The Basque People under the French-Spanish Imperialism (excerpts)

(Text initially published on September-2020, the 19th.)

The Basque People under the French-Spanish Imperialism (excerpts)

 

“Peoples do only mobilize themselves for great causes and at all events for national Freedom; they don’t do it for purposes that do not deserve it. A subjugated People can have consciousness of its national, political, historical and sociological reality, without thereby reaching access to the political ‘momentum’, that is: to the status of an actor of strategic level, which is the only thing that empowers it to be the protagonist of its own policy. It’s just that policy either is a strategy, or else it is nothing at all.

“The People that lacks its own strategy does necessarily make that of the others. That’s why if a People already subjugated under imperialism does not face the strategic imperative, that is, if it does not develop its will of national freedom WITHIN a strategy of its own: which is the SOLE reality that qualifies it permanently for the international political and ideological struggles, then sooner or later it is fatally doomed. And this even though it gets shaken and exhausted in permanent actions, affirmations, researches or performances – either folkloric, social, historical or cultural etc. – of an infrastrategic level.

“Without a strategic base of its own, and in the society ideologically and psychologically sick and battered that corresponds to a People subdued under an absolute imperialism – Nationalist, colonialist and of a centennial military occupation – as it is the Spanish and the French one on the Basque People, its opposition: diverted, misplaced and blocked by a purported ‘intelligentsia’ and an incompetent, corrupt and recuperated “political class”, is depleted, degraded and disintegrated; it oscillates between collaboration and attempts. In these conditions, the inevitable consequences are still appearing in all fields; and legality and illegality do destroy each other. The performances of such an ‘intelligentsia and political class’: consisting of opportunism, demoralization, demobilization and inhibition, lead to submission, collaboration, complicity and betrayal, in an accelerated and irreversible process of political liquidation, lethal to all democratic opposition. The Peoples are attacked and ruined from outside, but do collapse and sink from within: the indigenous collaborationism and complicity weaken them, humiliate them and put them on their knees.

“A subjugated People that under the monopoly of violence resulting from war and military occupation – whether it be foreign or domestic – is not able to face up morally and materially the reality of imperialism and fascism, has already chosen submission, the first phase of its liquidation. If, preferring illusions to reality, it doesn’t want to or cannot see and face the strategic imperative, nobody is going to do it for its sake.

“In policy, the mere will of the Peoples does not count at all, unless they are able to constitute the force: strategically structured, with which they can achieve their will. The People that – as a basis and structure of its behaviour – renounces to the strategic imperative, or that lacks its own strategy, does inevitably adopt the strategy and make the policy of fascism and imperialism; the rest is verbiage.

“Without a strategy, there is no policy; and the purported Basque political class: formed by the liquidationist bureaucracy Pnv-Eta and its satellites and branches, for more than forty years at least it’s not that it is having a misguided strategy, the question is that it does have none except that of the established imperialistic power. Guided by such a ‘political class’, all the popular virtuality of the Basque People has been ruined by cultural, ideological and political backwardness, primitivism and underdevelopment, thanks to the decisive contribution of the ‘moderate and radical’, armed and unarmed institutionalists.

“Without a strategy, there is no tactic either: the tactical choices, which only in the strategic approach do exist, disappear with the ruin of this one. Only an opposition strategically different from the imperialism allows to fight it from within and from without, “legally” and illegally. A strategy with some authentic content can to a greater or lesser extent be wrong; but its own dynamics and its effect: ideological and politically integrative, are already an invaluable advance over the absence of strategy.

“In the world in which we live there are no tricks, shortcuts, detours or solutions of easiness that allow the popular forces to make the economy a strategic line in compliance with the reality of the forces in presence; and – as all the Peoples of the World have understood – apart from national independence guaranteed by a State of its own, there is no substitute that can ensure the national survival of a People that has been subdued by imperialism. He who has not yet learned of this, is a mortal danger to the social group that he claims to represent or defend.

“Unfortunately, the modern history of the Basque People is an exponent of its recurring difficulty and incapability to access the strategic level – and even to understand the nature of policy – in the new conditions created by the ‘modern’ imperialism-totalitarianism of the usual predatory Peoples and States. In such circumstances, the Basque ‘intelligentsia’ and purported political class were even unable to understand the nature – and of course to provide our People with any protection against them – of the new ideological falsifications and weapons that emerged from the very beginning of the Contemporary Age against the freedom of Peoples. Created and updated by theorists of the dominant and predatory Peoples and States, such mystifications were immediately adopted to conceal and “legitimize” the French and Spaniards’ imperialism; whose eternal and criminal colonialist Nationalism: camouflaged now as ‘liberty, equality, fraternity, human rights and democracy’ since the French revolution and as ‘socialism’ since the Russian revolution, was integrated and accepted by the incompetent and undermined ‘Basque ruling classes’, and passed on by them onto the Basque People for its confusion and weakening.

“The simple consideration of its cultural products allows us to appreciate that our People has not lacked chroniclers and documentarians, rather than historians, or ethnographers, rather than sociologists. And that it has had philologists, rather than linguists; petty lawyers and administrators, rather than jurists; and theologians and moralists, rather than politicians; but the strategic question: which is the ultimate object of the applied art and science of war and policy in general, has been constantly ignored. Instead, idealistic speeches, wishful thinking, fairy tales, pink novels and romantic poems occupy the official literature and speeches. Campion and Arana-Goiri do not escape this sad reality.

“In the political, economic and cultural conditions that followed the conquest of our Country by the French-Spanish imperialism, the absence of a proper and genuine school of social sciences is cruelly noted, and this has never been remedied. Instead, all the ‘Basque institutionalist’ factions: vitally linked to the French Spanish imperialistic régime of military occupation, have a glaring interest in keeping our Country in the cultural and ideological underdevelopment; which is the effect – and in its turn the cause – of political underdevelopment.

“Politically fettered, and ideologically gagged by international fascism, the Basque People has shown again, over the past fifty years corresponding to the Second Francoism, its strategic incapability to face French-Spanish imperialism. Its political intelligence: encumbered by the underdevelopment and perversion of culture, and dulled by the alien domination and the indigenous collaborationism, is now so deteriorated that it prevents it from understanding, when it needs it most, the very nature of policy and imperialism.

“Ideological absurdities and food for fools such as ‘the institutional path and armed struggle, non-violence, the right to life as a sacred and supreme value, dialogue and persuasion as means to solve political problems’ etc. do highlight the backwardness of the so-called political class with regard to the situation and real capacity of the People which they claim to represent, to which they have reduced to the ideological and political helplessness, division and nullity. They have thus ruined both the illegal and the legal resistance, which they have deprived of any strategic reference. The democratic revolution resulted in fascist reformism and electoral and parliamentary cretinism. ‘Institutional’ cretinism and ‘armed’ infantilism do not integrate two terms of a political alternative; they are, by a constitutive deficiency, the same thing.

“Faced to the imperialism and fascism, the institutional collaboration and the attempts do not have the slightest chance of success. The institutional path, which aims to tame the occupant through submission, collaboration and complicity in its crimes, only manages to increase the contempt that the servile and corrupt aborigines inspire the conqueror. As for the attempts, whose own inability makes them politically harmless, they do only exasperate the natural ferocity, irritation, impatience and xenophobic fury of the predator.

“The ‘institutional path’ and the ‘armed struggle’ were the lethal substitute offered to the Basque People by the bureaucracies that sought to lead it, after having abandoned and liquidated from the Pact of Munich (1962) the strategy of national institutionalization in which the democratic unity of its popular forces had been founded. A unity that had been possible only on the basis of strategic opposition to imperialism, and whose restoration: impossible starting from the liquidation of that opposition, has never been achieved ever since; there having been produced on the contrary the greatest division and most complete lack of communication between the members of the independence movement, along with unprecedented international disrepute. The basis for the consolidation of the second Francoism was thus established.

“Under such conditions, the new official ‘opposition’: from the traditional Pnv to the Eta (along with their several satellites, branches and agencies in general), do constitute a joint conglomerate. Their commonly used designations – imposed or accepted by them all – of ‘right-wing and left-wing abertzale’, show that their components do mutually recognize in their respective policy and ideology. The functional complementarity of ‘moderates and radicals’ makes them ideal ‘rivals’: each group arising as a remedy to the ineptitude and inability of the other.

“Both groups do produce and reproduce each other, and do feed on the genetic waterwheel of a continuous – if not perpetual – motion that produces supporters of ‘the armed struggle and revolutionary war’ with the disillusioned and desperate castoffs: frustrated, bounced and renegaded from ‘the institutional democratic path’; and that reproduces supporters of ‘the institutional path’ with the desperate and disillusioned castoffs: frustrated, bounced and renegaded from ‘the armed struggle and revolutionary war’. The institutional frustration propels the attempts. The failure of the attempts brings back to the institutional path. Asymmetrical and badly balanced recurrence, of an inevitable evolution and fatal outcome.

“The political sub-class in functions of collaboration has bled and exploited this Country for fifty years. Half a century of ‘institutional democratic way and revolutionary armed struggle’ has decimated the human, cultural and economic resources; obstructed and destroyed the conditions, means and sources of the political opposition; and concluded with all freedom of communication and critical expression, with all initiative and innovation, for the benefit of the ideological fanaticism, obscurantism, dogmatism, inertia and fascism. And if that wasn’t enough, ‘the institutional path and the armed struggle’ do also allow to hide the reality of the régime, serve its propaganda, dose the ‘democracy’, cultivate vain illusions of an imaginary political world, and develop the corruption, cronyism and creation of social layers entirely dependent of the ‘autonomous’ Administration and ready to anything so as to preserve it.

“The result is the collapse of the democratic process and the paralysis without remission of the forces of freedom; the freezing of its expansion, limited to the politically underdeveloped areas; and the inevitable demoralization of the masses, invariably frustrated and betrayed, reduced once more to expectations as false as disabling and catastrophic. The official opposition has disabled, demoralized and made look ridiculous the popular forces, up to take them to feel the burden of guilt and shame of their national identity. The multi-format Pnv-Eta corporate and bureaucratic octopus of ‘moderates and radicals’ has captured the social body between its tentacles, does insatiably devour its vital organs, consume its vital forces, and destroy beforehand all strategic virtuality.

“The ‘institutional path and the armed struggle’ are demonstrations and supplementary instruments of the incapability of the Basque People in order to gain access to the strategic level that allows it to be a real ideological and political agent. They are excuses, alibis, provocations that play into the hands of the State’s repression and Terrorism. Neither the ‘political and institutional path’ (i.e. the ‘elections’ etc. that the accomplices of the imperialism present as ‘democratic and non-violent’) nor its consequence, complement and corollary: ‘the armed struggle and the revolutionary war’ (which is to be understood as the individual attempts), neither together nor separated, have a strategic entity to fill the political vacuum against the fascist and imperialistic occupation and terrorism.

“Indeed, if there is no real political base for implementing a strategic opposition to imperialism, ‘the strategy of the armed struggle and the institutional path’ is an absurdity of pitiful consequences. And if such a base exists, then the absurdity is much greater and the consequences much more deplorable, serious and disastrous; but its added cost is an additional catastrophe that blocks up the routes of political consciousness, action and restoration. Both ‘ways’ exclude all real political alternative to fascism and imperialism. ‘Institutionalism’ and attempts are expression and result of the imperialistic military occupation and political conflict that oppress our Country; but they are also a product and alibi of the political incapability, and of the strategic submission, collaboration and complicity of the Pnv-Eta ‘Basque political class’.

“The ‘institutional path’ and its corollary and complement, ‘the armed struggle’, are not an error in the democratic policy of national liberation. They are the abandonment of the policy of national liberation, and the devious integration in the imperialistic policy of liquidation of the Basque People. They are the ruin of the very idea of national freedom and democracy, the falsification of the fundamental and inherent right of self-determination of all Peoples, in order to adapt it to the régime – that they describe as democratic and non-violent at the same time – through its fraudulent replacement by a ‘right to decide’ that they have invented, in a vain effort to obtain the benevolence and approval of the imperialism towards a project ‘compatible’, acceptable, reconcilable, negotiable, recuperable and assimilable for what they call ‘the State’, that is: the French and Spanish imperialistic and fascist States that aboriginal collaborationists and accomplices of the imperialism recognize as their own ones. They are a death trap, a dead-end without exit nor hope of finding it.

“The ‘institutional path and the armed struggle’ do not lead to the national freedom of the Basque People, they inexorably lead to its liquidation. Their supporters have reduced the Basque popular forces to a strategic ruin. The result of half a century of strategic sabotage is the ideological and political defencelessness of the Basque People: without a pilot, compass or rudder, it is a cork at the mercy of the waves in the sea of imperialism. Half a century of lies, futile delusions and vain hopes have led to their own, inevitable and terrible consequences.

“Such procedures are the product of a fantastic view of policy and a romantic view of history, which turns the own experience into a useless one and ignores or misrepresents the example of the others. The ‘big Pnv’: all its satellites included, is the auxiliary, necessary, sold or manipulated instrument, which the imperialism has used to maintain the Basque People in the strategic subservience and inactivity during that decisive period. The real objective of the Pnv and its satellites, under cover of the established régime, is the quench, exhaustion, freezing and corruption of the Basque People’s popular forces.” (Excerpt from Chapter XXVI – ‘Ideology of the collaboration: “institutional path and armed struggle” (XXVI)’.)

 Epilogue: In the face of this emergency situation, it is absolutely necessary to achieve the strategic unity of all the forces of democratic opposition against imperialism. A strategic unity that can only be carried about in an also strategic function, that is: around a strategic and fundamental – non-partial or secondary – objective or purpose that makes it possible the accumulation of all those democratic forces, unanimous in its acceptance; whereas its rejection can only be done by the sectors committed to maintaining the positions of imperialism, which will fatally leave them exposed. And the only strategic and fundamental purpose that the subjugated Basque People has posed before it today is to be able to exercise its Self-Determination, that is: to achieve the liquidation of the Spanish and French imperialistic régime of military occupation, and the restoration of its own State: the Kingdom of Nabarre; which will allow it to guarantee its national survival as one more actor on the international scene, on an equal footing with all the Peoples of the World.

Now then, it is not possible to cope with imperialism if the fundamental – theoretical, ideological and political – concepts of a democratic opposition: which must necessarily be based on the defence of the fundamental human rights (and above all the right of self-determination of the subjugated Peoples, as well as the independence and integrity of their States legitimately constituted upon that principle), are constantly being falsified, distorted or ignored. The current “official Basque political class” is made up, at best, of absolute ignoramuses and incompetents on all these fundamental issues; the worst thing is that, moreover, they are corrupt persons that are economicaly, ideologically and symbiotically integrated into the régime of military occupation to which, whatever happens, they do not get tired of comforting and recognizing as “legitimate, democratic” etc. Without getting rid of that clique of scoundrels and/or incompetents, a national liberation policy is not possible.

“A class war: originally designed for industrial society and aborted there, has become the dominant pattern of international relations between the established ‘democracies’ and the third world.” (Reinhold Niebuhr, in ‘The international class struggle’; ‘The Irony of American History’, 1952.)

Imperialism is the class struggle at an international level: it is the domination and exploitation of one country for another one. And the imperialistic Nationalism: Nationalism in the strict sense, consists in addition in the destruction of the dominated Nation and the imposition on it of the national characteristics of the oppressive nation. Therefore, under the conditions established in a subjugated Country by a National-imperialistic and fascist régime of military occupation: as it is the Spanish ant the French one over the Basque People and its State, and until our national liberation and State restoration be achieved, there can only be a place for two real parties, namely: that of the integration into the criminal totalitarian power, on the one hand (with all its various avatars “on the right and on the left”), which leans on the military occupying forces and camouflages itself as “democratic” behind a papier mâché facade that hides the true imperialistic reality; and that of the Resistance, on the other, whose objective is and can only be to achieve the expulsion of the occupying forces: the decisive factor and pre-condition for implementing our Self-Determination or national Independence.

However, the agents of the Pnv-Eta liquidationist bureaucracy: in addition to establishing the ideological-strategic erring ways of admitting the fascist regime of military occupation as democracy, they enhance the internal partisan division of the subjugated People; so they manage to necessarily ruin the strategic unity around the aforementioned fundamental objective of Self-Determination or Independence of the Basque People. This is not strange at all, this being an objective and a concept in which the components of these mafia bureaucracies do not believe, and that they have in fact abandoned and replaced them with “the electoral contest, the ballot boxes and the vote” within the occupying State and its fascist régime that they recognize as “their own, non-Nationalistic, non-violent, legitimate and democratic”, and in which all they want is to “feel comfortable in Spain”: disputing each other and aiming only to get the salaries and rackets on which they depend to live and thrive; all of which they call “deepening in Basque democracy” and which really means the destruction of the Basque People.

Those who weaken our People: by boosting and making possible its internal partisan division under imperialism, are working to perpetuate the domination of the imperialism of Spain and France over it; this is the verification of a fact, and it is incontrovertible. Only after its liberation from imperialism, and once its national freedom is effective and assured, can a formerly subdued Country afford partisan division in its own FREE ELECTIONS. Until then, and in the face of this baneful internal divisionism, the strategic unity of the democratic opposition popular forces demands that they be gathered together in a National Resistance Movement: composed of all sectors of that democratic opposition; which can maintain their own personality, but sharing and defending all of them at this historical stage, as a single soul, two unique fundamental principles, complementary and absolutely inseparable.

These are principles that, being the very foundation of an authentic Democracy AND PRECISELY FOR BEING SO, they are nevertheless totally unacceptable and unrecoverable by imperialism and its ideological and political agents: whether they be open and sincere as those “good” native Renegades who do not hide their hatred of the Basque People; or covered up, as the “nice Basques” that are unequivocally Spanish and/or French Nationalists, and that behind their disgusting chit-chat, try to hide something that is evident and that they know perfectly well, namely: that there is not and cannot be any place for the Basque People and its language in the National-Imperialistic ecosystem of Spain and of France. Let’s look at a typical example:

“AUTONOMY... YES! (We already have it on both sides of the Pyrenees.) INDEPENDENCE NO!!!! [...] An independent Basque Country and tomorrow it is a fraternal war guaranteed as Tito's Yugoslavia ... Everything works very well as well. We don’t touch anything anymore.... and we live in harmony... autonomous.” (Fabien Oyhanetche.)

About the cry of this pack of “common curs, whose breath I hate as reek o’ the rotten fens, whose loves I prize as the dead carcases of unburied men that do corrupt my air”, and that is the voice of their master, we could also say together with the poet: “You are not to be taught / That you have many enemies, that know not / Why they are so; but, like to village curs, / Bark when their fellows do.” (W. Shakespeare.) See, in this regard, our work entitled ‘Indigenous Agents of imperialistic Nationalism: Renegades and Collaborationists’.

Instead, and on the contrary, these principles are absolutely understandable and immediately acceptable to all Basque popular forces of the democratic opposition. There are but only two principles whose maintenance does condition and allow the strategic unity of the popular forces for the establishment of this Movement of Resistance and National Salvation, which do incorporate in our favour all the democratic and strategic potentiality of the International Law. These principles are and can only be:

1/ Affirmation of the right of freedom, FREE disposition, national independence or self-determinationof the Basque People/Euskal Herria.

“Cornerstone of democracy”, the international right of self-determination or independence of all Peoples is a right that is original, fundamental, inherent, customary, immediate, unconditional, continuous, permanent, inalienable, indefeasible and imprescriptible for all Peoples subjugated under an imperialistic and foreign régime; that is the same thing as their unconditional and immediate independence in the face of/against any foreign domination or interference contrary to their national freedom; and that has been recognized – not constituted – by the contemporary International Law of the United Nations: from the First Article of its foundational Charter of San Francisco as well as by numerous and relevant Resolutions of its General Assembly, as THE FIRST OF FUNDAMENTAL HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE PRECONDITION FOR THE FULL ENJOYMENT OF THEM ALL.

Its corollary and practical application consists, as an inescapable requirement for its realization, in the DEMAND FOR THE UNCONDITIONAL AND IMMEDIATE EVACUATION of all the occupying forces and of the entire apparatus of imperialistic-colonialist subjugation of the occupying Powers: Spain and France, OUTSIDE the historical Territories of the Basque People and its State. And

2/ Affirmation of the continuity, validity and continuity of our own State: the Kingdom of Nabarre, successor of the Kingdom of Pamplona – “the Kingdom of the Basques” – constituted by a confederation of Vasconic Republics, Counties and Lordships historically and freely gathered around it. Internationally recognized for a thousand years, the Kingdom of Nabarre remains the sole State of the Basque Nation, and which it has never renounced to nor has ever admitted or recognized any other.

Its necessary consequence implies the constant and incessant NON-RECOGNITION AND DENUNCIATION of the occupying States: the “Kingdom of Spain” and the “French Republic”, and of their totalitarian régimes of military occupation, as criminal, imperialistic, colonialist and fascist, and not as their own, non-Nationalist, non-violent, legitimate and democratic, as the purported “official Basque political class” formed by the liquidationist bureaucracy Pnv-Eta and its satellites is doing to this day.

At the same time, as long as French-Spanish imperialism does not withdraw from our Country its occupying forces (given that they CONSTITUTE the essential and fundamental element of its strategic apparatus of domination, without which its entire system collapses), and since it is not possible to carry out an anti-imperialistic policy with the help of the imperialists and fascists, that is: the fifth-columnists agents at the service of that imperialism infiltrated among the subjugated Basque People (who, while refusing to publicly assume these principles that affirm our national rights, do on the contrary affirm their own “right of imperialism and of military occupation” over our People and State), the corollary and practical application of these two principles implies maintaining a TOTAL BOYCOTT:

– to any collaboration with any individual or collective person which, by rejecting either in whole or in part, in theory or in practice one or both fundamental principles mentioned above, do objectively – some of them even in an open and confessed way – form part of that imperialism; and

– to any participation both in the institutions of the French-Spanish colonialist and fascist régime of military occupation, and especially in their imperialistic juridical monopolies or “parliaments”: Spanish Cortes Generales and French Parliament (established over the centuries through their real and primary constitution: the Monopoly of criminal Violence and the Terror of war and State, and countless and imprescriptible constitutive crimes against the Basque People and State); as well as in their totalitarian “general elections” that “legitimize” all this.

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

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

Army of occupation not even with music!

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

TOTAL BOYCOTT OF THE IMPERIALISTS AND FASCISTS, AND THEIR RÉGIME OF MILITARY OCCUPATION!  –  AWAY WITH THEM!

LONG LIVE THE FREE BASQUE PEOPLE!!!