“Institutionalism”, “activism” and collaboration (VIII)

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

VIII – “Institutionalism”, “activism” and collaboration

Iñaki Aginaga and Felipe Campo

After General Franco’s death in his own bed, the Francoist régime: keeping intact all the agents, institutions and achievements – very especially the monopoly of criminal Violence – of the Spanish traditional unitary régime established by the triumph of Fascism in the civil and international War of 1936-39, was overnight declared democratic at the modest price of minor formal reforms and totalitarian“general elections”; and the bureaucratic “Basque opposition” of the Pnv and its accomplices did support the fraud of that intra-totalitarian transition, which meant a disastrous immersion of the Basque People in the magma of the unitary, imperialistic and fascist Spanish régime, accepted as legitimate and democratic.

In spite of the instinctive refusal of broad social strata of the Basque People to take part in that manoeuvre of the régime, and in spite of its express denouncement made by a significant ideological sector of the Country, which called for its boycott, the bought collaboration of a purported “moderate and socialist Basque political class”: namely the Pnv bureaucracy and its satellites as Esb, did in June 1977 manage to drag part of the Country to continue participating once more in Spanish “elections” presented as “democratic”; a suicidal behaviour that this bureaucracy had established in our Country since its participation in the so-called Spanish “constituent general elections” of 1931.

Thus it was made possible the continuity and consolidation upon our People of the Spanish and French colonialism: which after its criminal military imposition was now renewed and reinforced with the cover of that imperialistic ideological trickery based on a falsification of “elections and democracy”; of its imperialistic Nationalism; and of the totalitarianism of its ideological and juridical monopolies – parlaments – based on its monopoly of criminal Violence and absolutely reaffirmed after the defeat of our Country in 1937, but in additioin accepted now by those purchased traitors as “democratic”.

On their part the purported “radicals” of the Eta group: adherents to the line of individual “terrorism” and attempts that they called “revolutionlary war and armed struggle”, were unable to make the criticism of their sterile and disastrous plan of resorting to the path of attempts and “commands” vs. an Army of professional occupation by land, sea and air, and of individual “terrorism” vs. State Terrorism; all of which was a ruinous and infra-strategic response to a French-Spanish imperialistic régime of military occupation that held the absolute monopoly of criminal Violence. So, they continued in their insane and arrogant falsely “activist” messianism; and this even when they could have seen confirmed the unequivocal response and broad popular base of the National Resistance Movement in several key demonstrations after the aforementioned “electoral” claudication of the Pnv ad its satellites. Among these demostrations we must mention the Freedom March, in July-August 1977, or the semi-insurrectionary movement which arose spontaneously in the Country in July-1978.

But they were not able to see it and followed in their blindness; so from those moments on it resulted clear their loss not only of all sense of reality but even of the basic instinct for self-preservation. This would lead them in the first place to their own electoral capitulation in the following Spanish “general elections” of 1979, thus entering themselves also in the collaboration and recognition the Spanish fascist regime as “legitimate, non-violent and democratic”, while jeopardizing the Country with the worst consequences of their absurd and simultaneous “armed activism”. All of which made it possible the international strengthening of the Spanish fascist régime that they themselves had recognized as “democratic”, as well as the increased repression and the international discredit of the Basque People, falsely and insidiously identified with the “terrorism” of the Eta group.

On an ideological level the damages were not minor: supplanting of the right of self-determination of all Peoples – first of fundamental human rights and precondition of them all, according to contemporary United Nations’ International Law – and of the right of legitimate self-defence, replaced by the Pnv-Eta conglomerate through a “right to decide between all the possible options, all of them democratic” (including the continuation of imperialism); widespread demoralization and disrepute; electoral and political capitulation of broad social sectors; blocking and weakening of the National Resistance Movement while being assimilated to “terrorism”; and recognition of the damage caused to the Fascism presented as an innocent victim etc. etc.

Since the Spanish intra-totalitarian transition, the armed and unarmed institutionalists, collaborationists and accomplices of the Pnv-Eta aggregate did actively and effectively participate in the task – vital for the régime of occupation – of hiding, preventing, aborting and suppressing any theoretical or practical approach led to the creation or the development of an ideological and political opposition of strategic level against the French-Spanish imperialism. For that purpose, they allied themselves to and benefited from the monopolies of criminal Violence and propaganda of the fascist régime, so as to convey the inability, misinformation, confusion and division to their popular basis. They did thus recognize the criminal Spanish State of military occupation as “the State” of their own, and the Francoist armed forces as democratic and non-violent; and they are competing since then with the traditional Francoism in order to attain its confidence, grace and benevolence, without which they run out of the party.

In perspective of national freedom, which in such conditions was doomed was the Basque People. For a greater safety, the monopolistic propaganda of “the Basque moderates and the Basque radicals”: transmitted by the unarmed and armed collaborators and accomplices, led to make believe the public opinion and the victims of the imperialism that all political opposition of strategic level, that any real democratic alternative, that a path other than “the institutional and the armed” ones that they had established was not only sociologically but also logically an absolute impossibility or a formal absurdity: something like the fourth angle of a triangle. “It’s either this, or take to the heather.” The only possible strategy against the imperialism: which had been already historically and sociologically established in this Country on the absolute non-recognition and denunciation of the French-Spanish imperialistic and fascist régime, and on the total refusal to collaborate in its impossible “democratic consolidation”, was thus a priori and expressly excluded by the collaborationist and accomplice organizations, corporations and bureaucracies of “the moderates and the radicals”: “the patriotic right and the patriotic left”, who have declared non-existent, insoluble and absurd everything they don’t understand, nor want to understand, nor have any interest in understanding. The inevitable result has been the political frustration and despair of their victims: favourable ground for the defection, corruption and propaganda of the institutional path and the armed struggle.

Their purported leaders, with their strategy of liquidation, have always tried to hide and devalue, theoretically and practically, the reality and the function of the People itself as fundamental ideological and political agent; and they have not hesitated in discrediting and humiliating the People that they claim to represent and defend, ruining with it the very foundation of the strategic implementation. Yet, quite on the contrary to their falsehoods, they have been the popular spontaneity and the political culture familiarly transmitted, which have made it partially possible for the Basque People endure, not without dire consequences, eight centuries of military occupation, genocide, Terrorism, colonization and plunder, and finally the formidable onslaught of the multinational Fascism and its complementary Nationalist partners “of the Left”: the National-communists and National-socialists in their double form of autochthonous Renegades or allogeneous Colonialists; and not the action or the propaganda of the Pnv and its armed and unarmed satellites, which are the delaying, reductive and reactionary mislaying of the National Resistance.

In order to conceal the inevitable, inherent and disastrous result of the path of ideological and political liquidation that had been promoted by them in the conditions of the triumphant fascism; and in order to validate, glorify, exalt, sublimate, preserve, promote and accredit by reference the romantic falsification of what had really happened in our Country, the fact of establishing the affirmation of the promethean, demiurgic and thaumaturgic entity and function that the Pnv-Eta team attributed for itself was a prior ideological assumption, for whose maintenance it was necessary to deny both the imperialistic and fascist nature of the renewed Spaqnish transitive régime of occupation that they had accepted as democracis, as well as the reality of the popular forces. On the one hand, establishing the “democratic and non-violent” nature of the régime was “necessary” for them in order that their “institutional struggle” and “armed struggle” might have political credibility. And on the other, the history, validity and strategic potentiality of the National Resistance and the popular movements had “necessarily” to be non-existent or discredited, so that the “ruling elite” might accredit its rank and function.

Now then, the first general strikes and other anti-fascist mass demonstrations after the War occurred in the years 1947-51-53-56 and 58. The popular demonstration-tribute on occasion of President Agirre’s funeral in San Jean de Luz took place in 1960. The first post-war celebrations of Aberri-egun, in Gernika and Bergara; and of International Worker’s Day in the Capital Towns, towns took place in the year 1964 and 1965. All those movements of masses of the 1950s and 1960s – not to mention the popular movements of all kinds – that were able to create the ikastola (Basque schools) and the cooperatives in general etc. – refute the alleged absence of popular opposition. Presenting the movements of masses of the 1950s and 1960s – and the rise of the political, ideological and artistic-cultural pressure that came along with them – as achievements of the Pnv bureaucratism and the Eta attempts it is to falsify and make inexplicable the reality, it is to lower the Country that they pretend to be defending, it is to reverse the cause and the effect; all that in the service of the Pnv-Eta retardant and reactionary political subclass that has subsequently stultified the Country for the benefit of the Spanish imperialistic domination. It’s already half a century ago that the sabotage, deceit, farce and mockery are continuing in this way, while ensuring at the same time the corporate continuity of the collaborationist rear-guard ot the Eta, “officially” approved as a triumphant vanguard.

The ideological helplessness and the political defencelessness of the social base of the Basque Resistance Movement: a consequence of the “institutional path and the armed struggle”, became the “necessary” antecedent in order to establish the imaginary success – it is: the real failure – of the “leading” Pnv-Eta bureaucracies. Their own inability was presented as the inevitable “realistic-possibilistic adaptation to the inability of the base”, which they themselves – as a consequence of a social weakness which was really a result of their own “strategy” – had disabled due to a process of which they had been the necessary cause. The spontaneity of masses was replaced with the spontaneous generation of the “vanguard”; and thus, since there is no avant-garde without the correlative rear-guard, the retardant nature of the popular base was deduced with the same “necessity”.

Once that had been “founded” in this way: through apriorism, postulate, axiom or dogmatic statement, both the function as well as the protagonism and supremacy of the bureaucratic “Organization”, next can be comfortably drawn the premise, the reference and the starting point for the “tautological” evaluation and determination of the social base and its strategic virtuality, with the petitio principii as the sole base and demonstrative constant. Because if the Pnv-Eta group is the vanguard, “it is clear” that beyond it there’s only place for the rear-guard.

The issues relating to the political organizations, which are a part of the general issue of social struggles, are thus turned into the theoretical and practical premise of these setruggles; and then the ends and means of the popular base are determined and evaluated on the basis of those that the “vanguard” seeks to impose. Thus is being established a methodological inversion whose implications and consequences should surprise nobody.

“The capital event of the last fifty years is the development of the Eta movement”, say its propagandists. According to the propaganda of the Eta, “the new Basque resistance” was born “in a completely alienated population in total pathway of assimilation”. To reduce or deny the national base, in order to build, exalt, sublimate or justify by reference one’s own ideological and political image, is a particularly devious, despicable, reactionary and nefarious form of self-promotion and propaganda. It’s the only way that the members of the Pnv-Eta bureaucracy have found to pulling the wool over the Basque People’s eyes, in order to bring credibility to the “institutional path and the armed struggle”.

Against what the so-called “opponents of always” of the attempts and their revisionist accomplices claim to now, the democratic criticism of the individual “terrorism” had begun, both outside and inside this Country, before the attempts under the General Franco’s “organic democracy” had started, and it continued during the long period in which the agents and supporters of the Pnv – as well as of the PsoE and other components of the inorganic “opposition” – were extremely discrete, tolerant, benevolent, sympathetic, cooperating and recuperating with the actors of the so-called “armed struggle and revolutionary war”; something that now all of them would like to be able to hide. This democratic criticism of the “armed activism” of the Eta attempts was constantly maintained in our Country by a sector that, totally outside of the positions of the “official Basque political class”,did always denounce them as a false and disastrous opposition or response to criminal Violence and State Terrorism, while painfully costly to the People and the cause of freedom; all this naturally determined by the characteristic of our social reality.

Both the imperialistic propaganda – supported by the bureaucratic line of the Pnv, which caused the birth of the Eta group – as well as the democratic criticism “coincide” on their opposition to the non-governmental attempts (NGA) of the Eta; however, the fascist-imperialistic propaganda condemns the NGA against the fascist established power from the point of view of imperialism and fascism. It thereby serves so the denial of national freedom and of the rights of self-determination and legitimate self-defence of all Peoples and their States; as well as the continuity and development of the fascist-imperialistic domination and its monopoly of criminal Violence over them.

Instead, the criticism of the strategic lack of the NGA made from the democratic point of view, is diametrically different from their condemnation from the point of view of the imperialism and fascism. This democratic criticism of the “armed activism” and the NGA values them negatively as counter-producing and detrimental from the point of view of freedom and fundamental human rights (namely: the right of self-determination of all Peoples and the right of legitimate self-defence that is inherent to them), and does therefore serve the reinforcement and strategic implementation of the opposition against imperialism and fascism.

However, these intentions to introduce rationality and efficiency in the political debate: inescapable requirement of all democratic movement of national liberation, even more necessary under an imperialistic and fascist régime, were always presented, rejected and despised by the agents and supporters of “the Pnv-ist and activist move” as paralyzing “salon theorizations” typical of “intellectuals” or something worse.

“But soon our people began to see weird things. [...] what was needed to be done was to get trained, waiting for D-day, in which it would be time to do what was to be done. This was their thesis. Absolute inhibition of any action. Training and training, courses of this and of that, many meetings, many conferences... and no action. [...] We saw on this phenomenon of D-day, of no action and much training, the far-reaching hand of the [secret] Services.” (Javier Ortiz; ‘Xabier Arzalluz: Así fue’.)

Setting aside for the time being those ridiculous, contemptible and shameless simplifications and falsehoods, when not flagrant falsifications and slanders, they are all of them: those who have led the Country to the current disaster through “institutional” collaboration with the fascist régime and “armed activism”, who were involved as agents in that catastrophic and crazy plan of waste of human lives, that suicidal “spiral of violence and action-reaction” (with the development of the fascist violence, action and reaction as a result), and those who applauded or “understood” them. They are all of them, we say, the same ones who do now hypocritically bemoan about the obtained results and wonder how is it that we have reached to the current situation.

Meanwhile, they hide that they fought by all means: including those provided to them by the Spanish fascist régime, against the correct strategy and against those who did defend it and warn about the errors of them all, namely: the liquidation of the national institutions and of the strategy of Resistance, so as to pass to the recognition of the fascist régime as democratic and to the institutional collaboration with it, on one side; and to the “individual terrorism” of the attempts, on the other, to end up recognizing it equally, as the Eta group did. They all are the same ones that have no qualms about paralyzing and kidnaping now the National Resistance Movement so as to subordinate it to the aim of getting out of prisons – or bringing closer from home, to what they call “Basque jails” – the prisoners who would not have entered into them if they had listened to what they had been advised. (The dead cannot be resurrected.) Not to mention that in addition there would had been done what had to be done, and not exactly the opposite as there happened; with all the consequences that we thereby have had to undergo and that we are still enduring.

The politician, the chief of war or the high-level chess player are not, nor can or should be outstanding theorists, not even in their specialty: it rather can be said otherwise; but they’re never ignorant of the theoretical foundations without which there is no possible practice. Their mastery in their respective specific “arts” does not necessarily involve nor is reducible to their mastery of the pure or applied sciences; but it does turn out to be incompatible with the absence or the lack of them.

“Policy is action; but without theory there is no practice.” “The theory is a guide for the action.” “Organization is the form of mediation between theory and practice.” “All political theory is a theory of the action and is verified in the practice.” “An action is not positive or negative in itself but according to the strategic structure in which it is included” etc. Such ideas, repeatedly formulated and discussed in our publications and meetings, weren’t new even though here they look so. We quoted them as they had been exposed – horresco referens– by Lenin and Lukács, among others (which was enough to bring over us all the trash of fanatics and reactionary-Pnv-clerical supporters that surrounded us), and remain today as valid as before.

Yet, for the “activists and realists” supporters of the “armed struggle”, “to think, write, and all that is useless, the important thing is to do”, even though they didn’t know very well what to do, or what for. The concern of them all was always to drag the masses in demonstration into the streets, or into the fascist polling stations on the appointed D-day that the régime of occupation would indicate them, whenever they could and they should be somewhere else. A resource that was added to the fetish-strike, to the convulsive agitation, to the action for action’s sake, and to the abandonment of all critical sense in the democratic policy.

“The important thing is to do.” Marooned to themselves. either in their condition of followers of the ideological sectarianism or as victims of their own obscurantism, they have been incapable of realizing that their own “realistic and practical” activist sentence is itself a theory, although one of the bad kind. “The institutional path and the revolutionary war” imply and are also a theory, the same as any political or para-political action. The hypostatical dualism of “the theory and the practice”, like others, is the result of obscurantism and repression of the ideas maintained by the Pnv and its satellites, including the Eta, which have wrecked the popular Resistance against imperialism; beginning, for it, with the turning of their own followers into barmy people.

Indeed, the “dualism” of the theory and the practice has been heavily used by some “practical-realists” ideologists, in order to discredit those who they have previously had the precaution to qualify as “theorists”. However, this line of reasoning (?) seems to ignore that a political practice cannot be theoretically opposed to a political theory: only a theory can be theoretically opposed to another. Now then, given the purpose of its application, the political theory is a theory of the practice and for the practice. Therefore, if it is erroneous in practice, it is not correct as a theory; and if it is correct as a theory, it is also correct in practice. It cannot be accurately coherent as a theory, and incorrectly incoherent as practice; but formal logic and imperialistic propaganda are very different things, as we can verify every day. This country has been a paradise for a whole throng of unscrupulous incompetents, impostors, careerists and charlatans of every background and kind; who, after having discovered a vocation of “politicians” who they did not themselves suspect, have found in it a mine to exploit in their own advantage, always at the service of the imperialism. The price that it has had to pay for it has been excessive.

An erroneous or quasi-non-existent theory generates a null or disastrous policy; which, in its turn, has as a consequence the sterility or the theoretical ruin. Instead, a policy that applies or takes into account the theoretical or scientific bases of historical and social structure, creates the conditions that make possible the criticism, the creativity and the theoretical and scientific contribution. What have the Pnv bureaucracy and its “moderate and radical” satellites contributed to the social and historical ideology and culture in matters of policy, law, war, violence and terrorism, the theory of the State, the right of self-determination, the “Marxism-Leninism” and the historical materialism, the “national/class struggle” problem, the structural entity of the language, or the irruption of the ecology in the political economy etc.? Strictly nothing, except confusion and added obstacles, dogmatism and obscurantism. All the ideas that constitute a contribution in such matters come from the democratic theory and criticism, and are attached to them.

Instead, and as is inevitable, their traditionalist obscurantism, their “revolutionary” romanticism, and their cultural, ideological and political underdevelopment could have no other result than the one they have had. It is of no interest to know whether the armed and unarmed Pnv-Eta institutionalists, directors and directed, are really as stupid as they seem to, or so clever as to play the fools in order to better deceive their unwary followers and victims. What matters is that, in fact, they have adopted and do pass onto our People the recurring themes of the official propaganda of Spanish imperialism and fascism, even when they pretend or feign to oppose it; and there is no approval more insidious and dangerous than that which is presented as reprobation.

Arzalluz, for example, in his roll of leader of the Pnv bureaucratic group, finds it “embarrassing” and “reproves” the Article 8 of the “Constitution”. The armed and unarmed aboriginal “Basque” institutionalists do prudently “warn” us of the threat and danger of military intervention: “the Constitution still maintains the possibility of a military intervention”, they say, while hiding that it’s the constituent criminal Violence of the imperialistic and fascist régime emerged from the war of 1936 and from all that preceded it. This leads the Pnv and its satellites, including the Eta, to the claim of “reforming, developing and democratising” the formal “Constitution” through the deletion of its Article 8, “which gives its power to the Spanish Army”. They cannot and do not want to see that the Army does not receive its power from the eighth Article. It’s, quite on the contrary, the power of the Army which founds the Article 8 and, with it, all the formal and secondary “Constitution” os Spain and of France. The guns of the Army do found, first and foremost, the real and primary constitution: direct result of the wars that the Army won and that the others lost, and necessary assumption of the formal and secondary “Constitution”. Without the power of the Army there is no constituted “Constitution” nor constituent constitution, nor political régime to be reformed, developed, democratized or deleted.

The “abolition of the eighth Article” is an objective that, once again, denies or takes for solved the real problem, which is not solved ar all, namely: the reality of the French-Spanish imperialistic, colonialist and fascist régime of military occupation established on the Basque People and its State the Kingdom of Nabarre; a problem that moderates and radicals try to hide so as to turn the democratic opposition from its real tasks.

A Constitution is not founded in the “Constituent process” but before it. The drafting of the Articles 8 and 2, and of the others, are nothing but incidents and consequence in the secondary and formal constituent process, which is directed and supported by the primary and real constituent power, product of the real imperialistic and fascist Spanish and French power. The armed and unarmed “Basque” institutionalists do thus deny the reality of the French-Spanish régime of military occupation, through an idealistic, formalist and reactionary version of policy (that in this case is furthermore fascist of military occupation), which they do instead present as consisting of rituals, gestures and institutional forms – marginal, derivative and secondary – in suspension or levitation that have nothing to do with their foundations based of an order of criminal imperialistic Violence. They do thus conceal the real problem, in order to conceal their own role and responsibility in diverting the democratic opposition from its real tasks, and in their own recognition of criminal fascist imperialism as a democracy.

The belated, passive and contemplative “embarrassment” of Arzalluz was as hypocritical as the “abstention” of the Pnv to the Referendum on the Spanish “Constitution” in the year 1978, which in addition was intended to the recuperation and neutralization of the true abstentionist boycott in the “elections” of 1977. The fascist régime and its constitutional Articles cannot be fought with embarrassments and abstentions played for the gallery but with a strategic opposition; opposition which Pnv-Eta had rejected many years before, even under the régime established by the army of General Franco in which everything else is founded. The Pnv had rigged the liquidation pacts of Paris (1957-1961) and Munich, both of them preparatory of the Spanish intra-totalitaarian transition; and as if all that – and its final participation in the imperialistic “general elections” of 1977 – wasn’t enough, it also accepted and recognized, in the Spanish Parliament and in the Referendum, the “Spanish Constitution”: “which, although not being our Constitution, we do respect it as a rightful and democratic one”, according to the official statement of the Pnv led by Arzalluz himself. Counting on such abstentions, the adherences are not needed.

As for the “operation return” of the Eta “radicals” to “the father’s house”, it had already begun in the sixties – as was exposed in the previous Chapter VI: ‘Contribution of “the left” to the strategic liquidation of the Basque national policy: the social-imperialism’ – with the penetration among their ranks of Spanish social-imperialistic agents, with whom they joined in the task of attacking and slandering those who denounced their manoeuvres of liquidation of the Basque democratic and national strategy, and of collaboration with fascism, which entailed the designed Spanish “transition”. Next, their dift: which consisted firstly of going to the “elections but without participation in the Spanish parliament”, then to the “elections with participation”, then their “hot war on abstention” (“we have declared the hot war on abstention”), their “inevitable negotiation” and their pacts, proposals etc., were steps of the unconditional surrender and the return to the father’s house.

The “transition”, which the Spanish “opposition” had launched many years earlier, accelerated the integration of the Eta in the established régime and in what they called “opening a peace process through exclusively political, democratic and peaceful ways, in absence of any violence either legalized or of response, withelections, dialogue, persuasion and conciliation as means of overcoming political conflicts”, and other reactionary stupidities of the sort. It is the same “style” of Arzalluz and of fascism in general, which the media of ideological intoxication of masses impose to this long-suffering Country daily.

Yet, these reactionary stupidities are inevitable, given the circumstances, because without theory there is no practice, and without ideology there is no policy; and the Pnv-Eta bureaucrats only have those of the Spanish fascist régime that they have accepted as “democracy”. The theoretical obscurantismand the fossilization of thought do fatally carry political incapability, reaction, underdevelopment and stagnation, which in turn induce collaboration and complicity with the imperialism and fascism in order to reduce all ideological and political Resistance to infra-strategic level: an axial objective of the imperialistic policy. Obscurantism and ideological repression during fifty years have had as a consequence the lack of communication, regression and ruin of the political culture in this Country. The result is the tenacious and persistent adoption, on the part of the Pnv-Eta armed and unarmed institutionalists, of the most reactionary ideological assumptions of the ideology that is diffused by the French-Spanish imperialistic and fascist propaganda.

Voluntarily permeated and deeply impregnated by that ideology, and radically unable to provide our Country with the slightest protection against the aggression of the monopolies of propaganda and psychological warfare of the fascist régime of military occupation, or with the most rudimentary theoretical umbrella for the increasingly intense ideological deluge that accompanies the consolidation of the Francoist dictatorship, the armed and unarmed Pnv-Eta institutionalists did quickly became, quite on the contrary, the most effective way of infiltration, the most effective transmission belt for the penetration of the ideology and policy of the Spanish imperialistic régime: through its social-imperialistic and social-fascist variants of the Spanish National-socialism and National-communism, into the resistant strongholds of the Basque democratic opposition.

In this way, the “patriotic radicals” of the “armed activism”, after several alibis that sought to hide their shameful electioneering drift and capitulation (starting from their initial position of denouncing the participation in the Spanish imperialistic “general elections” of 1977 as a treason to the People), dragged their followers to the imperialistic ballot boxes since 1979 and incorporated them into a mendicant participation in the “democratic institutions” of what they call “the State”, that is: in the totalitarian institutions of the fascist and terrorist occupying State that “moderates and radicals” recognize as theirs, while ignoring their real own – the Kingdom of Nabarre – and declaring themselves, in the best of cases, as “Stateless Nation”. The result thus obtained by the Pnv-Eta “moderates and radicals” has meant for the Country a strategic catastrophe: predictable, predicted and announced, which has been added to that of the defeat against Nazi-Fascism.

The cultural under-development, the ideological opium, the idealistic and moralistic rhetoric as an ersatz for policy and strategy, the “inevitable negotiation”, the liquidation of internal and external democracy, the total ignorance of the very political essence, the sabotage of the own institutions and the participation and “legitimation” in those of the others: imperialistic and fascist to boot but accepted as democratic and the own ones, are insurmountable handicaps that haven’t any place in a world which does not tolerate nor forgives weaknesses, delays or misrepresentations; especially if they are committed by a defenceless and subjugated People. On such basis, our Nation is incessantly degrading and retreating before the imperialistic Nationalism and Fascism of Francespain; with the hypocritical opposition that consists in the effective complicity of its local auxiliary services Pnv-Eta and their satellites. Contrary to what these ones want to make believe, force and time play fatally in favour of the dominant Nations, which have all the ideological, political and economic advantages in their hands; and against the subjugated People, when it is unable to play those wthat it still has left because of the betrayal of its supposed leaders.

As a result of the strategic sabotage and subsequent political ruin achieved by the so-called peripheral “opposition”, the Second Francoism: legitimised as “democratic” and expanded its traditional social base with the incorporation of the Republicans and the Spanish National-socialists and National-communists neo-Falangist to the objectives of the fascist imperialism, surpasses in imperialistic and racist Nationalism, aggressiveness, anger, fanaticism and hatred to the military paleo-Fascism of its founder General Franco. Its “democratic legitimacy” is asserted with all cynicism upon the basis of the totalitarian elections and the “majorities” manufactured by the French-Spanish imperialistic and colonialist Nationalism; lately even by means of the announced resort to the “roving electoral-rolls” formed by such roving members of the army and police, established by “virtue” of the armed occupation and colonization. But colonialist and totalitarian imperialism is always imperialism; however formally majority though it may be in its “elections”.

All that has been possible thanks to the necessary collaboration of a “Basque official opposition” submissive and essentially recuperated by the Spanish imperialism, whose institutions in our Country – as well as its colonial trade-unions and political organizations who themselves claim to be Spanish – the “Basque leaders” do with perverse stubbornness continue recognizing as democratic and Basque for nearly fifty years.

In the times in which the fascist régime went out of its way in order to attract everyone towards what the armed and unarmed “Basque” institutionalists call now “political path, democratic and non-violent”, the Eta inventors of “the armed struggle, the revolutionary war and the Eight years Plan of national Liberation and Unification” denounced in 1977 the support and legitimation of the Francoism implied in the “electoral and institutional” participation, in the face of “the abstention, unique valid solution and better stance of fight”; “our stance is completely contrary to the participation” “political practice of deceit and betrayal”.

Then, their electoral capitulation and escalation process took them in 1979 to “the decision not to participate in the Spanish parliament but to stand for its anti-democratic and anti-Basque elections”, “with formal promise not to participate in the institutions and successive promotions of Members of Parliament, Senators and local offices” “democratically elected, without prejudice to the armed struggle and the complementary role of the mass struggle”, playing to democracies and parliaments with the declared candidates and elected of the official imperialism. To finally end up with statements such as: “fighting against abstention: a challenge for all”, or “we have declared hot war to abstentionism: it’ll be a meat or a fish day, but not a fast day”; “the more participation, the more democracy”; “to vote whom they want to, but to vote: it’s a good thing for democracy and good news for the democrats”; “you may call blockhead those who advocates abstention” etc. They had already forgotten that the first abstinent people: those who never voted after the “transition”, were those that were left murdered in the mountains, ditches, bullrings and walls of the cemeteries; the men, women and children crushed under the bombs, excluded forever from the electoral roll by the “inclusive, democratic and non-violent” imperialism and fascism of France and of Spain.

All of them are the issues that unite and associate, for more than forty years now, all the supporters and participants in the imperialistic and fascist Spanish institutionalism: from the traditional Francoism, to the armed or unarmed Pnv-Eta supporters of what they call “democratic, political and non-violent” path.

Without the decisive support of the corporative and bureaucratic, “realist-possibilistic and activist” organization; and without the continued and stubborn cooperation of the “Basque” armed and unarmed institutionalists – namely: the moderates and the radicals so-called “left and right wing Basque patriots”, from the official Pnv to its corollary the Eta – in the task of divert and reduce to an infra-strategic level the National Resistance in the occupied Territories of the Basque People, the monopolies of criminal Violence and propaganda of the French-Spanish imperialistic and totalitarian power would not have been able to achieve a fundamental part of their objectives, and the most serious and pernicious mistakes would have been avoided. Without them, the régime of the Second Francoism would not have been able to establish, maintain, consolidate and develop itself as it has done since its “transition”.

Established by the régime as a mechanism to avoid the overflow of the Spanish unitary State by the struggle of the subjugated Peoples, the system of “autonomous regions” was the great triumph that the Pnv-Eta “moderates and radicals” presented to the People; a system that provided them with the desired connections, perks and sinecures in return for their valuable services rendered. In any case, this “autonomy” granted by the Spanish imperialistic régime did not allow them to hide that “the national sovereignty resides in the Spanish people, from which emanate the powers of the State and the indissoluble unity of the Spanish nation, the common and indivisible homeland of all Spaniards”, as affirmed by their “Consdtitution” that they accepted and continue to accept. All of which implies to gainsay: the subjugated Basque People as a holder of an international and inherent right of self-determination or independence; the Basque Nation settled in its own historical Territories; the indefeasible validity and actuality of its violated fundamental rights and those of its occupied State, the Kingdom of Nabarre; and the correlative imprescriptible crimes of war, against peace and against Humanity committed by the French-Spanish terrorist National-imperialism in the enterprise of subjugating our People and State.

The Francoist plan of stabilization (in the semi-insurrectionary situation of the “transition” in the Basque Country), and the autonomy-trap (designed and imposed as a means of confusion, conditioning, fixing, containment, repression, erosion, reduction, manipulation, recuperation and corruption of the popular forces), came and replaced the democratic institutionalization and allowed to modulate the repression, to dose the “institutional reform”, to interpose buffers and cushions, and to preserve the control of fishing rod and reel, so as to hook, test, evaluate and give or recover line, according to the vigour or the weakness and the sudden starts or vagaries of the Resistance. Meanwhile, the effective centralization and concentration of the unitary political power ensured the fatal outcome of an “institutional confrontation” of fishing and catch resolved beforehand.

The Pnv-Eta “institutional democratic way” was the cover and alibi of the strategic sabotage. “The idea of a federal Spain, the historic rights, the additional provisions of the “Constitution” and their ‘authentic’ interpretation, the pact with the Crown, the constitutional pact between equals of Euskadi with Spain, the free association, and the Spanish pluralism”, were the reiterated, fallacious, absurd, empty, derisory and motley attempt to conceal and distort in the face of the public opinion the magnitude of the strategic liquidation and its inevitable and disastrous consequences. The “autonomy” constitutionally and legally established by the Spanish State in favour of its “regions” is another more trickery: the Organic Law does not establish the autonomy but an empowerment for the Government to do whatever it wants; and it is first and foremost a manoeuvre to afford an ideological cover for the “Basque” collaborationists and accomplices.

(Against what is claimed by its local beneficiaries, no Organic Law has ever established such autonomous régime, whose integral precariousness and formal and real arbitrariness have been exposed for forty years. The recent “denunciation” of “the State re-centralization” by the local collaborationists: who do not consider it as an occupying State but as their own one, is another falsehood and hypocrisy more that do not deceive or impress anyone; even less the fascist régime itself.)

The institutions and ancillary services of the autonomy-trap are an active part of the colonial Administration of the occupying State which they belong to, supplying it the indigenous bodies of proximity – administrative and repressive – it needs. Totally devoid of a political power of their own, these bodies of local administration: pompously called “governments” by the true Governments that have created them, serve the criminal Violence, Terrorism and corruption of the colonial rule.

In particular, such “autonomic institutions”, and the Pnv-Eta political bureaucracies that make up them, do provide: the recognition of the “democratic, legitimate and non-violent” nature of the régime of military occupation in which consist the imperialistic and fascist States of Spain and France; the repression of the persons and ideas of the Basque National Resistance; the organization and distribution of corruption through the repartition of salaries and connections for the collaborationists linked to the “autonomic” administration; the concealment and contempt of the striking proportion of abstainers to participate – in spite and defiance of the suffocating conditioning media – in their policy of national liquidation; the adoption and subsequent repercussion to the Basque People of the recurrent themes and terminology of the official French-Spanish propaganda (even when they try or pretend to oppose to it); and – finally – the blocking and suppression of any real confrontation of ideas, as well as the approach in its place of the spoofed “debates” that the fascist power needs, arouses and tolerates to demonstrate its “freedom of expression” and its “democratic legitimacy”. All of them are the real and true functions that have been assigned to the “autonomic institutions” and to the cliques of “Basque” traitors who make them up.

The “moderate and radical abertzale [patriots]” of the liquidationist bureaucracy Pnv-Eta and its satellites, unable to even denounce the blatant presence of the representatives of Francoism in the local Spanish radio-television called “Basque and autonomous-euskal telebista” (which invokes for this purpose a false and hypocritical “democratic equanimity”); and all that along with their own fears, self-censorship and restraint in the face of the insults and aggressiveness of the Spanish fascists (that are backed by their Francoist penal courts based on their monopoly of criminal Violence), have managed to spread in their false debates – and make pass as a “natural and normal Basque reality” – Spanish and fascist expressions and ideas that do not correspond at all with the overwhelmingly majority sociological reality of our People.

In all those “debates”: held under fascist conditions but admitted as democratic, the so-called Basque-patriots do share the stands of the mass-media quite naturally along with indigenous Renegades and spokespersons of the Francoism (either in its traditional version or in that of its National-socialists puppets of Falange-PsoE), who do all pretend to be “lifelong democrats” while repeating it over and over again ad nauseam so asto get it admitted; and do by their side endorse as their own the fundamental imperialist position no less incessantly repeated, namely: “the Spanish democratic régime and its rule-of-law State”, as the basic characteristic of the régime of military occupation and of the imperialistic, fascist and terrorist State and law of Francespain.

Thus, after having decided those “moderate and radical Basque institutionalists” to participate in the fascist institutions as an inevitable necessity “so as to be able to say something in this Country”, as they said, we finally find the “brilliant” result that saying nothing – actually it is something much worse, since they have to say what the régime wants them to – is the inevitable need that these collaborationists assume “so as to be able to participate in the institutions” of the French-Spanish imperialism and fascism; which is and always was their only goal.

In this way, the initial “revolutionary” tremendousness and maximalism has finally given way to the vaunted realism-possibilism-minimalism of collaborationism/betrayal of the Pnv-Eta “moderates and radicales”; which is in reality the nihilistic abandonment of all political opposition to the French-Spanish imperialism. (As a strategic principle, minimalism is a stupidity; so are maximalism and “medievalism”.) 

In order to justify all that, the sophistry of composition continues providing good services to the incurable followers of the dominant ideology of the established power: “When even getting the least is so hard and is not yet in sight, how could a fortiori be possible getting the most? I would like that to be explained to me, but I do not hear any answer that is worthwhile”, we are told. In reality, he who so affirms: an apologist converted from the Eta armed maximalism to the Pnv disarmed minimalism, doesn’t want “that to be explained to him”. What he wants is the Eta, or the Pnv, to explain it to him; which is impossible. Like so many others, he does not hear what he doesn’t want to.

Let’s see. Certainly, there is no constant and unambiguous relationship that may be established in this regard; nevertheless (and contrary to what is posed by sophistries and maxims of the type: “he who can do the most, can also the least; he who cannot do the least, cannot do the most”), in terms of political strategy it is frequent that he who can do the most, cannot do the least; and that he who cannot with what is less, can with what is more. In reality, the mechanical and linear substitution of the principles proper of the political strategy by other ones strange to it, will always lead to the same erring confusions. This is so because the mutual involvement and interaction constitutive of ends and means, within a given strategic framework (and therefore its curves of mobilization and effectiveness), are due to principles that are – we dare not say dialectic, which is now very frowned upon – let’s say essentially different from those applicable to the shopping cart.

All policy implies a strategic structure of ends and means, which does socially produce, maintain or modify the rapport of forces on which it is founded. The nature of that policy: either it be progressive or reactionary, depends on its actual outcome. Only the strategicmodification of the rapport of forces in favour of the popular classes constitutes the reality of democratic political progress. The strategic ends and means do mutually imply and constitute each other: the ends constitute the means; and the depth of the ends does condition and produce the extension of the means. That’s why the Nations are only mobilized for ends that deserve their effort.

For a subjugated People, the national independence is a purpose that – as it can be understood – finds natural difficulties for the aggregation of the necessary social resources, under the conditions of an imperialistic, colonialist and fascist régime of military occupation; whether it be in Ireland, in Algeria or in the American Colonies (where the terrorism of the colonists and the Founding Fathers gave rise to the current USA). But the abandonment of that purpose involves the end and liquidation of the democratic policy and ideology, of the right of self-determination, and of the policy of national freedom.

In the same Way, the Basque People will – perhaps – mobilize with a similar difficulty for national independence and the restoration of its historic State against the French-Spanish Nationalist-imperialistic occupation, domination and colonization; but it will never mobilize for a French “department” with a Prefect, or for a false “autonomy”, granted, regional and provincial by and of Spain. The Peoples do mobilize themselves for great causes and in any case for national Freedom; they do not do it for the sake of some humiliating dishes of lentils (“yes, but with ‘tropezones’ and sacraments”, it was said by A. Ortuzar, president of the Pnv) for some coarse and cynical traitorous collaborationists.

The support of “Basque” Pnv-Eta collaborationism thus comforts the imperialistic positions as “democratic”; and counting on such good offices, not even the manifestation of an almost-unanimous will for independence in the subjugated People would be enough to alter the imperialistic determination in qualifying and repressing it as an aberrant aggression against “the Constitution and the majority will of the Spanish people”: an ideological fiction that, hiding its imperialistic and genocidal genesis and imposition, is based – as previously indicated in Chapter IV: ‘Real constitution and formal “Constitution”: reality and falsification’ – in a mythological constructivism in petitio principii that denies the dominated Peoples and melts them as aliquot parts of the totalitarian “nation”.

In consequence, the fatal destiny of the indigenous “moderate or radical” collaborationist and opportunist is to strengthen, “comply with and enforce the laws of democracy, that are the same for all the Spaniards or French; or eventually to be denounced by the régime as delinquent if he refuses to do it so. With regard to the part of the Country under French occupation, the French imperialistic-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 therefore their denial is outright and total. It may be so that the Spaniards try to dizzy and deceive their dominated subjects with their “pluralism”, “autonomy” and other similar crap; yet certainly not so the French. In fact, the “revolution” had already honestly classified the Basque Language – Basque People there is not – as a foreign Language.

Meanwhile, the alteration of the sociological base of our Country: achieved through the mobilization, reorganization, radicalization and empowerment of metropolitan and foreign colonies of population; through the multiplication of the number and action of the indigenous Renegades; and through the systematic destruction of national characters by means of colonization, alienation and acculturation etc. (“democratic” measures all of them, according to the insane/corrupt Pnv-Eta agents), is a process that does unceasingly continue its work at the service of the criminal objective of always: the submission and liquidation of the subjugated Peoples. While the “moderate and radical” ideological puppets and auxiliaries Pnv-Eta do play – ever since the former, since 1979 the latter – at imaginary “democracies and elections”, the French-Spanish nationalist, imperialistic and fascist bulldozer continues day by day its demolition work; the economic, political, racial, linguistic and cultural roll of the colonial steamroller moves at a giant pace towards the complete destruction of the subjugated Peoples.

Imperialism is the class-struggle at an international level: it is the domination and exploitation of one Country by another; and Nationalist imperialism does in addition consist in the destruction of the dominated Nation and the imposition on it of the national characteristics of the oppressive Nation. In these conditions, in a Country subjugated under a National-imperialistic and fascist régime of military occupation there is only place for two real Parties, namely: that of the integration into the dominant power, on the one hand, which leans on the forces of military occupation and eventually disguises itself as “democratic” or even “socialist” behind a façade of cardboard and acronyms that hide the true reality; and that of the Resistance, on the other, whose objective is and can only be to achieve the unity of the subjugated People around the affirmation of its national independence and the restoration – or constitution – of its own State, and the rejection and expulsion of the imperialistic and foreign forces of military occupation.

Faced with this reality, the task of the agents of the liquidationist bureaucracy Pnv-Eta and its satellites: Ea-Ehbildu-Sortu-Geroa bai and the rest of their “trade-union, social and cultural” associations that cover them, is to stregthen the internal party division of our People, and then their own alliance with avowedly imperialistic parties in our Country (whose objective is to keep it subject to Francespain), in order to exclude the other “Basque parties” that are their competitors in their own aspiration to obtain the “autonomic-economic” concessions of the imperialistic régime; all of which does absolutely and necessarily ruin that goal of national freedom, replaced by the “electoral contest, the polls and the vote” within the bosom of the occupying imperialistic States of France and of Spain.

In such favourable conditions, the hypocrisy and bold shamelessness of the fascists do not know bounds: with the collaboration and amplification obtained from the “autonomous institutions”, under the shelter of its mass-media monopolies and with the protection of its monopoly of criminal Violence (which represses all freedom of expression and guarantees its agents their talking without a reply: also because of that and for that they are fascists), the neo-Francoist régime distorts reality and spreads through the whole society its ideology of hatred and oppression against the Basque People, reaching features of generalized fanaticism, stupidity and even mental alienation. In order to hide all this, the forced and mechanical insistence with which – under their own military occupation – they repeat the imperialistic and fascist mantras of “pluralism, democracy, freedom, peace, non-violence” and other key-words of modern fascist rhetoric, is an expression of the internal cynicism and external hypocrisy of their representative ideologists.

Emulating the well-known Orwellian precedent, and counting on the collaboration and betrayal of the mafia-liquidationist Pnv-Eta bureaucracy and its satellites, French-Spanish Imperialism and Fascism have imposed in our Country a newspeak and an upside-down ideological world where Fascism is “freedom and democracy”, and where any opposition to Fascism is “fascism”. Where all Resistance to French-Spanish imperialistic Nationalism is “nationalism”; all Resistance to its dominant Racism is “racism”; all Resistance to its aggression and its Monopoly of criminal Violence is considered “violence”; and where it is “terrorism” all Resistance to State Terrorism.

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