2023-08-27 02:03:58
At Basque summer parties, the presence of ETA with its impressive and terrifying halo continues to be overwhelming. When you stop in Plentzia you find the harbor breakwater on the horizon with a large graffiti: “Presoak Kalera” (prisoners out on the street). It takes many years and although on occasion it was erased, it did not take long to repaint.
The “Itsas Martxa” (marches in the sea) was celebrated once again this year in the festivals of this town on July 29. Organized by “popular movements” (Abertzales), hundreds of small boats, canoes, zodiacs, surfers, including children, congregate next to the aforementioned jetty with ikurriñas, posters, banners, T-shirts, torches and photos of their bloodthirsty (are there any that it is not?) prisoners, demanding their amnesty and even some divers are photographed underwater with the fashionable banner «Deank Aske Izan Arte» («until everyone is free»), before the serene gaze of natives and vacationers, It’s not that they don’t see, that they see, but like someone who sees the rain (it has rained so much in this land…), with a glass of wine in hand, thinking about what to eat next.
I recommend a comprehensive and precious photographic report in NAIZ (“your” newspaper) that makes a good expression about those images that are worth a thousand words. Or on Instagram @itsasmartxa, you really have to see these things.
Plentzia is governed by Bildu, but this complete display of ultra-nationalist protest merchandising not only occurs in towns governed by the filoetarras but also, for example, in Bilbao, the capital governed without alternation by the PNV. Although the mayor says that “the party is for fun”, the large awnings with enormous letters “Independentzia”, ”Presoak Kalera”, “Amnesty”, txosnas decorated with photos of men and women, murderers serving sentences (no name, for save yourself trouble), seem to indicate that the party is, for some, something else, an occupation of the festive atmosphere, a golden time for the threatening exposure of their sinister ideology. But for a party in peace there is no way to allude to freedom of expression.
A good and sad summary would be that there are citizens who sympathize with the terrorists and with the terrorism they exercised, sympathy that they do not hide, but rather display, which suggests that they are trying to give us some message. On the other hand, since there are local and national authorities that publicly allow this exhibition, it can be deduced that it will not seem so aberrational to them. There are other little things that happen that do seem super aberrational to them, but with this terrorism, “hair to the sea.” Then they are exhibited because they are allowed to. To this we must add that the “nationalist” radicals (with and without blood crimes) have power in a large number of Basque towns as well as in the Basque Provincial Councils and Parliament. And around all this, the spectators, the public, the great mass, which for different reasons contemplates all this spectacle like fireworks at night in the Bilbao sky.
It must be the celebration of democracy, but the most unsettling thing is to understand something very simple: they are where they are because the people have voted for them.
So, if you’re a bit sensitive and observant, and you wander randomly through Basque streets or go into any bar, well, it’s the normal people you come across who want what’s there. When you go to the famous and crowded Gernika market, most of those you run into in the crowd, these people, are the ones who have promoted their mayor of Bildu, described, after his election as a “conciliatory and dialogue” guy, by a non-nationalist newspaper.
“How long does a normal person need to overcome his innate repugnance to crime?” Hannah Arendt wondered in her book “Eichmann in Jerusalem.” It is the tyranny of minorities that impose themselves on the majority under false labels of progressivism, pluralism or diversity, human rights or true democracy. “The madness of a few and the foolish and vile consensus of many”, as Primo Levi said.
We should oppose the rise of social engineering willing to impose untouchable mental codes on society as a whole. The triumph of the perseverance of aggressive and falsely democratic minorities is the great success of the long periods of violence: the disappearance of the true opposition to the aberrational. The weakness born of fear. The deactivation of true civic courage.
Since the beginning of the popular festivities in 1978, the Bilbao festivities commission has prohibited police access to the “festival site” with prior agreement with the city council.
It is “the consented evil” that the philosopher Aurelio Arteta has studied: “the most common figure under which evil appears is that of the evil that we allow some to commit and others to suffer without trying to prevent it.”
General permissiveness is what makes abuse, imposition and, at certain times, crime easier. If we tolerate all those years of tons of blood that reached our necks, is that why we are already capable of tolerating any other abuse?
Happy Basque holidays. Only for patients and liabilities.
#festivals #basques