Purported “success” of the opportunist-realist-possibilist program (XXVIII)
XXVIII – Purported “success” of the opportunist-realist-possibilist program
Iñaki Aginaga and Felipe Campo
According to their propagandists, “the facts have proved that the Pnv – or the Eta – had reason”. Now then, the fact that the bureaucracy of the Pnv-Eta group proclaims the actual result of its policy as “highly positive” or something like that, this is something that will not surprise anyone, since any other result would have deserved the same appreciation. But the key issue, hidden in that assessment, is that they present the “achieved” results as the irrefutable proof that there were no means to do any different thing, this is: as a proof of the viability and the “success” of the policy that has led to them, and of the erroneous character of the criticisms to the contrary.
Yet, all the results, insofar as they are the product of a complex of determinations, are necessary, inevitable and the only possible ones. In this sense, no criticism and no political opposition have ever denied, but all the opposite, the capability of the Pnv-Eta group to reach such results. The fact of opposing against a determined policy does not have as a condition to consider that it is impossible but, very much to the contrary, it has as a condition to consider it very possible (and also disastrous, of course). Indeed, no one is opposed to a policy that he considers not to be feasible: such opposition is not realistic but absurd.
Thus, if our democratic criticism has confronted the Pnv-Eta scheme during the last sixty years (specifically, since the pacts of strategic liquidation established by the Pnv-Anv bureaucracy with the PsoE, above all those of Paris-1961 and Munich-1962; and as regards the Eta, since its very birth from the bossom of the Pnv itself, originated among its most helpless and disoriented sectors as an infra-political, infantile and retarding reaction against these pacts), this has not been so because its policy was impossible to realize but because, unfortunately, its realization: in the conditions of Spanish fascism in power, was not only possible but highly probable at the same time as pernicious. And it continues being so, at least for now.
As for its results, these “cannot” be isolated from the behaviours that have precisely formed part of the whole set of causes of the former. A given behaviour cannot, on the one hand, fill out an effective role for a determined result, and be at the same time presented as a simple adaptation to a relationship of cause and effect for which that behaviour pretends to be something external. “The facts have proved”, they say. Yet, the only thing that the “demonstration by the facts” proves is that the participation of the Pnv-Eta group in the facts has led to this result; not that the participation of the Pnv-Eta group is founded or justified by a result for which it – the participation – would be an external data, being so that it is precisely an internal factor and its efficient cause.
The “demonstration by the facts” is a simple begging of the question (‘petitio principii’), one more. So gross a sophism does however serve for the purposes of the Pnv-Eta group, which thus gets as a purported result what it had already established as an assumption.
Now then, the results are always a political success if the ends that were intended are modified and fixed a posteriori so as to match with those results. The “facts prove” everything that is wanted, if they are deduced from the obtained consequence for the sole purpose of confirming it; and everyone can balance the accounts if the factors are not previous but deduced from the result. Similarly, any situation is a breakthrough if the starting point is placed where it is due in order to make it appear like that. The Pnv-Eta group does never reach the targets it proposes; but it is an expert in running backwards the starting point so that the effective arrival is always placed forward.
The “sociological study of the totality demonstrates” fatally not the purported hypothesis but the thesis which the truism starts from. “Obviously, only preconceived opinions can decide to undertake such ungrateful enterprise: in the absence of such conviction, no one would think of getting into such intellectual adventure. And it would furthermore be quite useless to undertake such work, since it’s enough with just say that ‘things must pass like this’, and then remain in the same thing.” All this is evident; but there happens that ideology has its reasons which do not care a bit about the requirements of formal science. From all this is deduced the “inability” of the Pnv-Eta group – induced by bad faith – to verify the imperialistic and fascist reality of the French-Spanish régime of military occupation over the Basque People and its State; and, consequently, to found any genuine opposition in accordance with the reality of the forces in presence.
That the Pnv-Eta group practices “institutional struggle and revolutionary war”, this is something “undeniable”, since the corresponding terms and concepts of “institutional struggle” and “revolutionary war” have been arbitrarily defined so as to make them match with their activities, and even the formal logic has been modified to conform to them. Having established by definition that what the Pnv-Eta group practices is “institutional struggle and revolutionary war”, there is no “logical” possibility of denying it. Indeed, all reality conforms to the desired concept, if this one has been previously adjusted to the former. In this way, if – as they pretend – “the Basque People does not reach at present for more than that”, it is in any case the People that the Pnv-Eta group has reduced to the current condition. Yet, if the Basque People is lost, confused, demoralized, lethargic and stunned, this is not the starting condition of the Pnv-Eta “policy”; quite to the contrary, it is the Pnv-Eta “policy” that has reduced it to such a pitiful plight.
However, “the facts are stubborn”, and the reality of Spanish fascism has finally shown the emptiness of the Pnv-Eta institutionalist-activist propaganda. As it will be seen later, the annoying but irreducible reality of the Spanish imperialism is beginning to put into public evidence, forty-five years after the set-up of its “transition”, the true content of the Pnv-Eta propaganda, forcing them to a difficult but inevitable “adaptation” that allows them to continue their mockery to the Basque People and assures them, at the same time, the corporate continuity of the complex of collaboration-betrayal that they have established. Replacing the pretentious, pedantic and delirious sufficiency of the Spanish intra-totalitarian “transition”, it is now for them a question of saving the face or in any case the cheek which they have never lacked of. The important thing is to preserve the pre-eminence of that “Basque political vanguard”, relative though it may be.
As there generally happens in Countries that have been subjugated by imperialism (at the end of wars of conquest and extermination, without capitulation, commitment or reservation of power), and that are ideologically and politically under-developed, the subjected People – especially if it has a corruptand incapable political class, as is our case – tends to the opportunism and the political liquidation. The opportunism is the subordination or the abandonment of fundamental and strategic political and ideological positions, with the aim or the pretext of obtaining illusory, superficial, secondary or “tactical” benefits.
For a subjugated People, and from the point of view of its own interests, no partial, temporary or formal advantage justifies the abandonment of the political and ideological means and positions that this People has, because without them there is no possible democratic/national policy. Once the fundamental and strategic positions and objectives have been abandoned or subordinated, in pursuit of the secondary and “tactical” ones, the historical experience invariably shows that in such cases the result is the ruin of the former and the latter. Opportunism, adventurism, corporatism and bureaucratism are factors of a strategic liquidation that ends up destroying all effective opposition: not only the illegal but also the legal one, since there is not and there cannot be real political opposition without a strategic foundation.
The program of a “realistic-possibilistic-minimalist-opportunist opposition” is easy to discover: it consists in adapting its provisional goals to the barriers where the régime puts the limit to the alleged opposition, thus setting “minimum” objectives that do not disturb the system. Thus, the conditions created by this type of “opposition” allow the established despotic power to place its barriers not in order to contain the advanced lines of the adversary but to lead him to place his own advanced lines where he finds placed the barriers. By acting in this way, the totalitarian power does not seek to protect its real and direct objectives – which remain always secure and far from political contestation – but to indirectly dictate the deplorable “strategy” of the adversary. The “resistance” of the Spanish and French Governments to the “concession” of the complete or incomplete “autonomy”, in the first place, and of the “Basque Department with a Prefect”, in the second one (which are the objectives of the “opportunist-minimalist etc. Basque oppotition”), is due to this design, and it still continues to give good results. Unfortunately, as long as the Basque calf keeps on charging where they shake the cloth (that is, while he keeps on voting: Pnv or PsoE for fear of Pp, or Chirac or Sarkozy so as to “avoid” Le Pen; or endeavouring to be given a prefect in Baiona and not in Pau), it will not to cease giving them.
The submission to the established despotic power: whether covert or overt, partial or total, has considerable advantages. The occupied Countries do continuously practice it, at different levels and degrees, individually and collectively, insofar as submission is the only way to avoid or reduce the criminal Violence of the established power in order to keep oneself alive. If the actual violence – and not only the virtual one – of the repression in our Country has often been greater in the area of Spanish occupation than in the French one, it is not so – as it has been pretended – because democracy has been stronger in the latter than in the former, since it has happened quite the opposite.
Democracy is the political power of the People, and the greater capacity for Resistance of this one – with the consequent increase of repression – in one territory than in the other one corresponds to geographical and demographic differences and to other factors. Lenin wrote that “the French occupation is the hardest of all the occupations” (even though in this issue the contenders are many and outstanding). And Trotsky: “The so-called Republican democracy of victorious France, at the present moment, is nothing but the most reactionary, grasping government that has ever existed in the world. Its internal policy is built upon fear, greed and violence, in just as great a measure as its external policy”. Indeed, the Monopoly of criminal Violence in French style, that’s to say: what they call “Republican Democracy”, is so absolute that it usually leaves no other way of survival than the absolute submission. And from it to the collaboration or other worse things there is only a step.
Anyway, if – according to the “realistic-possibilistic” etc. program of the Pnv-Eta liquidationist bureaucracy – the supreme political goal is to avoid or soften the repression, and to obtain economic assistance and administrative privileges for the services of the indigenous collaborationism, then the best and safest thing to do is to abandon pressure and Resistance, and to submit to the Monopoly of criminal Violence of the established French-Spanish fascist power of military occupation. It’s all about balances and scales, and not losing sight of what is the objective to be achieved. Because if now the important thing is not the Freedom of our Country but to bring the prisoners closer to the “Basque jails” (as they say), or to get them out of prisons, then it was better not to have put them into. (The dead cannot be revived.) If the effective question is the “definitive truce”, because now “we are going to make them bite the dust of peace”, then they should have not waited fifty years for that, and we had better not to have bitten off the dust of their “revolutionary war” after having bitten the dust of the real war, in 1936-37.
The capitulation or surrender proponed by the official Pnv and its acolytes, the Eta included, arrive once again very late. To end up doing that, partial or total submission, collaboration or cooperation should in any event have occurred before: with Franco, Robespierre, Cardinal Richelieu, the Catholic Monarchs Philips III and IV of Aragon-Castile, Louis XIII of France, Cardinal Cisneros, Ferdinand II of Aragon, Isabel I and Alfonso VIII of Castile, and others, at the expense of noiselessly disappear as a Nation. In the area of Spanish occupation we would have spared some lost wars; but in that of French occupation we’ve had to go through – among others – various European and overseas wars, two imperialistic world-wars and the infamous African war of Algeria. But the Pnv and its armed or unarmed satellites have always been ready and able to take us – always out of our way – into the “institutional struggle”, the attempts or a suicidal war, with the only condition that they are lost in advance.
The auxiliary services of the Spanish imperialistic Nationalism do present from the “transition” a social order “clad in democratic legitimacy, expression of the free will of the Basque People, founded on the rejection of all violence coming from where it may come and the respect for the life and freedom of the human person as supreme values; on the moral order, the consensus and the free decision of the majority: rule of law, product of reason at counter-scarp of history”. By “making Nation day-by-day through the economic and cultural development”, and “deepening into democracy”, “is prevented the excess of policy” waiting for “the enhancement of the Statute”.
On their part, the Pnv-Eta bureucracy and its satellites carry out “the Basque opposition” through what they call “the political, democratic, institutional, ethical and juridical, tactical, realistic, possibilistic, minimalist or maximalist way; through persuasion, dialogue and the pact between gentlemen, the universal suffrage and the democratic parliamentarism, the plans of pacification or of free association, the new scenarios for the peace and the construction of Euskal Herria, the march towards the independence (which always starts in the next elections), the historical opportunities and the innumerable qualitative leaps, cycles and historical opportunities that hopefully are opened ahead, the commitments for the change and the basic consensus in order to reach a democratic scenario, the always very positive negotiations and efforts, and the exceptional juncture that open a political era full of opportunities and also difficulties”.
To “the institutional path” of the Pnv bureaucrcy has now been added the Eta, which did previously propose the “Plan of Eight Years for the Unification and Liberation of the Country, the revolutionary war, the armed struggle, the mechanism of action-reaction and f the spiral of violence, the amnesty, and the Lizarra-Garazi Pact ‘in this time of hope for Euskadi’”. Procedures that have their complement in a simulation of “struggle of masses” and that, with the passing of time, are reduced to “the inevitable negotiation between armed forces that will decide the political structure of this Country”, and finally to “the dialogue and the elections” as a way to solve the political problem. “My organization has it very clear that the way to get out of this situation is dialogue: the political problems are solved by talking.” (J.J. Ibarretxe) As it could not be otherwise, all this has given their undesirable but inevitable results.
Fatally, the reality is more stubborn than stupidity, charlatanism, flattery, “solutions” of easiness and institutional lie, whose consequences has paid and will continue paying more expensively each time the Country that bears them, which discovers, with fatal parsimony and at the provisional ending of its endless waiting, that here the winners are always the same ones, and that the losers are always losing, with revealing obstinacy. In reality, this Country has spent its life waiting in vain illusions and false prophets; and so it has thus arrived late to almost all ages of its history and that of others, what in policy is worth as much as never arriving.
Almost a century has passed since the beginning of the implementation of the “realistic, possibilistic” etc. programme, but the incompetence of its managers is more alive than ever; “after all”, the can is not carried by them but by the Basque People, whom they led to believe that after the conquest would arrive “the de-conquest”; and after the foral liquidation, the foral restoration. Already in the 20thcentury, when the Spanish Republic came and after checking that it took out the Army and the machine guns to the roads and also to the streets of Gernika (April 16, 1931) in order to prevent any expression and restoration of People’s sovereignty, it waited in vain for the Statute of Autonomy until Franco revolted and won the war. After the victory of the international fascism, it waited for “a turn” or for the redemptive victory of “the Western democracies” to come. After the “betrayal” of the Allies, revealed from November-1947, and for another thirty years, it waited for the “imminent collapse” of the Francoist régime. After the conversion of the Francoists to the democracy (and that of the anti-Francoists to the monarchical-Francoist legitimacy) of 1977, it waited for the Christian Democracy to win, then for the PsoE to win; fourteen years later, for the Pp to show “political will” (even more?), and another fourteen years more, for again the PsoE to win. After the “revolutionary war” of the Eta, it waited for the inevitable negotiation and the institutionalist re-conversion. Then, for the cessation of “the armed struggle” and “the definitive truce”, and then for “the peace process in the absence of all violence, either legalized or in response” etc. “We’ll have to wait for the next elections”, there says the consecrated expression: so often repeated after each “electoral victory” and subsequent post-electoral collapse. And it waited for the “Pact of Lizarra-Garazi”, for the “Plan of free association of the Basque Country with Spain”, the ghost-consultations to citizenry, the continuous, empty and repetitive statements and proposals of democratic resolution and of construction of Euskal-Herria: in Bergara, in the Anaitasuna and in Anoeta, or the new Navarrese-Vascongado Statute.
From the “great electoral victories” of yesterday up to the more recently achieved ones; from the countless “extremely positive” conferences up to the “Irish way” or the “three legislatures”; from the “Eight years Plan of liberation and unification” up to the “inevitable negotiation”; and from the vacuous food-for-fools of Lizarra-Garazi up to the Declaration of Boise, successive peace “proposals” and “strategic plans”, humbug and pieces of nonsense are followed with repetitive insistence at a greater speed each time, in the same measure as the incapability of their protagonists and the ideological and political inanity of their contents become increasingly more apparent.
Constant bimonthly “plans, pacts and proposals” of pacification and peace conferences; strategic plans for the twenty-first century; imaginary pacts and fronts: vertical, horizontal and transversal; tables of dialogue and negotiation with empty chairs; and “democratic resolution of the conflict, within the most absolute respect to the institutions, through a process of peace, dialogue and self-determination without any kind of violence” but above all without rhyme or reason, are the absurd and contradictory humbug that conceal the reality of imperialism and make the apologia for the French-Spanish fascist régime of military occupation. All of which, once they have admitted that imperialistic régime as legitimate and democratic (and its occupying State as their own State – “the State”, they say – with corresponding rejection by our State, the Kingdom of Nabarre), hides or reveals the bankruptcy of “the institutional path and the armed struggle” of the Pnv-Eta bureaucracy and its satellites: Ea-Ehbildu-Sortu-Geroa bai etc., as pretended – but more and more visibly hypocritical and faky – defenders of the national-state independence of the Basque People.
Countless “transcendental elections, weeks of frenetic political activity, historical occasions, general strikes of demonstration and hunger, unlimited or symbolic, limited or provisional unilateral truces in waiting for the definitive ‘truce’, exploration phase that has entered into a dynamic of concretion and reached an advanced and irreversible point, solid foundations that allow to reach a minimum agreement”; and – at length – incessant creation of new groups and associations, every time they don’t know what to do with the former ones, anything goes in order to entertain the staff, to spend the time without doing anything different than silly uproar, to conceal the nullity of their intended political proposal, and to hide that they do not know what to do or what to say.
All this gives substance and continuity to the mockery of the Basque People, and tries to hide from it the reality behind exercises of collective suggestion and self-suggestion, so as to feed the illusions of the gullible persons, deceive the fools, and make waste everyone’s time. So meritorious activities: which they themselves do not even remember a few days after having launchedf them, enable their agents and false prophets for the daily access to the institutional corruption and the media of propaganda and ideological intoxication of masses. We do not know nor care what they will invent afterwards. The Spaniards spent forty years waiting for the political general strike; here, where general strikes are mounted every two months, there always remains to wait for the Magi or the Holy Advent.
“The moderates and the radicals” Pnv-Eta have the patent of the “gradualist” reformism: a trick that hides the strategic problem behind nonsense that confuse political efficiency and mechanical de-multiplication. “In policy things are achieved by advancing step by step”, “the policy is made day by day” etc. “In our times, the political goals are achieved by progressing little by little”, tell us Garaikoetxea and the Pnv “leaders” on shift. If this is so, the Basque People: which is gradually advancing backwards, is the best directed in the world. After eight centuries of wars of aggression and military occupation against our Country, Imaz and Urkulu claim that “this is not the moment to raise political issues but to ensure the permanent abandonment of all violence”, that’s to say: to consolidate the French-Spanish imperialistic Monopoly of criminal Violence. “Sometime they’ll have to negotiate”, or “this looks like going on for two hundred years”, repeat – radical and impatient – the converts from “the armed struggle and the eight years Plan of liberationand national unification”, which are now pacifists-realists-minimalists-optimists. That is, the ideological collapse of the Pnv-Eta propaganda is presented as a breakthrough of the national consciousness achieved by them.
The result is in sight: whoever wins, “the patriots always losers” is the inevitable, bitter and disillusioned realization of those who did in good faith believe in the pieces of nonsense of the Pnv-Eta bureaucracy; if anyone of them still exist, because more than forty years of spontaneous electoral abstention, in the draconian conditions of the Spanish fascist régime of military occupation, have shown that most of the Basque People have never believed them. Meanwhile, the colonial steamroller crushes every day the oppressed Nation. The French-Spanish enterprise of imperialistic genocide has caused immense and irreparable destruction to the national reality and identity of the oppressed Basque People, for which those bureaucratic mafias are simple parasites that suffocate it.
The protagonists of “the institutional path and the revolutionary war” are increasingly using the old and well-worn trick of an extensive amalgam for hiding and diluting responsibilities and consequences. “The transition was badly made. Here we have made a mistake, but we all have made a mistake”, declared Elorrieta. (And even more than all, he missed to say, they were wrong those whom we threw out of ELA because of saying the opposite of what was said by those of us who were making the mistake.) They do not even try to cover up their responsibility, let alone discover its roots. They only intend to downgrade to their own level those whom they persecuted and slandered for having denounced the reality of the continuity of Spanish fascist imperialism against the Basque People, which is the only thing that was behind the Spanish “transition to democracy”, and for having announced what was going to happen accordingly.
“After having seen it, all clever”, said on his part Alvarez/‘Txillardegi’; but the Spanish “senatorial elections” to which he applied, and which followed the first “general” ones in which he also called to participate and even run with his own party ‘Esb’, showed immediately that, after having seen it, he did not even learn anything either. And, after having spent many more years stumbling or leaning on the same stone, they have shown that they continue without seeing or wanting to see anything. Decided now to be clever, even if it’s forty or fifty years later, the Pnv-Eta group and its satellites continues maintaining its purported position at the forefront of intelligence. Actually, the “Basque” accomplices of the Spanish intra-totalitarian transition neither were they so dumb before nor are so clever afterwards: it depends everything on the real interests that motivated their behaviour.
But lo and behold that, given “the new conditions” resulting from so many electoral-institutional “successes” (which are the conditions that have always ruled under the French-Spanish colonialist imperialism), they do now “discover” that the “Basque statute” is dead and even that it was stillborn; which does nevertheless show according to them the insight and political sense of the avant-garde that promoted it, and the absence of political sense of those of us who denounced it.
“It’s already many donkeys [years] ago” (J. Egibar) that they discovered also that “the participation in the [Spanish] elections comes to represent a form of materializing and carrying the broad framework of the abstentionist power that has always been advocated for by the consequent Abertzale Left”. That is, to say it clear: that voting and recognizing the Spanish fascism is the best and most consistent form of not voting it. The tacky and pedantic verbosity of its intellectuals – even once that they have finished their “Marxist-Leninist-Maoist” phase – has left dialectic traces and resources still useful for a time in which, “after so much dialectics, the simple common sense, combined with computer science and the subtlety of speech”, announce new decisive contributions of the unfading ideological-political Pnv-Eta avant-garde. Meanwhile, the speech becomes more and more symbolic, rhetorical and empty: the “bets”, the “balls on the roof” and the “movements of counter” replace the non-existent political propositions: “We’ve already made a move of the counter. If they really want a peace process, now it’s their turn to make a move: the ball is in their roof. Those who detain and torture, and the bodyguards, will go unemployed: we’re going to make them bite the dust of peace.”
And after forty years of purported “revolutionary war, institutional struggle and armed struggle, political awareness, excitement and advance”, they do similarly “discover” that “the French-Spanish repression is the only immediate horizon”, and that it is “urgent to put the bases of a civil process towards self-determination” which is not even close to start. Then, what have they been doing – the protagonists of the institutional struggle and armed struggle – for fifty years, when all the conditions of urgency and strategic possibility occurred? Conditions that they have concealed and denied ever since with the help of themonopolies of criminal Violence and propaganda of the Spanish fascist régime of military occupation, which during all that time they have been affirming that it was democracy, and continue to do so. But the fact that they and their revision “arrive” fifty years late doesn’t mean that they have now something to contribute. Indeed, their current “revisionist” performance is as empty as the old one, and there is in all this nothing but a set of nonsense whose sole purpose is the concealment and apologia of disaster, the perpetuation of deception, the farce, mockery and sabotage of half a century; thus ensuring – and this is the crux of the matter – the corporate continuity of the triumphant vanguard Pnv-Eta.
“Better late than never”, they dare say now. Yet, such a sentence is suspicious in policy, where arriving late is equal to or worse than never arriving; but it is also a completely hollow statement and even a sarcasm, when there happens – as it does – that the retardant arrives as empty-handed as when he did absent himself. “Too late is a great word, a terrible word in History.” The Basque People, under Pnv-Eta “direction”, has arrived late – actually it has not yet arrived – to the modern national and State consciousness established on the affirmation ofthe right of self-determination or independence of the Peoples and their legitimately constituted States on the Self-Determination or original Independence of Peoples; to the criticism of the pseudo-democratic illusions and the individual “terrorism”; to the sense of the fundamental political reality; and to the elementary perception of the nature and needs of the strategy.
However, by a methodological-functional inversion – constant in the Pnv-Eta propaganda – and a new stroke of boldness and mediatic impudence, the “success” that never arrives they suppose it as already accomplished; thus avoiding unfathomable periods of sad waiting and heart-breaking revisions. In this way, and as they pretend, if the facts do not perchance occur in the reality “as they should”, they do so in the ideas; and the collective delirium authorizes the flight forward into the realms of the irrational but ideologically functional. Because – they keep saying – if they do not want to negotiate, this means that the negotiation is underway and nobody can stop it. If they say that they will not negotiate, we “already knew that they were going to say so”: which all the same means that the negotiation is underway and nobody can stop it. If they do not want to talk, we say they do because they have no choice. “And if they don’t want to, then even worse because it wouldn’t be democratic.”
As for the Eta bureaucracy, if facts have shown that the “revolutionary war” is impractical, this confirms its viability and success, which allows and advises now its voluntary abandonment for tactical reasons. If “the armed struggle” is panting out of breath, there is no problem: the “truce” is the new weapon that will advantageously replace that one. If the Pnv-Eta group gets half of the Country in jail, including the special panels in charge of getting out from it those who they had get in before; and if cemeteries grow replenished and forced migration dismantled, all of it converges to confirm the so long-awaited victory, since now, under “the new conditions that the attempts have imposed”, they have discovered that the decisive weapon now is the “provisional or final truce”, that’s to say: that the good thing now is not to carry out attempts. The very vanguard of the Eta: which brought to the Country the idea and execution of the attempts, has not yet exhausted its inventive and discoverative capacity, because if before “the important thing was to make” (attempts), if before the attempts were the supreme political factor, now it affirms that the important thing is not to make (them).
That’s to say, and according to its own cynical or delusional postulate: if the Eta advocates for and carries out attempts for forty years, it does fulfill and demonstrate its avant-gard political role; and if it discourages and interrupts them, it proves it likewise, since, “unquestionably”, thanks to the attempts it is possible now to stop from making attempts. It is at least possible to assert, in an incontrovertible way, that thanks to the attempts, the truce (of the attempts) has become possible; and likewise, that thanks to the imprisonments, amnesty campaigns and associations – to take out of jails those who were sent in before – have become possible.Once again: if before the solution was in war, now “we are going to make them bite the dust of peace”.
As it seems, “the new resulting conditions” of such an astonishing game of ideological sleight of hand allow and order a “unilateral truce”. Because – they continue – pending for the “definitive truce” (sic), a new unilateral truce “would center the problem, drastically reduce the tensions between abertzales (sic), annihilate the violents/democrats sophism, and mess up fully the Government of Madrid and the fascistoid right.” The “truce”: a new weapon of miraculous powers, will replace the old ones (and so opportunely obsolete), and will ideologically and politically destabilize the increasingly deficient democracy of the Government in Madrid; which, already shocked by the armed struggle and the revolutionary war, was wobbly from the truce and the Pact of Estella.
As they continue to affirm, these were landmark events that opened “a period of hope for Euskadi”, and that were about to end with Aznar, Marcelino Oreja and the imperialism within a year. This period prematurely fixed, since, contrary to what the Pnv-Eta group presupposes (once again so as to give free course to its “democratic” ghosts), the imperialism exists, and as such it did “unfortunately and unexpectedly” refuse to collaborate in the programmed function: leaving all forlorn its imaginative guests, surrounded by empty chairs and screwed down to the table of negotiation. Fortunately, the invitation is still standing, the doors are always open, and the chairs available; and the institutional screwdrivers protect the administrative subclass against the risks of an overly prolonged immobilization.
It is clear that a thorough revision is necessary. But how can the silence be broken when one has nothing to say? However, the revisionist blah-blah is running again: “After so many dialectics, let’s just be sensible. Today Euskal Herria is not lethargic, nor does it need bloody wake-up calls to overcome the collective slumber. Today we live in the age of the computers and the subtlety of speech”. “We need an intelligent and intelligible (sic) strategy, with a program of a certain minimums.”
That is: the fools that have plunged this Country into fifty years of warmongering and institutional delirium (and their unwary followers into exile, jail or cemetery), do on top of that give lessons in wisdom and non-violence. Those who have destroyed all political virtuality, give lessons in “strategic” intelligence and intelligibility. The teachers of the “Eight years of liberation and unification Plan”, have retrained themselves in followers and pedagogues of the realism-possibilism-minimalism-institutionalism. Those who have spent half a century stepping on eggs with diver boots and playing the violin with boxing gloves, give lessons in the “subtlety” which, associated with the computers, is going to replace the dialectic of bombs and pistols. And those who have destroyed the freedom of expression, communication and association, “are” now those naturally qualified for “coordinating the democrats”.
But their brazen verbosity has not been exhausted: “The urgent thing today is to lay down the foundations for the implementation of a civil process of self-determination with separation from Spain and France, and Basque unification in one State. For whose start is a necessary condition the existence of a social climate without political violence, neither legalized nor of response”, they say now. That is to say, according to that, the “starting of the process needs a social climate without violence”, in other words: a condition that takes the problem for solved. In other words, the difficult problem of combating the monopolistic criminal Violence of the French-Spanish imperialistic and fascist régime of military occupation, and of belling the cat: a problem that before they said was going to be “solved” by the attempts, is “resolved” now by (unilateral) non-violence as a “necessary condition”. Necessary for them, but not for the régime that wields it, which does not have the slightest intention of renouncing to its criminal Violence, with or without “temporary or definitive unilateral truces”.
Incapable once again of even posing the real problem, constituted by imperialism, “the moderates and the radicals” Pnv-Eta and their satellites prefer to hide it and make their victims believe that the solution to this problem is possible through dialogue and agreement with imperialism; or, to put it another way, that imperialism is not imperialism. Likewise, they pretend now that “a political process has been opened to solve the problem”, but that the régime does not second the “peace process”: a process that only exists in their imagination or propaganda. Imperialism has not deceived anyone or breached anything; it has always said clearly what it was going to do. It is “the moderates and the radicals” Pnv-Eta those who deceive and mislead this Country, or refuse to see reality. Charlatanism passes, but imperialism and fascism do remain.
Simply, because political violence is not a matter of “social climate”, of situation and circumstances; it is the foundation of political order and disorder. Even though – nobody knows how – all political violence either legalized or of response “disappeared”, there would still remain the legalizing violence, which is the foundation of the “disappeared legality”. And if it is this legalizing violence that disappears, then imperialism itself disappears as well. From there, the “civil process of self-determination” does not “start”, since it has no place from nor whereto it can go, and the right of self-determination itself disappears likewise.
In other words, with that discourse they demonstrate ignorance that the right of self-determination of all subjugated Peoples is the correlative contrary to imperialism, and that it makes no sense without the latter. Indeed, if there is imperialism, there is right of self-determination; and if there is no imperialism, there is no right of self-determination nor any need of it, either. Yet, it is not this, evidently, what – breaking the silence with their verbiage – the retardant Pnv-Eta revisionism wants to mean. The real object of such false fabrications about the “civil process of self-determination with a social climate without political violence” is, once again, to hide the political reality, to hide the foundation of criminal Violence of the imperialistic régime, to make its “democratic” apologia, and to leave open field to the follies and the delirious “new strategy” of revisionist renovation with which the Pnv-Eta group tries to hide the consequences of the old one, in order to continue deceiving its long-suffering victims. The “right of/to self-determination” that they talk about – like the “institutional struggle and the armed struggle” – are words that are repeated in the illusory hope that they may produce the corresponding reality; but above all in order to hide their liquidation of all policy for the Basque People liberation.
As they have stated from their newspaper, any critical approach to the glorious trajectory of the “Basque radical left” would be “simply impudent”. A few years ago and in the same sources, maintaining the same critical attitude was “Francoism and Opus-deism in order to divide the workers of Euskadi” and other places, where “the entire working class of Spain is with us”. Now, the criticism of the “policy of the Basque radicals” is “simply” typified as an assault on modesty. But the austere and virtuous guardians of public decency have been appearing in an open raincoat for fifty years: half a century of impudent display and exaltation of the attributes that have led to the ideological and political ruin of our Country. Instead now, the high functions and the institutional posts that have assumed with all their consequences have not produced the slightest blush in the immaculate countenances of the representatives, senators, staff and other collaborators of the Spanish imperialistic and fascist régime of military occupation. That is why the fear to the slightest criticism is permanent, in all those who cannot do without the most absolute monopoly of communication, if they are to continue deceiving a defenceless public opinion.
In terms of historical and sociological method, the Pnv-Eta group does not stop at scientific limits, to say the least. The service for its corporate interests is the only motive for its theoretical and ideological pursuits, which are ordered and subordinated for it. Common places, assumptions, postulates, axioms, paralogisms support between themselves along with semantic confusion and falsification, and are consolidated with the demonstration in begging the principle and other forms of sophistry.
In matter of “pacts”, and after having the Pnv-Anv bureaucracy accepted the liquidationist pacts of Paris (1957-61) and of Munich (1962), the persistent invocation and vindication of alleged and erroneously called “Agreed Laws”: which had been militarily imposed on our People since 1839 after its military defeat, did found a whole century of illusory waiting in “the Full Foral Restoration”. Unable to understand that all this was and is impossible to obtain in the imperialistic-fascist French-Spanish States: which deny the Basque People and its right of self-determination or independence; and after having accepted the liquidation and abandonment of the own statehood: that of the Kingdom of Nabarre, within which these foral guarantees and institutions arose and were respected, the purported “Constitutional Pact between equals of Euskadi with Spain”, the “Additional Provision”, and currently “the foral Nation”, are still kicking in the propaganda of the “great” Pnv as “juridical basis” of the new “Pact of free association of Euskadi with Spain”. This occurs forty-five years after that, in the Spanish intra-totalitarian “transition” to the Second Francoism, all of them recognized as democratic all the achievements imposed on our People and State by the First Francoism.
The Pnv realistic-possibilistic-minimalist stalwarts: adherents to “the plan of persuasion, dialogue and non-violence (unilateral and only of the vanquished), and to the Plan of Free Association of ‘Euskadi’ (that is: the Vascongadas provinces of the ‘autonomous Basque Community’) with Spain, which had returned – as they said – hope and illusion to this Country”, do “gradually discover” the limits of the Spanish “non-nationalist and non-violent democracy” that they have been accepting, supporting and legitimating for forty-five years now; with which, by dint of vain hopes and bitter disillusionments, they have plunged the Country into despair.
And the Eta radical-maximalists stalwarts: promoters of the childish and suicidal resource to the attempts (a consequence, symptom and cause at the same time both of the cultural and political under-development), lacking in legal caution or alibi after the military, political and ideological “collapse” of their demented “strategy”, give now ridiculous pretexts so as to justify themselves, and with their attitude they facilitate the espionage and repression carried out by the “democratic” régime of Spanish imperialism, which they have accepted and are supporting for forty-three years now. As a result, they have emptied the Resistance and filled the exiles, jails and cemeteries; and they have depleted and exhausted the lean material and moral reserves of the Basque democratic opposition under the French-Spanish imperialism. But they have also protected the interest: common among all fascist forces, that the monopolistic criminal Violence that constitutes the French-Spanish imperialistic régime of military occupation be covered-up and hidden by “the violence of the – infrastrategic – attempts” of the Eta.
Its militants, after having explored the hazardous and stormy margins of legality and illegality, do gradually complete the long march of return and incorporation to the paternal home of the Pnv – or the transit to worse places – that they had started under General Franco, and that a series of stations and intermediate shelters try to stagger, soften and disguise. They need, at all costs and first of all, to restore the institutional respectability and honourableness, to legalize or re-legalize their organizations and activities, and to recover the fascist privileges of organization, financing and propaganda; for which they are reduced to begging for their permanent presence in the “elections” and other institutions of the Spanish imperialistic and fascist régime of military occupation that they call “democratic, non-nationalist and non-violent”. This leads them to compete with the traditional Pnv opportunism-liquidationism, quickly surpassing it in their common task of destroying the fundamental theoretical and practical premises of the Basque People’s national freedom.
The participation of them all as Spaniards in the “European elections”, and the “Europeanist” vote of the supporters of “the institutional path and the armed struggle” Pnv-Eta, is likewise the continuation of the enterprise of ideological and political liquidation of all national policy, which has plunged this Country into helplessness, division, strategic nullity, political rotting, and material and mental alienation. (For a further enlargement on the question of the “European Union”, see our texts ‘Otra vez “elecciones europeas”’, and ‘The “European Union” and the Freedom of Peoples’.)
The destruction of all strategic reference, and the lack of all sense of historical time and space, make this Country to enter always late, backwards and ideologically disarmed in the new political scenarios, which the imperialistic machinery adapts and modifies to its exclusive convenience, by its own and sole initiative. It is clear that the “unpredictable” lesson and the beating of 1936 have been useless here; that this People “takes them and repeats again”, and that everything is ready for the next “unexpected” chapters.
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