Imperialism, fascism and ideology (IX)
IX – Imperialism, fascism and ideology
Iñaki Aginaga and Felipe Campo
All imperialistic political régime, which established its power through criminal Violence, has now an increasingly imperative ideological need of legitimizing its power and hiding the role of that violence in history and society; and the modern totalitarian ideology provides it remedy to that imperative need. Its ideologists must therefore mask and conceal the reality, that is: the origin, foundation and nature of criminal Violence of the political régime thus established and preserved, which they do on the contrary present as a “legitimate and democratic” one. Criminally violent origin, foundation and nature that are replaced – in the corresponding ideological delirium created by those ideologists – through a social order without violence: not only as something utopian which is aimed to but as an already current, existing and effective project.
This is why the monopolies of propaganda of the imperialistic and fascist power: inseparable from the effective policy of criminal Violence and oppression that results from its monopoly of Violence, do try to hide the reality, and to prevent, blame and condemn all Resistance against that policy; making making believe the subjugated Peoples that the dominant violence does not exist, and that the imperialism serves values of justice, peace, love and good feelings excluding all kind of violence. To the brute force and unreason (of the others) they oppose “the non-violence, reason and culture” of the henchmen of modern imperialistic and fascist Nationalism; and do present what they call “the State” and the policy as organizations and activities “incompatible with violence”.
The wars of aggression and conquest, the destruction of the political institutions of the attacked People, the permanent aggression and occupation of its State, the crimes of war, against peace and against humanity, the war and State terrorism, the murders of masses, the negation, contempt and repression of all historical and fundamental human rights (and in the first place of the right of self-determination or independence of Peoples, first of human rights and precondition for the full enjoyment of them all, according to International Law): all of them procedures with which French-Spanish imperialism has established its domination over the Basque People and its State, all this must disappear from the collective consciousness through the work of the dominant ideology. Mission only possible if there are given those same conditions that are being attempted to be hidden, namely: the totalitarian monopoly of criminal Violence, and the monopoly of mental conditioning, which is its consequence.
The French-Spanish imperialism needs to present the thus founded and preserved domination as “non-violent, non-nationalistic, free and democratic”; and all resistance to it as “aggressive, nationalistic, violent and fascist”: such is the real and constant objective of the agents of conditioning, propaganda and ideological intoxication of masses. In this regard, let us see how has been described the linguistic conflict, which is generally concomitant with the political conflict in an enterprise of National-imperialistic domination over another Nation:
“This way something really perverse is achieved: the authentic radical nationalist is presented as a defender of openness, universality, knowledge, coexistence and progress, since he is speaker of the good language, of the superior language; whereas the person who – using simply the common sense and knowledge that overcomes prejudices so vulgar and simplistic as those seen before – appreciates his language and culture and refuses to admit that both (language and culture) are inferior or worse than those which are presented as superior, is considered a nationalist blinded by an irrational sense of self-complacency and selfishness.” “For this reason the linguistic Spanish nationalism is characterized, in an insolent display of cynicism, by deeming itself as non-nationalist, and by branding as nationalists those who refuse to acknowledge that their languages and cultures are inferior or of a lesser importance or value.” (J.C. Moreno Cabrera; ‘Errores y horrores del españolismo lingüístico’, Ed. Txalaparta, 2015.)
As it is evident, the reality reflected by these accurate words of the linguist from Madrid on the “supremacist and radical” – according to his terminology– Nationalism in the field of language, has its inevitable correspondence, exacerbated to the paroxysm, in the political manifestations of the imperialistic and fascist French-Spanish Nationalism, maintained by the permanent military occupation of our Country and State, the Kingdom of Nabarre, for at least eight centuries.
There is no place for talking of “human rights, non-violence, freedom, democracy, tolerance, dialogue and respect for everyone’s ideas” – and other obsessive and repetitive issues of the fascist-monopolist propaganda – if one does not begin precisely from, if are being forgotten, side-lined or presented as water under the bridge: the imperialistic war, conquest, occupation, repression and Terrorism, the violation of all fundamental rights, and the colonialist policy of spoliation and of racial, linguistic and cultural genocide. All ideology that does not start from the theoretical and practical recognition and condemnation of these terrible facts; any reduction of the current infra-structure and supra-structure of imperialism and fascism to a kind of theoretical controversy unrelated to current reality: a controversy that supposedly would be being held freely and between equals in a peaceful and non-violent society, is a particularly devious and hypocritical instrument of imperialistic and fascist propaganda. Any ambiguity in this matter is already an act of submission and complicity with the imperial-totalitarian régime.
“The Duke [of Alba] threatened those [Nabarrese] who did not submit with ‘making war with fire and blood’. (…) A new herald reiterated then the threats of the Duke. If they did not surrender he would attack the city [Pamplona] and treat its inhabitants as schismatic, ‘without mercy, with fire and blood’.”
“Navarre is so low in its fancy after your Most Reverend Lordship commanded to overthrow the walls [the ramparts of Pamplona and of the Kingdom’s castles], that there is no man who dares raise his head. [...] because it was a hard thing to provide keeping men in arms for every place. In this way the Kingdom cannot be more subjugated and more subjected, and none in that Kingdom will have the boldness or temerity for to rise up in rebellion.” (Letter from Colonel Villalba to Cardinal Cisneros; 1515.)
“If this peace [Peace of Basel] was followed by the union of the [Basque] Provinces and the rest of the Nabarre without the statutory barriers that separate them and make of them almost a dead member of the Kingdom, Your Grace would have achieved one of those great works that we haven’t seen since the times of Cardinal Cisneros or the great Philip V. [...] We will have enough forces on the spot for getting it made without firing a shot and without a soul who dares to reject it.” (Letter from Counsellor Zamora to Godoy; 1795.)
“It is necessary to create an atmosphere of terror; we’ve got to leave the feeling of domination by eliminating without any scruple or hesitation anyone who does not think like us. We’ve got to make a great impression, everyone who is openly or secretly a defender of the Popular Front is to be shot.” (General Mola in Pamplona; Instruction reserved, Base 5th; “Navarre 1936: from hope to terror”.)
“Let us not be talked about rights. We do not recognize any right except that of conquest. [...] Biscay is again a part of Spain for pure and simple military conquest. The sword of Franco has definitely solved the dispute. In these tragic hours of national Crusade, the Germany of Hitler, the Italy of Mussolini and the Portugal of Oliveira Salazar stand with us.” (Areilza in Bilbao; 1937.) Etc. etc.
Although, in the first moments of euphoria, the success of the criminal aggression is shown brutally or cynically – as we’ve seen – with a sincere authenticity (it’s the so-called “ideology of reality”), however, the recklessness of such expansive pleasures ends up being visible for the most warned between the agents of the imperialism. The need to modulate a better adapted response is then felt among those responsible for producing the so-called “ideology of illusion”, aimed to manufacture the myths and delusions that make it possible to hide the Violence, Terror and crimes that constitute the reality of the régime thus imposed, and to establish in its place as real a forged “agreed, legal and rightful, peaceful, legitimate, democratic and non-violent” foundation; which keeps also in line with the alienated fantasies of the dominated Peoples/classes, consisting of ignoring or refusing to see the reality of criminal imposition, and of presenting it as the result of false “agreements” and illusions that can make it bearable.
In the ideology proper to imperialism and fascism: constituted by the integration of the thinking activity into the ends and means of the Nationalist-totalitarian wholeness, the ideology of reality – for the necessary internal use of the ruling classes – is accompanied with the ideology of illusion, elaborated first of all for the others to believe it. This ideological unfolding is materialized in the division between the spiritual and the material work, in the organic division between “the ideologists of illusion and the ideologists of reality”, and between the monopolies and departments of propaganda and those of Violence, respectively.
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; 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” between the two kinds of labour does also occur through and inside of the groups and individuals.)
In principle, the ideological food for fools of the imperialistic and fascist propaganda is reserved to the classes dominated and weakened by the effect of the terrorist repression and the psychological conditioning of masses. Repression, obscurantism, and a single system of thinking/values make that the material weakness of the oppressed is also accompanied with their mental weakness. Yet, to some extent and as a result of the bad faith, this also extends increasingly to the ruling classes themselves that wield the monopolies of Violence and propaganda; whose leaders and propagandists: betrayed sometimes by their own mental weakness, seem to believe themselves the nonsense that they have to say so as to deceive the dominated peoples, since it is humanly impossible to clearly separate their own ideas (which must be kept in close correspondence with the harsh reality and with the correlative ideology of reality), from those that they have invented for the others to believe them and that correspond to the ideology of ilusion.
Indeed, the rulers, ideologists and officials of the imperial-totalitarian régime are of course cynical, hypocritical and bad-faith deceivers, liars and slanderers, but they do not always feign to believe the reactionary drivel they utter, since to some extent they end up in believing it themselves, and do not seem to have a full or clear awareness of the functional nonsense that they daily utter in this regard. Which rather increases their efficiency and makes them even more dangerous, because believing it is the best way they have for making others to believe it. As it is evident, no one gets to deceive the others better than he who, being himself deceived, believes the lies that he affirms. Paradoxically, this is also another more obstacle added for the rational and democratic criticism, because this one is much easier to perform in front of “pure” criminals and cheats: who are aware of their own fraudstery condition, than against those who are already befuddled by their own propaganda and that somehow are “sincere believers” of it, which puts them out of reach of that criticism.
The imperialistic and fascist ideological illusion is produced or consumed according to two psychological modalities: the conscious and deliberate lie and falsification of reality, on the one hand; and the spontaneous or hetero-induced ignorance and error, on the other; which are the pure forms of the ideology of illusion. Both of them get dissolved, blended and blurred on the vast beaches of the bad faith: a consequence of the “bad, miserable or painful conscience”; which leads their subjects – at the same time agents and patients of their own propaganda – to ignore what they don’t want to know, thereby avoiding calculatedly and cautiously the media and sources of information and interpretation that might upset their social adaptation and their individual and collective “good” conscience.
“Illusions do us the service of sparing us painful feelings, and allow us to experience satisfying feelings instead. We must nevertheless foresee that one day they might arrive to collide with the reality, and then the best thing we can do is accept their destruction without regret and without recriminations.” It is what happens with the belief – maintained by the scientific community and civilization – in universal pacifism, solidarity and rationality (“Alle Menschen werden Brüder / Wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt”), when there occurs that such values are consciously or unconsciously used as ways to hide or gainsay the imperialistic reality. In such cases the disappointment “is not justified, because it boils down to the destruction of an illusion”.
Now then, inevitably, the splitting of the National-imperialistic consciousness: so that the subject can ensconce himself in an idealistic and ideologically rigged reality (with the consequent escapism towards a distorted consciousness as a resource of self-delusion), is a syndrome of structural and permanent social-mental contradiction. The variants and consequences of that distortion of reality, for the health and general psychological equilibrium of the individual, are also asymmetrically located depending on the position occupied by the subject within the established political and social complex: either as a member of the dominant People, or as a member of the dominated one.
The ideology of illusion: relevant in the services of propaganda and in the apparent “Highest Bodies of the State”, in the General Assemblies of the Institutions, and the administrative or judicial bureaucracy of the imperial-totalitarian power, does rarefy – up to disappear – in the “lower” bodies of the apparatus of political violence; which, precisely,are the real foundation of the political régime. Indeed – even taking into account the need to maintain the ideology of the illusion and “the division between material and spiritual labour” – there is little, scarce or no margin at all left for “the sparing of painful feelings and the enjoyment of satisfactory feelings” in the members who perform an “intervention” of the armed forces, or who take part in the tasks of a torture chamber, in a firing squad, or in the brutal suppression of the Basque political dissidence. Such actions constitute the banal, honest, lucid and sincere expression-confession of a genuine and effective national and political conscience that corresponds to the Fench-Spanish imperialism on the Basqu People; they are a constant manifestation of hatred, aggression and contempt towards the subjected Peoples, thus recognized as different; and they leave little room for the illusionist and spiritualist ideological intoxication of the military, civil, or ecclesiastical propaganda services; which, each time with a lesser conviction, do appeal to a hypocrite “coexistence and plurality in mutual love and respect” that are absolutely impossible, under the Spanish and French National-imperialistic régime.
Be that as it may, in the dominant social group the ideology of the illusion is always subordinate, controlled and kept at bay by the ideology of the reality, because its reckless distribution “for the own consumption” would endanger the political régime. Evidently, that kind of illusions, that is: the official negationism of State Violence, “the condemnation of all violence whether it come from where it may come”, or the postulated non-violence of the institutions, would be a mortal danger to the system itself and their implementation would mean the radical and immediate end, the suicide of the States, which are precisely based on that Violence. No modern totalitarian order could survive if its leaders and “active members” would truly believe and – above all – put themselves into practice what their ideologists do invent and preach for the others to believe it. But there is no danger of that happening, because, although its ideologists may functionally toe out of the trail and say absurdities when needed, however the Bureaucracy and Administration of the imperialism, until the last official, do know very well where they are and what for; as anyone who in our Basque Country has dealt with them has been able to verify widely.
Actually, those – “non-violence” etc. – are ideas in which their propagandists themselves do not believe, or do not believe anymore: their policy and even their own statements do prove it widely. The mentioned negationism of the criminal Violence of the imperialistic State does not affect in the least to its monopoly of Violence and Terror of masses, or to the monopoly of propaganda that accompanies it, since that “illusionist” propaganda is reserved for the dominated and weakened social classes, whose capacity of criticism and spirit of Resistance disappeared long ago as a result of the mass terrorist repression and psychological conditioning.
The romantic tales and the functional lies about the non-violent nature of the established French-Spanish imperialistic régime have their limits in the general structure of class dominationand production/exploitation; a structure whose international species is the colonialist imperialism. In any case, once the aims of the Nationalist-imperialistic-colonialist enterprise have been established and accepted, the need to carry out the real repression against the Resistance makes the sectors in charge of this repression: imbued with the ideology of reality, laugh at their own formally proclaimed norms and legality (corresponding to the ideology of illusion), over which there always prevail the effective Violence and Terror; procedures that always find the comprehensive acceptance – and the correlative rejection and refusal to admit any proof of State Terrorism, however obvious it may be – by the colonialist population, agent of imperialist Nationalism.
Metropolitan judges and population: indoctrinated by the monopolies of mass ideological intoxication of the criminal French-Spanish imperialistic Nationalism, refuse to admit the existence of these “alleged excesses”, as they call them. Yet, the torture is an institution inseparable from despotism, and does by itself reveal the terrorist nature of a political activity or régime. It is, above all, an invaluable element of Terrorism to physically and morally crushand humiliate the Peoples who resist oppression. It’s only hypocrisy the “condemnation” of torture formulated by all those who, at the same time, do support the occupation and colonization régime which makes it possible, necessary and effective.
After having pointed out both the fundamental falsification that the imperialism and fascism need (namely: affirming the democratic, peaceful and non-violent nature of the established régime), as well as the ways of imbuing that falsification in the dominated classes, we will to expose next, in their true reality, some fundamental concepts that are being systematically subjected to such manipulation.
Policy is the determination of social behaviour by means of violence. All political reality – the same as its warlike and juridical species – consists in the determination in the social behaviour by means of violence; and all political history, in its evolution. The one and the other are inserted in the general rapport of forces and in its strategic expression, within the historical and social whole which settles them. All social group, either is capable of realizing itself as an agent in this dimension, or suffers an inescapable process of widespread liquidation.
Persons and Peoples may maintain legitimate or illegitimate, just or criminal attitudes and demands; but, with regard to the way in which they present these demands, persons and Peoples are not sorted as good/just or bad/criminal but as strong or weak, that is: capable or incapable of wielding or opposing against others the actual and virtual violence that ensures them viabilityfor their aspirations and survival.
And this is so because in the real world in which we live, in which “Imperialism is a perennial problem of human existence, for powerful nations and individuals inevitably tend to use the weak as instruments of their purposes”, the moral exhortations of the oppressed and righteous in the face of the criminal imperialistic predator are of no use, if they are not accompanied by a sufficient capacity for social violence: either the warlike of the armies, or the revolutionary one of a National Resistance of a strategic level.
Chatillon [Ambassador from the King of France]. Philip of France, in right and true behalf / Of thy deceased brother Geffrey’s son, / Arthur Plantagenet, lays most lawful claim / To this fair island and the territories, / To Ireland, Poitiers, Anjou, Touraine, Maine; / Desiring thee to lay asidethe sword / Which sways usurpingly these several titles, / And put the same into young Arthur’s hand, / The nephew and right royal sovereign.
King John. What follows if we disallow of this?
Chatillon. The proud control of fierce and bloody war, / To enforce these rights so forcibly withheld. Etc. (W. Shakespeare; ‘The life and death of King John’; I, i, 7-18.)
Exeter [Ambassador from the King of England]. [...] And when you find him evenly deriv’d / From his most fam’d of famous ancestors: / Edward the Third, he bids you then resign / Your crown and kingdom, indirectly held / From him the native and true challenger.
French King [Charles VI]. Or else what follows?
Exeter. Bloody constraint; for if you hide the crown / Even in your hearts, there will he rake for it. (W. Shakespeare, ‘The life of King Henry V’; II, iv, 91-98.)
When, after having raised a legitimate claim, the response received from its recipient offender is either the direct refusal (which is the normal answer for a criminal), or mere elusive evasions that – as these examples show with answers such as “what follows if we disallow of this? – are a prelude to the refusal, the alternative given to those answers is decisive to know whether, from then on, one is entering in the field of policy: which either it is strategy or otherwise it is nothing at all; or, on the contrary, one remains within the realm of prayers, religion, ethics, anthropology or ethnology, speculation about myths, psychiatric therapy in the face of frustration or other escapisms towards the pseudo or extra-political incapacitation:
"The Basque Country is not only a geography but the people who inhabit it; a people, and a people that naturally has its history, a very old history, so much so that there is not a single ethnic group in all Europe that has clearer contours than the Basque. This means that we constitute, among many other types of plants and flowers of which a garden is composed, a different genus of flower or plant that has the right to life like the others, [...]. This one is a care entrusted to us, and even more so if there is someone who wants to make it disappear so that any other flower may be better seen. We do not ask that any flower be cut but that they let ours live. (Jose Miguel Barandiaran, 1974.)
Now then, for one hundred and fifty years, after having lost the Wars of National Independence – wrongly called “Carlist” – and having been abolished our foral residues in 1876 through the imposition in our Country of the Spanish imperialistic Nationalism by means of its armies and the monopoly of its criminal Violence, the purported “Basque intelligentsia and nationalist political class”: plunged into a serious intellectual, moral and political crisis, have shown themselves to be absolutely incapable both of understanding the nature of the situation of military defeat and totalitarian integration to which the Basque People has been subjected under the French-Spanish imperialism, as well as of finding the adequate ideological-political-strategic response that our situation and circumstances demand.
On the contrary, those “Basque intellectuals and nationalist politicians” have been constantly debating with themselves and to this day in a nostalgic, metaphoric, romantic, self-indulged and impotent evocation/vindication of our national personality. A vindication that they do base either on mythology, on the repetitive and sterile contemplation/celebration of glorious past deeds, on the history of our People pitifully deformed – which some do currently call “narrative” – and recuperated by indigenous ideologists, “historians” and agents that do fatally move within the imperialistic universe, on traditions, folklore and historical rights, on justice and morality, or – again – on an armed, suicidal and pseudo-revolutionary neo-Carlist “insurrectionary tremendousness”. But with the particularity that they do all this while always and invariably remaining themselves on a politically infrastrategic level, that is: without ever reaching the anti-imperialistic policy and strategy that our current situation requires and that they replace with those ersatz, radically unsufficient – when not counter-productive – to confront the French-Spanish colonialist and fascist imperialism, whose supreme aspiration is the liquidation of our Country and of course of our national language, Euskara.
(See our work: ‘La burocracia Pnv-Eta, o “las familias políticas abertzales”. Su evolución y degradación: desde concepciones erróneas o infrastratégicas, hasta su conversión en una mafia liquidacionista’. [The Pnv-Eta bureaucracy, or “the abertzale political families”. Its evolution and degradation: from erroneous or infrastrategic conceptions, to its conversion into a liquidationist mafia].)
Not only have they shown a kind of specific genius for the strategic incapacitation and even for the understanding of the very nature of policy but, since the early sixties of the twentieth century, they have also maintained an absolute rejection and hostility towards those who posed this reality to them and offered them the only possible alternative for the liberation of our People. So as to finish making this liberation totally impossible, and for almost half a century now: at least since 1977-1979, the political response adopted by the liquidationist bureaucracy Pnv-Eta and its satellites – currently Ea-Ehbildu-Sortu-Geroa bai and the rest of trade unions and cultural associations that give them cover – has been to assume as their own that of the States of Francespain and that of French-Spanish imperialism; especially in its National-socialist/communist version represented by the PsF, Falange-Ugt-PsoE and their social-imperialistic offshoots. Imperialistic and fascist States that do militarily occupy our Country, but which all those “Basque nationalists” bureaucracies have accepted as democratic and their own since the Spanish intra-totalitarian transition to the Second Francoism, in which they have integrated themselves, and whose corruption and salariesthey participate in and on which they are sustained to this day.
Yet, as is evident, this integration into Francespain that those bureaucracies have accepted implies not only tacit but also express acceptance of its formal “Constitutions” and laws: all legitimate and democratic according to them; which, along with their imperialistic Supreme Courts, jurisprudence, parties and propaganda, do officially and categorically deny the existence of the Basque People and its State, as well as their international and imprescriptible rights of self-determination or independence of all Peoples, and of integrity and independence of their legitimate constituted States, affirming on the contrary that we the Basques are Spanish or French. Its liquidation of the Basque Nation is total.
In short, they have shown themselves to be absolutely incapable of understanding that policy does not begin where freedom, dialogue, peace, justice and love of neighbour and among Peoples do begin, in which they have been trusting for a century and a half. Quite to the contrary, policy begins where such things have ended or where they have never existed; as is the case of French-Spanish imperialism over the Basque People and its confederate State, the Kingdom of Nabarre. Policy tries to respond to the problems that exist in the world which we live in, where there are imperialistic offenders and criminals who subjugate and destroy Peoples and their cultures and who are to be confronted; not to the problems that are supposed to exist in the Limbo of the Fathers, or of the fools, or of the lunatics.
Policy is defined by the means that constitute it, that is: actual or virtual violence. This violence, obviously, should not necessarily be understood as a puntual, insurrectionary and “explosive” act to be carried out against the established despotic power, when – given a certain imbalance of forces – doing such a thing is neither possible nor desirable because it is equivalent to suicide. Quite distinctly, political violence manifests itself and is implied in the real capacity to build a strategic accumulation of social forces – either warlike or of political Resistance – capable of founding the alternative aimed at the achievement of the end that is being pursued, against the power that prevents/denies it. If the answer/alternative chosen and posed in the face of that power does not imply such a strategic accumulation of social violence: capable of forcing it to modify its behaviour despite its recalcitrant refusal to do so, then there may well be an exhortation to moral or religious imperatives – or perhaps science, history or literature – but not policy.
Violence is not just “one more means – whether valid or not – of policy”; it is not merely a form of political action; it is not “compatible or incompatible” with policy: it is its specific and constitutive means. Violence is the specific means of policy, not a simple accessory. As for the ends, they are political insofar they have violence as means of their achieving, and cease being so if those means that constitute policy are no longer used. “The decisive means in policy is violence.” “What is at issue here is the means.”
Policy is not “compatible or incompatible” with violence: is made up of it. The ideologists of the imperialistic régime, within their task in the service of the ideology of illusion spread by the monopolies of indoctrination, stultification and ideological intoxication of masses, affirm that violence and policy are incompatible. Yet, violence and policy are not incompatible; they not even are properly compatible: violence isconstitutiveof policy. Policy consists of actual and virtual violence, which determines the behaviour and ideas of those who are subjects to it.
Policy and non-violence are incompatible: without violence, there is no policy. A non-violent policy is a contradiction in terms, a vacuous attempt against all formal or general logic, and a hypocritical denial of the most evident reality, whose consequences are always suffered by the weak and the helpless. There is no possible opposition between violent policy and non-violent policy. One policy may or may not oppose another one; but it cannot, without formal contradiction, be opposed to violence.
The “non-violent democrats” advocate non-violence and democracy at the same time; but democracy is the political power of the People, namely: its violence. It is impossible to differentiate one policy from another one by their means, that is: by the presence or absence of violence, because, however different their ends may be, they all use the same means. The distinctions that could be established between democracy and despotism, between the defensive and the aggressive actions, between the “good” violence and the “bad” one, are completely irrelevant in this respect: violence is violence, and therefore all the behaviours involving violence are – ontologically – seamlessly identical with regard to such means.
Democracy (demo-kratía = power of the people, in Greek) is also a “cracy”, and therefore does not consist in non-violence: it consists in violence, the same as any political régime. Yet, Despotism, Imperialism and Fascism do not consist simply of violence: they consist of criminal Violence, exercised in violation and persecution of fundamental human rights. The distinction between the policy of Democracy and that of imperialistic and fascist Despotism, as regards their respective recourse to actual or virtual violence, is established:
a) qualitatively by their respective ends: when they are democratic, violence is licit since it is exercised in defence of the fundamental human rights against those who seek to violate them, and above all in defence of the right of self-determination or independence of all Peoples: first of fundamental human rights and precondition of them all, according to the International Law formulated by the United Nations’ Organization. And when the ends are despotic, violence is criminal since it is exercised for the destruction/violation of those rights; and
b) quantitatively by the differential doses: respectively controlled or uncontrolled that occur in both systems of policy.
All policy – either democratic or despotic/imperialistic – is constituted as such by strategic reference: by the project, conquest, distribution, organization and realization of social violence in strategic function; apart from this, there is no policy. The political action is strategy; and the key-issue of policy consists in the strategic implementation of a dynamic accumulation of forces capable to establishing themselves in order to achieve pre-determined political objectives, namely: the modification of the rapport of forces in presence. A policy-strategy will be democratic only if it succeeds in make this modification in favour of the subjugated Peoples/classes; otherwise, the policy-strategy will be imperialistic-colonialist.
If the constituent violence of policy succeeds in imposing itself in an indisputable and monopolistic way, it decrees then its positive law, consisting of a social order of violence whose only alternatives are anarchy or war. “Also the ancients (the wisest among them) knew that the origin of law is violence; that law is a function of violence.” (Yevgeny Zamyatin; ‘We’, 1921.)
Law is the determination of the condition and behaviour of the subjects by means of the monopoly of violence. So, law: a species of the policy, consists of a social order of violence. Law is a political order, which is not the same thing as the traditional idealistic conception of a normativist “juridical order”. All law is constituted by violence. Without violence there is no policy, nor law, nor human rights: fundamental rights do not exist. Therefore, opposing law or human rights to violence is also formally absurd. Violence is constitutive of all policy and of all law. “Law is not a non-coercive order, as a utopian anarchism would want.”
The actual or effective violence is the foundation of the virtual or potential violence, which is a necessary part and complement of all law. The violence (actual or virtual), the sanction and the penalty do not follow the crime: do precede and constitute it. Against what the dominant ideology and its – idealistic, illusionist, hypocritical, contradictory and official – auxiliary version of policy and law do aim to make believe, the violence does not “intervene” belatedly “so as to support, defend or restore the threatened or violated law”; it is not an occasional, circumstantial and more or less advisable or acceptable means to obtain political ends. Quite on the contrary, the violence – actual or effective, and virtual or potential – does precede and constitute the political order and disorder, Law, State and their laws or norms, the war and the peace. Law is not the basis of the State but its complementary and belated component.
All policy is and constitutes violence; yet, not all violence is nor constitutes policy. Whether democratic or not, all policy and – even more – all law: including the fundamental human rights, are violence, discrimination and imposition (at least against those who intend or would want to violate them); instead, and as it is evident, not all violence gets to constitute law, not even policy, or reaches a strategic entity and determination. The policy is not the individual or marginalized “violence” and “terrorism” of the weak and incompetents but the exorbitant, unilateral and unlimited Violence and Terrorism of the great strategic concentrations of power.
Political order and disorder, war, law and rights, are established, maintained, developed and changed by means of the violence and of the strategic opposition/resistance, as determined by the general rapport of forces. Peace does only exist as peace of law; but law, the same as all policy, is violence. So, the law of the peace, and peace itself, are violence.
Policy and law have as their own content the determination of the social behaviour by means of violence; yet they at the same time are ideological factor and vector – authoritatively imposed – of a first importance, and often are not nor pretend to be anything else.
Inevitably, the “theory on the law” does also undergo an ideological manipulation in order that it may suit to the domination of the ruling classes. In the traditional normativist and formalist theory, the so-called “sources of the Law” are consequence, form, vehicle and dissimulation of its real creation through the monopoly of violence. However, and against the mystifications disseminated by the idealist and formalist ideology of Law, the reality is that the positive political and juridical norms do all have as true “source” the anticipation and the threat of violence: virtual violence founded on actual violence, which do constitute them. The fear of violence: primary, instinctive, emotional and affective sequence of prudence, is necessary component of peace and war, of the legal norm and of the method of government.
The ideology is the determination of human behaviour by means of ideas. The ideology of illusion has always tried to hide the real and primary constitution of imperialism, i.e.: the origin and reality of criminal Violence inherent to its policy and positive law. According to such an ideology, the groups wielding the ‘de facto’ imperialistic domination would not be criminal aggressors and the strongest but the best ones: righteous, honest, wise, sociable, peaceful, non-violent persons, and servers of Good against Evil. In turn, the individuals or groups enduring political domination at the former’s hands would not be helpless assaulted and the weakest but the worst ones: perverse, unfair, dishonest, mentally stupid (or alienated), antisocial, aggressive and violent servers of Evil against Good. We thus see how the civilian, military and ecclesiastical monopolies of propaganda, brainwashing and ideological intoxication of masses do promote increasingly aggressive campaigns of ideological manipulation and dissolution; and of criminalization of the defenceless victims of criminal Violence and Terrorism of masses , in order to liquidate or prevent any Resistance.
As it is aimed at in such campaigns, the Peoples who defend themselves and resist, however weakly they may do so, are presented by their aggressors as wild beasts devoid of reason and humanity, thirsty of the blood of their peaceful and generous benefactors: innocent and unarmed victims of the brutality and barbarity of the aborigines. The racist and zoo-phobic references are not new. They were already heard or read in the first stages of the Aryan harassment against the Vasconic tribes and the Kingdom of Nabarre. This is how we Basques have been described already in ‘Codex Calixtinus’: an early smear campaign of colonialist and racist propaganda, driven under Christian-Frank-Hispanic impulse.
For their part, the Chechen rebels and their Caucasian neighbours they were already described as bandits, criminals, thieves and murderers – before becoming “terrorists” – since the first “peaceful and pacifying” expansionist campaigns of the “great” Catherine, promoter of Russian imperialism. Her successors did continue with her same “peaceful” Terrorist task: “We will never have rest as long as a single Chechen is left alive; [...] I desire that the terror of my name shall guard our frontiers more potently than chains of fortresses”, said General Aleksey Yermólov. So up to reach the current Kagebist-Putinist “democrats”, who do instruct and encourage their followers to “drown them in the toilets” (Putin dixit) anywhere they can be found. And so things continue, with the infamous agreement of the “democratic” Great Powers, which have slaughtered and looted the world by means of their atomic and conventional Terror of masses.
According to these criminal National-imperialists, the Nations that they have historically attacked, occupied and colonized have never had victimsor “executed” (that is: murdered) people; they have never suffered mass bombardments, wars, military occupation, prisons or torture. The annexation and colonization, the repression and Terrorism against them there have never existed: they have lived for centuries in peace and freedom under the sweet and attentive protection of the aggressor superior races. And if, in spite of all this, they do next revolt against them, going so for as to claim and exercise their inherent right of legitimate self-defence, this is an incontrovertible proof – they say – of their congenital ingratitude and perversity.
In policy, what is said does only count according to what is done. It’s revealing, in this regard, to verify the effectiveness of the adaptive mechanisms of the dominant People, agent of imperialistic oppression in the international class-struggle. Noting that the subjugated Peoples have abandoned the “violent” methods of the legitimate self-defense, and that they have replaced them with procedures of civil and peaceful Resistance, the previous “pacifist” leitmotiv of non-violence: which had so ardently and obsessively been sustained by the agents of colonialism (a simple consequence of the overwhelming campaign of their propaganda monopolies to de-activate the legitimate defense of these Peoples), is nevertheless immediately abandoned and forgotten by the population of the colonialist metropolis, which finds no contradiction or moral damage to its previously proclaimed motto of “non-violence” when, next, it then demands the military intervention of its armies and repressive bodies, and the repression against those who, even peacefully, “seek to break Spain or the [French] Republic.”
Thus we see that their insane statement “no cause is worth a drop of spilled blood”, was always to be understood as referring to the blood of Spaniards and French themselves: they are dainty about theirs’. As regards others’ blood, they not only have strewn it dreadfully and abundantly all over the Countries of Europe and of the Continents which they have spread their criminal domination over but have also made it an honourable mission, incorporating it even in their national anthem and inciting fiercely to irrigate the fields and countries they were marching into with such impure blood: “Marchons, marchons! Qu’un sang impur abreuve nos sillons!”
“The resulting widespread rise in worldwide populist activism is proving inimical to external domination of the kind that prevailed in the age of colonialism and imperialism. [...]
“Persistent and highly motivated populist resistance of politically awakened and historically resentful peoples to external control, has proven to be increasingly difficult to suppress,” etc. (Z. Brzezinski.)
“Historically resentful to external control”; “detrimental to external domination”. The cynicism and intellectual and moral perversion of the imperialists: confessed instigators of crimes against Humanity and genocides, is simply repugnant.Such functional insanities are the product of the ideological activity of the whole dominant society, with its countless agents trained and paid: journalists, intellectuals, civil and ecclesiastical teachers, historians, philosophers, sociologists, advisors, counsellors, Presidents etc., occupied or stooped in the vilest tasks of propaganda and ideological intoxication of masses. Imperialism and fascism do degrade and culturally impoverish not only subjugated Peoples but also the same peoples that attack, occupy and colonize them.
The falsification of history and sociology, the perversion, inversion, confusion and subversion of terms and concepts, the semantic counterfeiting and the destruction of reason: characteristic of the totalitarian régime, are the suitable and necessary means available for the task. “Non-violence, freedom and democracy” must appear in all cases as determining and essential factors of the historical and social constitution and legitimacy of the current régime of military occupation and of the imperial-totalitarian political power. This is how Spain and France have constituted their régime on the Basque People and its State, the Kingdom of Nabarre; a régime that the fascist shamelessness of its agents, beneficiaries, accomplices and servers does present as “legitimate, non-violent, peaceful, democratic and founded on freedom, human rights and the people’s will”. It is the ideological disguise of the imperialistic Nationalism.
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