciaux. Algérie 1955-1957’) of the nationalist “left” in power, these terrorist serial murders triggered in the Cote Basque are but a tiny part in the system of violence which constitutes the French imperialism; just in the same way as the corruption and the financial attempts are but tiny a part of the system of extortion and corruption underlying the imperialistic economy. It’s known that in France as elsewhere, corruption has always been the “natural” speciality of the “left”: it has the conditions for that.

X

“As Jaurès said, in my opinion, nationalism carries violence in itself as clouds carry the storm.” For various reasons of collective psychology, Jaurès happens to be the most popular of the French politicians – all periods gathered – along with Henri IV and Arlette Laguillier. In assuming, with all the consequences, the Nationalism and culture of the dominant Nation, Espilondo has also understood the benefit that can be obtained from the sacred task of which he has himself become the rabid servant. It is clear that in the Jaurèssic Park of the French Nationalism there can be made the worst encounters.

So, it’s necessary to return on the texts and historical contexts in order to measure the hypocrisy, the lack of scruples and the exacerbated xenophobia of which the French Nationalist “left” (like the Spanish one) is giving evidence, in its hatred and fury against the Basque People. Because, apparently, for this purpose the French Nationalists have had the need even to divert, shamelessly distort and slander Jaurès.

Jaurès did not think that “the workers have no fatherland”, since, in any case, the French workers had one. He said that patriotism is rooted in “human physiology”; which made its eradication particularly delicate for the organic subject, and all the more disturbing for the humanist. “Every individual consciousness, even in the individual forms of the self-preservation, is shrouded by a national consciousness.” “When it vibrates at the signal given by the freedom in danger, every soul knows that it is in unison with the Homeland; it’s the Homeland itself, it’s the common freedom which vibrates in it.” “National sentiment and democratic sentiment are inseparable.” “Freedom and Fatherland are inseparable.” “A little bit of internationalism keeps away from Homeland; a lot of internationalism brings back to it.” “All Homelands are equal; but it is precisely because they are equal, that none has the right to enslave the others.” “There’s truly no humanity but where there is independence, active will, free and joyful adaptation to the whole.” “The independence and the integrity of the Nation”: of his, in any case, were his main concern. Its right of free disposition, too: “Only France can dispose of France”.

On the other hand, since any recognition of the Nations subdued by the imperialism – as well as of their inherent right of free disposition or self-determination – was excluded, it is necessary to bring back to its true dimension the attitude of Jaurès towards the cultures of the European Peoples annexed to the Republic. (Its all-out recuperation remains reserved to the imperialistic propaganda, which – it – has the means for doing it.)

Jaurès was of Occitan origin, as Rivarol, Barrère, Combes, Doumergue and so many other French Nationalists who had joined the fight against “this diversity of rude languages” and of “childish and barbarian” cultures: natural sources of “feudalism and separatism”; these ones, bizarrely enough, always rampant – despite the State Totalitarianism and Terrorism – among the nationalities that “had however joined in the enthusiasm and adherence of the heart”. Jaurès was fluent in his language of Oc, which he called “patois” even though he found this name “coarse”. He used it for his election campaigns and even to make jokes in the Assembly. He had approached the Félibres and declared his support for “the teaching of these languages” (that the Republic had decided to suppress) and even of the Basque, which the revolution had honestly classified as a Foreign Language.

The Republic had already experienced the “tolerance” of 1790-93. Next, the Great Terror (1793-94) had been also realized as a “linguistic Terror”, officialized by the Ventôse Decrees and implemented by the “Angel of Virtue” – Louis A. de Saint-Just – in person. After the failure of that Grand-Terrorist enterprise, the Thermidoriens had been forced to allow “bilingual teaching” since 1794. However, the – for Jaurès – admirable and admired Ferry (he who, “increasingly hostile to the centralization and authority” in the face of the Empire, had said: “France needs a weak Government”) had later installed an increasingly more intolerant and totalitarian administration, capable to inflict new blows to the annexes Peoples whose Languages and cultures had resisted, better or worse, the Monarchies, the Republics and the Empires. And yet Jaurès said: “There is another reason why the State should respect the freedom of the communes [municipalities]: it is that, in the domain of philosophical and moral education, the State cannot adapt its teaching to the diversity of all spirits and of all walks of life”. No doubt he was not welcome to push further away so subversive a reasoning. As Gurdji (Giroud) has said: “At present, we know that everywhere, at the same time, in all schools in France, the schoolchildren are learning the same thing: it’s a great progress”.

The republican Jaurès was undoubtedly more sincere than his “disciple” Espilondo and others who now claim to be “supporters of the Basque teaching” under the monopoly of the (French) “National Education”. Yet, insofar as the political and linguistic context is not the same, the challenge posed by the current maintenance of the Language (along with the supposed means of achieving it) is no longer perceived in the same way; and it is that this purported and impossible “bilingualism” offered to us now: based on the national/State subjugation of our People, does not prevent but implies the humiliation and entails the liquidation of the “taught” Language. The “teaching” of these Languages, and other similar measures, are aimed to deceive and recuperate the subjugated Peoples. “Our mission is to help the minority languages to die sweetly.” (Morvan.)

Languages are always national, or they are not. The “secondary, minority, local or regional” languages, that does not exist and cannot exist, no more than the cultures and Peoples of which those ones are inseparable. Imperialism does know it, sometimes it even does say it; but its victims don’t always realize of it. We continue, however, with the analysis of the authentic statements of Jaurès.

XI

Although his characteristic method – in which are combined in a very eclectic and personal form – idealism and materialism, illusionism and realism, imperialistic Nationalism and inter-nationalism, reform and revolution, violence and pacifism – often makes subjective and provisional the estimations, difficult the syntheses, and uncertain the conclusions, nevertheless Jaurès did not ignore the connections of mutual involvement between war, imperialistic Nationalism, imperialism and capitalism. Given that their opposites: peace, internationalism, national freedom and socialism, appeared to be at all point as problematic, he did nevertheless count so as to safeguard them on a varied and classical panoply: respect for freedoms, concern for justice and peace, international agreements, a system of guarantees, international arbitration, abandonment of secret treaties, respect for the ‘status quo’ against the new annexations, balance of Powers, national defence and people’s army, simultaneous disarmament, League for Peace and – finally – the international general strike of masses and popular insurrection. “Only the working class, internationally organized, will be able to counterbalance the formidable forces of conflict and hatred that are being exasperated.” “It is the socialist peace which will be made.”

Jaurès did never claim to be himself “contrary to all violence wherever it comes”. He counted on it. It was necessary to make use of it in case of need; this is in which everyone, or nearly, was well in agreement:

“The International recommends that the proletarians should avoid war, but it prescribes them to safeguard the independence of Nations.” “Our project is to increase the defensive strength of France.” “I am told: ‘still more cannons are needed’, as if at this moment I declared useless the preparation of war material.” “May we have, as well we hope, Peace, or on the contrary – because the criminal madness of the aggressor – the holy war for our beloved France: Freedom and Fatherland are inseparable.” “There is no contradiction between making the maximum effort to ensure the peace and, if war breaks out despite ourselves, making the maximum effort to ensure, in the horrible storm, the independence and integrity of the nation.” “Let peoples say soon of our France that never, under a stronger armour, was shaped a softer heart.” “Since we are going to attend and participate in a huge military tension, it is a vital necessity to discipline the military force according to the spirit of a free nation, or we will go directly to the most absorbent dictatorship.” “The admirable national movement raised by our heroine Joan of Arc”, and the revolutionary Army, did always inspire the pacifist Jaurès.

Of course, Jaurès disapproved of the anarchist attempts or intended as such; all the more since they had allowed the deputies to vote the “evil laws” which limited again the republican liberties and exposed the opposition – therefore his own Party – up to increased and more and more arbitrary repression. Jaurès asked that the major financiers and corrupt politicians to their service: responsible for so many crimes, were prosecuted for incitement to acts of anarchist propaganda. Further away went Lenin, who – while showing the need for both legal and illegal fight – showed also the limits and illusory nature of the “individual terrorism”. Everywhere, as in the Basque Country, the attempts: product of the weakness and immaturity of the popular forces, have been caused, manipulated or used by the Nationalistic, imperialistic and totalitarian reaction as a pretext and excuse for the repression and terror against all democratic freedoms and against all forms of resistance to oppression.

(In this ideological domain the oppositions are often misleading, and the biological, physiological and racial conceptions of Jaurès do correspond without difficulty to the disembodied spiritualism and angelism of Espilondo and his Nationalist clique of Anglet: “I do not deny these people the right to think differently; I denied them the right to violence. He who takes a weapon knows the risks: let he accept them and that’s all, and let he not send people to cry or to demonstrate.”)

In 1885 Jaurès had voted for the war credits for Tonkin. In 1887, at the time of the Schnæbelé affair, he was in favour of the military credits for Algeria “in the patriotic silence of the parliamentarians”. In 1903, he asked the budget for the “peaceful penetration” in Morocco. In 1904, Guesde reproached him for “having voted the war and Navy budgets”; which Jaurès had personally avoided doing. But “those of yours have voted them – argued Guesde that year, addressing at Jaurès and the PsF. Your error is in your conception of socialism that has nothing of socialist; you do arise your socialism from the Republic, while we do arise it from the capitalist evolution. Your method is nationalism under a more dangerous form than any other!” In 1908 Jaurès rejected additional military appropriations.

The popular and defensive Army, the “New Army” of Jaurès, was to be the instrument of the people’s defence: both with a view to the “national defence” (the reading of Clausewitz had borne fruit) as with regard to its own Government and, therefore, as a guarantor of world peace. Which raised so many questions that it made that the whole of the political problems – on the nature of power, democracy and socialism, international relations and institutions, imperialism, revolution, defensive or offensive war – would be raised at the same time. (It is not easy to discern to what extent the popular army resolves the conflicts or assumes them already resolved.)

Even though – either before or after having seen Ferry at work – nothing could be ignored about the profound unity between army, education and imperialism, yet one may raise questions about the adequacy of military education as an instrument to “raise the level of the race”, as Jaurès granted it as a mission. The patriotism “has its very roots” “in human physiology”, certainly; anyway it is permissible to harbour doubts about the obtained effects, as a result of military education, on the republican genotype and phenotype. Of course, the manual of military training was quite explicit, when it prescribed to imbue in the minds of the recruits “the sense of superiority of the race”. Perhaps the scientific studies – which did not take long in establishing that German urine had an acidity rate far superior to that of French urine – helped to grasp it (the superiority, not the urine).

(Comparative studies on the specificities of the urinary acidity rates of Senegalese, Basques and other recruits of the Republican Army are sadly lacking because reliable samples had not even picked up at the source; if we are allowed to designate so the distributor organ.)

Since “French is an ethnic name”, according to the Petit Larousse, one could simply say “republican urine” instead of “French urine”, which prevents any formal ethnicism and the use of mixtures, averages or statistical procedures that could be as easily manipulable as was the object of study. Or even it could be constitutionally established that the French urine is the urine of the Republic; which has linguistic precedents and is not devoid of appeal. The Central Empires had no need to come up to this, since the ethnic urine was supposed to correspond in bulk, if not in detail, with the Imperial urine.

At a more general level, unambiguous relationships between urinary acidity, national aggressiveness and imperialistic Nationalism could not yet be established. The implication of urology in the sociology presents epistemological difficulties that turn unsafe the hypothesis, and unreliable the conclusions.

Even the most naïve scholars have been forced to note that “Science herself has lost her passionless impartiality. Its deeply embittered servants seek for weapons from it to do their share in the battle against the enemy. Anthropologists feel driven to declare that enemy inferior and degenerate, psychiatrists issue a diagnosis of him as mentally deranged of mind or spirit.” (S. Freud.)

“[T]he philosophy and the theory of law have in the data of the epoch of reference one of their best fields of contrast. The Nazism is a real ‘experimentum crucis’ for those disciplines. And even the moral tranquillity of their scholars may be shaken by that reflection, if we stop to consider the performance of the philosophers of law under that regime. The words of [Ilmar] Tammelo express the problem in all its harshness: ‘An especially acute objection against the jus-philosophical doctrines lies in the affirmation that the legal philosophy played the role of a harlot, insofar as it served to hide oppression, degradation and even mass murder. Among the philosophers of law – he continues – there have been contortionists that have bent their ideas to the political order of the moment [...], in order to provide it with a philosophical imprint’.” (Quoted by Arthur Kaufmann in ‘Rechtsphilosophie und Nationalsozialismus’, 1984'.)

“These discussions have already afforded us the consolation that our mortification and painful disappointment, on account of the uncivilized behaviour of our fellow world citizens in this war, were not justified. They rested upon an illusion to which we had succumbed. In reality, our fellow citizens of the world have not sunk as deeply as we feared, for the simple reason that they never really rose as high as we had believed. The fact that states and races abolished their mutual ethical restrictions not unnaturally incited them to withdraw for a time from the existing pressure of civilization and to sanction a passing gratification of their suppressed impulses. [...]; the primitive psyche is in the strictest sense indestructible. [...].

“But there is perhaps another symptom of our fellow citizens of the world which has caused us no less surprise and fear than this descent from former ethical heights which has been so painful to us. I mean the lack of insight that our greatest intellectual leaders have shown, their obduracy, their inaccessibility to the most impressive arguments, their uncritical credulity concerning the most contestable assertions. [...]. Students of human nature and philosophers have long ago taught us that we do wrong to value our intelligence as an independent force, and to overlook its dependence upon our emotional life. According to their view, our intellect can work reliably only when it is removed from the influence of powerful incitements; otherwise, it acts simply as an instrument at the beck and call of our will, and delivers the results which the will demands. Logical argumentation is therefore powerless against affective interests; that is why arguing with reasons which, according to Falstaff, are as common as blackberries, are so fruitless where our interests are concerned, and this is why the struggle by dint of reasons is so sterile in the world of interests. [...]; but it would seem that the nations still obey their passions of the moment far more readily than their interests. Their interests serve them, at most, as rationalizations for their passions; they put forward their interests in order to be able to give reasons for satisfying their passions.

“It is, to be sure, a mystery why the collective units should in fact despise, hate and abhor one another – every nation against every other – and even in times of peace. I cannot tell why that is so. It is just as though when it becomes a question of a number of people, not to say millions, all individual moral acquisitions were obliterated, and only the most primitive, the oldest, the crudest mental attitudes were left.” Etc. (Sigmund Freud; ‘Reflections on War and Death’, 1915.)

In fact, science and reason have always been in humans at the service of instincts and emotions, and there is no reason to believe that this will change in the future. “It is a widely held opinion, shared by some contemporary philosophers, that all human behaviour patterns which serve the welfare of the community, as opposed to that of the individual, are dictated by specifically human rational thought. Not only is this opinion erroneous, but the very opposite is true.” (K. Lorenz, ‘On aggression’, 1966.)

XII

Indeed, the attitude of Jaurès as regards Nationalism, peace, violence and imperialism, had nothing extraordinary compared to the dominant trends in the Second International. In reality, those who were opposed to imperialism and the imperialistic war were in general a very small minority. The right of free disposition or self-determination of all Peoples: being by definition the cornerstone of any alternative to imperialism, it was denied, manipulated, adapted or falsified in a way to make it harmless to oneself and dangerous for the others. The majority of States condemned Nationalism, imperialism, militarism and the wars of the others, while favouring at the same time Nationalism, imperialism, militarism and the wars that they were conducting themselves and their current or virtual allies. But it’s that, being the case of one’s own nation, no one could even imagine that it was, to tell the truth, imperialism but “the work of freedom, civilization and humanitarian commitment; and national defence against aggressions and annexations”. And furthermore, the statement “if we don’t do it, the others will do” was the excuse of everyone against everyone. There was no need to call oneself “socialist” for this, unless it was to better try to deceive the Peoples.

According to Manuel Irujo, “What is called the Portuguese colonial Empire, therefore, rather than being an obstacle means a great possibility for the future if, behind these territories, can be placed the policy of a defined and resolute Iberian community. It should not be forgotten, furthermore, that the Lusitanian colonial territories, together with Portugal, amount up to four-fifths of the total population of the Spanish State with its colonies and protectorates, and multiply several times the territorial extension of its soil and the potential of its economy”. “What we could not return to is to the abandonment of the jungle to a savage life; and what the sense of responsibility – apart from other reasons of an evident reality – will prevent us in any event from doing is to lower from the colonies the flags of Portugal and Spain so that are hoisted there those of the Nations foreign to the Iberian dominion.”

This apologetic adherence to the Portuguese-Spanish Nationalism-imperialism was written in 1945 by an exiled Pnv top leader, former Minister of the Spanish Republic, and published in Buenos Aires by an editor of the same tendency; which shows to what an extent the Nationalisms, the Empires and the Ministries are contagious, even among those who are supposed to be their victims. “All freedoms are solidary”, was a maxim that the same author repeated often. This way is marching, as a general rule, the “solidarity” between the oppressed Peoples of the world. This is how the same “Basque nationalist” Party does today recognize as “legitimate, democratic and non-violent” the régimes of occupation in the Basque Country. There are slopes in which one cannot stop.

The humanist-republican-opportunistic-socialist Jaurès did admire Ferry: “this remarkable man – he said – 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.) Thus, stopped in Europe after having put it all in fire and blood “to liberate it”, by subduing it, the French imperialistic Nationalism was forced to launch itself on the savages and barbarians of overseas. “We were preparing ourselves to give the others the place which we had the right to.”

From 1879 to 1885, Jules Ferry relaunched “the expansion of the French civilization”. “This remarkable man” did willingly expose “the reasons that should push a great nation towards imperialism”:

“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 capitals [...], 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. [...]

“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. Can you deny, is there someone who can deny that there is more justice, more material and moral order, more equity, more social virtues in North Africa since France has made its conquest? [...].

“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 upon domination.” (Jules Ferry’s address to the Chamber of Deputies in July-1885.)

“This remarkable man” had therefore declared to the Chamber 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.)

Exclusion, extermination, replacement of populations by colonies of settlement, plunder and exploitation, deculturation and forced cultural and linguistic Frenchification; this is how the French imperialistic Nationalism has always understood the work of civilization. It was necessary to “civilize the Arabs by means that were outside the civilization”. As colonel Montagnac wrote in 1843, making a self-satisfied account and apology for his own crimes: “making war on the Arabs”: that means, “In one word, to annihilate everything that will not crawl at our feet like dogs”. According to the official statement for Algeria in 1858: “We are in the presence of an armed and vivacious nationality that is necessary to turn off by the assimilation”, “the dislocation of the Arab (sic) people and the fusion”. According to D. Guérin, “At first [...] the military have dreamed of ‘ejecting well away, exterminating the indigenous population’. Subsequently, the enterprise has proved to be impossible. But, unable to physically eliminate the indigenous, it has been sought to break it spiritually and morally”. “It has been tried to kill the soul of this country. It has been conquered to make it a colony of settlement, so as to annex it to the metropolis.”

In those days, if war, repression, famine and epidemics decimated the population, this simply confirmed that “the backward peoples were disappearing before the higher peoples”. According to Y. Person “It’s significant that it was the same notable of the III Republic, Jules Ferry (who gave to the secular education that he had organized the orientation of a systematic cultural genocide), the one who has embodied the commitment of France in the late 19^th-century colonial imperialism. At the time when the British imperialism, eager primarily of economic exploitation, was returning to a certain respect for the personality of the Other, France was resolutely dedicated to destroying all the cultures that there could be found on a so broad sector as possible of the planet”.

Everywhere, throughout the world, the French Nationalism carried the violence as the clouds carry the storm. The conquest of Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Indochina, Madagascar, Senegal, Niger etc. (by the armies under the command of Duperré, Bourmont, Savary, Trezel, Bernard, Clauzel, Berthézène, Boyer, Saint-Arnaud, Montagnac, Baraguey, Valée, Bugeaud, Damrémont, Aumale, Joinville, Bedeau, Soult, Pélissier, Randon, Febvrier, Rigault, Page, Dariès, Charner, Lapierre, Protet, Faidherbe, Trochu, Chanzy, Négrier, Bonard, Grandière, Mac-Mahon, Massu, Aussaresses, Bazaine, Garnier, Rivière, Courbet, Forgemol, Hetzinger, Duchesne, Gallieni, Drude, Amade, Moinier, Lyautey, Mangin, Gouroud, Azan, Noguès, Voulet, Schmartz, Holl, Pétain, Argenlieu and Hautecloque) has been the policy of war, mass terrorism and massacres of men, women and children in atrocious conditions; of scorched-earth with fire, destruction and looting of villages, crops and cultivations. They were not those ones errors, or “rare and unfortunate accidents”; they were the own logic of the French Nationalist-imperialistic system: “Thanks to them, France has an empire.” “The war has its needs.” “He who want the end wants the means, whatever they say our philanthropists.”

And yet, in 1884 and in Albi (a landmark in the horrific record of the “expansion of French civilization” since the 13th century), Jaurès said: “France has managed to earn the love of all colonial peoples”. “We can say to these populations, without deceiving them, that we have never done any evil to their brethren voluntarily; that we’ve been the first ones in extending to the coloured people the freedom of the white people and in abolished slavery; that there where France is still established, it is loved; that there where it does but only pass, it is missed; that everywhere its light shines: it is a benefactor.” Apparently, the humanist, sociologist and historian Jaurès either believed all he wanted to believe and ignored everything he wanted to ignore, or did not recede to any lie.

Again, once more, colonialist romanticism forms a very significant part of Nationalist romanticism in general. However it is not possible to give an account of the imperialism through images of Épinal for children and adults, and through stories in rosewater with protective, generous, human and devoted soldiers, teachers, doctors, White Fathers and Blue Sisters. Imperialism is crimes of war, crimes against peace and crimes against humanity: there’s not the slightest romance material in it. (Finally, the criminal imperialistic enterprise ends with statements like these: “They call me a murderer, yes; but I just fulfilled my duty to France. It’s not possible to defeat the enemy without resorting to torture and summary executions. Torture becomes legitimate when urgency is imposed.” [General Paul Aussaresses, ‘Services spéciaux, Algérie 1955-1957’.])

(As it has been observed, for ordinary French Racism and Nationalism there could not be recognized, among the colonized, neither People, nor Nation, nor State; at the most “populations”, “villages” or “tribes”, as Jaurès said. In the imperialistic ideology the concept of “tribe” reaches an unexpected extension: from the colonial conflicts in Africa up to the disintegration of Yugoslavia).

For the French propaganda, these wars were not even wars but measures of police to restore order and peace. It is true that, as Lenin said it, “too often they are less similar to wars than to a savage massacre up to the extermination of unarmed people”. “Here is the kind of war that was waged against them: they were disarmed, and were exterminated with the machine gun. Are those wars? Of course not, these aren’t even wars, if we are to talk properly.”

The soldier was accompanied by the bureaucrat, the teacher, the capitalist, the concessionaire, the big and small colonists: republican, clerical and anticlerical, fortyeightist workers, communards [from the Paris Commune] and Alsatians who in 1871 were fleeing from their annexation by Prussia and meeting in Africa, Spaniards, Italians, Maltese and Jews fleeing from poverty or persecution, all of them turned into French, united all of them for the exclusion, the spoliation, the exploitation or the elimination of the “lower races”: “It is difficult to make understand the European colonist that there are more rights than those of his own in an Arab (sic) country, and that the native is not a race mouldable and exploitable at will”, said Ferry himself; who – as it seemed – was not involved there for anything.

All of them were accompanied and often preceded by the missionary and the clergyman, “sent in pioneers by merchants and bankers”, protected and subsidized by the Governments for “a religious mission that would pave the way for our political influence”. (An illustrious Basque writer, Basagaitz – Lhande -, came out with his panegyric on ‘Our missionary epic: Madagascar, 1832-1932’, which preceded in seven years the quite more problematic apologia of A. Perbal: ‘The French missionaries and the nationalism’.)

As everywhere (and we’re here, in the Basque Country, in the front rows for to know it well), the Church has been an essential part of the conquest and oppression apparatus. “It is a true Crusade what we are doing here”, said “the sinister” Charles Mangin. The Douarre “affair”; that of the missionary-informer Foucault and his “reports” to the II Intelligence Body (2nd Bureau); or the clashes of Lavigerie with the “Arab offices” and with MacMahon, do not obviously change anything: military, civilians and clerics, despite their discrepancies, were part of the same structure of Nationalist-imperialistic domination. And, in spite of the contentions that in 1906 resulted in the separation between them, they did never interrupt their collaboration.

Just the same as in the mesopotamique monument in his hometown, “in many localities the statue of Cardinal Lavigerie gesticulates on his pedestal”, wrote Guérin in 1953. Here as elsewhere, “the ‘spiritual conquest’ was not at all an enterprise different, parallel of the military conquest and the material colonization”; “it was on the contrary so closely linked to the general process of colonization that it was ultimately but an aspect or a means”. The “modern” imperialism has been, and continues to be, “the meeting place of capitalism, militarism and clericalism”.

In vain there would be sought signs of bad conscience. Neither the conqueror States nor the Church, have ever confessed, lamented or tried to repair their crimes. As it has happened with the Kingdom of Nabarre and elsewhere, they would want and do expect that all this is forgotten; that the time, the terror and the massacres have stripped out the historical memory from the collective consciousness; and that they will be able to continue, as in the past, trampling on the freedom of Peoples.

XIII

From 1903, however, Jaurès begins to become disillusioned. Things were not happening as he had hoped to, and the price was even more and more expensive. “France succumbs under a colonial empire disproportionate to its strength of expansion.” “There is at this time a whole military and colonial Party which dreams of putting its hands on Morocco by a large expedition. [According to its aim] France must send one on the Moroccan territory and establish there by means of force its protectorate. A senseless and truly criminal policy.” What was being prepared was not, in fact, a secret to anyone: “Let’s establish together a vast dominion of one piece that, from the Gulf of Gabes to the Atlantic, from the Mediterranean to the Great Desert, will include Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco in a vast Empire of North Africa!” exclaimed Etienne, Member of Parliament for Oran, a prominent member of the lobby, the political class and the French Government.

Yet, Jaurès was clinging to his (hopeless) hopes. We have seen that he had voted the military credits for Tonkin in 1885, and that had very strongly congratulated in 1887 (at the time of the Schnæbelé affair) for the military appropriations obtained “in the patriotic silence of the parliamentarians”. He now calls for “the budget for the peaceful penetration” in Morocco. “Yes, it is to be desired, both in the interest of the indigenous people of Morocco and in the interest of France, that the economic and moral action of our country will endure and be established there.” “If you’re doomed to a military expedition in Morocco, it is by hundreds of millions that would certainly be the total expenditure. If for the peaceful penetration of France in Morocco; if to give the French Republic the means of tying useful relations with the tribes; if to allow that France, when the tribes suffer from hunger, put grain at their disposal; if to allow France, with the consent of the tribes, to multiply the schools and infirmaries are necessary sacrifices of money, these ones will be infinitely less expensive than those that would cause the war.” “While we’ve always fought against the policy of warlike colonial expansion, the policy of armed expeditions and violent protectorates, we’ve always supported and are always ready to support the peaceful and reasonable expansion of the French interests and the French civilization.”

“The peaceful and reasonable expansion”. If we are to believe to his biographer Auclair, “These last words: dear for the university graduate, did conceal to the socialist leader the law of the jungle”. “At the beginning of the Moroccan adventure he will not be hostile to the enterprise; he will be content, naïvely, with wishing it to be peaceful.” “He could still expect that good words, a system of international guarantees [...] in three points [...], and a constant exchange of formal documents, would be capable of transforming the colonists in apostles, and the bankers in philanthropists.” And – it’s Reberioux who has written it – “He, like so many others, thinks up to the end of his life that the colonial expansion could have been peaceful, and that the most powerful sectors of the great international capital can work to the maintenance of peace”.

As it seems, “science and socialism” have always given cover to the French imperialistic Nationalism. Because it is undeniable that – as a historical category, and not a metaphysical delirium – colonialism is constituted by war, looting, exploitation, enslavement and destruction of the Peoples. Peaceful and humane colonialism is a contradiction in the terms. The “good colonialism” instead of the “bad”, the “peaceful and reasonable colonialism”, economic and moral, in the harmonic or harmonized interest of the colonizer and the colonized, in which French civilization and pure and simple civilization are identified, this has never existed. Even in idea, it shows the arrogance, the racism and the claimed superiority of the “great” colonizing Nations. It is also and above all the coverage, the “humanitarian” alibi, the auxiliary ideological hypothesis of the real imperialistic Nationalism. Be it Christian, Free-Mason, Fascist, Socialist-communist, of “left” or of right, the nationalist-imperialistic plague is still the plague.

As a connoisseur of the history of France and historian of the French Revolution, as a fervent admirer of Ferry, Jaurès knew quite well by what means had been obtained “the peaceful and reasonable expansion of the French interests and the French civilization”, and how there had been founded and kept the French Empire in the five Continents. (Although this is a domain where the competition has always been rough, Lenin himself wrote that the French occupation was the hardest and cruellest of all occupations.) All this, as Jaurès claims, to peacefully allow “the distribution of grain, the proliferation of schools and infirmaries, and the sacrifices of money with the consent of the tribes”. And yet, it was necessary to force them: an unheard-of fact which testifies to their perversity!

Indeed the colonized – as it is well known – is savage, barbarian, childish, devoid of reason, dull, stubborn, delayed, dirty, lazy, thief, drunkard, cowardly, sneaky, fake, concealed liar, hypocritical, elusive, dangerous, plunderer, treacherous, intolerant, fanatic, cruel and bloodthirsty. Point by point, he’s seen just the opposite of the French, whose qualities are explicated by the simple reversal of the terms. As it can be seen, it was necessary for the ideology at the service of colonialism to completely defame the colonized, making them stupid and evil enough so as to reject such benefits to the point of being resentful towards their benefactors. Dumas had done his part, thus reinforcing for popular consumption this distorted view: “Never had Morrel seen such an expression; never had such a terrible eye blazed in front of his face, never had the genius of terror, which he had so many times seen appear, either on the battlefields or in the homicidal nights of Algeria, had shaken around him more sinister fires. He stepped back in terror. (A. Dumas; ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’, 1844.)

So there have been needed armies and wars to bring “peace” to the territories occupied by the armies and the wars. There has been necessary to distribute grain to compensate for the arsons of silos and crops, the plundering and colonization of the lands. There have been necessary infirmaries to heal the survivors of the massacres and bombings. There have been needed schools to achieve the schooling in French of the 10% of Muslim children.

Now then, since these races and cultures were not worth anything, to liquidate them the most rapidly was the only thing to do. Jeanson has described thus the colonial theses:

“The Arabs are big children, with lots of defects; it is necessary to make their happiness despite them, and it’s also what we have been doing since always. But France does not understand the realities of here. It does not see that its demagogic concessions make weigh upon us the terrible threat of an uprising.” “The only possible policy is a policy of firmness, of regaining the control. It is necessary first to restore order.” “In the end, there is no Arab problem in Algeria, at least not in the sense that some demagogues have claimed: the Arab is obviously a lower being, but who knows very well recognize his inferiority as long as there are not committed errors and we learn to be sufficiently firm with him. Because, of course, he is quick to seize the opportunities, and some leniencies are for him weaknesses through which it is quickly lost all prestige in his eyes. Deep down he is a child, and it’s necessary you’re convinced of that once and for all: both in his interest and in yours. Just don’t deceive you: he is a child who will not grow (and who, moreover, does not ask to grow). Like most children, you should therefore expect that he is readily sneaky, hidden and sometimes elusive: there is not in it, as for the rest, anything that should surprise you, it’s exactly the same oriental character. As for women – this must be well admitted – all Moors are thieves. And in this regard, in any case, you can be sure that you will earn nothing in trusting them...” (Thus, those – men and women – who reject the “donations of money”, do tend on the contrary to “steal” it from the pockets of the French “honest colonists”. Jaurès could have drawn from it meanings and conclusions.)

It was also urgent to spread a “basic– French” for the overseas colonies, which might be sufficient for “these peoples who are children”, as the humanist Jaurès said in 1884 at his famous conference in Albi. After all, for the French colonialists, the Arabic or the Swahili were nothing else but the “patois” of the African colonies; just as it was also so the “childish Euskera”, which the Spanish charlatan Unamuno referred to.

But “what to do with people who prefer freedom to bread?” exclaimed – still 50 years later – disappointed, bitter and bewildered colonial teachers before “the inexplicable resistance” of these people to the benefits of the French colonization. It is the involuntary homage that colonialism pays to the colonized. Because, everywhere throughout the world, despite the overwhelming superiority – in weapons and equipment – of the Nationalism-imperialism-colonialism, despite the ferocity of the repression, despite the revolts drowned in blood, the “barbarian Peoples and the inferior races” have never accepted submission, have never ceased to fight for their freedom. They have done honour to mankind; they have shown that, if one can perhaps dominate, enslave or exterminate a People by means of violence, one cannot expect for voluntary accession nor consent to it, one cannot remove the sense of their dignity, of their identity, or their fierce commitment to their freedom. These “inferior Peoples” have often snatched to the imperialism their right of free disposition, that’s to say: of independence. An always long and painful struggle; because if Swedish or English can – through wisdom or calculation – “abandon” territories they have obtained and kept by the violence, but that exceed their capacity of management, ingestion and digestion, in contrast, French and Spaniards cannot do it before reaching the limits of violence of which they are capable.

In 1908 Jaurès was beginning to understand. “He refused to vote the additional appropriation requested for military operations”. He, who had believed in a “civilizing mission”, made at the platform “the examination of his own conscience and that of the country, followed by his mea culpa”, has written Auclair. Jaurès said in the Chamber: “As our intervention in Morocco is broader, harder and more brutal, I wonder, with increasing and sincere anguish, with what right we bring war, iron and fire to the heart of Morocco. I do well know that painful and deplorable incidents have occurred that have started this intervention, but I wonder if we do not have a share of responsibility in the state of mind that has made possible these incidents.”

While he “wonders”, the war continues. And when he ends wondering, it also does so. “Our diplomacy has aroused in the mind of the Moroccans this suspicion that we wanted to undermine their independence.” They were really apprehensive, mistrustful, suspicious and sensitive, those Moroccans! As it seemed to Jaurès, quite to the contrary, there should be no cause for concern for Morocco or Tunisia. The “protectorate” of a nation as France: of which all the records spoke for themselves, did offer all the necessary guarantees in this matter to those both sides of Algeria which had already been conquered, annexed and “pacified”. And however – we’ve seen it – five years before Jaurès had already denounced the “military and colonial party”, and the “senseless and truly criminal policy”, which aimed at “sending an army on the Moroccan territory and establish there by means of force the protectorate” of France. However, now he was wondering what the most suspicious, or the most morons of the Moroccans, should be concerned about! (Jaurès was well concerned, nevertheless, about the “American threat” on the French – and even on the Spanish – Empire, and about the “aggressive imperialism that were showing English and Germans”.)

And he went on saying: “The concessionaires of the port of Casablanca have had no consideration for the most righteous sensibilities of the Moroccans.” Of course, the bombing of Casablanca did certainly not reassure these populations to which the French diplomacy had made suspicious and the concessionaires had offended. And it was followed by the carnage of Chaouia: “Everything has been massacred, included women and children. It was a necessary lesson”, wrote a contemporary. At that moment Jaurès “doubts of the accuracy” of the new crimes whose notice arrives to him. When the doubt was no longer possible, he was indignant. But the apprehensive, the suspicious and the sensitive Moroccans – they – were already dead.

Little by little Jaurès becomes more lucid: “All the adventurers who have abused the weakness and folly of the sultan Abd el Aziz to push him to the craziest expenditure and the more expensive borrowings; all the bankers of prey who have exploited by means of usurious loans a country delivered to pirates by a puppet; the eager capitalists who made to be given concessions on concessions and who pushed their businesses without any consideration for the rights, customs and feelings of an entire people; the association Krupp-Schneider (the “friendly” hit of the German howitzer and the French shell) smashing a Muslim cemetery to operate a quarry; then – under the pretext of punishing the first violence and the reprisals of an exasperated Moroccan people – the heinous bombing of Casablanca, the delivery of Chaouia to blood and fire, more than fifteen hundred of dead women and children piled up, on a day of shame and mourning, under the debris of a harmless douar: here is under what figure Europe has appeared to the Moroccans since then”. “If we were there in the presence of fighters, how is it that it was not seen the necessity to save women and children? And if there were women and children, then it is that this was not a war camp!” It’s thus, the way in which are left in the populations “abhorrent memories: memories of blood, memories of violence”. France does not know “what seeds of anger, of pain and of hatred has sown out there, and what sad harvest will pick up one day”.

In 1911 – once the military occupation had been already launched in Morocco – the French Government and the propaganda services of the expeditionary force were still trying to deceive the Moroccan People and even the great Powers: “It is not about an occupation but about a provisional and urgent help.” But Jaurès is not fooled: “the Generals and the financiers are jubilant. Columns of French soldiers more or less disguised as Moroccans are going to march on Fez. If Spain makes a claim, it will be given its part. If Germany requests compensations they will be granted. If the Moroccans do rebel, they will be shot and will be called to the rescue the black troops, which will be covered of praise and enlightened of glory, and which will thus be prepared to intervene in the French affairs the day when it will be necessary to quell the suffering people. Here is the plan in which colonialism and reaction, piracy and repression are combined”.

“Is it perhaps from Fez, from where we will give Europe and the world, in the new crisis that may threaten peace, lessons of wisdom, unselfishness and respect of the international right hypocritically and cynically violated by us?” “I say that among all these peoples long oppressed or asleep, or separated from Europe by oceans of indifference; I say that everywhere there are new moral forces which are awakening, an appetite for freedom, an appetite for independence, the sense of the right, which to assert itself does sometimes borrow from us our own formulas.” “He came from far away,” says Ribérioux.

XIV

There can be found under the pen and in the speeches of Jaurès the increasingly acute perception of the nationalistic capitalism that is developing and of the approaching catastrophe. But his growing lucidity could not include the myths and dogmas of the French imperialistic Nationalism, which did fanatically establish a priori the “natural, democratic, peaceful and non-violent” foundation, and the “humanist and civilizer” character, of the French Empire. (The position of the Spanish National-socialism towards its own Empire has not been left behind in this same task of forgery.)

Jaurès did naturally understand that Empire, indisputably, as the French Nation and civilization, agents of universal progress and happiness. For someone immersed like him into the social-chauvinistic delirium, the imperialistic Nationalism of his (adopted) Country against the annexed and annexed-to-be Peoples and States is as impalpable as water is to the fish: its constitutive crimes are invisible for him, and its dysfunctions are, at the most, adverse natural phenomena that occur fatally. (This domain of meteorology was called to be very useful, as we shall see). It’s precisely this totalitarian and fanatical Nationalism: not recognized by himself, which finally ended up destroying him. Let’s see some of those moments in which he expresses his perception of the approaching catastrophe.

In 1895 Jaurès writes: “The industry itself is a struggle; the war becomes the first, the more excited, the more feverish of industries”. “Always your violent and chaotic society: even when it wants peace, even when it is in a state of apparent repose, carries with it war as the dormant cloud carries storm.”

The island of Cuba: “Spanish land” according to Jaurès, is the first matter of concern in 1898. The “pacification under the framework of the Constitution and the Statute of autonomy” of the Restoration, had led to the failure and the dismissal of General Martínez Campos. It was the turn of the bloodthirsty General Weyler, who would establish his well-deserved prestige by his crimes in Cuba and afterward in Catalonia. He was in charge of restoring “the national unity” on the island, and he fulfilled his mission in the only way that the French and the Spaniards do know in order to fight the freedom and resistance of the Peoples.

In the view of the European Nationalists and imperial-colonialists: including those who called themselves “socialists”, the atrocities of the Spanish armed forces, their policy of terror, the massacres and scorched earth, the concentration camps – whose horrors shocked even more the Anglo-Saxon liberals – “served as a pretext to the American designs”; pretexts that could be easily removed by simply not committing them. According to those ideological agents, such atrocities were all the more “understandable and forgivable” because these military forces “were at their home, in Spanish land”, and were operating on “also Spanish populations”. For the French propaganda and opinion the Cuban and Filipino “insurgents” “aspired to dictatorship”. They were “barely better than a gang of murderers”. Which did not prevent them to inflict terrible losses to the Spanish economy and regular armies.

At the very times when all the “left of the great civilized Nations”, including the National-socialists of the Second International, did ignore, deny, distort or deform – in words and in facts – the right of free disposition of all Peoples, and did consider mere madness the very idea that those colonial “territories” inhabited by black people would one day be independent States ruled by themselves, Sabino Arana-Goiri congratulated President T. Roosevelt for the assistance provided to the Cuban “rebels” in order to get their independence from Spain, proclaimed the right of all Peoples of the world to independence, and was immediately put in a Spanish jail (not “Basque” as his successors call them today) as a result of it.

The “American threat” was used as a pretext for European imperialism, which for centuries had not been merely a “design, an aspiration or a threat” but a reality of oppression, exploitation, slavery and destruction of the Peoples all around the world. Inevitably, the Empires of always or the new ones endangered the French Empire. Under the impulse of the former, the besieged imperialisms did transform themselves in “defence of the status quo” and in “national defence against the annexations”, this is: in defence of the ancient Empires and annexations, against the new Empires and annexations, which were those of the others. This did impose and announce, already, the alliance with Spain: “What a burnt country! What a tragic drought! Large plains bare, almost treeless, with poor and scarce wheat”. “There is in this poverty something picturesque and wild”, wrote Jaurès in 1911. The tone, the commonplaces and equivocal banalities do not lie: the Spanish Nationalism was not to be feared. Here is, at least, a well-secured border! Here is, in addition, a “natural” ally against the new American planetary danger.

This was his exposition of that reality: “By the annexation of the Hawaii Islands, by the direct or indirect control over the Philippines and Cuba, the United States are developing their capitalist power and asserting their military power.” “By their relations with Cuba, a Spanish land, here they are in communication and possibly in conflict with South America. And since, at the same time, the annexation of the Hawaii Islands do dislike and worry to Japan, the United States will be forced to consolidate in a permanent military organization the beautiful attack forces that they have suddenly mobilized. Here as everywhere, capitalism, necessarily aggressive and combative, leads to militarism.” “The wealth and power of the United States are a quarter of the wealth and power of the world.” “The struggles between Nations take the proportions of struggles between Continents.” “It is the inner fire of capitalism which stirs and confronts the Continents.” “For the first time, there will be a universal war involving all Continents. The capitalist expansion has expanded the field of battle: it is the whole planet that now is being disputed by the capitals, it is the entire planet which will be reddened with the blood of men!”

“But the sentence of Jaurès, infinitely repeated: ‘capitalism carries in itself the war as cloud carries the storm’, does not help as evidence”, according to Aron. However, Espilondo does not agree with Jaurès. Because if Jaurès is right, for this same reason Espilondo – who claims to be non-anticapitalistic – is not against but in favour of war; what he on the other hand confirms. He is only against the war that the others make. It’s of course the point of view of Hitler, we must be wary.

As far as France is concerned, Jaurès gives account only about “the painful mutilation of France” who was Alsace-Lorraine; the French Empire having never mutilated anything, of course.

In 1900 Jaurès notes “the aggressive imperialism that English and Germans show”. “An acute nervousness seems to have been installed in England.” The European Peoples are “surrendered to the worst suggestions of greed and hatred”. “In Germany, the Emperor seems to have lost his temper. The savage advice of extermination that he has given to his troops departing for China does attest that the European conscience can suffer from frequent eclipses and participate in the barbarism that it seeks to punish.” “In France, the nationalism is trying to deafen and stultify the popular brain for the benefit of the reaction. It has already achieved in this sense a tour de force. Twenty years ago it incited the passions of the street and the boisterous patriotism to riot against Germany. A rendezvous was made to meet at the East station and whistling the King of Spain who was returning from Germany, it was impossible to represent Lohengrin.” “Now, in a turn of legerdemain that attests the docility of the chauvinistic hatreds, it’s England which has substituted Germany among the swaggering nationalism. Tomorrow, suffice it that the Emperor of Germany outlines a gesture of threat against the English and he will be hailed by our compatriots, and the French-German alliance would be tremendously popular if it was turned against England. As long as this nationalist wind will blow on the world, the international proletariat will be stopped in its walk; and even a part of the working-class, dragged adrift, will play the enemy’s game.” “It is necessary to ask whether the imperialism contains in itself a seed of war.” [?!] “The expedition to China appears to have re-opened the era of epic struggles from continent to continent. Nothing shows that Europe will deal only with China; perhaps it’s the whole Asia that, one day, will be shudder.”

Yet, and after the experiences already provided by the French Ancient Régime and the Revolution, their subsequent actions: undertaken by the Empire, the Restoration, the Monarchy of July, the Republic, again the Empire, and once more the Republic, which premiered with the wild liquidation of the Commune, had given with largesse recent examples of the “savage exterminations” that Jaurès reproached to the Germans in 1900. Apparently, Jaurès didn’t see what he didn’t want to see.

Quite differently, the German socialist August Bebel, speaking also in 1900, did not avoid self-criticism nor did indulge himself in using the tricks with which Jaurès did alleviate the reality, using fancy lines on “the era of epic struggles from continent to continent”, or on “eclipses of European conscience because its participation in the barbarism that it seeks to punish”. For that author, there was no epic at all in those actions but only barbarism, and it was mainly German and European, as thus he said it speaking before the Reichstag: “No, this is no Crusade, no holy war; it is a very ordinary war of conquest... A campaign of revenge as barbaric as has never been seen in the last centuries, and not often at all in History... not even with the Huns, not even with the Vandals... That is no match for what the German and other troops of foreign Powers, together with the Japanese troops, have done in China.” (Vid. Mombauer, Annika: ‘Wilhelm II, Waldersee, and the Boxer Rebellion’, from ‘The Kaiser’, edited by Annika Mombauer. Cambridge University Press, 2003, page 97.)

In 1903 Jaurès stated: “In the present state of the world it’s not the war that may be a solution. The day in which a crucial Pact of peace will be concluded among the Peoples of Europe, the day when they will give between themselves through simultaneous disarmament – you hear me well – a guarantee of mutual security, that day all human groups, from Finland to Ireland, from Poland to Alsace, will have more force to claim their rights and to find the free play of their moral and historical affinities. They will not have to face anymore to the domination of military caste or oppressive aristocracy; they will not have to face anymore to the jealous surveillance of the nations that have incorporated them violently.”

Once again, it seems that the French imperialism was not to be referred to by the words of Jaurès. And it is also obvious in those words that the “rights of all human groups” which he spoke about were limited only to some of them and – in any case – conditioned to the peace between the States within the maintenance of the status quo. What made that the “socialism” of Jaurès was much leaned to the right: in the first place in relation to President Wilson’s “bourgeois pacifism”, for whom the right of self-determination of the Peoples was the foundation for the world peace. And, of course, in relation to Lenin’s Bolshevism, for whom peace could only be the consequence of the Nations’ freedom and of the socialist revolution; being well understood that must begin the struggle against the imperialism with the struggle against the imperialism in one’s own Country.

In 1905 Jaurès is getting warmed up: “If the Germans want to fight, we will fight!” In 1909 Jaurès wrote: “It is the conflict sometimes dull, sometimes sharp, always deep and formidable, of Germany and England”. “This conflict, which is weighing on us, is what raises or aggravates all the other conflicts.” “Whilst Germany and England do mutually counteract, publicly and stealthily around the world, here is that the United States are growing up and that their world ambition is awakening.” In 1910: “Germany, with its formidable birth rate, can – with its own active bodies – submerge and envelop us”. In 1911: “Ah, they want it, this war!” On his journey to America, Jaurès noted that passengers “were wondering whether a cyclone was going to swoop down”.

And in 1914: “We have against us, against peace, against the life of men, at the present time, a terrible odds, and against which it will be necessary that the proletarians of Europe attempt to do the efforts of supreme solidarity that they can attempt to.” “If Austria invades Slavic territory; if the Germans: if the Germanic race of Austria makes violence against those Serbs who are a part of the Slavic world, it is to be feared and predicted that Russia will enter the conflict.” “France, which for more than 40 years has subordinated to the supreme interests of peace its claim on Alsace-Lorraine, mustn’t let be dragged in a conflict whose bet is Serbia.” For the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy “There is only an effective and wise method: practicing an equitable policy towards the Bosniak and Croat elements. If the Serbs-Croats want to separate from Austria-Hungary to join Serbia, they will determine a formidable conflict in which they will not have any other chance of success if it is not with the help of Russia. And this one would make it pay dearly. The whole Great Serbia would be the vassal of tsarism”. “If Europe as a whole does not understand that the true strength of the States is not already now in the pride of conquest and in the brutality of oppression, but in the respect for freedoms and in the concern for justice and peace, the East of Europe will remain a slaughterhouse where the blood of cattle will be mixed with the blood of butchers.” “And here is why, when the cloud of the storm is already upon us, here is why I would still hope that the crime will not be consummated.”

As already seen, Jaurès placed “the aggressor” – the aggressive imperialism – a little everywhere and above all on the side of the Germanic race, with the Slavic race as an alternative. “We, French socialists, our duty is simple. We don’t have to impose a policy of peace on our Government: it practices it. I, who have never hesitated to draw towards my head the hatred of the chauvinists (by my stubborn will and that never shall waver in achieving the French-German reconciliation), have the right to say that in the present time the French Government wants peace and works in the maintenance of peace.” This point of view was shared by Léon Jouhaux, whose statements on the occasion of Jaurès’ funerals have not been without consequences, on the eve of the war.

E. Dolléans writes: “Since the beginning of the century, the peace runs great risks.” “During the years 1911, 1912 and 1913 the men feel pass on their heads the immense shadow of the approaching cyclone of which they can measure neither the extent nor the length”. Theorists of left and even of right had underlined the “uneven development” of the global capitalism, which made of war – imperialistic on both sides – the only possible outcome: necessary and even beneficial and desirable for the super-Powers that were able to deal with it. The affaire Schnæbelé, the Spanish-American war, the crises of Fashoda, of Tangier and Agadir, and the Balkan wars had warned the most optimistic. Delaisi and Merrheim foresaw “the coming war” and were concerned about “the war threats that darken the horizon”. The Trade-Union Congresses of Amiens, Marseille and Toulouse had foreseen and announced the war, and prepared the response of the Trade-Unions. In 1911 an extraordinary Trade Union conference had decided: “Where appropriate, the Declaration of War must be for each worker the voice of command for the immediate cessation of work”. “To any Declaration of War the workers must immediately respond by the revolutionary general strike.” It couldn’t be clearer.

Yet, in 1914 the general strike that the Parties and Trade Unions of workers did advocate for even a few days before the great slaughter, was never called or applied before the mobilization. “The preparation of the war, organized by the Government, was carried out much better than the action of the Confederal leadership against the threat of war, and the former won it in speed”, Rossmer wrote. A Trade-Union resolution of 1915 stated that the war “is but the result of the clash of all national imperialisms that have intoxicated all large and small States”. Liebknecht declared in 1915: “the current war is a global imperialistic war whose coming had been foreseen a long time ago”. Bebel and Liebknecht had honestly warned that, if the war was declared, “the German working class would follow it as a single man”.

“In the presence of the seaquake that dragged them, how to talk about the responsibility of the Trade-Union masses?” “Before the fatality, an immense resignation”, says Dolléans. “The national and warlike emotions do act more deeply on the human spirit than the international and revolutionary emotions”; “The hatred does blindly direct and lead the peoples to their extermination”, said Halevy. “We have been powerless the ones and the others; the wave has passed, it has dragged us”, explained Monatte. And Alphonse Merrheim: “We were completely distressed, crazed.” “At that time the working class, carried by a formidable wave of nationalism, would have not left to the public officers the care of shooting us: it would have itself shot us”. Jaurès had predicted it: “If there is war, we will be killed first; perhaps it will be regretted afterward but it will be too late!” “We should expect to be killed in the street corners.” When he declared to Sub-Secretary of State Ferry his intention to “continue our campaign against the war”, the latter warned him: “that’s what you will dare not, because you would be killed in the next street corner”. That same evening it was done.

Some militants, in “the legitimate anguish”, “do suddenly discover the futility of the methods of direct action in which they had hitherto believed”. “The confederal militants of Jouhaux, as well as the Second International of Vandervelde, have put their organizations as a hostage”, that’s to say: the conservation of the organ (of its bureaucracies) prevailed over the maintenance of its function, which was left aside on the eve of the great massacre. “The sky was clearing up for the last time before the bloody storm, and the agreement was made between the Party of the war and that of the peace.” Under this agreement, the former did keep everything and the latter disappeared.

“Among the socialist parliamentarians, a not insignificant clan was hyper-nationalist”, wrote Lavau, who did know it well. The minority socialist of left, revolutionary trade-unionists and anarchists, remained a minority: resigned to that state of things, tamed by the repression of all freedoms, gagged by censorship, and terrorized by the “card B”, the camp of suspects, the guillotine and the execution pole; blocked by the deferments of conscription and by the “health” commissions for recovery of “the reformed”, who were sent to make pacifism and to effectively rebuild their health in the front-line of fire; broken by the war itself, and overwhelmed by the warmongering Nationalism of the popular masses, while they found blocked the international conferences and correspondence through the denial of mail and passport.

“There are no more workers’ rights, there are no more social laws; there is but the war”, declared Millerand, who had become Minister already in 1896 with the support of Jaurès, his companion of Party, before becoming a quasi-immovable Minister of War between 1912 and 1915. But the Marxists of Guesde, as well as the “anti-patriotic” and anti-militarist Blanquists of Hervé (who were formerly quite more “intractable” than Jaurès on the imperialism, the peace, the war and the “national defence”), advocated for the Sacred Union as soon as the war was declared, and became out-and-out Nationalists and warmongers. And this despite the fact that Guesde himself had warned in 1899: “The day in which the Millerand case would become a general fact, we should say goodbye to any internationalism and become the nationalists that neither you nor I, will ever tolerate to be.” (Never say “never ever”.)

According to Lenin, “the French social-chauvinists, who are the most skilful, the most inured to parliamentary skulduggery, have long since broken all records in the art of pronouncing pacifists and internationalists phrases, infinitely grandiloquent and sound, while at the same time they betray with incredible cynicism the socialism and the International by entering in the ministries that are making the imperialistic war, by voting credits or loans”, “by opposing to the revolutionary struggle in their own country” etc. etc. These small bourgeois “have led the socialism to this incredible shame: justify and disguise the imperialistic war by applying to it the notions of ‘homeland defence’.”

At the Zimmerwald Conference (1915), Merrheim answered thus to Lenin’s urging him to act: “As for the strike of masses against the war, ah comrade Lenin! I don’t even know if I could have the opportunity of returning to France and telling what has happened in Zimmerwald. We’re far from being able to make the commitment to tell the French proletariat: let’s rise up against war!

Despite the supported – and calculated – tributes of Bolsheviks, and the reservations of pacifists, one shouldn’t make an illusion about the behaviour that Jaurès would have had if the hyper-nationalists had not removed from him any possibility of doing anything. His concern regarding “the state of our machine guns at the East border”, a few days before the outbreak of hostilities, was not at odds with his former ideas, and – in this sense – one could not speak of treason or inconsistency in him, as it could be said about other much more loquacious and uncompromising pacifists than he was. It can be assumed that the search for peace would have motivated him always, inside the limits that he had always affirmed. Instead, it is not possible to say without a shadow of hesitation what the Nationalist representatives of the current Nationalist “left” of Anglet would have done at those times. Judging by what we hear its representatives say, they would from the first hour have all volunteered for the first line of fire, just as they would have all been resistance fighters since 1940.

“In times of war, everybody becomes nationalist.” “The international is made for times of peace, it has no place in times of war”, said Kautsky. “Proletarians of all countries: unite in the peace and cut your throat in the war” was – according to the sarcastic commentary of Rosa Luxemburg – the new watchword of the Socialist International. This was in correspondence with that of the Roman Church: “Christians, love one another in the peace and slaughter each other in the war”. Which they did conscientiously do, on both sides, under the praises and blessings of respective national hierarchies.

The literature in the Basque Language has been enriched on that occasion with new texts that have become classics, such as the sermons and articles by Hiriarte-Urruti, Barbier and Anxuberro, pushing the indigenous youth to kill and to be killed so as to defend the true religion and the French Empire against the heretics and the other Nationalisms. It little mattered then the origin, language, religion or motivations, as long as the cannon fodder was ready to use at the designated point. As Espilondo says: “Why not, if it is to do well?”

As Lenin did still say: “The French bourgeoisie has instilled in the soldiers from its colonies that the Blacks had to defend France”. “France has called to arms to millions of Blacks to fight the Germans. Assault groups were formed and they were launched in the most dangerous sectors where the machine guns mowed them down as if they were grass.” The genocide of the subjugated Peoples of France’s colonies was continued by interposed German machine guns.

XV

Even if we take into account the symbolic rhetoric and style effects of Jaurès and the other authors that we’ve been quoting, we can still wonder what is hiding or revealing the meteorological inflation that does increasingly cover the political vocabulary, as war approaches:

“Dormant cloud that carries the storm, cloud of storm that is already upon us, thunders of war threatening in the clouds, atmosphere of lightning, horizons that darken, frequent eclipses, last clearing up before the bloody storm, winds blowing on the world, cyclone of an immense shadow, cyclone that is going to swoop down, formidable waves, breaking waves like tidal waves, seaquake, horrible storm”... apparently, the political analysis had fully incorporated the weather information with times of tides and weather forecast. All this along with the thorny and wild forest (as a bonus for natural history) where, for centuries, have been prowling the beasts of prey; and (for the astronomy) with solar eclipses to repetition etc. Where is the policy in all this?

Be that as it may, any doubt about the clear meaning of these images is not permissible: this piracy and this repression; these bourgeois, large and small wealthy owners, filibusters, journalists of prey, daring bankers and cynical capitalists; this thorny and wild forest where have been prowling for centuries the beasts of prey; these dreams of fruitful expeditions, this looting and this barbarism which the representatives of European civilisation do not deprive of; this high capitalist classes’ foam which goes cheerfully towards the Moroccan shores, these bankers of prey who have exploited by means of usurious loans a country delivered to pirates by a puppet, and these eager capitalists who got to be given concessions on concessions and who pushed their businesses without any consideration for rights, the customs and the feelings of an entire people; these protectorates established by force which have left in the populations abhorrent memories: memories of blood and memories of violence; this militaristic, disastrous, senseless and truly criminal policy in which colonialism and reaction are combined; these lessons that have been intended to be given – to Europe and the world – of wisdom, unselfishness and respect for the international right, hypocritically and cynically violated by us; this nationalism that is trying to deafen and stultify the popular brain for the benefit of the reaction, that incites the passions of the streets and the boisterous patriotism to riot against Germany, and that excludes Lohengrin of any repertory; this swaggering nationalism by which Germany is substituted by England in a turn of legerdemain and that attests the chauvinistic hatreds, and these nationalist and warlike emotions that act more deeply on the human spirit than the international and revolutionary emotions; this formidable nationalist crisis that has driven the working class, that has murdered Jaurès and would have shot any other who had resisted; this bad cloud that was placed over the workers world, this great wave that passed, turned distress, crazed and dragged the highest officials of the Trade Union movement; this breaking wave like a tidal wave; this nationalist wind that blows on the world, that stops the international proletariat in its walk, that drags adrift even a part of the working-class and carries it to play the enemy’s game; this immense shadow of the approaching cyclone of which it cannot be measured either the extent or the length; this last clearing up before the bloody storm; these Peoples who feel in an atmosphere of lightning; these thunders of war threatening in the clouds; this industrial society that even in a state of apparent repose carries with it the war as the dormant cloud carries the storm; these war threats that darken the horizon; and – at long last – this worldwide imperialistic war, whose coming had been foreseen a long time ago and is the result of the clash of all national imperialisms that have intoxicated all large and small States, all of it is: in the texts and contexts of Jaurès, the French imperialistic Nationalism, it is the French capitalism and bourgeoisie in concurrence with the other “great” Powers for the world domination and supremacy.

But lo and behold that the new exegesis that Espilondo is presenting differs significantly from this interpretation. According to Espilondo, the nationalism which Jaurès talked about, the nationalism that threatens and violates the international peace, freedom and order, is not that of the French, English, German or American Imperialism that has unceasingly bloodied Europe and the world, but it is that of the Basques. That industrial society: which even in a state of apparent repose carries the war with it as the dormant cloud carries the storm, is that of the Basques. That nationalism is the plague of the Basque bourgeoisie.

In similar cases, one can doubt among three hypotheses. Either Espilondo has not read – even from afar – Jaurès, but he feigns that he has done it so as to deceive the victims of his chatter. Or he has read him, but has not understood anything and distorts Jaurès’ ideas. Or he has read and understood him, but he is a liar and a forger. In any case, he either lies or else distorts the ideas which he pretends to profess, making use of his prophet Jaurès to satisfy and serve his hatred of the Basque People. Thereby he is morally disqualified, and he does also disqualify the movement that has made him its spokesman. “I have always made the choice of loyalty to democratic values, of the permanent contact with the land and of a sincere talk. In the clarity, always in the clarity. The political life must be clear. I reject the double talk. It also consists in making the choice of certain political ethics.” How beautiful are the democratic values, how beautiful is the political ethics, how clear and true is the talk, and how reliable is the loyalty that comes from Espilondo!

A man like this rots everything he touches. He’s like Midas, but it’s not gold what results from his touch, it is rubbish. Espilondo is a liar and a forger. It can be said of him what Roccard says about Mitterrand: “He was not an honest man”. And Jaurès: “I say to you all, republicans: remember that in our history there are two indivisible forces, two synonymous words: counter-revolution and slander!” And Marx: “A man who tries to accommodate the science to a position that does not derive from its own interest – wrong though it may be – but from foreign, alien and strange interests, I say he is a vile man, I call it vile”. Well understood: neither Jaurès nor Espilondo are Marxists.

XVI

The PcF, member of the Third International after the Congress of Tours (1920), has not changed anything. And yet, at the V Congress Roy said: “It is admitted (and the Second Congress of the Communist International has clarified it enough) that the Communist International recognizes the historical necessity of proclaiming the right of the oppressed nationalities to the free disposition”.

Already at the IV Congress, Safarov had pointed out that “These comrades of the French Party [...] are not comrades but petit-bourgeois”. “These so-called communists [...] protest against the appeal of the International Communist addressed to the French colonies.” “It is not about cannibalism, it is simply about the national and colonial question.” “Under the banner of communism are lurking chauvinistic ideas strange and hostile to proletarian internationalism.” Which – he said – was to return back to “the conceptions of the II International before the war”.

And Manuilskij pointed in the V Congress: “About a year ago the Komintern launched an appeal to the colonial slaves, calling them to rise up against their masters. When this appeal arrived to a section of the P.C.F. in Algeria, that of Sidi-Bel-Abbès, this section adopted a resolution condemning such an appeal of the Komintern to people of another race, exploited by French imperialism”. “Have been already excluded from the Party these men who are perhaps good Frenchmen, but very bad communists?” “Where are the documents where the French PC affirms the watchword of the separation of the colonies?

“You have at present 800,000 indigenous workers in France. I ask: what have you done to organize these workers, to prepare them to be leaders of revolutionary agitators in the colonies? Your army has 250,000 black soldiers. Do you believe that you can make a social revolution if tomorrow these 250,000 persons are located on the other side of the barricade?” “Following the Congress of Lyon, the Komintern had sent an appeal to the French workers and to the colonial peoples. ‘L’Humanité’, when publishing this appeal, did previously remove from the text the words ‘and to the colonial Peoples’.”

As for the “analytical report” of the V Congress (published by the Library of L’Humanité), Carrère and Schram write that it has been reduced “to a few lines without relief”, “a transvestite of the full text” “sweetened to the point of having been rendered unusable”, where the criticisms that concern the PcF “have been also much attenuated”. The PcF has not improved since then.

The French “communists” claimed, in effect, that the principle of free disposition was only applicable for some colonies (the English ones, obviously); but that “a sovereignty of anthropophagus is not desirable”:

“There are peoples under tutelage that are now capable of governing themselves all alone, and others that are not yet capable; and whether the communist duty does order to give freedom to the former, it orders still more imperiously not to abandon the latter to their miserable fate: it strongly orders to serve them as human and selfless preceptors”, “even in the interest of the unfortunate populations of North Africa, Syria, Lebanon and Indo-China.” “The indigenous are largely composed of Arabs refractory to the economic, social, intellectual and moral evolution, indispensable so as to achieve that the individuals can form an autonomous State capable of reaching to communist perfection.” “They have no technicians, nor tools, nor workers who could put in value the soil and sub-soil of North Africa”. “The Arab bourgeois defend nationalist and feudal principles.” “The indigenous proletarians are being exploited mainly by their bourgeois co-religionists, by their religious leaders”, “by their heads of rural farms.” “Muslims reject the instruction of women.” “The uprising of the Algerian Muslim masses [...] would be at the present time, that’s to say: before any victorious revolution in the metropolis, a dangerous folly of which the Algerian associations of the Communist Party – which have above all the Marxist sense of the situations – do not want to be guilty before the judgment of communist history.” “So, a victorious uprising of the Algerian Muslim masses that did not come after a same victorious uprising of the proletarian masses of the metropolis would inevitably result in Algeria in a return towards a nearby system of feudalism.” “You will certainly have, in the case of a premature Arab sovereignty, to free the communist slaves from the yoke of the Muslim feudal lords.” “Owning slaves, in the narrow sense of the word, is a Muslim tradition in Algeria.” “The Arab nationalist bourgeois would take advantage of the independence to launch themselves in a feudal policy of oppression towards the indigenous masses of the lost villages.”

This is the Party that is launching accusations of xenophobia against the Basque democrats. One would swear to be hearing the “communist” clique of Anglet. We do know where all this has led us, what repression and what atrocious crimes have been put into practice by the Government “of the left” against the subjugated Peoples, for the defence of the French civilization and National-socialist or National-communist revolution.

A little later, the French Nationalist Thorez gave his opinion on the Liberation Movement of Colonial Peoples in the opening report of the Congress of the French Communist Party, with mystification of Lenin's thought included: “In Lebanon and in Syria, France cannot continue to favour [an Arab nationalism driven by] the actions of the fascists, agents of Mussolini, an enemy of France of the Popular Front, who make reign the terror over a people who wants to live in friendship with France. The fundamental claim of our Communist Party concerning the colonial peoples remains to be free disposition, the right to independence. Recalling a formula of Lenin, we have already told the Tunisian comrades, who have approved us, that the right to divorce does not mean the obligation to divorce. If the decisive question of this moment is the victorious struggle against fascism, the interest of the colonial peoples lies in their union with the people of France, and not in an attitude that could encourage the enterprises of fascism and place for example Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco under the yoke of Mussolini or Hitler, or make Indochina a base of operations for militaristic Japan.” (Maurice Thorez; IX Congress of the French Communist Party, Arles, December-1937.)

“We have said and we repeat: ‘Unite all men who want to live free, without distinction of races or religions: all the French of France and all the French of Algeria. When I say ‘French of Algeria’ I can hear you all present here, you the French of origin, the naturalized French, the Israelites, and also you the Muslim Arabs and Berbers, all the children, if not by blood, at least by heart of the great French Revolution, which made no distinction among races and religions when it claimed that the French Republic was one and indivisible’.” (M. Thorez, Selected Works (2). 1938-1950.)

However, in order that some of them be not its “children by blood”, it is quite necessary that there be others that are children by the blood of a French republic that –as we are told – is different by that blood, whose formula has not been communicated to us. And, on the other hand, if the French republic is always one an indivisible, then there is no place for the right of free disposition of all Peoples, which are denied in theory and practice by the French imperialistic and chauvinist Nationalism.

And he goes on saying: “Where is now in your country the elected race [...]? All of them have been mixed in your land of Algeria, to which have been added Greek, Maltese, Spaniards, Italians and French, and which French! The French of all our provinces, but in particular the French of the French lands of Corsica and Savoie, and those from the French land of Alsace, having come in 1871 so as not to be Prussians.” “Our sake: the sake of freedom; the sake of Freedom and of France, will triumph by unity. Long live unity!”

Now then, we see that, if “all of them had been mixed” in Algeria, there were no longer Berbers, Arabs etc. there but only “descendants and children” of those people, all of them having become French “in all freedom”. The “French of origin”, on the contrary, are French ‘per se’, and not only “descendants and children” of those people; since, of all those people from different backgrounds, only they remain being what they were. For the others, the union “with” the people of France is actually the incorporation “into” the people of France that already existed before.

This is not the plurality of the French “of origin” and of the other Peoples of different origins, as different Peoples; it is the “plurality” of all backgrounds but only once that all of them have been turned into French, since the Peoples of other backgrounds do no longer exist as they have ceased to be what they were to become French. How great, how generous is the France of the PcF, ready to civilize-Frenchify the whole world! Suffice it for it to exclude the “exclusionary nationalism” (Greek, Maltese, Spanish, Italian, Prussian, English, American, Japanese, Vietnamese, Algerian, Numidian, Berber, Carthaginian, Roman, Arab, Turkish and, of course, Breton, Corsican or Basque; in short: that of all the others) for the benefit of the unique (French) “inclusionary anti-nationalist non-Nationalisme”, always obsessively reaffirmed: “French of the French lands of Corsica and Savoie, those of the French land of Alsace”. But at the same time, “the fundamental claim of our communist Party concerning the colonial Peoples remains to be the free disposition, the right to independence”. Undoubtedly, this is still the 'right of free disposition of all the Peoples' incorporated into the French nationalism “of left”.

The paradigmatic Algerian case: “The apparent simplicity of the issue – independence or not – conceals the complexity of the situation. If the independence of the protectorate or of the colony were considered by the imperial State as an ‘absolute’ evil, an irremediable defeat, it would be necessary to return to the elementary duality friend-foe. The nationalist – Tunisian, Moroccan, Algerian – would be the enemy: not ‘occasional’ nor even ‘permanent’, to resume the terms we have defined above, it would be the ‘absolute’ enemy, he with whom no reconciliation is possible, whose very existence is aggression and who, consequently, if the logic were to be followed up to the end, had to be exterminated. ‘Delenda est Carthago’: the formula is that of the absolute enmity, the enmity of Rome and of Carthage; one of the two cities is de trop. If Algeria ‘must’ remain ‘definitely’ French, the nationalists who want an independent Algeria must be eliminated without mercy. In order that millions of Muslims become French in the middle of the 20th century, it is necessary that they cannot dream any longer in an Algerian nation and forget the witnesses whose throats had to be cut off.” (Raymond Aron; ‘Paix et guerre entre les nations’, 1962.)

But this also seems to be Jaurès’ position of principle; even though the concrete theoretical applications and the passage to the act illustrate its limits.

XVII

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.)

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 that ‘Penguin Island’, driven by its imperialistic and chauvinistic Nationalism, excludes any critical revisions that may question the established dogmas.

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. Thus, 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. To liberating all human persons, that’s to say: dominate the Peoples, exploit them, exterminate them, and incorporate them into France in the name of freedom and democracy: forged and presented as identical to the “natural” characteristics of French Absolutism, whether monarchical or republican.

Moreover – those “liberators” imagine – this is what those same “peoples” 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 the French version. As we’ve previously indicated, imperialistic romanticism forms part – a very significant one – of 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 is solely owned 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 lies, 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. From all this ideological crap, in which the French Nationalists do firmly believe, 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 such a 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 [...]. 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 to Kautsky, 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 hindquarters until the gentlemen in France abolish poverty and ignorance – they are grotesque”. (Letter of June 7, 1866.)

“‘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 Lenin; ‘The Right of Nations to Self-Determination.’)

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 same as the Spaniards – the French 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.

XVIII

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” that 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.

As it happens in general with any enterprise of aggression and domination against the freedom of Peoples and the integrity and independence of their States, there is no theoretical or scientific problem to establish the historical and sociological nature of the imperialistic subjugation in the Basque Country. 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 removed to 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, and 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 entitled: ‘History of the USSR 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 at least has not been invited and is not reducible to the Moscow academic soup.)

After having exhausted the resources of the divine, natural, historic or other rights to justify its domination, the ideology of the French-Spanish Nationalist Imperialism 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. For its Nationalist ideology, the French “Nation” is God, and the French State is its prophet. Right, moral and all power do come from it. Outside of it there is no salvation.

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 to avoid that the “representation” (compact despite the Portuguese “bite”, and all in yellow of the Spanish Empire were “dismembered”, that General Franco triggered the great slaughter of the real Peoples, and organized the terrorist and totalitarian régime that has become their prison. It is in order that the hexagonal “representation” – all in pink – of the French Empire may continue to poison the consciences, that the French Nationalism crushes the Peoples and exalts as glorious facts and heroes the crimes and criminals who founded it.

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 right – 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 in the form of Napoleon – have come to France 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 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 naïve confession of the Chief of police at Liselotte 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 more high 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 Peoples do desperately resist the conquest”, she tells us. She has explained the relationship between conquests and corruption, as well as the appalling repression within that absolutist Kingdom. 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 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 of the criminal fait accompli and of 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, 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” offspring, 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.

According to the formulation of Marx-Engels, “The division of labour, in which we have already recognized one of the most important and most powerful factors in history, appears also in the ruling class as a division between the spiritual and the material labour. In the inside of this class, one of its parts operates as thinkers of this social class: they are its active and conceptive ideologists, who have the specialty of forging the illusions of this class about itself; a speciality of which they mainly make their living. The others keep, with respect to such ideas and illusions, a rather passive and receptive attitude because they are really the active members of this class, and have less time to make illusions and ideas about themselves. This split may even degenerate into some antagonism and hostility between both parts in presence. But as soon as occurs a practical collision that endangers the whole class, this opposition disappears by itself”. (Not being this specialization rigidly corporativisée, the theoretical – but ideologically functional – “contradiction” does also occur through and inside of the groups and individuals.)

They all know that without that military occupation, and without the miserable traitors that make up the Pnv-Eta liquidationist bureaucracy: who have been deceiving the Basque People for half a century so that it accepts the régime of military occupation of the Second Francoism, and the imperialistic and colonialist Spanish and French States, as the “own, non-Nationalist, non-violent, legitimate and democratic" regimes and States; that without that reality – we say – of oppression, corruption and stultification of the People under the monopolies of criminal violence and ideological intoxication, their domination could not be sustained. It‘s high time, therefore, to present the ideological-strategic bases that allow the Basque People to free itself from the imperialistic domination of France and of Spain, as they have been set out in the Manifesto of the Basque Movement of Resistance and National Salvation.

https://nabarrakoerresuma.blogspot.com/2021/03/manifesto-of-basque-movement-of.html