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The Democrats and the Violent

JOXE AZURMENDI

THE DEMOCRATS AND THE VIOLENT

www.visionlibros.com THE DEMOCRATS AND THE VIOLENT JOXE AZURMENDI

MIRANDE'S CRITIQUE OF THE FRENCH

II - THE CRITIQUE OF BY NIETZSCHE AND SPENGLER

We are descendents of the Revolution, whether we like it or not. And such is the way that the revolutionary heritage operates, dogmatically, within us all that there was need, to begin with, to make democratism relative. There is no need, of course, of being against democracy to understand anybody's antagonism towards it (in this case, Mirande). But being against democracy, in any sense, must be totally acceptable as a rational possibility (it has to be possible rationally), if being positively in favour wants to bear claim to rational possibility on its part. If not, as we said, it is mere mystical democratism, it is not rational. In a , that is, where the rational possibility of being against democracy cannot be of de facto, it cannot be said that democracy is thought of rationally. And this is (in many sections: in some parties and the press) something that happens even perhaps today (or something that happens again): After the war, in any case, this was a normal antifascist attitude. That is to say that someone who was, for whatever reason, unwilling to accept beforehand the smallest doubt about democracy could not understand Mirande. Surely this is what happened to Mirande with the Basque patriots of his time. What the Basque patriots who waged a courageous war alongside the "Reds" could have maybe understood easily before the war, they could not understand - confess, accept - after losing it in blood and tears: The and indifference, morally, of the democracy they strove to defend in the frontline. This would mean to add moral devastation to military and political disaster. The last thing that remains to be sacrificed to the loser: Moral pride and dignity. Do we still have to carry on like this? Is Mirande still impossible to understand? (and I am not asking whether it is not time by now to agree with him). For, as such, the history of the critiques to democracy and the , with their of society and the future, their morals, political objectives and ideals had started in European thought well before Basque was born. And this is indeed where Mirande stands with his critique. That is, the Mirandean critique to democracy and the French Revolution does not look for reason in a last minute political conjuncture but in a whole of humankind and history: It situates itself within this critical thinking (which the "simple- minded", precisely, consider as fascist). Let us take a look thus at some important parts of such a thought.

6. Democracy equals Judeo-Christianism equals Decadence "Democratism - we read in The Twilight of the Idols, no 39, chapter 'Incursions of the untimely' - has always been the decadent form of the organising forces (...) the decadent form of the ". Such Nietzschean position of contempt for democracy finds a famous general formulation : He sees the French Revolution as the beginning of the "great slave rebellion".

I. Judaic, not Greek, In my own words, this means more or less the following: We have two different roots in Europe: One is Greco-Roman and Germanic, pagan (plus philosophy, science et cetera); the other is a religious one, East-Christian (Judeo-Christian). The cultural realm that we understand as Europe was established with the Roman Empire and was inspired, while it lasted, on unity and strength. Today's states are born during the Renaissance out of the Medieval Ecclesiastic-Imperial chaos. The Monarchies which were then raised out of merciless struggles and settled afterwards were sustained by the knight nobility. These also followed the so far leading Imperial or Greco-Roman : The principles of rank and nobility, the of greatness and bravery. Elegance, dignity, vitality and courage, chivalry and pride. On the other hand, with the French Revolution, when European aristocracies, that is, the hitherto triumphant classes, collapsed, the cultural and moral tradition they embodied also gave way: Henceforth, we all are brothers, all equal; by living together in equality we shall be free. This is a completely new morality to the state (only known previously to the Church). But a morality stems from certain interests. Who is interested in these principles? Well, he who has always been below. He who has never been able to be above or superior to others. And who, in order to dominate, competes with no dignity whatsoever by cheating and using dirty tricks instead of fighting in a clean and clear manner. In a word, the snake. With the French Revolution, thereby, the poisonous virtues of cowardice and misery took over together with the mediocre, resentful, envious and vindictive principles of the people who had been crushed for centuries. Neither more nor less, Christianism has reached us, the slave religion, that is, Judaism, i.e., "as an antinatural morality", "a revolt against life which has become almost sacrosanct in Christian morality". Little by little, Jerusalem has again stepped on and spiritually oppressed the defeated Athens and Rome. A frequently quoted formulation of the above reads as follows in The Genealogy of Morals: The of chivalry-aristocratic judgments is a powerful physical constitution, a flourishing health, rich even unbounded, together with everything that suits the maintenance of it, that is, war, adventures, hunting, dance, fights and, in general, everything that strong, free and joyful activity entails (...) Nothing that on earth has been done against the 'noblemen', the 'violent', the 'lords' and the 'powerful' is worth mentioning if compared with the doings of the Jewish; the Jewish, that sacerdotal people [as opposed to the warrior lineage and people] who only took satisfaction of their enemies and rulers by means of a radical transvaluation of the latter's own values, that is, through the purest act of spiritual revenge. This is the only thing that resulted appropriate to a sacerdotal people precisely, to a people with the most restrained longing of sacerdotal revenge. It is the Jewish who, with a terrifying logical result, have dared to invert the aristocratic identification of values ( = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = God loved) and have fed with the most abysmal teeth of hatred (the hatred of impotence) such inversion, namely, "the miserable are the good; only the poor, the impotent, the low are good; the , destitute, sick, deformed are also the only pious, the only people blessed by God, blessedness belongs only to them - you instead, you the noble and violent, you are, for all eternity, the wicked, the cruel, the insatiable, the lecherous, and you shall be eternally also the ill-fated, damned, condemned!"... It is known as to who recollected the legacy of such Jewish transvaluation [i.e., Christianity].

II. Judaic, not Greek, type of democracy In general terms, there is, for Nietzsche, two kinds of principles, two souls, two styles of people, two moralities: The elegant and hard/tough spirit and the miserly weak spirit. In accordance with one of each such spirit, two kinds of society have appeared in history depending on which were the dominant principles: (a) The rising gay, healthy and strong aristocratic ; and (b) the unaffected, decadent, confused, sad and vulgar democratic societies. It is all throughout the time since there are organized societies (states) that we find the dominant and the dominated, and the conflict between the two (principles) lasts during all that period. It is not only a struggle between two social classes: It is two social kinds, two races, two world views and perceptions, two social rules, two patterns of behaviour, two souls. I think it can be imagined with little effort that, opposite moralities must have existed in aims and value-scales between the noblemen's moral order regarding their own peer relationships and those based on authority upon their subjects, and the moral order constructed by the subordinate in order to survive in the long ants-like struggle while having to humbly gain their masters' pity and favour not to be annihilated at any moment.

III. Democracy of weakness It is just like that. The last upright aristocratic spirit in French culture is , according to Nietzsche. Everything coming next is pure plebeianism, pusillanimity, sickly democratism and fussy, frail, mourning sentiment; the poison of the villain, in a deeper way, the subterranean revenge of envy and hatred. The one who displays his plebeian origin throughout all his ideas, the preacher of Christian based ideals in the name of supreme humanity is Rousseau: I hate Rousseau, writes Nietzsche, even in the Revolution: This is the historical-universal expression of idealist and canaille duplicity. The bloody farce with which such Revolution was performed, its '', that, I do not care much; What I hate is its Rousseaunian morality - the so-called truths of the Revolution, which still continues causing effects and persuading to side with everything superficial and mediocre [these are the democrats for Nietzsche!]. The doctrine of equality! Tell me of a poison more poisonous than that (...) The fact that around such doctrine of equality have occurred so horrible and bloody events has bestowed this "modern idea" par excellence with a sort of aureole and splendour in such a way that the Revolution as spectacle has even seduced the noblest spirits.

IV. On Judeo-Christian disaster A last mention to finish with Nietzsche. As he approaches religious (Protestant) and bourgeois revolution he states: "Even in a more decisive and deeper sense than in the Protestant Reformation, Judeo came to triumph again with the French Revolution: The last political nobility existing in Europe, that of sixteenth and seventeenth centuries France, succumbed under the popular instincts of resentment - never on earth was heard a greatest jubilation, a more resounding enthusiasm!". With these comments, we succeed in knotting the three issues, i.e., why is Mirande an enemy of Christianism, therefore, of democracy, and, therefore, of French Revolution. And how is everything but one. We only need now to complete the above with one more point: The part played as such by Basque patriotism in the refusal of Revolution. For, if Mirande protests that "by being a natural from La Soule, that is, a native son of a people denied of official existence by the French Republic", the fundamental point does not lie in the greater or lesser amount of pain of his personal sorrow, but in the deeper significance of it.

7. The anti-naturality of democracy Mirande would tell us that democracy is anti-natural. How can this be understood? It is anti-natural in many meanings. We shall take it now in the anti-historic and anti-cultural sense. In fact, our problem is not that the Revolution beheaded the Queen and many noblemen by the guillotine: Our problem is instead, what has it consequently done to us, to the people of Soule, for instance.

I. Individual in the flesh vs. paper citizen Is it not true that, in this world, before being paper citizens we are our mother's sons in the flesh. What is a human being in reality? To start from the beginning: What are these many Black and yellow Asian individuals that can be seen in the tube station at Paris? What is their soul like? What are races, peoples, cultures and what are then custom-houses, parliaments and states? Everybody carries a nursery rhyme in the soul, but nobody carries a passport or a custom-house in the soul. What is the rooted history of the blood-fleshed man , the history of the people's soul, and what is the one of the state armoured with principles and law codes?

II. State vs. If we apprehend man in the length and width of time, we see him somehow gathered in a "natural" association, family and lineage, country, nation. These institutions are the product of hundreds or thousands of years, they have grown together with man, or we ought to say that it is man himself who has grown with and within them. Man adheres to them with an adhesion of thousands of years. By adhering to them he adheres to himself deep down inside: He is them. They are the fruit of place, these old institutions, of the sea and the mountains, of man's sentiment and life in this place, of both social and natural intervention together, of time which even smoothes rocks out. For the Souletin and the Parisian to be different there are thus all the reasons of the world, and for them to be the same there is not one single straight reason in line. If we refer to people, therefore, to say "France" is a fiction: "In fact, it is a race, , law - written and customary- , history that separate one people from the others, and from this point of view, much the same as and Catalans can be found in Spain next to the Spaniard, or the Welsh and Scotts are beside the English in Great Britain so we have six races in France other than the French themselves: The Basques in Laborde, Low-Navarre and La Soule; the Bretons; the Dutch in Flandes around the city of Lille; the Germans in Alsace and Lorraine; the Italians in Corsica and the Catalans in Rosillon". All these peoples have not gathered together spontaneously and naturally but were rather "appropriated by the Kings of France throughout history by means of war, diplomacy, marriage or money". However, to the extent that allegiance was due to the Crown's unity, not to the French as such, this protected the natural character of the different : "Which means that the Kings granted them the power to use their own assemblies and laws, habits and customs as well as their own ".

III. Basques in the nation and Basques in the state

We should now bring to the fore the profound that Mirande accorded to the inherent genuineness of the people, as well as the ways in which Mirande's somehow naturalist are as fundamental in his philosophy as in his politics: How is it that, throughout the centuries, the Basque spirit has taken shape in its forests and mountains; for the alluded genuine Basque as a whole, with his mind, instincts, intuitions and mythologies (the theology of the Basque race) not only does he appear as a non-Christian , he is also anti-Christian. Mirande is convinced that the tradition "Basque = Believer" is just an awful falsification, both historical and anthropological. And that the "honest", nice, church- goer, democrat and "genuine" Basque is also a false modern invention (i.e. an invention stemming from the bourgeois-democratic revolution). All these topics are tied up, tightly knotted with one another. They have to be set apart only not to extend ourselves.

The urban bourgeoisie has annihilated the personality of these nations that were born and grew up by their own, their institutions (blossomed from their blood and the old genuineness of the people), their nobility and pride. "However, by beheading the King and the Queen and establishing the Republic the 1789 famous Revolution or Revolt changed things completely as to the fate of small nations as well; for in 1789 August the 4th, the prosecutors removed all special from individuals as well as towns and provinces: The special rights of such provinces were in fact old laws and customs, which Kings allowed after conquest. Within a year, prosecutors went further along this path: They abolished the very provinces and devised a new administrative organisation instead, by dividing the Kingdom into Departments".

All this is well known (or should be), and so we shall not continue with the history of destruction that the Revolution undertook in the Northern Basque Country (Pinet, Cavaignac). We are more interested in the political which was introduced at the time, and the consequences of this.

8. Antihistorical rationalism

The essential point of this praxis is that, ideologically, "The French Revolution means (...) the victory of rationalism" according to Spengler.

I. On how people are rooted in history and culture; not in geometrical rationality

People constitute complex, rich realities. Consequently, it is only normal that we want to see and to know what the people are, underneath the state shell: English-speaking Eskimo customs inside their houses, Armenian migrants memories in Paris, Jewish families' always admirable wanders whether in Zambia, Jamaica or Müster. Go on holiday to the Kabyles inhabiting the E Atlas mountains, or anywhere else for that matter, and you will return from an unfertile up-land Hamlet of scarcely five hundred inhabitants having discovered an always shamelessly new and unexpected universe so far completely unknown to you;- this without having read a single book for a month. Knowledge is not in books. Knowledge is in the millenary prayers, myths and hopes of these people, in their silence while they look at the mountain under the light of dawn. The soul of man is to be found in the human cultures created by it.

When we hear and enjoy Souletin songs and traditions, romances and old stories, these are all ancient tales, but it appears to us that we learn what kind of people Souletins are at this very instant. When we see the external Souletin mountains, forests, the sun, it appears to us that we capture the inner Souletin soul by plunging deeply into the culture of a people. And the same applies for the kind of people that Bretons constitute, or the Provençals & Alsacians. The soul of a people expresses itself in history, in the culture that it constitutes. This is what people are about.

The democratic social model is the reverse. It is not the outcome of a slow and calm historical evolution and experience matured little by little throughout the centuries, but the design and fabrication of some restless cabinet heads. It is the pure geometry of reason, the effort to reduce society and history to geometry. An invention of philosophers and men of letters, not the fruit of life. "All the ideas of the revolution" says Spengler in The Decline of Occident, "are eternal and truthful. The rights of man, freedom and equality are literature, pure abstraction, not realities". There are no Basques or Bretons, with the rights and obligations that they have constructed in their consciousness (personality) throughout generations. Only the citizen exists. From now on books will be more important than the historic experience of our ancestors. Instead of the old traditions from antiquity the eternity of cold principles will take over human relationships. At work, in politics or at war, the modern bourgeois does not confront the real or people before him, but figures, concepts, ideas. And with ideas and figures the will can be "objectively" cruel;- i.e. one has to abandon softness and sentiments and become objective and rational.

II. Rationalism vs. History

Neither the bourgeois nor the city crowds are embedded in the old past, they have no roots in the lands tilled by the ancestors from generation to generation. They do not even understand anymore the deep intimacy grown out of a close contact with nature. Spengler again: "All bourgeois are to be found but in the big cities, and it is their distinguishing feature that they have no understanding whatever of old which have been substituted by attainable interests (...). From now on, only what is justified by reason is valuable".

The bourgeois does not posses a culture, a distinctive characteristic of its own. He has not even fellow countrymen; or, better, he has no country. No proper society as such. He is cosmopolitan. His friends are the same in Paris and London. His interests too are the same in London and Paris. In practice, the bourgeoisie has the same "reasons" here and there, the same character anywhere, and they pursue the same goals wherever they are. On the other hand, the same happens with the rootless crowds of mystified citizens; they came from everywhere looking for fortune but them they are from nowhere as they mix in a confused, disarranged melting pot.

It is them, therefore, who will project their model of society in a way that reason is one and the same for everyone: one person is one vote and the addition of votes is the people: one country for everybody, one law, one language, everything is one. Differences of place and history, differences between the soul of nations and traditions are erased. One Soule would become an issue and a problem that would not fit is such a conceptual apparatus. It is not understandable. And this is why the French Revolution "frees the concept of the nation rather than the nation itself" (Spengler). III. The mathematical nation: Peoples constructed with constitutional papers...

Consequently, Mirande has often criticized "the abstract concept of democracy". Here are a few clear words: "Anybody with common sense knows that a people is shaped by race, language, ancient customs and history. French republicans, however, do not take much account of such factors, is it not to deny them altogether. For them people constitute a simple logical abstraction; they shape a people as if they were the outcome of a set of rules or constitution. There is nothing to be surprised with, therefore, if a ghetto-born Polish Jew or a Black African are accepted as French citizens without pre-judgments, earning thereby the praise from all the "progressives" of the world. But, on the other hand, they will deny that the Basque Country (...), Brittany, Flandes an so on constitute true peoples, i.e., nations. And those among the Basques, Bretons or Flemish who think or wish otherwise will be considered as either stupid or traitors". In the essay On Patriotism, written in 1953, Mirande is not mislead by the apparent help that France offered to the Basque during the war: "That is, the French hostility or friendship is not a concern of the Basque race, but only in a political way. How could it be any other way? The French do not know what a race is; they do not even want to know. According to all French politicians, from Maurras of Accion Française up to the demo-Christians and socialists, Basque patriotism is just an empty idea; for some, France is Rome's best daughter and for the others it is the origin of democracy... But none of them take any notice of man's reality, the real man in the flesh and his race"

IV. ... and paper individuals

A little qualification is perhaps convenient here: There are many different models of democracy. It is often said that modern democracy is based on , that a person is equal to the numeral one. But Switzerland is a democracy and women are not one but zero. The South African Republic is a democracy (in its own form: But the colours black and white are not the same mathematically): Israel is a democracy, and better enough a democracy that the Spanish one indeed (Is the Palestinian struggle not, however, "legitimate" and democratic?) In democratic Athens "strangers" did not have the right to vote (is that the case in Germany?). The old peasant democracy of the Basque Country endowed the vote to the family as a unit: It would have been impossible for husband and wife to have two votes (two different interests). The public person was the family, the household in fact, the fireplace. With the Revolution, bourgeois democracy wipes out "natural associations" such as family or neighbourhood, it atomizes society, each person becomes an equal number, i.e., "abstract individuals". How is it that man has ended up by becoming an "abstract individual"? Here is now a concrete example which appeared in the newspaper (Egin, 1989, February the 5th: letter written by J.L. Davant and Jeanne Idiart Davant)

The married couple formed by Fréderic Larçabal and Jacqueline Idiart were arrested on the 11th Jan. following an earlier arrest that very afternoon of a presumed ETA member half a mile away from their home . The operation resulted in three further arrests. - Their two daughters, Otxanda and Idoia, 15 and 13 respectively, could not see their parents during the incommunication period at the police station which lasted until the 15th. Official authorities did not convey any news to the girls regarding the possible fate of their parents . Neither then nor afterwards. It was left to the daughters to find out from other sources, and also, to find help for their everyday life. For the state, there is only mere isolated individuals who are taken on or left out one by one...

9. Youth struggle, old age democracy

Hegel used to say that nations have their own ages, childhood, youth... During the good healthy period of youth they strive for struggle and adventure: They generate captains. But in the older period they beget philosophers: They are a bit tired to go out in search for action and so they stay indoors by the warm kitchen, theorizing. Hence, coming back to our issue: Democracy, as understood by Nietzsche and Spengler, corresponds to the old age of a nation. The age whereby internal strength cannot be sustained but with the backing of ideas.

I. A decadent system

As said, from this (Nietzschean) point of view, democracy is not a quasi system, nor the best at its worst (or the less bad of the bad: W.Churchill), but a typically decadent and sloppy system which is good and sweet only to decadent and crooked people. When a society stops being on the move; when it is not able to win anything new and what has been won is willingly shared among everybody; when there is no courageous leader for a country to continue upward, in such a condition of bleached tediousness and shadowy fatigue, the democratic politicians appear in the place of knights and soldiers. The smooth talkers take over the tough fighters.

Spain was not democratic under the Catholic Sovereigns, Charles I and Philip II. The greatness of France comes with Louis XIV: under absolutism. Take a look at Rome, at Alexander the Great in Greece, at any Empire. As Txomin Peillen tell us, it is known that Spengler's The Decline of Occident affected Mirande a great deal. And Spengler's appraisal of both democracy and the French Revolution is also quite familiar.

II. A disorderly urban system

That Revolution is merely a triumph of the death inorganic cosmopolis over the organic life of the farmhouse. The Revolution and its ideas are the product of the bourgeoisie, the bourgeoisie being itself a product of the city. The bourgeoisie, however, possess no culture (because of its lack of roots), no education, no growth, no personality of its own. And even if it is something, it is not itself: it is pure surface and appearance, mask and copy.

The bourgeoisie is born out of the fundamental contradiction between the city and the countryside [let us allow ourselves to extrapolate the contradiction between Paris and La Soule]..., as a shared sentiment opposing the primitive nobility and the feudal state and also the feudalism of the Church. The concept of the third state (le tiers according to the famous word of the French Revolution) is a unity in contradiction: it cannot find a determination in its content, for it lacks its own habits and own symbolism, since the distinguished bourgeois society copies the nobility, and the city-based religiosity [urban] follows the example of the primitive priesthood [rural].

With the bourgeois rise to power, the masses also take the social and political life to the street. This is a new phenomenon in history. In Spengler's uncompromising words:

Another element must be added now, which appears for the first time and which (...) now represented a force: that element which in all civilizations receives the unequivocal name of mob, populace, plebe. In the big cities - which now decide about everything while the countryside is, at most, able to take a position before accomplished facts, as it is proved in the nineteenth century- gather masses of an uprooted population who do not belong to any social sphere. These men do not feel united to a , nor do they belong to a professional group - not even, at the bottom of their hearts, to the working class although they are compelled to work. By instinct they belong to this mob of people from all kind of classes and groups, uprooted peasants, ruined businessmen, and above all, noblemen who have gone depressed and astray, as the Catiline epoch shows it to us with dreadful clarity. Their power is much bigger than their number because they are always placed near the big decisions, always ready for everything, with no respect for order, not even the order necessary for a revolutionary party. These are the men who give events the annihilating power which distinguishes the French from the English revolution, and the first tyranny from the second. III. "the tree is known by its fruit"

The new hardship and slavery that the eruption of the bourgeoisie gave rise to in the labour world has been better denounced by Marx. Hence, to finish with this point in general: How can this blessing "age of democracy" of the last two hundred years be valued in history? Democracy is much praised. But this time that we call democracy has not always been a bed of roses: the human being has never known in history more terrifying destruction and war and massacre than in these last two hundred years. Also, methods of war and destruction have somehow "democraticised" themselves: indiscriminate bombing of civil populations, concentration camps, planned genocide, chemical warfare.

The methods of war, their means and their ends adopt other forms, naturalist and terrible forms. They are not, anymore, like in the eighteenth century, gentlemanly duels similar to the competitions in Trianon Park, encounters with fixed rules as to the moment when the forces must be declared exhausted, as to the maximum quantity of war elements that can take part, as to the conditions that the victor, a gentleman, can impose. They are terrible struggles of enraged men who fight with all the imaginable resources and which keep on going until the falling of one's body and the unrestrained exploitation of the other's victory. The first example of such return to nature is given by the armies of the Revolution and Napoleon, which instead of the artistic maneuvering of small body troops they make use of massive attacks regardless of losses thereby undoing the fine Rococo strategy. To place on the battlefield all the muscular strength of a people, as it happens with the application of compulsory conscription, is an idea utterly alien to the era of Fredrick the Great.

We could prolong ourselves by recalling other aspects, but there is hardly any need for this: it is enough to display the new "culture" that democracy brings about on work and war (we rely on Marx as to the realm of work). There is also Goya's painting "The dreams of reason".

10. That to have the quantity is not to have the right reason

The democratic principle relies on the quantity of votes. But be careful again: There is a trick here.

A twofold trick. In order to concede or divide power, the criterion of ballot numbers can be as appropriate or inappropriate as anything else in terms of a good pragmatic principle, and it is at least, as rational and legitimate as the monarchic institution. But, first, the fact of having to divide and count votes along the lines of political parties is not a necessarily straight consequence of the democratic principle at all. There is no reason whatsoever in discerning how political parties should be more democratic than to forbid them. And, second, the usual equation according to which the more votes cast is equal to more reason is, rather than a simple trick, a bad lie.

I. The trick of equality, or how the fox wins over the wolf

In democracy we are all supposedly equal to one another. But let us take two facets of this into consideration. There are no two equal de facto. We have stated that a democratic automate citizen is a cabinet rationalist invention. And that at its base lies the humanity model of the weak as an ideal morality. But what happens when the weak realize that they can raise above the others, and are able to raise on the back of others? That as this is not quite accepted in the new morality, what cannot be performed in the open needs to be achieved via trickery and deceit. If there is no possibility of being wolves, they will become foxes. And this is how we reach the institutionalization of hypocrisy and dirty astuteness: These people organise their parties, parliaments and necessary elections, to obtain and influence what they want through others without ever turning their hands over but to stealthily call the tune from behind the scenes. But then we find ourselves in contradiction with what was said at the beginning: albeit under a mask, the inequalities that we denied in principle appear again, they return to us dialectically, in the practice. We are not all equals! are we? Yes, Mirande would answer referring to the alluded de facto powers; and he would then add Orwell's sharp and witty saying: "Yes, we are all equal; but some are more equal ...

II. The trick of delegation, or the professionals that the people apparently need

Let us imagine we live in a tiny Republic. This week education issues are dealt with at our parliament and from our town (or neighbourhood, vicinity) which has a population of about five thousands souls we have sent Mr. Urlia, the school principal. Mr. Urlia is our representative because he is the most skilful person within our community in education matters. Next week we will send a doctor to discuss health issues. Next is the turn of Mr. Sandia, a high street saving bank employee, a youngster very competent in economics as well as concerned about ecology to the point of having developed some very original ideas. And upon their return they inform us at our local assembly of everything they have done, what issues were discussed and the agreements that have been reached.

Now, discarding the above, what happens really in our ? That we make one visit to the polling station and elect a delegate representative who is responsible for years to come. It is always the same person. (Let a statistic survey be commissioned to see, all in all, how long these members remain in power representing the "will of the people"). Our representative is a professional politician. But "professional" of what? Agricultural issues, education, transport? Of anything: He is always able to speak out about everything and to say whatever is necessary. From this point on, he lives among his professional peers: we do not see him for the entire year, he does not attend our meetings (unless they are the ones of his own party). It is through the party that he understands people's needs. It is also the party, not us, which understands very precisely what needs must be defended during parliamentary debates, the words and the reasoning that must be used to vote this way or the other and case by case, according to particular party interests. And so on and so forth. Hence: Is it us or the party apparatus which is represented at the parliament? But let us drop the "delegation" issue for we could carry on forever.

The acceptance that these things are as they are because they have to be so is general, and we do not question them. Historically, however, and according to its original sense, the bourgeois democratic principle is not one based on a party system, even if it seems that today's democrats cannot imagine a democracy without political parties (In Cuba and the Soviet Union attempts were made at finding more appropriate solutions). But now it is useful to believe that political parties constitute the embodiment of the purest democracy, while we all hide and almost forget that at the beginning of modern democracy and up to the nineteenth century, these very parties were forbidden as they were considered anti- democratic and irreconcilable with a pure democracy. There were no parties in Pericles classical Athens, in Renaissance Florence or in the Basque formal democracy. Leaving aside the previous reasons: Is it not true that instead of the parties having to fulfil the wishes of the people, is the people who fulfil the wishes of the parties by casting their votes? Yet, to the great "enlightened" theoreticians of democracy, there is no greater theoretical-historical absurdity than that of wanting to level democracy and the party system. Someone like Rousseau, for instance, does not leave room for deception: "It goes against natural order that the greatest number governs and the smallest number are governed". "For the same reason that sovereignty is inalienable, it is indivisible; for will is either general or it is not (a will)". "From the very moment that representatives are elected, the people are not free: They are not a people". III. The trick of rationality, or on how reason is divided into pounds

Coming to the second fraud: We have stated previously that modern democracy is the product of rationalism. This is perhaps true, but just a bit less than that: for, at the very bottom, what is found in the greatest amount of votes, greatest amount of "reason" (rights, power) identification is an explicit farewell to, and a flat denial of, the requirement of reasoning. Instead of doing one's best to rationally reach an agreement, it is through the amount of ballot papers that it is decided what to take as rational in order to solve problems. The truth and the rational are qualitative determinations of opinion and reasoning. But as it is frequently difficult to rationally ordain about such qualitative rightness, it is quantitatively that the whole issue is resolved and that's that, the whole posing of the problem is fundamentally altered in a whisper (in practice: from reasoning to propaganda) and the solution is recommended either to fanciful fortune or successful advertising. At the end of it all a voluntaristic solution anyhow, by no means a rational one. That is, a would be rationalism that would like to rise up on the leg of irrationality: much the same as if one wanted to convey the pleasant sentiment of a melody with pounds and turn sadness into yards. This is the fiction performed in democracy, nonetheless. Reason is verified with the amount of votes, with numbers. The very original maxim elicited by the fathers of rationalism is forgotten (it is not even worth saying that there is no one more forgetful than he who does not want to remember): namely, that truths and reasons have as much to do with votes than with, say, south wind. Votes cannot substitute reasoning as Descartes claims in his Discourse on Method: "The quantity of votes is worth nothing to make a decision over the truth of arguable disputes, for, rather than the whole country, it will happen to be easier to a single individual to discover it".

11. Production of popular opinion: on the secretive owner of democracy

Since we no longer live in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with the fathers of rationalism or the leading theoreticians of democracy, we do have another sad reason in our contemporary victorious age not to trust too much the identification between the amount of ballot papers and the right to rightness. Now there is a whole new science, swift techniques and a vigorous industry to make and produce whatever the people needs according to their interests. Only that enough financial strength is needed to back such and manipulate whatever "is convenient" for the people. The money holder, then, also produces "reason" and has, through ballot papers, the rights on his hands.

If the amount of votes is equal to reason and rightness, then Arana Goiri was not right in the Basque Country. He was a fanatic. How much money is needed (how many votes) to be right? And to be true? For, equally, wrong were also such against the majority as , Jesus of Nazareth and , only to mention these in the history of humanity. But Hitler in Germany, Salazar in Portugal, Papa Doc Duvalier in Haiti, Porfidio Diaz in Mexico and so on and so forth were right, and, in France, I do not understand why De Gaule should have been right and just during his time whereas Pétain was not to be so during his. Or reasoning the other way around: when there were no elections it was right and just for Fraga to be a fascist, and then to hold elections it was sufficient for the same politician to be an exemplary democrat, et cetera. Or police officers and torturers in were fascist and in democracy are democrats.

Therefore, against the predicament that the amount of votes or the majority should secure anyone's truth, reason or rightfulness we shall take issue with Mirande's view rejecting such absurdities and metamorphosis possibilities. And with 's reason likewise (De off. 2,22): "Non enim numero haec judicantur, sed pondere", which, for those not very strong in Latin, Schiller translated as follows in his unfinished drama "Demetrius": In order to know who is right through the ballot box "votes must be weighted, weighted not counted". That is to say again, quality is read through quantity. I. That force is always the source of power

Thus, to understand Mirande's position, our own position will be this: 1. In society there are only interests and forces and the struggle between these forces. Power is the outcome of force. These interests and forces: either they can do their best to cut one another into pieces, or they establish a deal and try to reach some form of agreement (when interests are different, not necessarily contrary in nature, and there is some possibility of giving them up). Elections and the amount of votes are the mechanisms to calculate and distribute such interests according to the relation and proportion of their forces. Albeit hidden, force is always there (force has many different names), it always rules from underneath. Morality, rights, the people's expression of "their needs" et cetera have nothing to do with it all.

Greeks did not use to apply whimsical moral ointments in order to call things by their name in politics. In 's Republic or the Politeia (338 d-e) dialogue, Trasimachus discusses with Socrates on this topic as follows (thanks to Pujana's translation):

But don't you know that some cities are governed by tyrants, some others by democrats and some others by aristocrats? Isn't it true yet that each city is ruled by the powerful? Thus, each ruler sets the laws accordingly, the democrat democratic ones, the tyrant those of tyranny and the others the same. Once in place, however, the that is convenient to them is communicated to the subordinate, and everybody coming apart from it is punished as an unjust law breaker. This is, my greatest of friends, what I say, that the right thing is the same in every city: what is convenient to the power in place, which is the one with the force, and that, as someone thinking with sense knows, justice is everywhere what is more convenient to the more forceful.

In summary: There are many modes of government in the world, just the same as there are many forms of democracy in history, from the Homeric noble and aristocratic democracy (or the similar war counsels of Indian films) to the Renaissance Communes and Republics or the peasant democracies. Neither can democracy in abstracto and for any case be considered as an ideal political system nor the bourgeois democracy can be seen as the best form of democracy in any case. It is a solution devised according to some well known interests and intentions; with party elections and a system of majority government. It is precisely with this, according to Spengler, that the specificity of modern democracy was secured, i.e., bourgeois power: "This principle was totally accepted: that elections are a business and that all civil servants (the original says Staatsåmter: posts) are the prey of the victors". Like power, rights and justice are also, albeit of a particular kind; and in bourgeois democracy their value and fate are played within the marketplace.

II. On the majority principle

This is a fundamental issue: If nature was turned into mathematics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Galilean-Newtonian physics), society was also converted mathematically in the eighteenth century. This concept dictated that a numbered abstract citizen corresponds with the democratic majority principle. In democratic terms, the majority becomes sacred (like the Crown in a monarchy, or the quality of the blue blood in the latter and the vote quantity in the former); the majority is a political sacrament. We know that critiques to such bourgeois democracy can be laid down from many sides. We are not interested here in the line of say, Marxist critique, (that of class struggle) but in Mirande's and other "rightwing" people of similar thought. However, concerning the argument (or myth?) about the majority principle, the right and the left agree, at least as to the views stated so far. If democracy is to shape the "will of the people" then, the concrete meaning of this in the praxis is, firstly, to fabricate the will of the people; and only secondly to carry it out as expressed (through ballots). For, as stated, social majorities are fictions and constructions. But, more fundamentally, you can find the beginnings of such fiction in the very Constitutions on which the majority principle is based.

III. What comes first, the majority or the Constitution?

Is the Constitution based on the rights of the majority or are the rights of the majority based upon the Constitution? This problem is like the chicken and the egg situation - what comes first?.

We are going to invent a democracy now. Will there be parties in our democracy? What shall we demand of them? (To be obedient to the Crown? To swear on the Constitution? et cetera) How will they be represented in Parliament? Will women (blacks, Palestinians, "foreigners") have the right to vote? Why will it not be possible to cast one's vote until being eighteen whereas it will be allowed after sixty five?... Who decides all these things? Yes, a referendum was organised upon which the rights and limits of citizens are now based: but what are the foundations of this Constitution? And what legitimated the referendum? (the date, the forms and so on). How is the Constitution voted on which the right, manner and value of casting a vote is based? Who decided the text, the date and the form of what it had to be voted (by coincidence, I had much preferred to stay in bed that precise day rather than having to go and cast my vote!) and who authorized whoever to do so? (These are questions of the crooked "de facto powers" that protect themselves in hiding). Even if the "majority" gave an overwhelming yes to such a Constitution: Who has the secret calling capacity to establish the overall framework on a society's behalf before and after the Constitution and the elections take place (and, which is therefore placed before and higher than such a majority)? Upon what rights? And why did the referendum take place in Irun but not in Hendaye, and why Ceuta? And what happens with the minority saying no? And with those who that very day were seventeen and not quite eighteen? And with those who could not care less?...

In fact, we were going to invent a democracy. Let us say, for instance, that we usually have pretty bad weather in our town, and that we have decided to emigrate to a Pacific island, and we devise a Constitution that allows us to live together over there: what the majority wants will be achieved et cetera. There are five thousands inhabitants within our town. However, when debating on the constitutional text, an ill tempered old man doesn't cease to repeat to us that he doesn't care in the slightest, that he has nothing to do with the Pacific, and so to leave him alone because he is pretty well where he is now. But now we are the majority and, according to the proper rights of democracy, we take him by the neck and force him to come with us to the island. We threaten the old man to stay put and quiet because there are 4.999 of us. And yes: "One has to do what the majority wants". From this moment on, he will have to take part in elections, to play the game of the majority and the minority and do "like good democrats do"... And yet he still refuses: he is on the island because he had to come, but everytime there are elections or whatever he will always creates havoc. We cannot force the stubborn man into being a democrat.

Such are the problems stemming from a "majority" based Constitution (from where all rights and obligations emanate to all citizens) And this is why Rousseau remained obstinate as to the fact that if a democracy camouflaged in tyranny is not desired, then, rather than the forms of democracy, what is needed is a total and univocal agreement of those who want democracy, not just the majority. For a system to be completely democratic, it has to be democratic from the very outset. That is, only those participating voluntarily can belong to the association: "The law of the plurality of suffrages is the same institution of convention as such and implies unanimity once at least". Or at another place: "There is only a single law which by its own nature demands a unanimous . It is the social pact: for civil association is the most voluntary act of the world (...). Therefore, if there are opponents during the social pact, then their opposition impedes that they be understood within it; they are foreigners among the citizens". (I believe that it is for reason of this nature that Euskadiko Ezkerra's interest for a post festum acceptance of the Constitution can be explained).

But now let us return to Spengler:

These forms [the democratic constitutions] have not grown up spontaneously, like feudalism, but are the product of reflection, which is not based on a profound knowledge of men and things, but on abstract representations of law and justice; this is why an abyss opens up between the spirit of laws and practical customs, which are formed in silence under the pressure of laws, either to adapt to them or to maintain them away from the rhythm of life. Only experience has shown, throughout evolution, that the rights of the people and the influence of the people are different things. The more general the suffrage, the smallest is the power of the voters (...). The other dimension of every democracy is very soon shown, making it obvious the fact that to use the constitutional rights one must have money.

IV. That majorities have to be produced

We have discussed earlier that the number or the majority are not equal to reason. What then are these majorities? How do they come about? For majorities are not like the roses from the mother's garden that miraculously blossom each year, roses wide open at once, on their own, always on their own, always by a mother's miracle. In fact, the self-legitimation of the democratic system is a subtle trick, as if society would generate it from within itself and it is given to us ready made like the stars in the sky, and as though politics ought to respect such untouchable, sacred flower and fruit: A hypostasis that the people want in their hearts, both natural and pure. The majority is there, it is given (in itself) by nature itself, it must be respected. To respect such will is to respect the people.

However, reality is simpler than that: what the people want is fabricated, just the same as sausages and beers are fabricated and sold. And science, and machinery are ready enough to fabricate whatever needs of the people. The tale of democracy, therefore, is to efficiently control the production and market of opinions.

V. Who invests the capital and who serves the machines and the market in the production of majorities

Let us allow ourselves the hypothesis that EA held a better political project than the PNV (more patriotic, more modern, more whatever). However, the EA originally emanated from the very resourceful PNV as a break away party. And now it has to manage its organisation and find its own financing sources. We have supposed in the hypothesis that EA's project is better, and we want to suppose also that, at least at the beginning, the sympathy of the people is greater in the former PNV constituents. But what will happen if it does not obtain money, means of propaganda and friends in the right place? Or, if to obtain all of this, the banking sector forces it to restrict its project: to the pact "for " et cetera, not to be out of place in the "democratic game"?

This is to say that once the rules are accepted one has to play by the rules. But then the game becomes dialectic: the best project in theory may become the worst in practice; because there is no way of financing it. And, therefore, there is no way to apply it. In a democracy, all the best things and ideals find their limits in "economic interests": or, clearer, in people's interest to mediate in the financing of the party and its political campaign. (The framework of democracy is the framework of financing possibilities, nothing more nothing less). As a consequence, a policy that these people find "interesting" will have to be projected. Objectives that these people hold as "reasonable" will have to be held back, statements and claims will have to be spoken in a way that look "sensible and realistic" ("ethical" that is). And then it is understandable that the discourse of the politicians turns muddy and confusing, that it becomes metaphysical: Employers' associations understand better the "socialist" discourse than the workers and the trade unions; and then this is how a "nationalist" comes and tells you: "you know that concepts such as independence must not turn into absolutes, we are no longer in the nineteenth century, we are heading towards the year 2000". What is stated and (perhaps at the party club) claimed by someone as a patriot, must be moderated and diluted by the same person as a democrat (i.e., as a "realist"; or to put it in a cruder way: as a little sheepdog of the de facto powers and the financing sources or as a puppet of the sacrosanct popular opinion makers from the written press and TV. This is precisely why, at the end of it all, the party, in democracy, by limiting itself, whether it likes it or not, to respect and represent the interests, tensions and pressures of the hidden forces (money sources and opinion makers), they also reflect the duality of the democratic system in its own organisation: "The truths and the facts, in the form of (a) the party ideals and (b) the party cash are already clearly separated".

And now we should ask: What do you think are the interests of all these blessing money sources and friends in the right places who finance the campaigns and apparatus of the PNV, EE and other patriotic-democratic parties in say, the life of the , or in the sharing of work to overcome unemployment, or in "destroy Lemoiz" and all the ecological struggles and so on and so forth? And what interests can they have, at the end, in the independence of the Basque Country? Therefore, what value can democracy have regarding the fulfillment of such objectives?

VI. "First and foremost, a patriotic" struggle

This is where the younger thesis comes from, of course, that the Basque Country will have to be independent, and socialist, or that it will not be anything otherwise. Only that as Mirande who refused the French Revolution, democracy and Christianity, he was even more disdainful of for much of the same reasons. His attack of the Anaitasuna magazine is well known. Siding neither with the Christian-democratic patriots nor with the younger socialists, Mirande remained alone with its own patriotism.

From then on develops another history: the one whereby Mirande commits suicide. NIETZSCHE, JÜNGER: THE PARADIGMATIC MEANING OF AN ANECDOTE

(a) They have turned Ernst Jünger into a Doctor, Doctor Honoris Causa. And so what? Nothing: A few people held a protest. The great V.I.P. crowd grandiosely commemorated this event at Leioa. And so what?

Nothing. This is an everyday occurrence within the Basque Country.

(b) However, Jünger's story happened to be a clarifying paradigm for us to deploy a melancholic meditation at the turn of the decade... It highlights again where our positions lie: To begin with, the Basque society is divided into two parts.

This is to say: we find that A and B have become arch-enemies, but in such an extraordinary way whereby, in the end, A does not care in the slightest about B. Two Universities. Two Basque Countries.

Moreover: I am A in this hypothesis: I want everything to go wrong for B, everything planned to fail in A's hands. A versus B. It has become an obligation to wish the failure of the other.

(c) Probably, nobody is particularly interested, if at all, in the Jünger affair. Always embroiled in a quarrel, nobody feels up to it anymore. What's the point? It's simply not worth it anymore.

Is there a solution for this country?

Let us start again from the beginning: What is all this noise around Jünger about?

I - AUTUMN MEDITATION

(a) Sometime ago when somebody spoke about the "two communities" of the Basque Country, we "patriots" stood firmly against him. Then he was an unshakable "Marxist", now is a member of the PSOE.

Let us take a look: now there really are two communities. And the mechanisms of such two communities function, at least since the "anti-ETA block/ade" was formed at Ajuria-enea, with the iron perfection of a machine. They function not only in the institutions but also in the civil society, social relations, culture and the press: The duality by now is not anymore Basque/Spanish, or patriot/'sucursalist", but (how to name it without compromising anybody?), on the one hand the "majority" defining itself as "democratic" against the other side (under the PSOE hegemony), and on the other hand, HB and the remaining minority fraction, quite a colourful mosaic itself (but under ETA's somehow valued hegemony, I suppose, whether they like it or not).

Divide et impera. First point of the meditation: Basque society in polarized in two fronts.

If one returns to the post-Franco history again, the above must be considered, in my opinion, as the PSOE's, or more concretely, Jauregui's greatest success (an the most important political fact of the last years): to activate such evolution in the Basque Country as to have shifted the main political contradiction in public life from patriotism to democratism. (Basque nationalism itself being divided into four parties, moreover, while the four sects are bitterly pitted against one another). So much so that, in practice, the national question is secondary for the very "patriots" themselves: political forces are polarized or gathered together/opposed by "democracy". Formerly, we "patriots" did our best against some "Marxists" to ardently deny the subordination of the national question to the imperatives of the class struggle. In many political and cultural mini- organisations, in the Basque schools, within ETA itself, a hard struggle took place.

Look now: it is subordinated.

(b) Not to freedom. But to peace. Peace has become an absolute. Freedom can easily be relativised: freedom, what for? If out of misery then, we are to eat leeks grown in our own back garden! And this are Basque nationalists speaking without batting an eyelid. Before it was without the Lemoiz nuclear power station that, according to some "nationalist" politicians, we would have died of hunger and cold. Now, as always, it is without peace that we are wrecking our economy,: "Europeans" will not invest here, local companies run away, et cetera. (There is no ETA in Galicia: how about "European" investments over there?) Yes, there is a logic in such arguments.

(Can peace come before freedom in the value system of a movement that calls itself "patriotic"? With which kind of logic?)

In any case, I suppose that everybody wants peace in the Basque Country.

For to want peace is the same as to want a society (like the "natural condition", violence and war are pre-social). Therefore, one will have to suppose that everybody is interested in peace.

Interested, yes: but there is no peace between A and B, and they both accuse each other of not wanting peace. It is like this in the street, and at university.

At the expense of oversimplifying a little, we can say that the reason for such A and B to exist has been violence. Careful, neither A nor B use violence themselves. Indeed some say that they deny any use of violence by principle and in absolute terms (the Spanish army, the budget's "defence" entry, the military service, NATO, armament for the police forces, et cetera); although, fundamentally, what they take into account and oppose is ETA's violence in its struggle of national liberation, and not, in a strict sense, any general ("moral") principles. This is exactly how it works, even if in the ensuing controversies, the eternal trick of the "democrats" is to run away into general evangelical principles. But this belongs to the sphere of the Church and religion. It is impossible to conceive of a state by denying all violence: all political theorists agree on that.

Once again: what happens? A confusion of twisted and troublesome lines of reasoning.

Nobody in B wants to question the legitimacy of the peaceful and "democratic" choice. (Those who think of democracy as "immoral" are usually Nietzscheans, but, as far as I know, the Nietzscheans here should be found in the group A, not in B). To give a testimony of my own position, it is clear to me that my own doing is not, and could not be the armed struggle. The problem begins when by this I mean that armed struggle is not appropriate for anybody else: when I think of my own personal option as the only possible and moral option and I do not tolerate other possible options, as a possibility.

And this is the situation in which we find ourselves. Reason takes the following options: armed struggle (1) is not appropriate for me, (2) it is not appropriate for anybody (3) it cannot be appropriate.

I have often mocked this kind of sophistic arguing from the part of "democrats". But as a speculative witness I do not forget that, by laying the problem out in this manner, the most difficult (theoretical) work falls on the democrats themselves, for if the question is to prove the illegitimacy of violence, the whole onus probandi remains their entire responsibility. And, once we set out to imagine it ourselves , with what kind of rational and only rational means could they prove, could be possible to prove, the "impossibility" of an armed option in a liberation struggle (movement)? How should these "impossibilities" be proved, moral, political or what else?... This is, in any case, how "democrats" here have wanted the problem to be set out.

(c) There is another "violence": The one which uses barricades, throws stones and shouts "PNV traitor", or the one which uses scorn and slander and manipulation and lies and prepotency et cetera. We are interested in this one now.

Interested, not because there is a scarce possibility of accepting what is done and shouted at ("Do you think it is good to smash all those panes of glass to pieces?" asks you warm-blooded the opponent. "Why should he think that I think it is good if he is in his right state of mind?); but because, if we want to understand the conflict once we have reached this point - and I am not playing with words anymore- everything stemming from polarisation, in the long term, is only polarisation between two intellectual fronts. And a polarised struggle becomes boringly indistinguishable and monotonous.

Furthermore. Since reasons and reasoning seldom have, in their nature, a simple, dualist yes/no aut/aut alternative form, what a polarized dichotomy hastens in practice cannot be rationality but decisionism and imposition. Instead of reasons, what Parties only care about are the direct consequences: as it is written in the Gospel according to Saint Mark 2.27, Parties do not belong to reason but sabathos do to Parties. "Reasons" are trafficked in and traded off in accordance with Party interests and the game is one of "flexibility". In plain language: reasons are worth nothing, the reason that Parties understand is self-interest. This is not understood as doctrinaire, but as pragmatic.

To begin this autumn meditation once again right from the start:

(a) What we are interested in with our rotten "dialectic" is: how are we immersed in a situation where A cannot but beatify the whole of their doings, and B cannot but protest in vain.

Paralysed: both blocks are compelled to play their roles mechanically, which is suicidal for a culture, a people and a society in such a situation as ours. The outcome is discouragement. Degeneration, at the end, both moral and political.

What is the solution for this country?

(b) What we are interested in is how, I don't know in the name of what realism, democracy, peace or the respectful sacredness of institutions, how are we thus always compelled to swallow and believe anything (who has guts now to stage a public protest against Pinillos as did indeed?): and how, most amazingly, have we come to be so gullible, and acquire the widest of abilities to mouthfully swallow anything coming into us from such narrow a democracy. With no indigestion.

It will be in vain, but we shall continue meditating our protest; aware of the uselessness of the protest, and still more useless in the Basque language: But what we have here is the sales of all ideals: The resignation of all principles, triviality, I-don't-care-less philosophy, demoralisation and submission (an immoralisation), the sale of consciousness in exchange of Spanish warmed-up leftovers, desertion (or surrender, pure and simply), conformity, the giving up of personal responsibility and protection under the flock of the majority. The twilight of all dreams. This is what we want to read in E. Jünger's honoris causa doctor nomination and the surrounding implications. Flat conformism dressed in academic ceremonial robe. (c) And what is utterly interesting is the paradoxical, almost comical, if not absurd farcical nature of the whole story. (A truly appropriate paradigm of the "rationality" level of many quarrels among us). In this case, in fact, the issue was not the doctor nomination of such mister cultured pearl or such foolishly idiotic clod. What was at stake is the "consciousness " between the two blocks: the one related to the philosophy of violence. And this is where the paradox could be found: in the role that the two blocks came to perform in this particular case. The "democrats" proudly honouring Jünger, the chorister of weapons and combat, to whom honour was due, while the meek and docile "violent" protested peacefully at the doorway.

But who is he, really, whom -just a few days after the Pinillos scandal- the University nominated as doctor honoris causa?

II - IN A SCHIZOPHRENIC MOMENT

I think that we live hanging in contradiction like monkeys on the forest branches. We are all mixed up with our and reasons. But now we are only interested in aspects of public behaviour. For the whole public life is full of contradictions in this Autonomous Community of Absurdistan.

At least since the war, I don't know whether it is a process of disintegration or reintegration, but the Basque society is sliding through an anxious evolution, and our mentality is changing. I would say that we now find ourselves in a schizophrenic moment. Although, often, it is difficult to make the difference between schizophrenia and pure hypocrisy. But without entering into a diagnosis, we shall just take the opportunity to offer some reflections.

1. A Nietzschean master: the "right" master

It has been no coincidence. Some knew very well who E. Jünger was and what he represented. It is no honour at all to the "academic community", but let us suppose, to avoid supposing the worst, that the majority did not know who was proposed to become doctor honoris causa. From the moment that an official celebratory party was accepted and protests broke out, however, I want to suppose that the respectable academics went to look up on a handbook or an encyclopedia (I don't want to suppose that they are completely irresponsible). And then they must have found something like this:

If one looks at the new Gran Enciclopedia Larousse (1989, vol.13), this is what can be learned about E. Jünger, among others: "He saw in war a law of nature, and his Nietzschianism had perhaps some responsibility in the formation of the national-socialist spirit". It is this Nietzschean who has been put to us as a model.

And someone who has perhaps been pretty close to national-socialism, not someone without a model just in case: what has just been looked for with this nomination, therefore, is a sense of concord within the academic community, a tribute to a model intellectual who could be accepted by all parties, as an ideal example. Look at the French Encyclopedia Universalis (1980, Organum, "Supplément"): "Few contemporary German writers have been the object of so vivid controversies as Ernst Jünger. Both his personality and work (..) have provoked as much enthusiasm without reservation as passionate attacks". Why does he provoke such rattling? Because at least one side of his life and work is quite obvious in this chosen Mr. doctor honoris causa, namely, and always according to the Encyclopedia Universalis, the extreme right-wing propagandist side: "important journalistic activity in right-wing militarist publications, of which he is sometimes the editor in chief". (Obviously, there are no "fascist" writers in Germany from 1945 onwards) And if we take a modern history of philosophy, for instance, Historia de la Filosofía (in Siglo XXI editores), one of the most widely read by students, we can read this: "What Heidegger designates with the name of Gestell is what Ernst Jünger understood as `total motivation' (totale Mobilachung), the process according to which an entity is subjected in its totality to men willpower through technology. Without doubt, such conception of totalitarism, which Heidegger shared with some of his contemporaries, was not irrelevant to his adherence to national-socialism in 1933". Enough now. Always the same reference to nazism.

If someone would like a more precise information, he can take a look at an interesting anthology of III Reich literature: E. LOEWY, Litteratur unterm Hakenkreuz, Das Dritte Reich und seine Dichtung, Eine Dokumentation, 1969. There are really many extraordinary texts by E. Jünger compiled in this documentary anthology. In pg 300 ss, there is information about the character and his appraisal in reference to nazism. Those interested will find there enough bibliography for further information.

So, enough is enough.

2. The supreme individual: Which individual?

If only to avoid trouble, Jünger should have never have been given the doctor honoris causa nomination in this University.

Such has been the case, nevertheless: where is the explanation for this to happen? Such explanation could not be found in a mistake, nor in the ignorance of university lecturers.

There were reasons, although in my opinion, they were precisely those which were the less important of all: Jünger's ideas. In the year of Heiddeger's celebrations, or better, in the year of polemics about Heiddeger (Farias: Heidegger et le nazism), a more than arguable philosophy has been taken as a model at the Basque Country University, a risky philosophy has been paid homage. A philosophy inspired on Nietzsche himself, like Mirande's among us.

Nietzscheans, therefore, are again masters at home (at least if they come from the outside). Although Nietzsheans, we always had more of them than we ever thought. We have them at home. How come? Social, collective, egalitarian and democratic Prometeism (this is leftist tradition) faces the individualistic and libertarian, aristocratic, elitist and grand alternative. Break the (leveling) social norms, destroy social morality, laugh at having to be equal to others. Put sacrilege at the beginning of our lives : "Through sacrilege the humankind conquers the very best and most supreme things" is taught in The Birth of Tragedy. This is the path for the true man. To be a man we have to break all moral ties, which are the chains of a slave spirit, that is, the covering that the trivial mind creates to hide his spiritual shame, "the mended rags of a beggar" (E.J.). To be a real man we do not have to care about the others. A strong heart goes his own way.

And we are strong, Europeans, "Arians". We are noble and we have to continue to be solid. Therefore, we have to accept, and love "the most intimate core in the legend of Prometheus - that is to say - the necessity of sacrilege, imposed upon the individual with titanic aspirations".

Raw naturalism. It seems that nowadays we can choose between sweet and sour according to a heavy or light Nieztsche taste. But "immorality" remains always there. "The great Pan is dead": definitely. The big godly eye who once governed and kept the world under his control has gone. And freedom begins. It is up to everyone to find his own , that is. There is no God to help him out. Principles, "morality" (the ten commandments), religion will not assist him: the great Pan who once tied it all up within a coherent whole is dead: everything is loose, unbound, random, crumbling, decomposed: it is up to each one to make, or remake, his own world, his own moral order. By renouncing to God and heaven and wholly affirming earth.

According to F. Savater, for instance, Nietzsche's alluded book The Birth of Tragedy is "one of the most luminous and fiercely beautiful works of Western culture"; and its author's "powerful thought is the cleanest and deepest of his century".

3. Indifference is the King

Anyhow, let us leave Nietzsche aside and acknowledge this: E. Jünger's nomination as doctor honoris causa at the UPV-EHU (Basque university) is due as much to his ideas as to our own, more than anything, our own.

There are many ways of reading Nietzsche, and now we leave Jünger's in one side. In fact, the thinking of other "Nietzscheans" (Mirande, for instance) find little official honour over here. It is true that he was a Souletin and a "radical patriot", but apart from that, he did not look that much different than Jünger. We asked ourselves how could Jünger's nomination be explained, being as controversial as he is. And if the answer was two-fold: because of his ideas and because of our ideas, then it is time now to look at ours.

Although there is a double sense here as well: on the one hand, because praise of Jünger's work responds to the ideas which are about now; and, on the other hand, because nobody cares about anybody's ideas anymore. Both reasons sprout from the same root.

Coming back to the Nietzschean root in both attitudes: to say "God is dead" is to say nothing. The issue is to know which man has killed Him. To know which two-legged model remains in earth after His burial. And what remains is not Zarathustra's disciple "superman" but the "postmodern" man, "a narcissistic and hedonistic attitude towards life " or "a world leveled up by indifference". In Lipovestsky's words in The era of Emptiness:

All this must be considered as another one among these eternal lamentations over Western decadence, the death of and the death of God. European nihilism, as analyzed by Nietzsche in terms of morbid depreciation of all superior value and empty meaning, does not find a correspondence anymore with the demobilization of the masses which is not accompanied of either despair or a sense of absurdity. All of it indifference, the postmodern desert is a long way both from 'passive' nihilism and its sad delectation of universal inanity and from 'active' nihilism and its self-destruction. God is dead, the grand finalities fade away, but nobody gives a damn, this is the happy novelty.

In Lipovetsky's analysis, postmodern care-lessness is not passivity, negligence, abandon or withdrawal from the world to privacy, intimacy and laziness. It is a new interested strategy: "indifference designates a new consciousness". Interested indifference. 4. Indifferent culture loves praetorian order

If God is truly dead, in the Nitzschean sense, two paths can be taken: a) either to try an alternative value system - E. Jünger had done just that: to oppose the Judeo-Christian value system with a "philosophy of life", in the sense of a heroic-titanic life. Then force and fire are exalted and "what is fundamental is not what we fight for but how to fight" (E.J.: "nicht wofür wir kåmpfen, sit das Wesentliche, sondern wie wir kåmpfen"). It is not the good objective but the good struggle which delineates the value of life. Vitalist nihilism. b) or all value systems are simply dispensed with and life is arranged around "indifference", that is, around this famous "postmodernism".

The outcome in the union of both: E. Jünger doctor h.c. at the Basque Country University.

5. Our old complexes are back again

Does people read at all in this country? Or, after reading, is something understood? Or is it that everything is read, understood and told when and as pleased? Or is it that everything is the same ever since Jon Juaristi threw at Txillardegi something like "I don't think that coherence is an interesting value"?

There is a great confusion right now with our ideas and values! It is true that we are adapting at great speed to "Western democracy" so that we can be too like everybody else in the world, and that we are adapting ourselves very well indeed, and that at this speed, we will soon be thinking and acting like Castilians and Extremadurians. At last then we will overcome being the Indians of the prairie, and we won't have to be ashamed of being provincial "peasants" (the parochial country cousin as the other says).

At this high rate of speed, moreover, we will soon be able to pay back our debts for the original Carlist sin and become even more democratic than anyone, and our democratic diligence will turn us into the more tolerant among the tolerant so as to willingly accept everything and be affable and conciliatory with all opinions and beliefs, and open the windows to all ideas, and eliminate today's narrow- mindness. At last, we shall overcome our "cultural nationalism", and become patriots but of the world only, not of such a measly and sad place as ours, and we will be very glad each time they con us (provided that it is in a constitutional way), and we will feel very honoured when the University of the Basque Country turns the institutionalised memory of the honorable scholar Millán Astray into a yearly bank holiday.

That day, deportations, (Basque) police pellets of bullets against the young, telephone line tapping and everything will be allowed: torture, dispersion of prisoners, tricks and tracks on their relatives, insult, humiliation, scorn and the blessing of all of this by the democrat-nationalist politicians.

(Helvetius, Maximes et Pensées: "Men are so silly that repeated violence seems a right to them"). Particularly when violence is exerted upon others.

But now, before that day arrives soon, we want to allow ourselves a bit of illusion, and imagine in the sunset time that we have a licence for some intolerance: a couple of ideas thought out by ourselves and two preferences in our heart; that it is still legitimate for us to choose for a little while the scholars of our own choice, before becoming fervent disciples of El País and the BOE (Hansard). 6. A Marxist 'counter-master': Lukács

How about choosing, say, Lukács as a 'counter-master'? By no means because we have ever worshipped him, personally or in absolute terms, as our master, but simply because many among the "rational" and "democrats" of today, before becoming lovers of the prevailing sacred order, when they were doctrine- lovers perhaps, they used to much admire, make reference to, and glorify Georg Lukács, especially the one who wrote The Assault on Reason.

The question is: how can a whole intelligentsia turn, so completely and so quickly, from being so leftwing and devoutly pasture works such as the above, to bless someone like E. Jünger as a master of honour, or to accept without the slightest protest the official celebrations at the University? What can be thought of the intellectual seriousness and honesty of these people? I am not here to name anyone.

For Lukács is quite embittered with Jünger in this particular work (1953): "From Jünger... to Rosenberg there is just a single step" A bit too much isn't it?

Anyway, we already know Jünger's philosophy on history and war: war is the law of nature, "as old a situation as the world, the struggle for life". And history is written by war victors, it is said. Like says Jünger himself, although Lukács (in spite of this phrase being a Marxist cliché) is not ready to accept the in the sense impressed by Jünger. In fact, the same words could be uttered to say the same thing, but in two utterly opposed senses: "Speaking on the birth of myth, says Jünger, 'the victor creates the myth of history', a sentence in which the negation of all historic objectivity reaches the climax of cynical insolence". This on Jüngers concept of history.

On morals: Jünger is a blatant critic of bourgeois morality, like all Nietzscheans (Marxists are so in another way). But, in Lukács' eyes, the entire meaning of Jünger's critique is simply this: "the demagogic critique of bourgeois culture from the philosophy of life standpoint is of the greatest importance in the foundation of fascism as a conception of the world". "Jünger is the first to interpret from the point of view of life, the antithesis between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat so as to obtain the broad social base necessary to the new imperialist war longed for to substitute with life the dead bourgeois world". always the same reference to nazism.

That Jünger's is a completely undominated and critical thought? It could well be. But Lukács was not pleased at all with "Jünger's mystically infatuated romantic nihilism";- which was much admired here somewhere. Although the problem is not about taste.

Let us move a long text. The assault on reason was written during WWII. Once the war ended, the "ideas" of German intellectuals also changed, obviously. Even Lukács explains in his book that he had to extend the Epilogue. In this text, Lukács explains how, following defeat, German intellectuals made their best to "remake the past", how, that is, these "reinserted" intellectuals had apparently remained in "opposition" (we all know some "democrats forever"), but how, nevertheless, they were all now more "enlightened", how they were able to see more clearly the utter frightfulness of the regime that had just collapsed. In the heat of the moment, Lukács accepts neither excuses nor conversions: he wants to denounce again the mistake of these intellectuals at the origin of fascism:

Ernst Jünger, whose Arbeiter (The worker), as it is known, contributed much to the birth of nazi (...), took, on the one hand, a much more intense part in the Hitlerian regime, although most of the time in purely decorative positions of representation, and, on the other hand, he has strived to underline in a more obvious manner, later, his attitude of "opposition". But the latter also adopts a line of an aristocratic protest against the populace element in Hitlerian demagogy, if not against its social content; and he only differs from Schmitt [the main juridical apologist of nazism] in the fact that he, Jünger, openly emphasizes to the first rank the role of birth nobility in Prussian junkers during the open dictatorship (the strength of his novel Heliopolis). To which it must be added, as an ideological background, the proclamation of myth and magic as the characteristic of the difference between the new period and the nineteenth century (...) Jünger joins, therefore, a series of ideologues who- like Jaspers, Heiddeger and Schmitt - offer, from the "opposition" side against Hitler, a weapon to the new imperialism, the irrationalist myth as well as presenting themselves as the bearers of it.

7. A wholly self-interested indifference

Did it ever occur to anyone amongst us to take into consideration Mirande's teaching and thought? Before, we always knew which philosophy could not have been ours. We only had to wait for the "democrats" of today and "rational" intelligence to come and tell us.

What has happened for this to happen? That, to begin with, the vast majority of "intellectuals" today believe more in "their" newspaper than in their critical colleagues. The newspaper is the breviary and enlightenment of the liberal intellectual (the liberal intellectual is not a fanatic). It is in the newspaper that the official truth of the day comes every morning; it is enough with reading it. But for this one must subscribe only to the right newspaper.

Secondly, there is also this nonsense happening: that we are aconfessional, yes, but Christian aconfessional. Savater once wrote this: "(...) The ethical values of Christianism, more or less modernized and rationalized, remain overwhelmingly untouched". And moreover: "It is the more radical parties from the left which support them mainly, thereby confirming to a great extent Nietzsche's point of view on socialism".

In fact, what happens with our post-Christianism is quite comical. We have all "overcome" Christianity a longtime ago, both in private and public life. We are religiously indifferent (even in politics we are aconfessional, including the Christian Democrats). Let the Pope give up on silly predicaments, at once. We allow neither Church nor Saint Spirit to dictate orders and obligations on us everytime we want to do anything. Everyone of us has his own inner self to dictate orders according to necessity. After all, we are adults.

At the very root of our concept of morality we find, therefore, intimate personal values. "Ethics are a private question referred back to the interpersonal sphere" to continue with Savater. There is no Pan to morally tie us up. At the same time, common reason is not grounded in ethics (Heraclitus), but instead, we, modern baby birds, are Rousseau's heirs rather than Socrates', say: everyone with his own sentiment, sense and sensibility (ethics are rooted in each one's particular "character"). "My body is mine" (this is a pro-choice slogan) and my morality is mine. Political justice and the state have nothing to do with reason anymore: "Ethics could not, or would not know how to wait [a more just state; a revolution]; its conflicting greatness derives from the necessity to act right now, in desperation. With no God, no Reason nor State to justify values in an absolute and unappeasable way, the search for a sense of action becomes a personal adventure". Ethics is one issue and politics another.

We are completely dechristianized; therefore, we do not accept any moral demand or burden: even when we accept it personally for ourselves, we do not accept Christian moral values to be imposed on civil society, but without escaping from the world, even enjoying and having a taste of the world, we have invented a new "monarchist" morality, in the more etymological of its meanings. This is Nietzsche. But only this. On the other hand, there is no place in our ethics for the task of struggle, for the pain of renewing society. We have enough with our own selves. That would mean to surpass the strict ethical framework (individual, as said): the aim of ethics is my own little happiness between shirt and chest. To strive to change society (revolution and other such discourses) are, at most, the leftovers of ideologies already overcome, if not the source of intolerance and crimes of any kind...

Only that the Christianity which is not desired for oneself is wanted somewhere within the social apparatus that surround us. It is up to the state (the social and political environment) to be charitable, to be good, delicate ("violences" are not aesthetic), to help out, to build facilities for leisure. The comforting welfare state, the pleasant, satisfying soft hand: The state (God) be love, like in the Gospel according to Saint John. What we want thereby is that, apart from ourselves, the world be "Christian". (We are not Christian, but send our daughter to the nun's college). That we be free to do as pleased, but the general framework and structure within which we live to remain under the "Christian order". That the barbarian revolutionary do not make us vacillate.

8. What to do?

We live in contradiction between ethics and politics, between personal and public life. In the private sphere: , freedom. In the public sphere: security, order, wellbeing, a "protective" shell of social and state apparatuses over each and everyone of us, ordinary heteronomy. In a very comprehensible way, two opposites become complementary.

The more stable and solid the framework (state) of society, the more fragile, rootless, and volatile the ethics of intimacy, the more slippery, gratuitous and shapeless: "for [our ethics as Savater clarifies it to us] begin with the death of God, that is, the end of any trancendent legitimation of supreme values, the break down not only of the divine right of royalty but also the royal divinity of rightness. But the philosophies of will inaugurated with devastating vigour by the great contemporary thinkers, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, annihilate the serene self-substantiation of Reason itself, enthroned on the vacant altar of retired divinity".

In the mean time, what is the point of repeating the old tale as to what the state is becoming? Once the sour critical analysis of sometime ago (Marcusse: "One-dimensional man"), the dark negative utopias (Huxley, Orwell) and the protest cries () are forgotten, and with a near lack of the slightest sense of resistance in civil society, the cobweb of power spins peacefully over our heads, all over the place. Even the dressing room.

No future: it is already completed and achieved. Rather that predicted, had already announced "the organic social articulation, that is, the East-Egyptian" type ("only that, in contrast to this one, [the modern apparatus] is as strictly rational as a machine". And the issue that Max Weber faced regarding the modern state was already this: "In the presence of the basic fact of the unrestrainable progress of bureaucratization, the question around the political forms in future organization can only be set forth in the following terms: In the presence of such prepotency in the trend towards bureaucratization, how is still possible to save some kind of freedom of individual movement?". And I think that the solution cannot be found in descending towards emitity but in rising up through struggle. The former is a "religious" solution (stoic, Buddhist, monastic: it doesn't matter), but not a political one.

Fundamentally, that is the question: What do we do?, Lenin's question of desperation, the question of persistent Hamlet. For us: With which value system, with which consciousness are we to confront such state? Such process? If we have become truly de-Christianized, what positive non-Christian values do we count with, to construct a new world? (At least, if we don't want to conform to the one inherited from Christianity). In the end, which is the positive being remaining to us in such non-Christian being? In this world, in this culture, in this second millennium, in Europe, the Basque Country, in this journal, it seems that we are not Christians anymore: Neither Greeks, nor Romans, what are we then? What is our morality to be in the world?

And more fundamentally, the problem is a) the state, b) society, that is, Nietzcshe: "the new man". Or the "overcoming" of man. Of bourgeois culture, that is. Of Christianity. Of Democracy. Of Pacifism. The clear elimination of slave morality, and "immorality".

For example, and only to mention an urgent and concrete point, violence is a problem to act in history and society: force against love to fellow men. The Gospel according to Zarathustra: "I do not exhort you to work [the moral of bourgeois puritans] but to battle (...) You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I tell you: it is the good war that hallows every cause. War and courage have done more great things than love [meaning more than Christian charity here]". But letting aside wars with guns, the issue here is the moral attitude. The morality of force. Struggle against the state, society, against all "slave" cultures. Why this side of Nietzsche is always "forgotten", that is, the only risky one truly, for someone who wants to declare himself a Nietzshean?

Thus spoke Zarathustra is - according to Savater again - one of those rare works, it goes without saying, that justify a whole culture by themselves (...) There is no book more rigorous or enigmatic, nobody has succeeded in keeping lyrism, demolishing prophecy and a major speculative depth together by means of a bond both intimate and compelling. This work offers the first - and so far last - theoretical alternative to dualist monotheism (good and , life and death), to the unique truth of both Christians and scientific positivists, to the one-dimensional truth which had emerged victorious in the Western world.

9. Nietzsche: Return man to the lost garden

An alternative to the fractured bourgeois culture: this is what Marxism strove for (it seems that "it is over" now) and Nietzsche too (and then fascism et cetera). The post-war Basque movement also endeavored to find some kind of an alternative way: a patriotic alternative, aconfessional, leftist: an alternative socialism, humanist, non-dogmatic.

Previously, Mirande had already explained his own alternative, inspired in Nietzcshe's thought. In general terms - and following the former quotation - Savater values in a quite positive manner the Nietzschean alternative mode:

Accused of irrational by a rationalism dismembered of divination and myth, Nietzsche's masterpiece is an overwhelming effort to keep sane outside the System, to preserve reason outside the victorious monotheist reason, the highest exponent of which is found in Hegel's Grand Reason. No-one can imagine a greater task than returning man to the lost garden, without either relinquishing the apple of knowledge or admitting culpability for the gesture that conquered it.

10. The lost garden of some: the state

Birds could not transform the forest by continuing to sing on an on. But less so the scarecrow. The axe could. That is the problem: We have to function (ethically) in this new Leviathan and we don't know how. We don't know how either as persons (individually) or as a Basque community, culture, nation, project. What have we got to see, and what have got the ethics that we want for ourselves to see, with that state machine which determines its own laws objectively? What is the morality of the state? What can our morality be towards such a state?

For since a long time ago, society has already become "East-Egyptian" in a way that Max Weber could never have dreamt of. But the sophisticated coercion of the modern Pharaon is "rational" and scientific in a way that the desires and consent of the people are integrated within the program, and conformity to the system of control is given through avowal and legitimation. The morality of the majority is thus produced by the state;- duly backed up by eminent professors. Clearly: "The life of the state within individuals has been called morality" (Hegel).

Deeply embedded in consciousness (like religion), such a state will not find special practical problems to face public opinion in such cases as Brouard's murder, Joseba Arregi's death by torture or the deportation to Dachau and Cabo Verde of helpless citizens, if it's not to launder the dirtiest of "state actions", and if laundering turns impossible, then to engage in an endless string of mixed-up stories. If there is (political) violence in society, the whole effort of the state will not consist of finding other state arrangements, but to suppress violence with more violence. And to do so, it has to begin by declaring criminal the other violence so that the state "reason" becomes the only evident one. There will be no lack of the faithful. Much the same as the monarch in the monarchy was legitimised from the pulpit, it is in the newspapers that the legitimation of the Reason of State is elaborated in democracy. And it is saying nothing in favour of nazism, to denounce that the democrats use, quite reassuredly, the same cynicism that the nazis themselves when it comes to legitimise their own dirty-tricks. "I have known two world wars in my life - said Marcuse filled with fright during the Vietnam war- but I cannot remember so shameless calls to slaughter. Nor can I remember, not even in the nazi press, a headline such as the one reading: "United States satisfied by the lack of protest against tear gas" ( Los Angeles, 9th September, 1965). We have seen a great deal bigger than that, afterwards.

III- ON PUBLIC (IM)MORALITY

Someone wrote an article saying that there is no moral delegitimation of violence here: I am amazed, really, that anyone should be surprised by this.

This is not to legitimise anything, to legitimize positively (what could legitimise violence "rationally"?). This is only to say that if some hedonistic, non-Christian (cross-bearing, sacrificing) and relativistic, egoistic ethical positions have been taken ("anti-dogmatic" it is said: it sounds better, of course), then it is not possible to condemn political violence morally from this kind of individualistic and privatist point of view. The moral positions that one accepts in one chapter must be coherent with what follows in the next chapter. Nothing else. Period.

Or perhaps yes, there is something else: everything else is Pharisaism and lies;- of which we have had enough for a long time.

11. There can be different models to interpret morality

In the ancient Greece of Plato (after Heraclitus) there was a need to interpret morality and politics together: morality (also private: do not mix private and particular) is always a public issue and the solution is political (at the polis level, that is). There is not one ethics for the state (polis) and another for the individual persons: the moral obligations of individual persons are defined in the state.

In Saint Paul's model, the model of Christianity, it is not the city but the soul which must be saved (Christianity is a religious doctrine of salvation, not a morality in its origin), and no notice is paid to politics and the state. A particular morality is elaborated for everyone's consciousness and what is contemplated at the most is the religious community, not the political one. Political power will not be offered any kind of full and complete consideration, "for there is no power outside God. And the rulers of today are established by Him" (Erm.13,1). Write any names of the rulers He establishes: Caesar, Hitler, Stalin, Saint Paul for the propagandist of the new faith, it doesn't matter. What matters is just how to save one's own singular soul. (Is it not curious how some "non-Christian" morals of our days look Saintpaulians deep inside?)

It was still some kind of naturalism which demanded the state to have a morality (we have tended to thank Father Vitoria's name). Basically Christianity, that is. Or still better: Platonism (For Nietzsche Christianity is just popular Platonism, vulgar Platonism). But this seemed essentialist and these modes of philosophising were excluded with . In contemporary political theories the moral issues of the state find their place within the realm of law; justice and juditial legitimation are the very quintessence of any trial or lawsuit (Positive justice). This is why the Process of Nürenberg is of special interest to us: in what name could humanity condemn the nazi leaders? What was the condemning "humanity"? Where was the crime? How much of the crime amounted to being German? (Basque, loser?) Apart from justice (as code) which ethics remain? Where?

12. In the end, the state is the reason

There is a strong tendency today to find solutions to problems by hiding them or denying them: there is no possibility of being more or less patriot ("who has the monopoly to distribute tickets to be authentic patriots?); there is no absolute morality (therefore, there will be no morality with which to put the state under an obligation).

In the end, nobody will want to acknowledge it this way, but there is no state morality, for there is no superior moral instance above the state to take it to trial. And this is not a simple of fact: there is no superior instance of rationality than the modern state itself. "The state (...) is the rational in and for itself" (tells us Hegel, The , ƒ258). And still in more cruder terms in The : "The state is reason on earth" (with its laws and courts). Who is going to ask the state to account for its morality? These are words by Hobbes: "The state can do whatever it pleases with all impunity, to judge lawsuits, to impose punishment, to make use of anybody's strengths and goods at will, and all this by law; which can be confirmed in all present and past states" (De cive, VI, 13). In fact, nobody has the material capacity to punish the state because nobody has rights above and outside the state!... "Man owes what he is to the state": Hegel.

This brings to our attention uncertainties in Greek thought, from sophists Prodicus and Hippia Elis to Plato and , who by simplifying aphorisms without solution were tempted to conceive of politics as an almost scientia prima. However, it is us moderns who have fallen in such a "possibilistic" temptation: we are the simplifiers and immoral and owners of all conciseness, we are the pure "politicians" (cfr. Hobbes). Only to us does poleos equal authority assessment alone, equal law, equal right. State interests (opinion, doxa politiké) equal justice. Much the same as the neosohists of today are the truest sophists ever in "philosophy", so have politicians become "technicians" of politics. Nobody will want to confess himself as a Machiavelian, but when, in the praxis, morality and politics have been separated in such a de facto way, it is sad to hear a democratic Party saying: "We shall only accept deportations and extraditions as long as there is no harm to human rights". You can relax: there will not be such harm. How could this be known and proved with some certainty, were it not be through the tribunals of the very state?

Whose invention are "human rights" but the state's? There is no God-like human rights, we are socially aconfessional, politically secular, the concept of nature is scientifically neutral in regards to moral values, there is no absolute ("dogmatic") morality in social history; relative are decided by each individual for and by himself only, and by the majority in public life. As a consequence: what exists is Law, not morality; and as to individual personal life: one's own particular options. A complete mess! And the worst is how resolute they are for our ideas to remain is such a mess forever by using all kind of bold techniques and industry... And, among them, effrontery;- they meaning first "the majority of intellectuals in the University of the Basque Country" to speak with a journalist terminology. And, second, in more general terms, perhaps so that my accusation is not perceived with malice: All those who have given up on debate, have handed in their resignation to struggle, want only to become "normal(ized)"; those who find shelter in commonplace and cliché away from problems, because our problems are turning out to be too difficult, that is the truth.

13. The state is ethics

A fellow appears on television, quite well known a character himself, and we hear him say: "It's not only because of political differences with HB; much deeper inside, what separate us from them is an insurmountable ethical barrier, which does not allow any possible dialogue". This kind of neoracist style is frightening: now (the same as white European conquistadors were higher beings than Indians) there is a lot of people in politics who are "higher moral beings". The change in the process is curious as well: those who were denied rationality previously, now they are denied ethical sentiment. On the contrary, of course, there is no problem whatsoever either to share the same ethical sentiments or to engage in dialogue with yesterday's Francoists (newspapers, journalists, politicians, professionals), which is very important.

The same fellow continues with his lesson in ethics: "violence is legitimate if the people approve of it (just in case, the "people" has to be saved : there is no way for a leftist to walk around the world with his head held high saying that the violence of the people from El Salvador is not legitimate); but here the majority has expressed it once and again that they do not want violence..." (Elections have taken place over there, I believe). Let's drop it!

For, surely, such is the right democratic mode of formal reasoning.

I think that Cathrein used to teach this indeed. Cathrein was studied in Seminaries. Although what is not stated above is that, other than democratic, such way of reasoning, with no pure reason or pure logic, is fundamentally pure "Christian-democratic" (there are many Christian-democrats around, albeit often disguised as "progressives"): in other words, that it supposes a Theodicy, a Providence, a spontaneous social nature, a necessarily "natural" (or God-given and absolute) order et cetera. Fundamentally, a Christian type of rationality. However: did we not want to be aconfessional and secular in our political and public declarations? Personally, everybody can be whatever pleases him best: but he doesn't have to impose his Christian morality upon the whole of society.

Moreover, such a line of argument is a democratic imperative only as a declaration of principles. In practice, otherwise, it does not reveal indubitable democratism; for what is not political cannot reach to be democratic either. Certainly, with such lineally simple and clean doctrine, the Basques have not even the right to believe they may ever be serious; for, in history, things have never been lineally clean and simple in the world of Basques. When, in an apostolic way, a Basque culture person underlines such a plainly virgin thesis making emphatic faces and grimaces and all, the only thing he proves is how far we have reached into being intelligent and rational, into thinking like, and make even with the "others", instead of sorting things out with our own minds and our own histories. To believe was always easier than to think;- which also applies to the secular laymen who still nowadays keep on believing (it seems) in a Latin-written thesis put forward by an Austrian Jesuit, a long time ago. But the simplest and easiest of all is to believe, or want to believe, without question, that we become rational and intelligent by believing every morning in the intelligence and rationality of a newspaper. How many wars, whether offensive or defensive, have taken place with true consent from Saint Majority within society? How did the majority express "freely" what they wanted with a war? In Germany against the Czechs, in France against Germans, in Algeria against the French or in the US against Panama and in Rumania against Ceaucescu? How is the will of the people established and expressed concerning the chapter of violence and armament? All revolutions have been the work of a minority. All wars have been thought out and initiated by hardly a handful of souls. And leaving wars aside, what have the people to do with violence in everyday political life, apart from the fact that they have to bear with it? For in all systems, in fact, (and with little difference in fascism, or democracy) the "apparatus of violence" are the most protected from all kind of democratic control, the most autonomous, the less subjected to the opinion of the people and the less available for MPs to inform their constituencies (military secrets, espionage, police, army organisation et cetera: when has a referendum on these matters taken place? This being so, in which conditions could "the wishes of the people" have value to legitimize violence in democracy itself? (Affaire Dreyfus, nazi concentration camps). Or Plato's dilemma: it was the democratic majority which condemned Socrates to die: is it "justice" then, only because it is democratic? Isn't there room for democratic injustice? But even supposing that the democratic framework is the purest one to judge on the dispute over the possible (im)morality of violence: why do we suppose that such a framework is more legitimate than any other to resolve the issue "morally"? Why is an "antidemocratic justice" unthinkable? Or, finally, how can a theoretical solution which does not help to find any solution in the political reality, be rationally legitimized? Who remembers, in fact, if the presence of violence in history has ever had anything to do with its legitimacy?

14. On how violence is our home ground

Discussions on violence, and therefore, all our political discussions, will find no way out if right from the beginning one violence is privileged in a hidden and concealed way, and excluded from debate by closing our eyes as if it did not exist.

We live in states and the problem is whether we accept the state or we do not. Violence constitutes a reality which is constantly out there: the sovereign state budgets its costs pretty artfully and seriously (the same as health and pensions for the elderly, or education for kids). Violence is taught and learned at school and it is an obligation of all adult male citizens to learn it through practical training: with our taxes we subsidize such special colleges as barracks, military academies, scientific and technical programmes for military research. Violence is the profession of many people (a honourable and very duly privileged way of earning one's bread and butter). A whole science and particularly acute methods of investigation have developed in its service, both overtly and secretly, which have led to the finest of technologies known in the world.

Military service seems both most "evident" and "legitimate/reasonable" to us: why this is not the case with the kidnapping of a person for political reasons? and this is the case again when, through police action, the French state catches a stateless Basque patriot to deport him to Cabo Verde with no trial or tribunal or nothing at all? Even tribunals, why do we care about them when the state shows us, with the calmest of cynicism, that they can easily be dispensed with so that even the blind can clearly see that justice (tribunals) is but a puppet of state power for making the authority of coercion seem less abusive?

(It is a comedy I can hardly understand that someone may, as evangelically as Saint Mathew himself, condemn all violence wherever it comes from, and then takes part, with no problem whatsoever, in the "institutions";- to use a controversial concept nowadays.) For before getting mixed up in today's entanglements we had already learn from Max Weber: "Ultimately, one can define the modern state sociologically only in terms of the specific means peculiar to it, as to every political association, namely, the use of physical force. 'Every state is founded in force,' said Trotsky at Brest-Litovsk. That is indeed right". To avoid anybody's doubts: "A state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Specifically, at the present time, the right to use physical force is ascribed to other institutions or to individuals only to the extent to which the state permits it. The state is considered the sole source of the 'right' to use violence". The monopoly of violence is essential to the state (in our case, the democratic state). But, precisely, what such monopoly indicates is that one violence is blessed (the monopolized administration of violence) in order to damn all the others. One violence is good: therefore it is not considered as violence; all the others are considered as violence, bad violence. "The state is a relation of men dominating men, a relation supported by means of legitimate (i.e. considered to be legitimate) violence. If the state is to exist, the dominated must obey the authority claimed by the powers that be".

15. Peace: the dialectic war

Dialogue and reasoning lose meaning if, at once, words mean differently of what they always meant according to the speakers fancy. So self-determination will not imply determination but everyday political routine, et cetera. And let alone Basque, we won't speak romance: -tion will not be a suffix meaning a clear act, but a dark labyrinthine process.

And peace will not mean peace. Which is an old tale, since it is also a long time ago that we all had the opportunity to learn from "the German warkid" by Brech:

The powerful say: war and peace are in their own nature different.

But their peace and their war are like the wind and the storm.

From their peace war is born and such is a kid from his mom.

Same frightful features there.

We shall not know what we know, and we shall know nothing. And it shall not be our : That shall be our final defeat.

16. The failed debate on violence

Franco died in 1975. During the next process known as the "transition", theologians, moralists and philosophers ardently attempted to work out the issue of legitimacy (or lack of it) in the use of force; to the point that such a topic became almost a fashion throughout the public debates and monographic symposia of those years.

Before ten years, it was clear that such "ethical" debate (first phase) on violence had failed: a Greek would not have had a problem (Tuquidice, Aristotle), but in our model of rationality today, we only reach the possibility of mere ethico-rational non-approval or non-refusal of violence in general. Somewhere, the legitimacy of violence refuses, in principle, to be rationalized into a model within the framework of the modern state.

If one wishes so, it can be considered as a failure of some kind that such ethical debate on violence did not devise other formulations and other discourses on the "legitimacy" issue, or that efforts were vainly wasted in sterile "condemnations" which bore no fruit. But if we take a closer look, this is related to problems of another nature: Worst than the failure of the ethical or philosophical debate is the failure of the political debate.

For it is not possible to conclude that ethics has nothing to say on the issue of violence because it has not been capable to summarize more clearly and decisively the fundamental dispute over legitimacy beforehand. Ethics should have a lot to say. And this is way the ethical debate rehearsed during post- Francoism, cannot be considered as a success: the main reason being, in my opinion, that it got entangled in the useless knot of yes/no (condemnation/vindication) of violence.

If one wanted to struggle, however, and conquer freedom, it was politically that the yes or no to violence should have been debated in the first place: it was politically that the convenience or inconvenience of violence in the road to freedom should have been perceived. Instead, nevertheless, what do we see? That rather than producing their own (political) debate, politicians want to rehearse again the debate that has already failed. And they are worst at it. Or better said, they do not know how to produce their own debate and so, instead of reasoning, they escape to the debate of moralists, although only to produce, dogmatically in general terms, a (moral, moralistic) condemnation of violence.

The failure of the ethical debate on violence is paradigmatic, as much as the evolution of the ensuing disputes, i.e. the evolution of our "reasoning" over the last fifteen years. Violence today, other than inescapably expounded in a religious (evangelical: "disapprovable wherever it comes from") or "humanist-moral" way, is also bad and inopportune (immoral): the question of "efficiency" in violence seems too risky for Nietzschean "sensitive souls". It is paradigmatic because it displays how far our inability to produce a clear rational argument (both political and moral) has gone in a scandalous way.

What is the point of bringing the whole violence issue to the fore again? will ask the reader, pretty bored by now with my last articles.

Haven't they nominated Ernst Jünger a doctor honoris cause right up our faces? I will ask in my turn more than bored with this society's schizophrenia. Are we performing a tragedy or a farce?

17. The cult(ure) of violence

As such, it is well possible to think of a culture (morality) that adulates and holds the spiritual greatness of force and war in high regard, and other than the possibility of such a thought, if we are really post or Des-Christian, this should have to be accepted in our culture (European, particularly) as a mere historical fact of a non-Christian source in society. We have all watched samurai films. Perhaps, we even know a bit of Yukio Mishima. For Nietzsche healthy Greece and Rome amounted to this. And then the same during the Renaissance: "a splendid and disturbing resurrection of the classical ideal, of the noble way of valuing things". Troubadour Bertrand de Born was a Renaissance man, sometimes mentioned by Mirande . If we are not Christian (I mean culturally) why should we think of all this as immoral?

Have not some (bomb) attacks been celebrated with Champagne? (Manzanas, Carrero Blanco) What "moral" sentiments stimulate such celebrations?

When in May, fields and paths flourish, the troubadour's heart swells with joy as flagged knights set out for war:

What a great happiness when I see across the fields armed knights and horses Among weapons, life finds a new sense of bright glory:

Trumpets, drums, banners and pennons and columns of black and white horses (...) this is a song of yours

What do we have to do: To celebrate such philosophy with Nietzsche, but them to condemn it when violence takes place at home? Loudly applaud it in El Salvador and damn it here? A gun, is it not a gun all over the world? Well, no it isn't (To think that it is the stupidest among all thoughts since a long time ago). We have understood that: good. But then, how is the difference defined with clear precision? Or is it that it is always positive? Natural? And then we have to drop all the moralism and distinctions that we wanted to make? Since violence is a hard instrument of life, will we have to consider it as something which is never evil but always good, wherever it comes from?

We already said that E. Jünger places himself within such embellishing philosophy of life and war: for him, war was the mother of culture and civilisation, war dignifies society, enhances our spirit, does honour to nations. These ideas scarcely belong to the left. But, as a consequence, disdain towards E. Jünger does not arise simply from Lukács, with his Stalinist rigour, and then from the newspaper Egin and a bunch of local nutters. From quite different a position, A. Camus appears just as drastic: He judged "Ernst Jünger (as) the only man of superior culture who gave nazism an appearance of philosophy". And referring to the ways in which philosophy develops into practice: "Jünger deduced from his own principles that it was better to be a criminal than a bourgeois. Hitler, who possessed less literary talent, but was, in this case, more coherent, knew that to be one or the other was indifferent from the moment in which one only thinks in success". And remembering the wrack and ruin that followed such nihilist and militarist a philosophy:

Hitler was history in its pure state. "To become - said Jünger- is better than to live". He preached, therefore, the total identification with the courant of life at the lowest level and against all superior reality (...) Rosemberg used to speak in a pompous way about life: "The style of a marching column, and it makes little difference towards which destiny and which end this column marches on" [Jünger expressed himself in a similar way in some earlier quotation]. After that, the column will sow history in ruins and will devastate its own country, but at least it will have lived".

18. We are all sick and tired

That nobody comes along and says Camus and Lukács are either old Cold War tales of radically opposed activism, or exaggerated valuations of postwar heated philias and phobias. A massive ten volume "Historic Dictionary of Philosophy" is now being published in Germany, and E. Jünger appears there as a "conservative revolutionary", specifically pointing out, moreover, that intellectuals paved the way in many fields to facilitate the victory of nazism. And in 1984, a French "Dictionary of Philosophy" says as follows: "Without doubt, E. Jünger constitutes one among the most controversial cases in contemporary literature and thought (...). The contradictions that come into being in E.J.'s trajectory are perhaps more apparent than real, for, he has never denied anything at all as to his own positions, however extreme they were. One cannot therefore be satisfied with only seeing the writer (...), and forget that he also was from the year 25 to the year 33 the theoretician of national-bolshevism".

Some pieces are also written in Basque, although perhaps this is not known elsewhere. This is what Krutwig tells us in a UZEI dictionary:

National-Bolshevism: A political movement that emerged in Germany after the European war. Its main leader was E. Niekisch. According to the thinkers of national-bolshevism (...) Germany should strive to reach a strong alliance with Russia. Accordingly, they saw as appropriate that the German and the Russian Red Army march together. As the nationalist MP Eltzebather said, Germans should tend towards bolshevism. The famous writer Ernst Jünger also belonged to national-bolshevism. With him it can be seen clearly how national bolshevism and national-socialism should meet in Germany. According to Jünger, there was a need to establish a tight alliance between nationalism and communism to attack and destroy all the bourgeois . National-bolshevists also sought to nationalise all economic actions of the state. It is from this tendency that the leftwing of Hitler's party emerged.

So enough is enough once again. I did not want to reach any form of conclusion. This is not a thesis. But simply to take a look and see what there was around. We are all, including myself, sick and tired.

Yes, if we wanted to, we could have drawn conclusions, by the thousands. Starting by the last point: that it seems pretty useless, in the land of Basques, to write in Basque. In this strange country, bilinguals are uncultured; the cultured, unilingual. To continue: that this very article will also be useless since the "majority" of Basque intellectuals do not read Basque.

And then: that in concepts and attitudes are normal during crisis times. Although nowadays ambiguity is cultivated (with an air of "intellectual freedom"); instead of trying to establish one's own position we flirt with equivocal speech. Indefinition is chic, and there is no need to say that this is often justified: only that to doubt about everything we did not need a master. And to be ignorant we have enough with ourselves, we do not need anybody's help (Voltaire, Candide). Such a fashion is too cheap for anybody which sets intellectual requirements for himself. But for such purposively decadent and nostalgic feelings and for such modesties of pretty words it is great to honour professor E. Jünger with no doubt whatsoever: who was against him was enough reason for them to be in favour of him. Like disciple, like "democratic" master has been chosen. Sic itur ad astra!

"How has it been possible to nominate such a figurehead as a doctor honoris causa, where and precisely in the Basque Country? This would never happen, not even in the Alpujarras!" a friend of mine told me utterly astounded referring to Jünger's story. But here, unlike the Alpujarras, everything is possible. This is precisely why. This is our absurdity; here everything is possible.

"Do you think that this University is from the Basque Country because it is located here?" I should have answered him. At that moment I could not find a better answer.

I replied: "It's better that we do not continue to mislead ourselves: this nation is not the one which went to the 36 war in search of freedom and got Gernika bombarded. The one which endured forty dark years of bitter opposition and resisted by means of a bloody struggle! This is not the nation portrayed in books. This is what we have here, say, at the other end of the telephone.

19. On my own...

On my own, in the evening, I am watching TV again. There is a program with a conversation between politicians as to how, at the end of this century, the left-right differential has been thrown away as a useless nineteenth century old rag that it was... And it is probably true. In fact, if following the sharp reasons of our rational people we apply the one which has appeared to us as the cleaner of old controversies and the enlightener of all obscurities, then: Who has the ticket monopoly to decide who is from the left or the right, a progressive or a reactionary?

Why not consider Ernst Jünger as much of a democrat, progressive, liberal, independent or whatever? Or better still: Why bother about such worn out, stuffy and spoilable adjectives at the turn of the second millenium? That whoever is allowed to do as he pleases, then everything goes. At last we are all democrats: equal. All free and tolerant. There is no right, there is no left; no Basque patriots, no Spanish "succursalists". Differences are erased (we are not "excluding" people). We have given up on taking definite positions. We have finally overcome the torn and tattered nineteenth century, its intransigence and fanaticism.

Blue and wide in the sky, from horizon to horizon there is only Spain again, in the new official rationality. "Empieza a amanecer" again, dawn breaks again. Is there not a solution for this country? MIRANDE'S CRITIQUE OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

Let's begin with this question. What are you first: patriots or democrats?

Then we shall follow Mirande in his critique of the French Revolution. Although today I will not emphasise many of his texts and quotations - they will be given more profusely elsewhere - but I will attempt to remodel his way of thinking and reflect somehow his thought in a contemporary style.

First we shall place Mirande's issues in today's context (I) then we shall look at the sources of his antidemocratic and antichristian ideas (II).

I - IN SEARCH OF A NON-DEMOCRATIC NON-CHRISTIAN PATRIOTISM

Mirande blamed Basque nationalists for being democrats, first and foremost, instead of being nationalists; since that made them democrats at best, but by no means patriots.

The foundation of such a critique is understood today better than ever; for rather than a mere theoretical casuistic it constitutes a practical issue right now. However, at this very moment we are not looking for an answer to this critique. Instead, to begin this lecture I would like to confront you all with this very question: What do you feel to be first, democrats or patriots? If she wants ever to be free, what do you think the Basque Country should strive for first and foremost?

I know that the typical know-it-all will devise the eluding solution in a second: he is both "a patriot and a democrat", he does not accept the choice between one or the other.

In our turn, however, we are not to accept the know-it-all's clever answer either. What we are telling him is in fact: Yours is a good answer at the level of abstract principles, even perhaps valuable in practice, at the personal level of individual action. Nevertheless, our concern now is one of general politics, it is about a fundamental attitude to know what to decide in regards of concrete issues arising at each moment.

So this is how we want the issue to be set out; the question in a more specific way is this: It seems that ETA and the Spanish government are engaged in a dialogue at Algiers. What is our attitude towards this: Should we prefer the Spanish government to make some concessions, the more the better, to ETA (that is, to Basque national claims) or not to make any concessions at all but to settle, at the most, the question of prisoners' release (we are all very humanitarian) and shamelessly humiliate the armed organisation? To put an example, Mr. Ardanza, (President of the autonomous Basque government) has repeatedly stated that rather than achieving it through ETA's use of violence he chooses to obtain none of nationalism's elementary goals: It is not worthwhile to unite the four historic regions, for instance, is it not but through democratic means. Nor can the topic of self-determination be introduced while ETA still exists. Otherwise democracy would be harmfully damaged in the future. This is the sense of the question.

But today's task is not to analyse the opinions of Ardanza and the autonomist parties either; it was only to better understand Mirande that we were interested in the alluded dispute. In fact, quite widespread a story contends that Mirande was a fascist, was he not? (it is a habit among us to oppose democrats vs. fascists). And this needs to be understood. Therefore, our initial question can take now a new form: Is it to be fascist to be a patriot first before being a democrat?

Perhaps this is a newly stated argument, which would well need an investigation, but even Midande's fascism does not constitute our topic as such. Or else we should rise other issues such as Nietzsche and fascism, Spengler and the nazis and the like. We are not doing that. Yet Mirande's critique of the French Revolution -our very topic- is not but a part of his critique of democracy. And this critique of democracy is the result of his radical patriotism. "Being first and only Basque, Mirande said, I boldly proclaim to be their enemy [of Catholicism and France] even if I have to repudiate the whole lot of would-be Bascophiles and 50% of patriots". With this we fully enter into the topic.

It is certainly easy to understand the relationship between being an enemy of France and the critique of the Revolution. One cannot understand Mirande properly, however, before appreciating how the critique of both Catholicism and the Revolution are related. And, moreover, how the critique of Catholicism, France, democracy and the Revolution are one and the same. These are the points of this discussion.

That violence is immoral, that it isn't, Mirande did not take all those disputes into consideration at all. Why not? Are they not worth it? No, they are not worth it and are completely useless indeed. It is pure Judaeo-Christian and democratic impertinence. But who, in today's politics, sees himself as a Christian, and confesses to be so anyway!

1. The Negation of Christianity: the Basque spirit

Rather than elaborating on Mirande's critique of Christianity, we shall concentrate more so on the connection he establishes between the Revolution and Basque politics.

"Basque=Believer", it is claimed (a traditional claim). It has been also said that we Basques are democrats in ourselves: the world's oldest democracy somewhere out there.

Mirande will contend that originally Basques are neither Christians nor democrats. This is a construction. And this is precisely the degeneration of Basques.

The Basque had his own spirit in ancient times: A wild, tough, tenacious mind; a superior, magnificent, courageous soul of noble character; a bright, joyful, nonchalant life instinct. "Nowadays, on the contrary, some would-be patriots despise the proud and bellicose aristocratic spirit of ancient Basques while replacing it with their own ideal model of the new, peaceful, good neighbour and well sided Basque rooted in the democratic spirit à la française". Instead of the original wild and pure, we have the church-goer Basque democrat.

Between yesteryear's grand self-conscious Basque and the modern patriot's newly found peaceful consciousness, there are a thousand years of Church presence. Everyday at church it is said "peace be with you". It is not said: "freedom be with you". Between peace and freedom the Church's resolution of the conflict is peace. Freedom, for the Church, is freedom from sin and passion. The freedom of the Church relates to the individual's own chastening of, and reign over desire and natural inclination. To someone's own sacrifice. If we refer to the people, collectively, then freedom relates to a docile sense of brotherhood and egalitarian spirit. The enemy must not be fought against and destroyed, they must be loved, and one must pray on their behalf without wishing them bad. "However, writes Mirande, the influence of the Church has been more damaging in the spiritual realm than the political one, since it has clouded all fresh sources for any future revival. The ancient Basque's wild, tough and great soul has been humbled, weakened, or better said, castrated by its doctrine;- which has turned us from wolves into lambs".

Democracy (the democratic spirit) does more of the same: To debilitate and emaciate the soul. The democratic spirit is not a spirit for struggle. To the extent that being a democrat was linked with France (these are still period tales of the Franco era) Mirande reiterates the Basque democrat patriots with: "A country which falls asleep with rusty dreams of French-like democracy shows that it is becoming old and tired".

2. Negation of Democracy: Negation of France

Mirande has taken us now from his enmity of Catholicism towards that of France. For that very France that Basque nationalists imagined while living under Franco, that is to say, the democracy that they dreamt of, is not the solution at all. To begin with, Basque patriots, Mirande reminds them, helped the French against the Germans wholeheartedly, and then French democrats promised to pay back the Basques: They did not remember much afterwards. But this is reasonable and just. Everyone has to look each to their own. What do Basque patriots expect from these democrats? Mirande writes with sarcastic irony: "Since France is the Nation of Liberty - as they proclaim themselves quite loudly- Basques thought that they would be supported in their struggle to free the Basque Country... The falseness of such trust is now clear. Thus it seems that Basque patriots should comb and clean some hopes and imaginings to improve their vision and see better, after the cleaning job is finished, what can be done to save the Basque Country".

France will help towards Basque freedom as little as Spain (that is, democracy will help as little as the Francoist dictatorship); in fact, leaving aside their different political systems, "we observe that France and Spain are the most centralist countries". If Spain has ruined the Basque autonomy, there is nothing to hope from France (democracy). The Basque patriots who, against Franco, dream with democracy are but dupes that deliberately deceive themselves.

This is how the choice he gives to the Northern Basques is so clear-cut (and is equally valuable to the Southerners): "It would be suitable that those Basques interested in politics decide what they want to be exactly: Either Basque before anything, or French, and then, whatever the decision, that they be courageous enough to assume the consequences right up to the end".

So there is nothing to expect from democracy (the states called 'democracies' will not help us out in our way towards freedom). To fully comprehend this point two explanations are needed:

(a) That the original Basque appearing to us in history is not a democrat in itself. Therefore, if Basques truly want to associate their original and authentic identity with the patriotic movement, they do not have to be democrats. This would be everything but authentic. Although we will not extend ourselves with the historical examples he mentions to corroborate his opinions, here is an extract from the essay On the necessity of a noble war: "It would seem that I am playing with paradox, but I maintain that Basques have never really been democrats until this latest period when they have undergone the three- fold influence of miserable foreign social manners, foreign schools and the Christian-Democracy of the Roman Church".

The second explanation is that (b) so as to link up with what has already been said about the Church, democracy too, other than being stranger to us also signifies Basque decadence and perdition. Alongside the docile Basque, castrated by the Church, we find the working, peaceful citizen degenerated by democratism, all mild and folkish as well as stupid games-lover.

Mirande denounced the whole Christian democratic nationalist political project as being "realist" altogether, in other words, as being vulgar, with no Romantic utopian sense, that is, a "panem and circenses" project. With no highness. No fervour. No ambition. Everything is Christianity is low and grey. Sacristy flavoured: To begin with, lots of card games and ball games, dance and folklore. "However the bread of the people is not forgotten, since Basque politicians do give us their word, butter-smooth word indeed, as to tomorrow's seizure of government. Then we shall know economic improvement, social justice and, of course, Free and General Elections, the golden keys of a nation's happiness..., in a word, the Basque Country will be an earthy paradise! That in the mean time we live under foreign rule, that Basques are in the process of dying away, that Basque language is disappearing through the increasing presence of outsiders? Do not worry: This second-rate situation shall not last. But first we should be free, our freedom was taken away against the law, ergo, sometime they will have to return it to us by law: International Justice stipulates so. And there is no doubt whatsoever that democrats from all over the world will cooperate with us in our journey towards freedom, since we deserve it thoroughly. If we are to believe these law abiding and faithful Basque politicians, then is it not true that we have always lived, from the Stone Age up to the twentieth century, under democratic principles? Are we not the only nation that has never engaged in any conquest war ever?".

To summarise: The democracy of democrats and the Christianity of Christians have ruined this nation. In other words: There is no way of freeing the Basque Country by performing as Christians and acting as democrats. "Dear friends, it is time to despise this laughable idea of Basqueness and to start formulating a more valuable one. Who does not see, who does not suspect that this is a parody or caricature of our race, and that the hard-body sweet-heart ideal of Basqueness presented to us is not but the rotten fruit of our decadence?".

You all know what Mirande proposes against this, it is struggle, without excluding the bloody use of force of course (what morality now calls violence), for struggle always implies the use of force. This is why ("Rise up Basques rise up/ let us grind them to the ground") Mirande has shocked so many people.

3. On the legality of violence in Democracy

Before anything I would like to put forward another problem: Is the use of violence right or wrong to achieve certain political objectives in democracy? And here again, we are not to let the usual know-it-all escape with "this is not a democracy" type of answer. We want to suppose that there is democracy (in the worst of cases what we have to let aside is whether this is "our" democracy). In the hypothesis that this is as much of a good democracy as say, the US, Holland or the now so often mentioned Albania, we ask: Is ETA's use of force, of violence against democracy legitimate?

Let us elaborate a little more on the sense of the question. Nowadays, democracy is used as a principle of justification or dejustification: "Now there is democracy, we hear, there are ways for everyone to say and reason what they think. Therefore, there is no place for the use of violence" (To reason versus use of force and violence). "The majority has decided so" it is said, et cetera: "So violence is unjust/irrational" (immoral and illegal, both in the sense of being).

These modes of reasoning are very popular at the moment. What do you think? Tough again, we do not accept tricks: Evasions such as "life is sacred" are not to be admitted in this context: The sense of the thesis is very simple: "There is no place for violence in democracy" (if life is sacred, however, it will be so under any system and circumstance). Equally, if asked "Why don't they come to parliament" someone else reacts disdainfully: "What for? These institutions are not able to solve democratically the little disputes over Turzio and Trebiño against Burgos and Cantabria, how are they to settle the one of Basque independence against the whole of Spain?", then, he might carry with him the whole reason of the world, although we will still sustain that the sense of the issue now is not one of efficiency but one which is strictly moral. We do not care about efficiency (at this very moment we do not care about it yet, for methodological purposes: since, otherwise, someone mindless about efficiency in policy-making is not to be a morally diligent chap, but a foolish one). In fact, democrats nowadays, do not want to play the role of being more efficient, but of being more moral. For the democrat (his) democracy is moral. And his enemies are all immoral. This is at least the role being played. (The very possibility of such a role to have become a part of democracy's necessarily shrewd political game is not our immediate issue now). So that Caesar's wife be honest is a moral problem. But that she looks honest in public is a political problem. To democracy (to politics: see Machiavelli on this issue) the moral problem is not a concern, it is only a question of appearance. Nonetheless, we ask now about the legitimacy of violence in the moral sense.

And to be truthful, I do not recall any text from Mirande dealing with this problem. In addition, I think that a text of such kind would hardly be possible within the logic of his thinking. But if looking backwards, we want to understand Mirande, we need to begin from our very issue and question. In making him understand, perhaps, today's uneasiness better, the Mirande in whose time all this distress made no sense, may now be of great assistance to us. If I understand his position correctly "why should violence be more unfair against democracy", I imagine he would ask us in return, all amazed, "than against monarchy, tyranny or any other system for that matter?".

Therefore, to those who sustain the thesis "today there is democracy, there is no reason for violence to exist" we shall oppose - as a provisional working hypothesis at any rate, and after having interpreted, in one's opinion, Mirande's line of argument - the following antithesis: Democracy has its own morality, and it is true that democracy does not accept as lawful (legitimate) the violence exerted against it, but neither did dictatorship, nor monarchy and never did anybody. All systems have used, and use, violence, and democracies scarcely less than dictatorships or monarchies: Take a look today at Central America and Namibia/Angola, Iran/Iraq, Afghanistan and Eritrea. (If they can, of course: Otherwise there are neither praxis nor morality. Those who cannot are always white saints) All systems consider violence not only as legitimate but as a against any other system. On the contrary, there is no system which sees violence against itself as legitimate. Violence is only legitimate "against others".

What is the sense, then, to ask violence about its legitimacy? What position can you ask that from? In principle, it can be asked from the viewpoint of Christianity, or perhaps even better from Hinduism, but here we are not dealing with legitimating-questions of violence of a religious kind, but of a strictly rational and political kind (of political morality, perhaps, but secular in any case), with the sense of it all, and the on which they lie, rigorously.

Each system has its own rules of legitimization and delegitimisation, including the legitimization and delegitimation of violence. This set of rules, however, is only of value within the system, within the coherence of the system, for the system in itself, and it presupposes the acceptance of the system. Outside the system, they all keep a relative value, that is to say, they are worth nothing. To put it in a more visual way: A democratic knight would be an absurdity both historically and morally. There are as few white horses of Saint Jacques which are black as there are peaceful and forgiving democratic movements of liberation in the world (we will not talk about Gandhi calculatedly). A democratic "morality" would not have any sense in a nobleman's society (the Homeric one, for instance): it would be a dishonour and a disgrace. The moral codes of a patrician society would seem a crime code against human rights in a modern democracy.

It is all far too simple: Why are we misleading ourselves in vain?

Violence against Monarchy, say during seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was not only lawless but a sacrilege in the concepts of the theological-political system. But the democratic system began by turning such sacrilege into something rightful and lawful, precisely two hundred years ago. When Revilla was kidnapped, we could read on some walls written by who-knows-who from who-knows- which peace movement: "Revilla's kidnapping does not make us more free". I do not know if the one who wrote it has a meter to really measure this: To know, that is, what with and how are we made more free or not. Yet what we do know is this: That the birth of modern democracy is the outcome of such wars and violence as never known before. So, if those who wrote "Revilla's kidnapping does not make us more free" are democrats indeed, they should be asked this further question: "How is it then, in your opinion, that chopping Marie Antoinette's slender neck off make us more free". If democracy is freedom (to the point of delegitimising violence for this reason), then this is how, and not otherwise, such democracy began functioning: by the guillotine.

Therefore, for those who accepted to play inside a system to advocate, against those others who have not accepted it (democracy, in our case), that "in this system violence is not legitimate" may well be a correct line of reasoning, albeit virtually empty content-wise. Without this presupposition, "violence is not legitimate in democracy" becomes a protest or a predicament from those who have accepted the democratic game-rules against those who do not. A dogma for democrats, perhaps. Or a paranoia. By no means a line of argument.

4. The Modern Democratic Faith

The issue of democracy and violence is the issue of Modernity and Revolution. Often, this wants to be forgotten now, but the Revolution is a by-product of Modernity and vice versa.

Why is "violence is not legitimate in democracy" constantly repeated, as if it were a solid reason. It may have sense on one of these two grounds: Either because it is supposed that democracy already exists among people with strong faith in it; or because there is need to preach on its behalf so that this desired faith comes into being. The latter is surely the case in the Basque Country: It is not easy to have enough faith in this democracy, an effort is necessary for it to be. This from the view of "democrats".

For even if they want to make us believe otherwise, faith is not the privilege of the violent. There is a faith in democracy, a magical faith. And the use of democracy as a concept responds often to this magical faith: Like in a sanctuary or the Church, violence is not legitimate in democracy. It is a sacrilege ("life is sacred" et cetera). Or else, like in a sacrifice, there is need of blood for salvation (freedom). And yet, to understand Mirande, it is fundamental to grasp that, from another point of view, both the post- revolutionary democrat (pacifist) and the wishing for revolution democrat (violent fighter) may appear to be just one and the same. You have Locke as the latter, Rousseau is the former.

Let us take a fresh look at all this, in two parts: A and B.

A. How did Mirande reason a favourable position towards the use of force? This constitutes a whole philosophy. It is not a simple line of argument: Violence because of this or that. In Mirande's case, especially, there is a whole philosophy of the world and a philosophy of history that we cannot yet go into. So let us begin by looking at the situations in which we find a reflection on violence within the parties involved; which among us are the parties in favour or against ETA. Within such a context, Mirande is not readily understandable because his case was different.

To begin with, (a) there is always, a belief and a line of reasoning in the position favourable to violence; (b) as much as there is a belief and line of reasoning in the position against. I say this because it would not be impossible that the basic belief is fundamentally the same (and moral, therefore) while the lines of reasoning (political calculations thus) are divided along the two party lines.

What is clear is this: That the situation in which we are living one side believes in "this" society whereas the other does not. He who is favourable to violence is in favour of it because he believes that today's situation neither fulfils nor allows to fulfil his concept of society. He who opposes violence believes the opposite: For him, either his objectives have already been achieved or the means and conditions to achieve them are at least given. Let us discuss first with the "democrat" enemy of violence, i.e., the one who believes in the system, or at least in its possibilities. Which is the sense of his condemnation of violence? A system needs belief in the system (not necessarily through reasoning, or thereabout). To preach against violence within the system implies preaching belief in the system. The weaker the belief (or questionable its legitimacy: How can this police be democratic? What about Fraga? et cetera) the stronger the need for preaching. This has the same value, in the praxis and the political field, whether such condemnation of violence stems from the Catholic Church, the government, the "independent" press of the Court theologians. And with this it is not meant to imply that all these condemnations are to be valued in equal terms politically, let alone morally; but just only that all condemnations play in favour of the system politically.

What complicates completely the issue of violence in today's situation is this: Not only that those "democrats" who yesterday used to applaud (and practice) violence find themselves hand in hand with the "fascists" that have always condemned it, but also what remains hidden, that is, (a) what is the faith from which it (violence) is condemned or approved, and (b) from which mode of reasoning could be reasoned, in this faith that we want to suppose democratic, the necessity to accept or refuse, rationally, one concrete violence. (The rational conditions of a" just war"). For almost invariably there is only preaching in regards to violence ("all violence", "wherever it comes from"), no reasoning. In fact, the possibility of refuting a violence, rationally, is dependent on the possibility of acceptance of this very violence in other conditions, and clearly, the possible sense of the latter restricts all possible sense of the former. The possibility of a "good" violence (without which there is no "bad" violence) can only be thought of in terms of faith. In other words: Only faith can turn violence into good or bad.

That is to say that in this tale of ours everybody has a faith, whether they be for or against violence. Moreover, in this sense, to rely on faith is to have confidence, to believe in the appropriateness of a system or in some political solution; politics and actions always follow a faith, they are firmly fixed in faith. The point in question, then, is not that some are faithful and some are not, or that some are more faithful than others, but that in Modernity we demand faith (except the religious one) to be placed under scrutiny and calculation, to produce the proof of its foundation and rationality. And that, somehow, we identify such rationality with democracy.

To simplify matters: No doubt there are all sorts of people condemning violence but let us suppose (a) that they are all real democrats; and let us suppose (b) that everybody in favour of violence advocates independence. What happens? The right to independence, in itself, as a modern concept, is a democratic right. That is to say, both democratism and independentism are the outcome of modern reason. Now it matters little that we add something else to the advocate of independence: that he is Socialist, Communist or whatever. He will always be an offspring of what is called modern rationalism, obliged to rationalism.

So both believe in a "(more) rational" organisation of societies and individuals. For this was the faith of modern rationalism: The faith to build rationally a society of liberty, equality and fraternity. Democracy has been nothing but that.

Democracy, however, is a binary entity: (a) some principles and one ideal (that of rationalism): At this level, it can be said that both those for and against violence come together, (b) an organisation and practical arrangement of society, with its requirements (French Republic, Spanish Kingdom, Soviet Republic).

It is at the level (a) that the one in favour of violence finds the easiest discourse to legitimise violence, somehow in the style of J. Locke's reason: "For it is reasonable and just for me to have the right to destroy he who threatens to destroy me". For instance: "THIS democracy is not a true democracy because..." Or: "Our struggle has this objective. Unfortunately only through the use of force can this objective be achieved", and in general, it is not necessary to discuss, according to the democratic ideal, whether the objective is good or more or less acceptable. It is at the level (b) that legitimisation becomes much more difficult for him: to show that the violence used to reach this goal is also worthwhile and efficient, and that, therefore, violence is positively good. (Wanting to give this difficulty a moral connotation, on the other hand, is frightening, and I think that some "critics of violence" can only use it unconscientiously: it seems to imply that the larger the violence then the more efficient it should be judged, more efficient and more moral thus more legitimate: So to kill a hundred Spanish policemen a day instead of one would be more moral!)

Inversely, the one opposed to violence should have it easier to reason at the level of realism and practicality (he has the whole state apparatus in his hands): To do so it would be enough for him to show us that any objectives are achievable through peaceful and democratic means (at least if such objectives are not negated). This mode of reasoning is often used. But what remains curious is this: that it is never considered as enough to condemn violence politically in terms of its lack of efficiency or something; more than anything, it is morally that the "democrat" feels the need to condemn violence, the fury of condemnation. Why? Because he feels that rather than his efficiency, violence disputes his legitimacy ("that society is not a rationally built society: I will build it"). So it is the very possibility of thinking of a morally legitimate violence that must be extinguished, if, on the contrary, anybody's possibility to consider democracy as immoral is to be eliminated.

Said in a graphic way: The most urgent interest today of yesterday's Marie Antoinette executioner is to properly secure that the essential immorality of being this very executioner is generally and universally accepted and stated in a blind way. That no other executioner appears to him: That nobody feels legitimate to be an executioner.

Just because of this, it becomes of great importance to the democratic state to foster the propaganda of its morality and the other's immorality (in this task, a concrete philosophy will offer good services just like a theology did to monarchies under the grace of God). The state cannot legitimate itself while the other's legitimacy is still possible, i.e., it finds itself in the need to delegitimate the other totally. How can the other be delegitimated? By equaling violence to irrationality, and rationality to democracy. And here we find ourselves again at the starting point: Belief has to be preached by iron and by blood, it is necessary to believe in the system's rationality et cetera.

B. Mirande stays away from all these means of posing the problem;- and this is his particularity in Basque thought.

In fact, what is at work underneath everything said so far, dogmatically, both in the positions for and against violence, is the democratic i.e. Judeo-Christian presuppositions. For, at the end, the ideals accepted by both parties are the democratic ideals: Judeo-Christian ideals.

But what is possible to obtain with these presuppositions is to say at the most "unfortunately in this case it happens to us that violence is absolutely necessary". (So is more or less the tonality that ETA employs in some of its communiqués). Never: "In any case, struggle is natural and beautiful; it is good for a healthy people".

For that reason, ETA and Mirande's interpretation of violence are utterly different in essence. (This is what Luis M. Mujika repeats, and rightly so, in his Mirande's Poetry). But let us now leave the democrat backing violence and carry on with the one opposing it. As it can be supposed, there is also a faith in Mirande's argument: What is good and natural for the individual and the people, what belongs to history et cetera. Just the same as there is faith in the argument of democrats: On the "natural" goodness of humankind, on "natural" rights et cetera.

To secure a sense of oneself, moreover, the system reinforces and urges for faith instead of critical judgement to the point that, at the end, it is faith, not judgment, which legitimates the whole system (as in a theocracy). Faith in democracy is understood as the "natural system" of humankind. And thus everything seems natural in democracy, even the most unnatural things: military service et cetera, or the fact of one Party taking on the Government of a whole nation. Democracy then possesses a sacramental grace to suddenly turn former fascist policemen into democrats and former anti-fascist fighters into fascists.

But with this we reach a very curious paradox: That, in the end, Mirande is more rationalist by denying rationalism and following the irrationalist confession path of will preference than any democrat who's whole task is to end up calling upon faith in order to legitimate his own complete system. (We shall concrete all this better in the second part). But let us leave Mirande aside for a moment. Ortega y Gasset was aware of Western democracy long ago: In the fact that, historically seen, such faith in modern democracy stemmed from a deep faith in rationality of eighteenth century Enlightenment and nineteenth century liberal struggles. It is because they believed in rationality and the rational construction of society that the revolutionary of that time believed in democracy. Today that, on the other hand, the classical rationalism that sustained the good trust on democracy has since collapsed a longtime ago, it is the myth of democracy alone which continues to exist through public piety and a liturgy of propaganda, though it remains trapped in the tangle of its internal contradictions, as Ortega observed in The Topic of Our Times:

The present characteristic fauna is the naturalist swearing to positivism without ever taking the trouble to restate the topic that it formulates: It is the democrat who has never put into question the truth of the democratic dogma. From which it follows the burlesque contradiction of present-day European culture that, at the same time that it claims to be the only rational one, the only one grounded on reason, it is not lived and felt by its rationality any more, but adopted mystically. Pío Baroja's character who believes in democracy as he believed in the Virgin Mary, is, together with his forerunner, the pharmacist Homais, a regular representative of the present time(...). The traditionalist is in agreement with himself. He believes in mystical things for mystical reasons. At any moment can he wage battle for, without finding hesitation or reservation within himself. On the contrary, if someone believes in rationalism as in the Virgin Mary, this means that, in his organic depth, the belief in rationalism has ceased to be. Whether for mental inertia, habit or superstition - in short, traditionalism-, he keeps on following the old rational thesis, which already exempt of creative reason, is now paralyzed, hieratic and Byzantine. The rationalists of present times perceive in a more or less confused way that they have not the right reason anymore...

(We shall return again later to that rationalism which turns blindly into voluntarism by denying its own self).

Split within his own rationality, doubting and uncertain, this democrat will take fervent pain in shouting the irrationality of "others" while hiding his own. Obviously he will declare violence irrational and all users of violence as irrational. And, he will not care less if he thereby has to declare irrational the whole history of humankind, including his own history, or the origin of democracy itself. In proportion to the internal contradiction that he has to conceal, our reliable democrat develops into an extremist of the centre and a fanatic of moderation. He becomes a "middlecrat". 5. From the moral maze towards a historical and political formulation

Careful! We did not intend to bring the thesis stating that violence in democracy is immoral and unjust/irrational face to face with the antithesis "violence is reasonable/legitimate in democracy"; but rather, perhaps, that the matter of contention between violence and democracy is not a moral issue at all, but an issue of some other kind (yet to be seen): That is to say that, in the history of mankind, democracy is only a relatively appropriate system, a possible one among other systems, neither more moral nor immoral than others in itself. As a point of departure, therefore, democracy does not legitimise or delegitimise anything at all to us. As any other system, it is to us to legitimate it, case by case and one by one according to each context and condition.

In this respect, the whole perspective changes from top to bottom in order to continue with our reflection, that is, to understand Mirande's logic. And now yes, the question of efficiency comes to the fore. The question is not anymore whether violence is legitimate or not, but whether violence is efficient to achieve freedom, at least for a movement of liberation (the patriotic movement, for instance). Democracy does not possess the value of an intangible sacred basis above and according to which everything can be legitimated or delegitimated; instead (democracy) itself is questioned: To put an example, what is democracy worth to reach independence? (If independence is desired). Or more generally: How do we value the moment of today's Western democracy during the course of history? (For it must not be forgotten that the history of Europe is long, whereas that of democracy is pretty short). Is it a step forward towards progress or a waning leap towards decadence, itself a product of decadence also?

Again, all these issues are not yet our immediate concern but only to understand Mirande in all his realism. And Mirande's position has been this: (a) As a theoretical formulation: That the moral disputes between violence and democracy constitute false problems and problems without a solution, interesting only to those who have the whip hand. And that their source resides in the fact that democracy as a system is a system of consecrated falsehood and hypocrisy;- the political Judeo-Christianity. (b) As a political formulation, therefore: That, first of all, we Basques will never achieve freedom democratically. And second, that democracies will never give us freedom. A third thesis lies at the base of, and fundamentally explains the two former as well as it takes us back to (a). It is that, looking at the whole of Europe and its history, democracy itself remains very far from constituting an ideal system as well as being the very perdition and calamity of essential European culture and tradition. In the case of a Basque patriot then, and fundamentally any "non-Christian" European, it is not only that violence against democracy is not illegitimate but it almost becomes a moral obligation. This is what Mirande takes generally from Nietzshe and Spengler, which is to be looked at with calm attention in the coming second part. TWO WORDS TO FINISH

As a cultural worker, one can firmly stand on his two feet within the realms of politics and struggle, and - even if I do not consider myself to be a great politician or fighter- I will say that I thoroughly approve of such a personal choice if this is indeed someone's vision of the path to be taken. It does not matter whether this is done by acting as a cultural worker within an organisation or a political party or by abandoning all penwork to devote oneself to politics and struggle altogether. It is a choice. Although, as with all choices, this one has its own limits. Its laws, and its prohibitions. All choices have restrictions. They relate, as far as we are individually concerned, to performing a good job within the consciously and freely chosen domain. This with the shared objective of taking good care of the appropriate means to each domain, and with all the dependencies that taking care of the means often implies. Someone who places himself within the realm of cultural production, and is socially committed, will certainly do politics and fight. But for me, it is important that to be his own politics and his own struggle. I do not think that in the long term is good for anyone to mix up different domains - politics, struggle, culture- ; at least certainly not for the cultural worker. Although by saying this, I would not like to be caught up with the independence of the intellectual myth at all. That is, the autonomy of culture does not imply intellectual independence from the suffering and misery of the humankind, but independence from power. We know for a long time now that an aseptic (apolitical) culture does not exist. In the face of the world - in the face of organised exploitation and repression - one has to take sides. And not to take sides is to take one, namely, to take side with what there is already, which is always the side of the majority. In such a context, the struggle of the intellectual can only be the one of the poor and the oppressed;- the struggle in favour of the poor's overthrown reason and freedom [1]. In our case, the struggle of the poor and oppressed Basque Country. Limited and humble, the specific work of the intellectual is to cultivate and express the discourse - reason - of such struggle (not a discourse pertaining to propaganda, although this is also important: "critical" thought in its original meaning). Which then, inevitably, will turn out to be very different in practice according to the position that the intellectual occupies as a popular oral versifier, journalist, novelist, essay writer, teacher, priest or whatever one is within such a "silenced people". And it is important that the independence of the cultural worker is never lost, not even to friends.

The war was over, classical patriotism was apparently failing: some took up arms; some did not. A new spirit took on different ways - in search of a new way. This is our history. History continues and by now (like it already happened before) some would like to see both A and B, and the ideas that inspire them, wiped out from the political map forever, and from the world also (for nationalism and democracy are irreconcilable [2] et cetera): these will only want order and "peace" again - the everlasting Basque Country within the eternal Spain still and quiet-, will only want "nationalism", seemingly the only cause of all troubles, eradicated from earth without leaving any trace... No, we do not want such new "everlasting" Basque Country either! If we are a project, our first task should be to guarantee our position properly. I think that all Basques working on culture have had, at some time, the romantic temptation, or ecumenical illusion of achieving understanding and appreciation from all parties in the following way: to develop a single and broad Bascophilia, universalist, open, with utterly nice human and cultural claims, with just a few fundamental and elementary humanist ideals devoid of agressivity, pretty basic and almost apolitical (able to agree with all politics), easily understandable even among the "enemies" in a way that could be accepted by anyone with good will and a minimum of culture... Until the moment comes when we all learn that in Spanish culture there is no Basque radical or moderate nationalism, no liberals or fanatics, no intelligibility or unintelligibleness, no rational or absurd; and that, at the end, other that completely useless it is also ridiculous to go there on a door-to-door pilgrimage in search of "comprehension". Whether because of extreme care or absolute lack of it, they never have space in their world to understand us. And if it is this that we want, then we have to fight. ("They will understand us when they do not comprehend") Then, we would like to rationally secure our right (our reason) by means of indisputable historical and philosophical proofs, that is, in a scientifically objective and absolute way, so that not even the enemies could refute our categorical arguments forged with rigid iron logic from top to bottom - as if we could hope better from logical reasoning than what we hoped waiting in vain for understanding. Why is it impossible to rationalise Basque patriotism - or science indeed! - to the last limit and in an absolute way? It is very simple: because it is the fruit of freedom! Because is the work of human spirit (which, therefore, blends culture, ethics and everything together: history, in a word) and not the product of a pure - formal - intellectual exercise or a mechanical, mathematical operation. It is above all during the new awakening to patriotism or during its youth that such need for security stemming from absolute rationalisation, "truth" and "reason" is felt in order to face all the enemies (this is why it is very critical with the preceding nationalism). Until the time comes when it is discovered that such pretension, such obstinacy, was not only rationally impossible but socially and politically futile? With whom do we want to reason in fact? ( We could not possibly imagine that the receiver of our message - the alluded hypothetical Spanish interlocutor- is the very embodiment of pure rationality: history doesn't reveal this!) To reason what, to explain what, to gain what? To begin with, who do I have to reason with, and what do I have to justify to anybody my yearning and desires for, my thirst for freedom? Basque patriotism is a few desires and a few simple hopes. Where does this very sentiment, this need of having to reason and justify my desires come from, if it's not from the fact, within the arrangement of society today, that they deny them and oppressed them, and "morally" somehow forbade them? And what is the sense of "reasoning" with such a repressive arrangement - administration, tradition, culture, school? Prior to internal reasoning, it is such a repression - the ultimate negation - that I have to break and argue against. Nowadays we all know how much reason counts for in politics, unfortunately, as well as we know that physical mathematics and astronomy are not purely objective and rational from top to bottom: that these too sustain themselves on, and derive from, a pile of conditions and subjective choices, both within the historical-cultural and the theoretical-objective realms; that is, that they have not solely rational foundations in their constructions, beginning from zero; or that scientific rationality cannot be thought of as if created by a goddess out of nothingness and sparkingly flying above chaos. Such model of absolute rationality was but just a dream of a bourgeois century when men and women were wanted to be imagined as the most perfect machines. A worn out dream by now, of course. Does that mean that we do not care about the rationality of our intentions and objectives? That history is produced by nothing but blind force? Not. But yes: rationality as such in the unsecluded universe is just the fruit of social freedom, desire, hunger and thirst, and violence: The product of irrationality ( who wants to be shocked by this?) ;- much the same as the fruit of basic social rationality were this desire of, and hunger for freedom. This is what the human being is. Sure, patriotism has subjective and irrational elements. So has physics. As our political and cultural projects are arguable, science also - like art and the very social existence - are products of freedom: they are constructed on "faith" and subjective choice. And even if some fond of treating the others as irrational have not realized it yet, that is where the source of the greatness of them all is to be found. All beautiful work is the fruition of freedom and free choice. This means that against the comfort and security that we often desire, patriotism likewise cannot take a rest thinking of a "safe" theoretical project in the fabrication of moderation, that is, in the fanaticism of moderation (or some "democratic patriotism"): for rather than being the product of rationality, if patriotism is the work of humanity, that is, of liberty, then it has to risk and create rationality by being at the same time the creator of social freedom - like art and science.

To say it with an image, it is as if we wanted the river to be in its inner essentiality all purely rational from its very source before it begins to work and develop. As if it was the very idea which had to be crystal-clear: but it is by moving down the mountain and spraying its streamlet corners, by blooming hedgerows and growing trees green, by improving the fields and prairies in the lowlands, by joining human dwellings together in its surroundings and connecting, communicating cities, by spreading forests and farming, commerce and culture along its way and throughout the seasons that the river - in its different enriching praxis - makes its history and its "rationality". In the history of men and women (and their projects) it is work, struggle, research, journalism, literature, everyday reflection, politics which make true rationality;- from the source of an original and reasoned free choice. And there is no other kind of rationality in human undertaking. There is no much worth (curiously it is the one who does not need reasoning and has never reasoned who gives much importance to "rationality") but - in these history games of men and women - the humble contribution of cultural work rests, at best, just on that: to take on one's shoulders the projects of doing works, struggles, poetry, justice, economy or politics in sewing one's discourse of rationality. But I am afraid that not even that little bit can be done nowadays in the Basque Country. Because, nowadays, what is understood as reasoning is nothing but noise and confusion. (Perhaps it is been always so in modern politics). This is why if it was for the sake of desiring I would desire, for instance, to organise a group of patriot intellectuals to systematically respond against the enormous spaniard-ist assault; but without believing much in it. And I don't believe in it, because apart from the fact that we are not able to (how many of us can we gather to respond against "300 million" people?), there is no way of generating dialogue that way (as it is not the case either in the "conversations" organised on radio and TV stations) but only a monologue of the deaf which would only increase noise; and we, at least, haven't got anything to win there because as Kant would say, "the philosopher is embarrassed before the popular laughter of the triumphant and conceited crowd" frenziedly applauding and entertained in such as crazy as useless a contest. I am referring to noise, however, not in terms of its tonality - which has become compulsory mockery and insult - but the modes of circulation of the very ideas: of these reasons that we see used and misused according to convenience, for it is manifest that we are not dialoguing but struggling with ideas. And thus concepts and ideas are weapons only, and are useful only as such. "Democracy" is one of these ideas which has become a weapon. But ("peace", "tolerance"...) it is the whole of public thought which is once again armed with fetishes on behalf of the Crusade in the eternal Spain. And then Gibraltar is a colony but Ceuta isn't; Mirande's thought is fascist if it is patriotic, but the same thought is Honoris Causa if it is used in an antinationalist postmodern manner; Nietzsche and Nietzscheans are canonised against Christian morality, but at the same time democracy is declared sacred [3]... Comedy is performed (I mean intellectual comedy) to escape tragedy. At the end nothing is important, but the question is to burn the "evil" and to gather as much people as possible at the town square to listen to the auto-da-fé amid frenetic applause. Thought "in democracy" is propaganda: a tool of domination. Xabier Mendiguren, - who decided that Los Españoles y los euskaldunes ([1977] 1995: Colección 6 Mila Lasturko, HIRU: ) had to be published - has also chosen and published these essays which were written in Jakin seven or eight years ago. And in looking backwards, it is at least ten years since I pointed out my suspicion that in just coming out from fascism we were heading towards "demofascism" (Jakin 41, 1986, 104-105). Rationality is increasingly formed by "a shrewd and all- knowing administration"; and democracy is equaled to this very State, to its interests and mechanisms. Democracy is sacred, but the most sacred in democracy is State control. And this not only in Spain. It is now ten years ago, precisely March the 17th, 1987 that Charles Pasqua then French Minister of Interior (Home Affairs) formulated this reality very appropriately with this sentence which wanted to be the expression of strict democratic justice: "Democracy stops where State interest begins". The State comes before democracy. Then the State decides what justice does on does not consist of. How much freedom is or is not allowed is measured in accordance to State interests. The fundamental - the substantial - is always the State, which remains unchanged underneath surface differences. What is then democracy? To the extent that it is interested, democracy is what interests to the State now (now: not always). (And yet we are still striving for that State which interests democracy! But we are dealing with either the myth or the utopia of Basque democracy, will say the rational democrat)... What shall we say? This being so, the Prince does not need Machiavelli as an adviser in democracy: it is already incorporated within the system. For someone who has been interested in the Weimar Republic tragedy for a long time, the endeavour to dare into a critique of democracy is not something devoid of shame - and even fear. It is something ambiguous and uncomfortable. Somehow dirty. But it seems that nobody is living much of a clean period. In the last issue of the Bitarte magazine (10,1996) I find Jewish philosopher E. Cassier and nazi philosopher M. Heidegger together (nationalism and nazism are the same thing, et cetera: to differentiate them is not the philosophers doing anymore): and according to lecturer Gorriaran [4] of the Basque university, it seems that Jewish E. Cassier who escaped Nazi Germany with wife and children in a painful odyssey through Switzerland, England and Scandinavia to die in America in April, 1945, had a "direct responsibility" in Nazism and his fate ... In the mean time E. Jünger Doctor Honoris Causa at the University of the Basque Country. Long life to confusion: that is where our democratic rationality feeds from! Mix and confuse executioners and victims in the same bag and there is no executioners and victims anymore: the victims are the executioners ... [5] (A reflection of what is happening in our streets?). To finish like Orixe: "Forgive me, reader, for it has taken me longer than two words". In the crossroad - liesroad - that our country in living we shall have to continue meditating.

[1] Both the poor and the rich can be right (power and freedom can be endowed with reason). But the rich have a thousand means to show their reason; if the reason of the poor is not accompanied by its free intellectual component, then it can only recur to the protection and assistance of violence. This idea, more or less, appears already in Western Father St. Benedict's Rules (Reg. 53,15). Formulated in a religious manner, obviously. [2] At the end it seems that Basque patriotism and the State are truly incompatible in fact: before with Franco and now equally with democracy, or with the ways that some have to understand democracy. [3] Democracy is pure Christianity according to Nietzsche: a perversion of politics invented by an enslaved morality. [4] Last minute news: the same author more recently says that ELA trade-union constitutes "a caricature of the Nazi trade-unionist movement" because of the rally organised in Gernika to denounce the weakness of the Statute of Autonomy (see, Egunkaria, 24th Oct. 1997, "Gernikazoa") [5] In this our democracy some kind of "courageous intellectual" always prosecutes the prosecuted (of yesterday and of today); that is, with the postmodern artifice of saving the condemned and condemning the saviours, he looks for the messy confusion of victims and executioners. He cannot tolerate - because he knows in his that under the democrat mask hides a pure fascist maybe? - the presence of the victims of fascism.

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