I remember when I was in school, and was convinced that History has been done by kings and knights, by armies and soldiers.
That was before one of my favorites teachers in school, began explaining us the French Revoluction. She told us: “it is true that the inmediate cause of the Revolution was the raise of the bread’s price. At that time, bread was the basic element of the meal of any French man. But the French Revolution would never have taken place if ideas had not make its path through the French society. French thinkers were convinced that the bad situation of peasants and in general, every one who belonged to the lower parts of society, was not going to change if the Ancient Regime did not disappear. So what at first only seemed a normal unrest over the bread’s price, turned to be a total change of the basis of society and ideas which, together with American Revolution -with a similar ideological situation-, was going to change the reality of the West forever”.
“But ideas can also impell society in a bad direction: take for example, the Mein Kampf. Hitler wrote it and its content really changed the direction of Germany in the worst way possible. The results of his thought are well known: destruction of democracy, dictatorship, the Shoah, assasination of dissidents…”
Looks like the evolution of my teacher’s thinking has not reached some of the leftist intelectuals in my country.
The other day -one of the few that I am able to- I was watching Telemadrid, the TV from Madrid’s Autonomous Community. In the evenings there is a program called “Night Diary”, in which basically a summary of the news from that day is being done. Lately, a new director, Fernando Sánchez Dragó, has begun his leadership over this program, a really very interesting one.
Well, as I was saying the other day he invited a leftist intelectual, called Benjamin Prado, and a right-wing one, Luis Alberto de Cuenca, to speak about terrorism. Mr Prado begun saying that anyone in Spain thinks the same about De Juana Chaos -well, except Mr Zapatero,who has called him a “man of peace”, and in favor of the peace process-, but that he did “not want to punish anyone for writing an article”.
Of course, someone who writes defending the independence of any part of a country -in this case, Spain-, has my respect, even if I think that not a bright thought in a world each day more interconnected and in which the economic competitiveness is going to be held between growing groups of countries.
Police experts call a serial killer someone who kills a lot of people, but with no political reason. They kill just because they need/like to kill, normally after producing an enormous amount of pain in the victim. Jack the Ripper was a serial killer. But he did not have a ideological basis for his acts, he did not have any moral justification for it and also his acts can be explained because of mental problems. So everyone -except other very few serial killers- has rejected even having a little likeness to him.
The problem with terrorism is that serial killers HAVE ideological basis and moral justification, inducing the peaceful people of a country, the world, etc. to think that their lives are at stake if their demands are not fulfilled. The blackmail to society is deepened by the characteristic of peaceful that can be applied to our modern society. Yes, violence exists but the majority of the people are not violent, they just want to live in peace.
So here, the majority of the people, who are peaceful and who have renounced to violence in favor of justice, are made to think that political negotiation -the basis of the violence- is going to end every known problem regarding terrorism.
WRONG: if US Government would have negotiated with Al Capone -who also had some kind of justification: people wanted to drink alcohol and he wanted to live very well- and gave him all that he wanted, more and more Mafia personalities would have appear, just as happened in Italy after Mussolini. You know, that is a very interesting thing: Mob have been nearly ended by Mussolini -a bastard by the away, don’t be confused-, and US Armies thought that Mob was going then to be a very good force against fascism. So they helped Mob and nearly 50 years later, we all know what happened with Judge Falcone and Sicily and Naples.
If democracy wants to overcome terrorism, the only solution is to ensure that the Law is applied over all the people who kill, maim, and kidnap -wonderful the interview with Ortega Lara, 532 days kidnapped by ETA-, but also to people who finance -very important, we would have to consider who is “earning” money because of ETA terrorism- and ideologically justify those terrible acts.
So now someone would ask me: and what about freedom of expression? What about the Mohammed cartoons? Well, the difference is obvious: the cartoons WERE NOT calling anyone to kill, maim, etc, etc. They were just a non-Muslim vision of the figure of Prophet Mohammed. But afterwards, foolish imams and reknown personalities all over the Muslim world called Muslims to behead the cartoonists, the paper responsibles, … So there is the “moral” justification for acts who are totally oposite to any human value of respect to another’s views and ideas.
This is the reason why I went yesterday -with nearly over 1.5 Million Spanish- to a demonstration in Madrid held to oppose ETA negotiation and to remember the 2 Ecuador nationals who were killed on Dec 30th in Madrid-Barajas Airport 4th Terminal. We did not have the kisses of the “intelectuals”*, such as Almodóvar, Bardem, Penélope Cruz, etc, etc, some of them went to another one in which only 200.000 people supported Zapatero’s policy. Argentinian actor Federico Lippi said “we have to build a healthy barrier to stop this prehistoric, even gothic right” -I guess he is not referring to gothic music, even when I know several right-wingers who like Evanescence, for example me-. Well, I have some respect for this old man, having to make such a role, because he did not underlined how on earth that healthy barrier was going to be made. Stars in right-winger’s vests perhaps? Ghettos to anyone who do not think like him?
Ortega Lara said, when asked why he did not go to the intelectual’s demonstration, “I agree with the slogan For peace and against terrorism, but I am going farther than that. I am also against any sort of political negotiation”. I agree with him. The violation of other people’s rights can’t have any kind of retribution in a democracy. If not, we are living under a Terror dictatorship. And that is something no one wants. Or are there some Robespierres nowadays living among us?
* One of the curious things of this time in History is what society considers an intelectual. In past centuries, only very few people were given that kind of consideration: Galileo, Kepler, Copernico, Cervantes, Shakespeare, St. Thomas of Aquinas, da Vinci, Durero, Einstein, Madame Curie and her husband, Newton, Descartes, Hobbes, Voltaire, etc. You know, people whose ideas, inventions or discoveries were so important they had influenced reality and made it completely different. You know, what we could consider as “heroes of the mind”, who acheived that kind of consideration after long years -sometimes a life- of study and reflection.
Nowadays, anyone who has played a role in a film and has appeared twice in a “coure” newspaper, even if he/she can barely write or has never been a good student, considers that his/her duty is to influence society. And of course, they take that as seriously as they can take the rest of their lifes. That is: very few are really fighting for ideas, they are doing that because it is modern or because American people are less inteligent that Europeans… and, afterwards, doing whatever they need to obtain an Oscar and to begin working in Hollywood. In most cases, they are nothing but hypocrites, who would be praising any other Government, whatever the ideological position it would have, if their money or job would be at stake.
In Spain, cinema regulation stipulates that State should give money for interesting projects. Of course, interesting is not a very clear word. Spanish films are not very succesful and each year fewer people are going to see them, because they are basically the same: Civil War, whores, homosexuals, drug addicts, etc -with very few exceptions-. But they keep on making that crap, and saying they are doing “social realism”. Of course, the culprits are the Americans… without taking into account that French made an even more restrictive regulation over foreign films and they are also losing people.
We can say that here the Catholic hypocrite -that man/woman who went to Church to be given communion, so everyone could see he was a very good man- had been replaced by the leftist-intelectual hypocrite: you are nobody if you do not consider US and Israel the basic culprits of everything bad under the sun, if Ché Guevara or Ho-Chi-Minh are not your idols and you have not gone to any “NO to Iraqi war” demonstration.
Err, yes, before you ask, for that people I am nobody. And I am very proud of that.
(I wrote this on Sunday. After that, there is a political storm here over some photos of bloody ETA terrorist -son of a bitch, with all the letters- showing how emaciated he is after his hunger strike all over the British press. I do not know why this political storm. If a serial killer or a multiple rapist begins a hunger strike if his freedom is not granted after being condemned, ehhh, what would the answer of British political correct people would be? Instead of worrying so much about someone who is using his freedom this way, one would suppose British readers would be more interested to learn what is going on inside their mosques -or in the future ones-. But of course, it’s much interesting to speak about a bloody Spanish -hey, that is terrific, he is not Basque, even if I am tempted to call him that- TERRORIST).
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You have some here. Socialists have argued that Spanish flag and hymn should not have been used in the demonstration… because we were stealing them from all the Spanish people. This is as one party in US, France, Great Britain, etc. tells the other: do not use the flag, you are stealing it from all the people of this country… This is remarkable in Spain even more because they are not using Spanish symbols as they think they are too…. Spanish…
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