Ideological camouflage of criminal Violence and State Terrorism (8)

Violence and Terrorism.- Their ideological mystification at the service of Imperialism

8 – Ideological camouflage of criminal Violence and State Terrorism

Iñaki Aginaga and Felipe Campo

For the ideologists of the illusion, who fabricate and disseminate the whitewashed “conscience” of the French-Spanish imperialistic régime established in our Country over mountains of corpses, rivers of blood and permanent military occupation, the constituent “immaculate conception” of that régime is not only the sublimated genesis of its armed forces that pretend to be non-violent; it is also the schizophrenic model and doublet, the imaginary and mythical past and present of its Empire, which do transfigure its historical reality. It is the transcendent romantic illusion of their imperialistic and totalitarian Nationalism, the shameless obscenity with which they exhibit the unpolluted cloaks and white gloves over the virginal bodies and hands of the monopolies of criminal Violence and their beneficiaries. It is the hypocritical invocation of the Fifth Commandment – “We do not kill” – uttered by a régime established over uncountable crimes; and the proclamation of “life – that of themselves – as supreme, absolute, inviolable and sacred value”, and of “the right – that of themselves – to life as first of human rights (those of themselves), without which all the rest are impossible”. “Everything starts from there”, confirm in their turn the Pnv leaders.

But if the general history has nothing of pure or virginal, the special history of the imperialism goes far beyond the evocation and activities of a house of ill repute; even taking into account that here the repute is always given by the same ones. The Nationalists, imperialists and fascists who in the French and Spanish States exert the monopoly of criminal Violence and State Terrorism in the occupied territories of the Basque People; the individual and collective murderers of the wars of aggression and their Terrorism of masses, call now themselves “democratic non-violent and non-nationalist victims” of “the violence and the peripheral imperialism” of two million violent, aggressive, bellicose and morally depraved rebellious natives who threaten the life, peace and freedom of their eighty million peaceful and helpless neighbours, who are in full possession of the monopolies of criminal Violence, Terror and Propaganda.

Those who through the violence of taxation do exert the permanent institutional looting of the human and material resources of the subjected Peoples, denounce “extortion” of tiny plots of the social product that escape their monopoly. Those who through the military violence have exerted for centuries the “legal” kidnapping of masses in prisons and camps of concentration, forced labour and extermination; and have through violence and for violence instructed and obliged thousands of colonized persons to serve in their armies: dragged to kill and die as cannon fodder in the wars – imperialistic on both sides – of their oppressors, or as mercenaries at their service, do condemn the “deprivation of liberty” that these agents of the imperialistic fascism pretend they are suffering as a result of the legitimate self-defence that the attacked carry out against their aggression.

In the established ideological compound, the cynicism and/or hypocrisy of the social groups and of the ideological, moral and cultural agents that produce and transmit the totalitarian ideology correspond well to the unprecedented capability of the modern monopoly on propaganda, inseparable from the monopoly of political criminal Violence. Everything appears to be possible, there where the fascist “theorists” speak only them: just because of that and for that reason are also fascists. Political Terrorism and ideological Terrorism are inseparable. The Basque People has not only been and continues to be a patient and testing ground for the modern Terrorism of war, of occupation and of State against defenceless populations; it has also been and continues to be a patient and testing ground for propaganda and psychological warfare taken up to their utmost extreme.

The monopolies of Violence and propaganda are the real political and ideological base of the French-Spanish régime of military occupation over the Basque People and its State; a régime that the modern fascist shamelessness describes as non-violent and democratic at the same time. In fact, the affirmation of its non-violence and democracy is its ideological axis. Its ideological agents develop since many years a colossal campaign of confusion, criminalization, brainwashing and ideological intoxication of masses about the inextricably linked issues of Violence and Terrorism, on the one hand, and of democracy, freedom, dialogue, right of self-determination of all Peoples, and fundamental human rights, on the other.

The propaganda monopolies – civil, military or ecclesiastical – present the imperialistic and fascist political power as “natural”, neutral, free, peaceful, non-violent and democratic, all at the same time. The French-Spanish imperialism and fascism against the Basque People and its State, and their crimes of war, against peace and against humanity, disappear in the collective schizophrenia ideologically induced by the monopolies of Terror and ideological mass intoxication. Their fanaticism and obscurantism are dressed up in enlightment, science and civic education; without thereby ceasing to continue and reinforce the policy of Peoples’ oppression that has always constituted their essence and their existence.

On the key issue of Violence and Terrorism, of pacifism and non-violence, very particularly, is clearly apparent the imperialistic technique of ideological manipulation and dissolution designed by the imperialism and the fascism. French and Spanish imperialistic Nationalism cannot recognize the criminal Violence that is the true origin and foundation of the French and Spanish States, oppressors of our People and State; nor the political and historical reality of their régime built by war of aggression, terrorism, military occupation, annexation and repression. The imperialistic and fascist propaganda about pacifism and non-violence, violence and terrorism, is perhaps that one where the irrationality and the formal contradictions of the dominant ideology, where the shamelessness, cynicism, hypocrisy, bad faith, stupidity or mental alienation – as appropriate – of its promoters, servers, collaborators and victims do appear in the more apparent and revealing form and degree.

Such is the calibre of the – formal – nonsense that the monopolies of propaganda, psychological warfare and mass ideological intoxication disseminate at all hours regarding this issue, that they reveal in themselves both the nature of the régime that uses them, as well as the phenomenal gullibility that it has managed to develop among the populations which they are addressed to. Imperialism and fascism do thus make their victims: supposedly and clinically normal people, ideologically schizophrenic. The social and political alienation: which is characteristic of the imperialistic and fascist system, has thus been turned into generalized mental alienation. But this result spreads increasingly to the dominant Peoples themselves, whose leaders and propagandists seem to believe themselves the nonsense that they say for the others to believe.

If the supreme and subordinate agents of modern imperialism, who are supposed to be in possession of the secrets of gods, do themselves believe their own insanities, it is indicative that the fascists who govern us are also “the dangerous mentally ill persons who govern us”. (D. Owen.) The destruction of reason degrades the dominant Nation along with the dominated; but it does always ideologically serve imperialism and fascism.

“A conqueror is always a lover of peace: he would willingly accept enter our State without opposition.” All the political agents have always condemned the violence of their adversaries, and justified their own one, which they recognized but – as they have also always affirmed – justified since they had been forced to use it as a last resort. Instead, which highlights the contemporary ideological drift is the fact that the current powers, established and maintained by war and monopoly of criminal Violence, and holders of the greatest means of destruction that never before were accumulated, do at the same time pretend to be... contrary to all violence!

Contemporary fascist ideology goes even further: it deniesthe own violence, presenting it in addition as founded and constituted by non-violence and in opposition “to all violence wherever it may come from”, which is formally condemned. That dominant ideology, in its fictionalizing mission, hides its political reality: constituted as such through criminal Violence, and replaces it with a fiction that presents a purported non-violent social order that – as it claims – is not something utopian but a current, existing and effective reality. That is: a purported apolitical, Irenist, Montanist or acratic-anarchist society, where the social order is created and guaranteed by the word, the dialogue, the reason etc. This idyllic and harmonic society is disturbed only by the attempts against that régime: the only violence that the dominant ideology does know and recognize. In this way, the current official and radical version of the totalitarian political power: which falsely presents it as “pacifist and non-violent”, does not qualify positively, does not justify or mask its own criminal Violence but simply denies its existence.

It is an amazing show, for those who do not know the unlimited capacity of cynicism, hypocrisy, brainwashing and ideological intoxication of masses of the current totalitarian powers, that a political power, whatever it may be, pretends to even present itself as contrary “to all violence coming from where it may come”. And, even more, that a de factopolitical power: which holds the monopoly of criminal Violence and was established by war of aggression, conquest, military occupation, Terrorism of masses and violation of fundamental human rights, dares to deny Violence as constitutive of its own reality, and on top of that accuses its innumerable victims of “violence”.

The supporters and executors of torture and terrorist summary executions: realized against the democratic opposition as a solution of the resistances that imperialism and fascism are still finding, do suddenly discover and find for themselves a new exquisite sensitivity or sentimentality, an absolute disgust and intolerance towards the slightest shedding of a blood drop, at least that of their own; to whose preservation must be sacrificed, if need be, the others’ Nations. “No cause, righteous though it may be, is worth a single drop of spilled blood”, repeat the agents and successors of those who have spent their history in shedding that of the others.

Even more, the great continental and trans-continental Empires: “bands on a large scale” of fanatics, thieves and murderers who have bloodied and destroyed all the Countries that have had the misfortune of falling into their claws, accuse their victims of “violence and terrorism”.

The real objective of the imperialistic propaganda is always to hide the original and permanent, fundamental and constitutive criminal Violence of the imperialistic régime and State to which it serves; and to conceal that its very nature, foundation and origin are built in war of aggression, military occupation and Terror of masses, replaced in the corresponding ideological delirium by a social order without violence. “Non-violence, freedom and democracy” must appear in all cases as determining and essential factors of the historical and social constitution and legitimacy of the current régime of imperialistic military occupation and of its totalitarian political power. A mission only possible if there are given the very same conditions that are intended to be hidden: the totalitarian monopoly of criminal Violence, and the monopoly of mental conditioning that is its result.

The issue of violence, as well as the question of the right of all Peoples’ self-determination and others that are of the utmost importance for the imperialistic ideology, is extremely clear and relatively simple; but the imperialistic ideology uses all its resources so as to make it dark, ambiguous and complicated: “My name is confusion”. Its central ideological purpose is to hide the true moral, juridical and political question, that is: the real structure of ends and means of criminal Violence that constitutes the imperialistic-fascist system of political domination over the subjugated Peoples.

For the imperialistic ideology, the terms of ‘violence’ and ‘terrorism’ mean what, depending on the case, the established power decides that they mean. They do not have an unequivocal meaning. They correspond to an amalgam of diverse meanings that do follow to one another, accumulate or combine according to the requirements of the propaganda, the psychological warfare and the political practice. In this way, the imperialistic and fascist ideological technique in connection with violence plays upon several aspects: formally contradictory but ideologically integrated and operational, in an amalgam as confusing as ideologically functional.

In theory, there can be established different species of violence: actual or virtual, individual or collective, aggressive or defensive, bad or good, despotic or democratic etc., according to the different – formal and subjective – criteria and evaluations that may be proposed; whether those ones be technical, political, legal, strategic or moral. But those distinctions are irrelevant with regard to their generic identity as violence; an identity that, as such and as we have already indicated, cannot be altered: violence is violence, no matter how different – licit or illicit – are the ends which the acts of violence are aimed to. In any case, to present them as non-violence is contradictory in terms.

Genocide, aggression, war and guerrilla warfare, terrorism, bombing of civilian populations, homicide, murder, repression, kidnapping, prison, torture, imprisonment, hostages, ransom, intimidation, threat, banishment, deportation, exclusion, tax and taxation, extortion, pillage, robbery, plunder, denunciation, democracy, security, balance, peace, human rights, reprisals, humanitarian interference, “civilian” wars and conflicts, belligerency and insurgency are acts of violence, which materially and objectively do not at all differentiate among themselves as to the violence that they all involve, and do not cease being acts of violence due to the alleged values, motives and purposes that may move them; even though, violence is certainly used in a natural form with incomparably greater intensity and extension by totalitarian powers. However, the dominant ideology hides, manipulates, differentiates, attributes and distributes such behaviours according to formal criteria of legality and morality, in such a way that it may serve to hide the common essence of violence that constitutes them.

Of course, the holders of the political and ideological totalitarian power do not ignore the difficulty involved in this artificial differentiation, and try to hide the “dangerous” identity of violence of the means constitutive of their own political action; for which they must destroy the ideas and words that reveal that identity. In this way, the concept of “violence”: common to those means of action, is split and replaced by special ideas, and their differentiated qualification is referred to formal, ethical and subjective criteria that pretend to pass off as a material and objective differentiation of means; this as for its idea or concept. As for the corresponding common term, this is also split in different terms so that, once the identity of the word has been eliminated, there may not remain any trace of the identity of the concept, and that the differentiation of words may induce to believe in the existence of materially different ideas and realities.

Confusing the ideas by changing the names of things is an old trick that keeps on giving good results. Therefore, “violence”: of a negative terminological import, is presented in opposition to “force, compulsion, coercion, constraint”, of a more positive, soft and misleading psychological content. These terms, coated with a positive connotation thanks to the ideological conditioning of the patients whom the operation is aimed to, do correspond to and are those used when it comes to naming one’s own violence, which is so good that it is not nor is even called ‘violence’.

These terms: ‘coercion or force’, thus remain “differentiated and opposed” to the term ‘violence’, of a negative import, which is and corresponds always to what others do. With this, one can resume the starting point, namely: “the rejection of all violence”, since – by a decision-making designation – ‘violence’ is and is called solely what the others do against oneself, not what one does against the others. Disappeared even the name that recalls the monopolistic criminal Violence of the totalitarian State, we are informed next that: “the law is force”; “the Government will pursue terrorism with all the force of the rule of law”; “in Corsica, the Government of the Republic will oppose the violence with the full force of the rule of law” etc. A different name is thus given to that mysterious thing, inseparable of policy, State and law, but that they pretend it is not violence.

According to this, the Government, the State and the armed forces are not violent, they only are strong; and are not based on violence, not even in force: they only respond to others’ violence. Of course, all violence is force; but according to that ideological fiction not all force – namely: theirs – is violence. The force of State and of law is thus classified together with the economic or cultural forces, and conceptually separated from the other kind of force that is violence. It is clear that only pre-established political interests may lead someone to such exercises of ideological confusion and juggling.

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

Finally, and through a practical, technical and strictly legal approach, those ideologists and legists determine by a decision-making construction the term and concept of political violence, which according to that approach are henceforth identical to those of terrorism. Thus, it is “terrorism” any real or virtual opposition to a totalitarian Government; it is not so, what that Government is or does. An over-extensive interpretation, established through the use of criteria of analogy, responsibility, result and social situation (criteria that were formulated and put into practice above all by the totalitarian régimes of the pre-war period), makes that – under the impulse of the current crisis of international order and disorder – the offence of “terrorism” has become the only (political) offence, by incorporation and assimilation of all the others. “It” is thus avoided, through the empty – though without recourse – evidence of the truism, any problem of qualification or imputation.

Thus, imperialism and fascism disguise the all-too-obvious criminal Violence of their States through a narrow and constituent designation and idea that excludes it from their own behaviour. For that purpose, the political power has once again applied the old recipe of changing and unfolding the names to make believe that the ideas – their realities – are different. They thus have two meanings and concepts of Violence and Terrorism formally contradictory; what does not cancel nor weakens their ideological arsenal but quite the opposite. Their traditional concept, which is the reprehensible one, is retained so as to fully recuperate the – ideologically ruinous – denotation and connotation of the words and ideas on Violence and Terrorism, as well as their primitive, instinctive, affective and emotional charge: repulsive and negative, which are channelled towards the political adversary. And, simultaneously, a reduced, narrow and “technical” concept is maintained, which denies the criminal Violence and its characteristics as something that can belong to and be attributed to the established political power.

In pure formal logic, “good violence, just war and holy war, defensive war and pre-emptive war” are as incompatible with the non-violence as their contraries; but formal logic and imperialistic ideology keep problematic relationships between each other. However, the professional thinkers of imperialism and fascism do not see in all this any difficulty while it gives them good results. And in view of the results that the modern totalitarian State gets from the public opinion, it is clear that the imperialistic ideology: safeguarded by censorship and the monopolies of propaganda in front of an already by itself arduous democratic criticism, does not meet drawbacks but advantages in the successive or simultaneous accumulation of antithetical assertions. Which by itself gives evidence of the extent of the destruction of reason by the modern totalitarianism; a fact that the falsification and confusion of terms, concepts and political reality seeks to hide and justify.

Let’s see: in the first place there comes the word-play based on “the rejectionof allviolence”, so as to proclaim the non-violent purity of the régime. This allows the fraudulent and misleading recuperation of positive and negative notations and connotations, in order to influence the emotional and affective reaction of the social groups historically punished, weakened or infantilized; thereforefearful – and rightly so – of violence.

Then, if perchance this first position becomes difficult to maintain, because in an ensuing theoretical debate it is revealed the inconsistency between that proclaimed non-violent purity of the régime, and the reality of political institutions and that therefore are constituted by violence, this leads the theorists of imperialism to an eventual tactical retreat on a second line of defence of their position, which is formally inconsistent with the first one. When placed in that situation, they are forced to reply: “we didn’t mean to say so”; or else: “if things are carried to that point”, which is the point where they carry them to, at all times. (“We didn’t mean to say so.” But anyway they do mean it, as long as they see that it works smoothly. And they will return to mean it, at all hours, if the circumstances make it useful and feasible, as soon as another person will give signs of stupidity that could make of him a new ideal victim, or when the public monopoly of repression and conditioning of masses will ensure the lonely expression of the régime’s theorists.)

Forced into this tactical retreat, the ideologists of imperialism do then resort to narrower and more qualified ideas of violence: ‘good violence’ against ‘bad violence’, or ‘defensive violence’ against ‘offensive violence’; ‘good violence’ always being theirs, and ‘bad violence’ always that of others.In short, the traditional name, idea and justification of State violence – that is: the recognition of its existence that was in principle hidden/denied – end up being admitted and explained as a benevolent and “transfigured” reality. However, such a recognition of State violence is immediately reverted, to again be denied and hidden when lucidity and danger are over.

Obviously, it is an auxiliary resource of escape that is formally contradictory with the first position, although it is ideologically useful in the face of unexpected flashes of lucidity among the predestined and conditioned victims of fascist propaganda. Of course, that occasional tactic withdrawal from one version to the other does not prevent them from immediately – quickly and alternatively – returning to the modern “saved version”, namely: pure and simple negation of State violence, where and when new patients present the deficit mental profile that makes them scapegoats of collective swindling programs.

Thus, the imperialistic ideology does incidentally use – in succession or simultaneously – the current theory of totalnegation of the Violence of State, along with the traditional theory of “the two kinds of violence”: the good one (i.e. that of themselves), and the bad one (naturally that of the others). But, as already indicated, this is in formal contradiction with the initial “rejection of all violence”, from which they had started, and of their correlative basic statement, namely: that “all violence is inherently bad”,

As is evident, these two theories of violence are formally contradictory between themselves, because it is not – formally – possible to condemn all violence and only a part at the same time. Indeed, denial-condemnation of allviolence, on the one hand, and affirmation-justification of someviolence, on the other, are formally incoherent and contradictory propositions. Let’s see: if all violence is evil, then there isnogood violence that can be justified; and if there is any good violence that must be justified, then not all violence is evil. There cannot be justified the same thing that is condemned as a whole. Moreover, if the own violence itself is now is denied and the political power affirms that is non-violent, what need is there to justify a violence that they affirm does not exist? What does not exist cannot be justified; what is justified – i.e. the own violence – is because it exists and therefore it cannot be denied. The internal contradiction in such propositions is insurmountable: denial and justification of the same reality is a logical and sociological absurdity.

Faced with this new difficulty, the new “solution” to which they are forced consists in unfolding and splitting the terms and concepts of violence, so as to hide the essence ontologically and materially identical of all act of violence.

In the ideological reality of imperialistic and fascist totalitarianism, the two contradictory ideas of violence are never fully dissociated and absent: they remain in a latent, dominant or recessive state. So the traditional – illusionist and transcendent – justification of violence and terrorism, and its current – realistic and immanent – positive version are used and combined in a simultaneous or successive, joint or separate form, and they interact, transfer and accumulate their respective qualities according to the needs of the psychological conditioning of the masses; without the misunderstanding, confusion and formal contradiction: typical of the dominant ideology, being able to affect the ideological effectiveness of the procedure. The reserved, alternative, confused and diffuse function of this swindling mechanism is exercised without discontinuity in the collective psychology of the totalitarian society. On issues of morality and legality, as in so many others, for the imperialistic and fascist propaganda quantity overrides quality: the more, the better.

Everybody is in favour of “good violence”, that is: one’s own, which in reality they pretend does not exist as such violence; and against the “bad, illegitimate, unfair, illegal etc.” Violence, this is: that of others. In the same way, everyone is against “terrorism”, on condition of giving the word the meaning that is best for their ideological and political interests, and worst for those of the opponent. Everybody is also in favour of “peace”, on condition of accepting their own concept and their own conditions for “peace” along with the subsequent political régime. Even the purported apostles of a complete pacifism, who condemn “all violence coming from where it may come”, do at the same time support the “good” violence (that of themselves), and condemn and reject the “bad” Violence (that of the others). But that way of escape: usual resource of tactical ideological retreat between the so-called “non-violent democrats”, which opposes and justifies the “good” violence against the “bad” one (while naturally identifying goodness with the own positions and wickedness with those of the others), although it may be ideologically useful, is an escape as commonplace as unpresentable and absurd.

The modern ideology of imperialism and fascism about violence is not unaware of the drawbacks of so cynical an identification and so practical a regulatory simplification; but it's a too effective ideological trick, for the purpose of maintaining the manipulation of the masses, as to be sacrificed to honesty and the principle of non-contradiction. The falsification-recuperation of the traditional terms and concepts, words and ideas, allows the additional ideological exploitation of statements that are formally contradictory. “The condemnation of all violence coming from where it may come”: first line of the modern campaigns of pseudo-pacifist swindling, involves the previous falsification-recuperation of those traditional terms and concepts. Their ideological content: positive and negative, affective and emotional, once it has been falsified and transferred to different ideas, allows to influence the reaction of the weakest social groups against the alien behaviour, which is presented as violent, and in favour of the own one, “coincidentally” peaceful and non-violent.

The real fascist Violence is so big that it gets not even be seen, and the “good violence” –one’s own – is so good that it is not even called violence. It is so different that it does not have any generic or onomastic community with the others’ “bad violence”, that is the only violence; which allows to cynically or hypocritically maintain in words the permanent opposition “to all violence coming from where it may come”, and – at the same time – to consecrate the maintenance of the original and permanent “non-violent” violence of the imperialistic-totalitarian régime. All of it in formal contradiction with the political reality, established by means of violence, as well as with the traditional theory, which approves the just violence and war.

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

Those who impose their own purportedly “free” elections on the subjugated Peoples, after having imposed themselves upon them and their States and legitimate institutions through war of aggression, conquest, military occupation, annexation and subsequent colonization, do next show their “democratic” indignation because – as they say – the fear of the attempts “prevents them from voting”. As they pretend, the power that they have previouslyestablished over those Peoples through the monopoly of criminal Violence and Terror does not frighten anyone, nor does apparently prevent anybody from voting in their own election, in their own Country and in their own State, whose previousdestruction and permanent proscription they have imposed by means and through extreme Violence. Similarly, when those, who for centuries have tried and continue to impose – by means of criminal Violence and Terrorism – their arrogant, pretentious and presumptuous national identity and imperialistic Nationalism on the whole world, do observe that there are Peoples who do not want even to see it, they have the cynicism to protest because these ones, as they pretend, “do not allow them” to preserve their identity.

To “refute” or comment once and again the shamelessness of the French-Spanish Nationalist-imperialistic and totalitarian ideology, in these and other of their favourite topics, would already be to incur in a naive and sterile logomachy, which serves the imperialism and fascism in order to make waste time and work to the others. It would be “to once and again put the nose in the same manure”, that the monopolies of imperialistic and fascist propaganda produce and distribute without discontinuity.

The dominant ideology, following the same model – already exposed above – that it uses to distort the concepts of policy and law, seeks also to oppose violence to democracy and presents them as incompatible. But democracy is a “kratia” (meaning “power”), that’s to say, a system of political power: precisely the political power of the People, and – like any political system – is constituted by violence. The fact that a given policy and law be those of a despotic system, or those of a democratic one, in no way affect its specific means of action: violence, which materially does not differ in its various forms.

It is impossible to distinguish between despotism and democracy by reference to the use or non-use of violence, since both political systems use the same means. As we have already explained it elsewhere, they can only be distinguished from each other qualitatively, by reference to their respective ends – whether criminal or licit – that are the object of such violence; and quantitatively, by the differential doses – uncontrolled or controlled – that both systems apply. Democracy does not consist of non-violence; it consists of violence, like any political régime.

The ideologists and agents of the imperialism do exhort to renounce to violence so as to “adopt the rules of the democratic play”. But the democratic “play”, like all policy, is violence, and its rules are rules of violence: they are created and imposed by means of violence. The political power that conceals this, is showing with it that it is not only a violent power but also illegitimate and undemocratic, otherwise it would not need to deceive its victims: when violence is legitimate and democratic (since it is placed at the service of the protection and enforcement of fundamental human rights), it does not need of deceit or concealment.

As for the “pacifism” of the Church, there cannot be place for ignoring that the greatest wars, massacres and atrocities of History have been made with the instigation, blessing and responsibility or participation of that institution. The Church has in addition condemned formally the non-violence: a “Christian heresy”, according to the terms of the R.P. Ducattillon. Its own Constitution and historical life are inseparable from the system of violence, which governs the world before and after the Religions of the Book had gained in it a status of nature.

The hypocritical condemnation “of all violence coming from wherever it may come from”, formulated by the propaganda of the dominant power, is materially and formally contradictory with the reality of Violence of the policy and the State of France and of Spain; a reality that is upheld and justified by the same hypocrites or morons who profess or disseminate such functional insanities, since those States are constituted as such not only by violence – as all States are – but by criminal Violence.

As it is well known, all political reality is constituted as such by violence. Whether it be applied in the service of democracy or of despotism, of the defensive action or the aggressive one, or that it be about “the good” violence or “the bad” one, all of these are not only questionable moral and subjective classifications – which are generally manipulated and falsified according the own convenience – but they are completely irrelevant issues in this regard.

Objectively, violence is violence, and therefore all behaviours involving violence are – ontologically – seamlessly indistinguishable as regards the nature of such means of action. In the case of the imperialists and fascists, their violence is moreover criminal and illicit, since it is at the service not of the defence but of the violation of fundamental human rights. But even so, the agents or imperialistic propaganda do still keep repeating their absurd and hypocritical condemnation of “all violence”, when there happens that some violence of legitimate self-defence of the oppressed is opposed to their criminal, original and eminent Violence. And incredible though it may appear, “so huge a contradiction does not seem to cause them considerable ideological prejudice”.

The incapability to verify so evident a reality, in connection with something that concerns its own activity, reveals a profound alteration in the capability for perception that is generally attributed to extreme cases of oligophrenia, paranoia or schizophrenia. Social alienation has been sublimated into mental alienation. Schizoid and paranoid brain disruption, political autism, delusional forms of megalomania, and false conceptions, are the result of the centennial social, political and ideological conditioning induced by the ideology of imperialism, since the times when it intended that “the Barbarians, aware alike of the humanity and the prudent administration of the Hispanics, were of their own motion, both of nobles and the others, to accept the King of Hispania as their sovereign”. (Francisco de Vitoria.)

And similarly: “If France wanted to remain a great country capable of exercising on the destinies of Europe the influence that belongs to it,” it had to “carry, everywhere where it can do it, its language, its costumes, its flag, its weapons and its genius”. “Nowadays they are the Continents which we are annexing, it’s the vastness which we are sharing.” “All the plots of the France colonial dominion, all these remains must be sacred to us.” “It is essential to base colonization on domination.” “Gentlemen, we must speak more loudly and more honestly! We must say openly that indeed the higher races have a right over the lower races. [...] I repeat, that the superior races have a right because they have a duty. They have the duty to civilize the inferior races. And is there someone who can deny that there is more justice, more material and moral order in North Africa since France has made its conquest?” (From Jules Ferry’s address to the Chamber of Deputies, relaunching “the expansion of French civilization”; 1885).

However, the reality had been quite different: “The French, in a few years, have committed more cruelties than the Turks in two hundred years”, said the Deputy Roger to the Parliament already in 1834. And as early as 1847 Tocqueville reported: “Around us the lights have gone off, the recruitment of men of religion and men of law has ceased; that’s to say, that we have made the muslim society much more miserable, more disorderly, more ignorant and more barbaric than it was before it knew us”. [Report on the draft law to the extraordinary credits requested for the Algeria, 1847.]

And what about “the humanity and the prudent administration of the Spaniards”? “A vivid early account of the workings of the encomiendahas come down to us from Bartolome de las Casas, a Dominican priest who formulated the earliest and one of the most devastating critiques of the Spanish colonial system. De las Casas arrived on the Spanish island of Hispaniola in 1502 [...]. He became increasingly disillusioned and disturbed by the cruel and exploitative treatment of the indigenous peoples he witnessed every day. [...] [He] began a long campaign to reform Spanish colonial institutions. His efforts culminated in his book ‘Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies’, written in 1542, a withering attack on the barbarity of Spanish rule. [...] The strategy and institutions of conquest perfected in Mexico were eagerly adopted elsewhere in the Spanish Empire. Nowhere was this done more effectively than in Pizarro’s conquest of Peru. As de las Casas begins his account: ‘In 1531 another great villain journeyed with a number of men to the kingdoms of Peru. He set out with every intention of imitating the strategy and tactics of his fellow adventurers in other parts of the New World’.” Etc. etc. (Daron Acemogly & James A. Robinson; ‘Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty’, 2012.)

Indeed, the answer posed by the title of this lucid work had been rightly anticipated by Galbraith: “The list of commonly accepted causes of poverty is by no means complete. We regularly attribute some role to the slow rate of transfer of technological knowledge. [...] We also attribute something to war, rapine, predacity, and civil disorder. The Fourth Crusade, Genghis Khan, and the brothers Pizarro showed that, in the hands of highly qualified practitioners, these can have an enduring effect on income. The communities which were the principal objects of their attention have been poor ever since.” (John K. Galbraith; ‘Economic Development’, 1965.)

But the creators and responsibles of the current dominant ideology about the “non-violent” violence are not clinically mad or something like that. Unfortunately, they are not in danger of being institutionalized in specialized mental institutions, since ideologically induced psychotic pathologies are not considered susceptible to psychiatric treatment. Certainly, the imperialistic ideology on violence has certain versions only suitable for socially and mentally weak and defenceless patients, and other different ones which are reserved to the ruling classes; although sometimes, as already indicated, the ideologists themselves end up believing their own nonsense, which makes them much more persuasive and dangerous.

The hypocritical adaptation of Nationalist and Terrorist propaganda, in order to comfort the pseudo-pacifist populism of imperialism, finds its limit in the contradiction between its proclaimed non-violence, and the violent and criminal essence and reality of its political activity. Actually, the reckless and immoderate success of the illusionist propaganda of imperialism about “pacifism and non-violence” would destroy the political institutions to which it serves, rather than comforting them; which, obviously, the social sectors that are dedicated to the exercise and maintenance of that real power through the monopoly of criminal Violence do not foresee allowing to happen. It appears also here the classical “opposition”, the theoretical and practical contradiction between the ideology of illusion and the ideology of reality.

If the sanctimonious or hypocritical humanists of the Pnv and its satellites do – heretically – condemn all violence, but do not perceive the armed forces that do found and constitute the French-Spanish imperialistic political régime, which they qualify as non-violent democracy, then there is no doubt that they have reached a degree of mental decline whose results in no way differ from the effects of characterized retarded and schizophrenic states. And if, in such circumstances, such “Basque” agents are considered “normal” by an important part of the population, up to the point of recognizing in them any degree of representativeness whatsoever, then there is no doubt that this human group has a serious collective problem of mental health, whatever may be the political and media conditioning that it is subjected to.

Those who condemn “all violence coming wherever it may come from”, without condemning in the first place – and as the basis of all political and ideological consideration – the French-Spanish state, imperialistic and fascist monopoly of criminal Violence, not only hide or ignore that criminal Violence constitutive of imperialistic policy and State; in reality they do approve, support, disguise, recognize and bless that monopolistic Violence that maintains its imperialistic and fascist régime of military occupation over the Basque People and its State. They are imbeciles or phoneys, and – in any case – agents of the French-Spanish Imperialism and Fascism.

(From: ‘Violence and Terrorism.- Their ideological mystification at the service of Imperialism’.)