Uruguay protests against the forgetfulness of Mujica

The authors of a massacre in 1994 against those supporting Basque exiles remain not just at large but with power to commit again any such massacre or worse. Hundreds demonstrated in Montevideo against such impunity, demanding justice and memory.

Roberto Facal and Fernando Morrone were the victims of a massacre executed by police in 1994 to break the resistance of some 4000 Uruguayans against the extradition of Basque exiles, who were in hunger strike at Hospital Filtro. At least 500 police officers took part in the attack, using nothing but live fire. 

Not just demonstrators were killed or injured but also nurses like Esteban Massa who was shot in the back while he aided another victim. 

The murderous repression continued mercilessly in union offices and through the neighboring streets. It was then when the two mortal victims were shot. 

It was a bourgeois elected government which assumed all responsibility with no shame nor remorse. Minister of Interior Gianola was backed by the government in full, nobody resigned, nobody was ever prosecuted. 

Every year in the anniversary of the massacre people march through Montevideo demanding justice and memory. The Frente Amplio ignores the issue and one of its leaders even said it was a massacre "to forget". 

Forget? Never! Forgive? Never! The culprits must pay or something of the like will happen again. 

Source: Borroka Garaia Da![es]

Marx as "Anarchist"

Or almost. Maybe more like modern Autonomists.

The Commune publishes today a very interesting article by David Adams questioning in depth the notion of Marxism, or more precisely Marx' own thought, as authoritarian and statist, being in fact quite different from the Leninist model (as well as from the Socialdemocratic or Bersteinian one).

A key excerpt on the dictatorship of Proletariat as being nothing but radical grassroots democracy:

A little-known text by Marx, his 1874 “Notes on Bakunin’s Book Statehood and Anarchy,” explains the concept of proletarian dictatorship more clearly than any other. In his book Bakunin ridicules Marx’s concept of the transitional state power of the proletarian dictatorship, and Marx critically responds in his “Notes.”  Bakunin writes, “If there is a state, then there is domination and consequent slavery. A state without slavery, open or camouflaged, is inconceivable-that is why we are enemies of the state. What does it mean, ‘the proletariat raised to a governing class?’”²⁶ Marx responds, “It means that the proletariat, instead of fighting in individual instances against the economically privileged classes, has gained sufficient strength and organisation to use general means of coercion in its struggle against them; but it can only make use of such economic means as abolish its own character as wage labourer and hence as a class; when its victory is complete, its rule too is therefore at an end, since its class character will have disappeared.”²⁷ The claim that through revolution the proletariat will be “raised to a governing class” thus has nothing to do with creating a dictatorship of a political sect, but is rather a claim that the proletariat will use “general means of coercion” to undercut the bourgeoisie’s power (by abolishing the private ownership of the means of production, disbanding the standing army, and so forth). It is the entire proletariat that is to exercise this power.  Bakunin asks, “Will all 40 million [German workers] be members of the government?”²⁸ Marx responds, “Certainly! For the system starts with the self-government of the communities.”²⁹

Can there be a more Anarchist statement? Or rather we may want to describe it as genuine Communism. 

Another excerpt: Leninism as Blanquism:

Blanqui, for example, advocated an educative dictatorship of a small group of revolutionaries. Marx’s use of the word “dictatorship” in the phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat,” however, is original and deliberately distinct from Blanqui’s usage. Engels emphasizes this point in a passage on Blanqui: “From the fact that Blanqui conceives of every revolution as the coup de main of a small revolutionary minority, what follows of itself is the necessity of dictatorship after it’s success-the dictatorship, please note, not of the entire revolutionary class, the proletariat, but of the small number of those who made the coup de main and who themselves are organized beforehand under the dictatorship of one person or a few. One can see that Blanqui is a revolutionary of the previous generation.”³⁷ It is clear that the Leninist model of a particular sect or political party exercising political power is much closer to the Blanquist conception of “dictatorship” than to Marx’s (...)

Much of the divergence between Anarchists and Marx seems merely semantic: the use of the word "state" (polity):

For Marx, this form of power can be a “state” from the perspective of its political, coercive function of uprooting the foundations of the rule of capital. It cannot be a “state” in the sense of a “parasitic excrescence” usurping power from the mass of workers.⁵⁰

Again much closer to Kropotkin or Durruti than to Lenin, never mind Stalin.

Marx saw the mandated and revocable delegates of the Commune as an example of working class state power in action.

Mandated and revocable delegates? Isn't that precisely what Anarchists propose?

So what do Marx and Engels mean by "state" and "class dictatorship"? In the words of Richard N. Hunt:

The full-time army as parasite disappeared, but the part-time National Guard remained as the coercive instrument of the workers’ state. Here in sharpest focus one can perceive Marx and Engels’ double usage: the parasite state is to be smashed immediately; the state as instrument of class coercion is to remain until the need for it fades away.

A people's militia under popular command, it seems.

The criticism of bourgeois "democracy" and state is persistent and merciless, and Engels charged against the USA as archetype of this separation between society and state by means of ritual and pointless elections:

Nowhere do “politicians” form a more separate and powerful section of the nation than precisely in North America. . . . It is precisely in America that we see best how there takes place this process of the state power making itself independent in relation to society, whose mere instrument it was originally intended to be. Here there exists no dynasty, no nobility, no standing army, beyond the few men keeping watch on the Indians, no bureaucracy with permanent posts or the right to pensions. And nevertheless we find here two great gangs of political speculators, who alternately take possession of the state power and exploit it by the most corrupt means and for the most corrupt ends-and the nation is powerless against these two great cartels of politicians, who are ostensibly its servants, but in reality dominate and plunder it.

Naturally, although many have forgotten, the term Communism itself derives from commune (municipality or local government in French and other languages) and very specifically from the 1871 Paris Commune.

In this pioneering communist "state", not just the army became part of the people in full but the whole state did by suppressing the bureaucracy and getting managers to be paid common workers' salaries and be under the command of the People directly. Totally different to what happened in the Soviet Union.

Marx did not live to see the Russian Revolution but he witnessed the beginnings of the rise of what is now the Socialdemocracy, especially in France and Germany. It was then when he famously declared "I am not a Marxist myself". He was very critical of Lassalle and his socialdemocratic or proto-Keynesian ideas of building socialism from above by means of state loans and other nonsense. 

One of the key issues is democratic centralism, centralization or central planning. In this certainly Marx and Bakunin were very much at odds:

While Bakunin was a sworn enemy of all political and economic centralization, Marx had a very different perspective, but one that was in no way more “authoritarian”: “National centralization of the means of production will become the natural basis of a society composed of associations of free and equal producers, carrying on the social business on a common and rational plan.”⁷⁰ Marx thought that both centralism (a common plan) and democratic control from below were necessary for building socialism.

Read the original article, "Karl Marx and the State", at The Commune.

Basque Country: 200 years of "Liberal" Spanish imposition

Today 200 years ago the Parliament ("Cortes") of Navarre was dissolved in the name of the new post-Napoleonic "Liberal" regime of Cádiz. 

You may not know it, but in all the Kingdom of Spain, it were the Basque provinces the only ones who remained indifferent towards Napoleonic occupation. There was no guerrilla (except for some late offshoots triggered by the abuses of occupation) and the French Army had absolutely no problem in holding in our little country. Why? Obviously there was no sympathy for Spain and their Nationalist ideas and soon also it became obvious that the new "Liberal" ideology sought to impose the notion of a single nation-state against the wish of our people and its long-held liberties. 

The liberties of Spain became the yoke of the Basque Nation. 

For centuries, the Basque provinces had retained their unique (and quite "Liberal") institutions in the context of the Feudal system that dominated the Kingdom of Castile (later Spain). Our provinces were ruled by elected bodies since at least 1200, date of the Castilian annexation of the Western Basque Country, rooted in the Navarrese Law, very distinct from the Latin one. 

Residual Navarre had however evolved its "Cortes" into an more feudal-like body, similar to other European Parliaments of the time, in which the different estates (castes) were represented in less-democratic form. It was still better than what Castile/Spain had: absolute monarchy, with its intrinsic tendency to corruption and decadence.

With the Spanish War of Independence against the illustrated Napoleonic protectorate, a new and short-lived Spanish Liberal Monarchy arose from the Cortes of Cádiz, under Machiavellian British support. This new state suppressed the Navarrese Cortes altogether exactly 200 years, and also forced the Western Provinces' Juntas (Parliaments) to swear the new constitution, which incidentally suppressed them altogether. 

Ironically the return to Absolutism restored the Basque liberties, what set the stage for a whole century of Taliban-like support by the Basque institutions and people of the most reactionary camp in Spanish politics. Two Carlist wars, almost only manned by Basques, were the product of that imposition. Eventually it became obvious that the Spanish reactionaries were not either our friends and that the Basque society was much more liberal than its forced affiliation may have suggested and a more modern Basque Nationalism emerged, first with the Navarrese Republican Party, then the Basque Nationalist Party and finally with Basque Nationalist Action and its more recent offshoots: ETA and the Basque National Liberation Movement, with its various tactical names.

Partial source: El Blog de Fernando Mikelarena[es].

Chile: torturer physicians' list is made public

A list with the names of 36 physicians who tortured political prisoners under Pinochet's Fascist-Thatcherist regime has come to light. Many of them still exert their profession freely. 

The full list is available in Spanish language at WPChile and Webguerrillero.

Basque Country: hundreds commemorate the Battle of Noain (video)

Basques from Navarre and the other regions paid homage to the fallen in the Battle of Noain, one of the last stands of Navarrese resistance against the Castilian invasion of 1912-21, demanding once again the right to free self-determination. 

Source: Ateak Ireki.

Basque official report on the victims during the guerrilla war

Fascist mercenaries at the Montejurra massacre

The semi-autonomous Western Basque Government has issued a report[es] that attempts to quantify the numbers and typology of the victims in the period of the guerrilla war from 1960 to 2013. 

Actually ETA was only active in armed form from 1968 and officially declared the end to armed struggle in 2011. Guerrilla war and state repression should be quantified, in my understanding since 1936, when the fascist coup ignited the fire of popular armed resistance, which existed since then in many forms (grouped in the catch-all term maquis, inherited from the French Resistance), some of them with clear independentist undertones. 

The report also seems somewhat biased in favor of certain kind of victims, not counting, for example, deaths in prison or those killed or mutilated in car accidents when traveling to far away prisons to visit their relatives or friends. People in prison for political reasons, with or without sentence, should be accounted and in most cases are not. The report mentions once and again the various associations of "victims of terrorism" but never any association against torture, for the rights of prisoners, etc. Those killed in police operations against armed groups, such as the Pasaia Massacre, don't seem to be accounted for either. It is not clear if the reports of police violence include those by French agents (surely not).

Fascist PM Carrero Blanco was killed by ETA(m)

In any case, the report accounts for the following figures for the 1960-1978 period:

• 136 killed by ETA, Autonomous Anti-Capitalist Commandos (CCAA) and other anti-system groups. In detail:
• ETA (prior to schism): 18
• ETA (militar): 89
• ETA (political-militar): 9 (2 in kidnappings)
• CCAA: 4
• Iberian Directorate for Liberation (DRIL): 1
• Others: 2
• Not sufficiently clear: 13 (2 in kidnappings).
• 87 killed by the Spanish police (74), death squads (13) or death penalty. In detail:
• Police abuses, confusion and other causes: 23
• Police violence in demonstrations: 22
• In road controls: 19
• In police custody: 5
• By out-of-service agents: 5
• By the Basque-Spanish Battalion (BVE): 3
• By the Apostolic Anti-Communist Alliance (Triple A): 2
• By fascist violence against demonstrators: 3
• By execution after military trial: 2 (the famous Txiki and Otaegi, 10 others were sentenced to death but never actually killed).
• Other anti-system violence:
• 236 seriously injured in attacks (230 by ETA in its various forms).
• 14 people kidnapped and later released (3 after being shot to the knee).
• 8 attacks against media.
• An undetermined number of police agents injured in demonstrations.
• Some 3600 major attacks (by organized groups) in this and the following period.
• Some 4500 minor attacks (in the so called "street fight") in this and the following period.
• Other state violence:
• 422 injured by police violence in demonstrations. 
• 355 death squad arson attacks and death threats.
• 238 subject to military trials.
• 103 terror attacks by death squads (not including kidnappings).
• 32 journalist brought to trial or otherwise jailed.
• 22 injured in road controls.
• 22 death squad attacks against demonstrations.
• 13 hospitalized after arrest.
• 11 death squad attacks against media.
• 9 kidnappings with violence and torture by death squads.
• 6 injured by out-of-service police agents.
• An undetermined number of arbitrary arrests, preventive prison, etc.
• An undetermined number of media closures, censorship and prohibitions.
• Not researched but mentioned: abuses and torture against prisoners.
• Unclear: 4 people missing.

Not accounted for? (Pasaia 1984)

In the 1979-2013 period:

• 703 killed by anti-system groups:
• In attacks by ETA(m): 644 
• In attacks by the CCAA: 38
• In attacks by ETA(pm): 12
• In attacks by Iparretarrak (IK): 3
• In attacks by Iraultza: 1 (but a member of Iraultza, which never targeted people).
• In kidnappings by ETA(m): 8
• In kidnappings by ETA(pm): 2
• In kidnappings by the CCAA: 2
• In kidnappings by ETA-VIII: 1
• In "street fight" actions: 3
• Itsasondo man who got tired of police persecution and killed two with a hunting rifle (later run away and joined ETA): 2. 
• Not clarified: 314 (figure by FVT, highly suspect, not added to total).
• Some 126 killed by the state and satellite groups:
• In attacks by the Anti-Terrorist Liberation Groups (GAL): 24
• By police (abuse, confusion or other causes): 18
• In attacks by the Basque-Spanish Battalion (BVE): 14
• In police custody: 12
• By out-of-service police agents: 12
• In road controls: 11
• By police violence in demonstrations: 10
• In attacks by the Spanish Anti-Terrorist Groups (GAE): 7
• In attacks by the Triple A: 3
• By death squad attacks against demonstrations: 3
• In prison: 2 (only?)
• Women raped and killed by the BVE: 2
• Other death squad kidnappings with murder: 2
• Missing people whose corpses were found: 2
• In attacks by "Antiterrorismo ETA" (ATE): 1
• Deaths by death squads never clarified: at least 3. Most cases were never investigated properly anyhow.
• Other anti-system violence:
• Injured in attacks: figures vary: from 2068 to 16,000.
• Kidnapped and released: 
• ETA(pm): 24 (11 after being shot to the knee)
• ETA(m): 17
• ETA-VIII: 5
• ETA (prior to schism): 3
• CCAA: 3
• ETA-VII: 1
• Not clarified: 8 (these may be mafia violence in fact)
• Attacks against media: 32
• Major arson attacks (by armed groups): some 3600 (both periods)
• Minor arson attacks (by the so-called "street violence"): some 4500 (both periods)
• Other state violence:
• Torture: maybe as many as 10,000 victims, some 5500 public denounces.
• Hospitalized after police arrest: 124
• Only 62 agents (who tortured 31 victims) were declared guilty of tortures, 27 of them were later pardoned by the government.
• Injured in road controls: 30
• Injured by police (confusion, abuses and other causes): 39
• Injured by out-of-service police agents: 13
• Injured by police in demonstrations: 222 (only?)
• Undue closure of media: 2 (Egin newspaper and radio, Egunkaria)
• Violations of human rights in prison: not researched (lots!)
• Injured in death squad attacks: 232
• Injured by death squads in demonstrations: 10
• Women raped by death squads: 13
• Kidnappings with intimidation and torture: 49
• Arson attacks and death threats by death squads: 633 (10 against media)
• Not clarified: 2 missing people and another unspecified case.

While I do not necessarily subscribe the data produced in this report (too many blanks and question marks), it is clear that it serves as partial reference for historians and political debate.

Zionism as anti-Semitism (censored by Al Jazeera)

A most interesting article by Joseph Massad (Associated Prof. of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University), titled The Last of the Semites, was published at Al Jazeera and soon taken down in a clear act of censorship. At the time of writing this it was still available at Al Jazeera mobile edition but the original version had vanished even from Google cache. 

Luckily, Jews sans frontieres copy-pasted it in its entirety. I strongly recommend reading it. 

This is maybe the centerpiece:

When Zionism started a decade and a half after Marr's anti-Semitic programme was published, it would espouse all these anti-Jewish ideas, including scientific anti-Semitism as valid. For Zionism, Jews were "Semites", who were descendants of the ancient Hebrews. In his foundational pamphlet Der Judenstaat, Herzl explained that it was Jews, not their Christian enemies, who "cause" anti-Semitism and that "where it does not exist, [anti-Semitism] is carried by Jews in the course of their migrations", indeed that "the unfortunate Jews are now carrying the seeds of anti-Semitism into England; they have already introduced it into America"; that Jews were a "nation" that should leave Europe to restore their "nationhood" in Palestine or Argentina; that Jews must emulate European Christians culturally and abandon their living languages and traditions in favour of modern European languages or a restored ancient national language. Herzl preferred that all Jews adopt German, while the East European Zionists wanted Hebrew. Zionists after Herzl even agreed and affirmed that Jews were separate racially from Aryans. As for Yiddish, the living language of most European Jews, all Zionists agreed that it should be abandoned. 
The majority of Jews continued to resist Zionism and understood its precepts as those of anti-Semitism and as a continuation of the Haskalah quest to shed Jewish culture and assimilate Jews into European secular gentile culture, except that Zionism sought the latter not inside Europe but at a geographical remove following the expulsion of Jews from Europe. The Bund, or the General Jewish Labor Union in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia, which was founded in Vilna in early October 1897, a few weeks after the convening of the first Zionist Congress in Basel in late August 1897, would become Zionism's fiercest enemy. The Bund joined the existing anti-Zionist Jewish coalition of Orthodox and Reform rabbis who had combined forces a few months earlier to prevent Herzl from convening the first Zionist Congress in Munich, which forced him to move it to Basel. Jewish anti-Zionism across Europe and in the United States had the support of the majority of Jews who continued to view Zionism as an anti-Jewish movement well into the 1940s. 
Anti-Semitic chain of pro-Zionist enthusiasts
Realising that its plan for the future of European Jews was in line with those of anti-Semites, Herzl strategised early on an alliance with the latter. He declared in Der Judenstaat that:

"The Governments of all countries scourged by anti-Semitism will be keenly interested in assisting us to obtain [the] sovereignty we want."

He added that "not only poor Jews" would contribute to an immigration fund for European Jews, "but also Christians who wanted to get rid of them". Herzl unapologetically confided in his Diaries that:

"The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies."

Thus when Herzl began to meet in 1903 with infamous anti-Semites like the Russian minister of the interior Vyacheslav von Plehve, who oversaw anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia, it was an alliance that he sought by design. That it would be the anti-Semitic Lord Balfour, who as Prime Minister of Britain in 1905 oversaw his government's Aliens Act, which prevented East European Jews fleeing Russian pogroms from entering Britain in order, as he put it, to save the country from the "undoubted evils" of "an immigration which was largely Jewish", was hardy coincidental. Balfour's infamous Declaration of 1917 to create in Palestine a "national home" for the "Jewish people", was designed, among other things, to curb Jewish support for the Russian Revolution and to stem the tide of further unwanted Jewish immigrants into Britain. 

The Nazis would not be an exception in this anti-Semitic chain of pro-Zionist enthusiasts. Indeed, the Zionists would strike a deal with the Nazis very early in their history. It was in 1933 that the infamous Transfer (Ha'avara) Agreement was signed between the Zionists and the Nazi government to facilitate the transfer of German Jews and their property to Palestine and which broke the international Jewish boycott of Nazi Germany started by American Jews. It was in this spirit that Nazi envoys were dispatched to Palestine to report on the successes of Jewish colonisation of the country. Adolf Eichmann returned from his 1937 trip to Palestine full of fantastic stories about the achievements of the racially-separatist Ashkenazi Kibbutz, one of which he visited on Mount Carmel as a guest of the Zionists. 

Despite the overwhelming opposition of most German Jews, it was the Zionist Federation of Germany that was the only Jewish group that supported the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, as they agreed with the Nazis that Jews and Aryans were separate and separable races. This was not a tactical support but one based on ideological similitude. The Nazis' Final Solution initially meant the expulsion of Germany's Jews to Madagascar. It is this shared goal of expelling Jews from Europe as a separate unassimilable race that created the affinity between Nazis and Zionists all along.

→ full article at Jews sans frontieres.

Nakba infograph

Very informative: at Electronic Intifada.

Spain: more than 100,000 documents from the Civil War remain classified "secret"

The Spanish Ministry of Defense retains as "secret" 100,000 documents older than half a century which should clarify many dark details of the fascist massacres and other deals in the Civil War and World War II, when fascist Spain was closely allied with Hitler and Mussolini, even if it remained "non-belligerent". Other items of interest could be the relationships of fascist Spain in the Cold War and the dubious aspects of conflicts involving Morocco (Ifni War, West Sahara).

While Carma Chacó, Minister of Defense under Rodríguez Zapatero, seems to have explored the declassification of all these documents, so important for historians and the general public, the initial overture was never approved by the government and the issue remained parked until the neofascist People's Party took power in 2011. Since then nothing has been done about them either. 

In addition to these 100,000 documents, there are known hidden blanks in the documentation of the Spanish military available to the public, surely hidden in the High Defense Command. Nobody seems to know exactly how much because, as historians denounce, in Spain there is no information transparency.

According to the law of historical patrimony all documents must be available after 50 years. However the government applies the law of official secrets decreed under fascism, in 1968. 

Among the data hidden it is known to be old defense plans, armament projects (possibly hiding the secret nuclear ambitions of fascist Spain), multitude of documents on political repression and censorship, concentration camps, forced work prisoner brigades, summary executions, guerrilla activity, secret deals with other powers, etc. These key historical and political documents are scattered in a number of archives in Madrid, Sevilla, Palma de Mallorca, Ceuta, Barcelona, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Cartagena, O Ferrol, Cádiz, etc.

Source: El Mundo[es].