The Spanish Protests of 2023

4,759 words

A series of daily demonstrations have been taking place throughout Spain since the beginning of this month, including in the ethnically differentiated regions, in front of the offices of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), Spain’s “socialist” party.

Background

In the last Spanish general election in July of this year, the PSOE lost.Until then the party had been governing Spain in a coalition with the neo-communist Podemos party, which once it was in government became the “feminist”/androphobic Unidas Podemos. The latter has split as a result of the personal ambition of the government’s Second Deputy Prime Minister, Yolanda Díaz, who abandoned her declining party to create a new one under her own leadership. It was the first coalition government of the post-Franco regime.

This government had come to power through a motion of no confidence as a result of accusations of corruption against the entire ruling party at the time. But when the PSOE itself was shown to have carried out the biggest corruption case in Spanish history, in which it stole colossal amounts of money that were destined for the unemployed in Andalusia, their government nevertheless refused to resign.

It goes without saying that the current weariness began a while ago. For example, the current Prime Minister has been responsible for the huge migratory invasion that Spain has recently suffered, spreading the invaders who have been arriving in the south all over the nation as if the way to clean a dirty room was to disguise it by spreading the dirt all over the house instead of sweeping it up and taking it out.

Under this government, Spain has been one of the countries that has taken the longest to recover from the COVID crisis in terms of gross domestic product, as well as one of the Western European countries with the highest inflation (despite not being dependent on Russian energy). Additionally, given the energy crisis driven by the war in Ukraine, Spain has become more energy dependent on other countries since this government has been destroying power plants on allegedly environmentalist grounds and due to the 2030 Agenda.

Spain is also the leading country in youth unemployment within the European Union. Pedro Sánchez has produced lousy figures for general unemployment, which has only been combated through opacity and accounting trickery by removing those who work via intermittent contracts from the category of those who are considered unemployed. He has also signed an agreement with the Biden administration to take the excess of the invaders arriving in the United States from South America, and has presided over a runaway increase in national debt by showering public money on like-minded political entities and associations.

Sánchez has further implemented a law of historical manipulation known as “Democratic Memory,” which prohibits any denial of the official narrative of various aspects of the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s regime, as well as a law that punishes parents and psychologists who try to stop minors — who have no voting rights — from having genital mutilations performed on them if they so choose. There has also been a housing law that further protects squatters and other privileged parasites of cultural Marxism at the expense of workers and taxpayers who are homeowners, which has made it so that they cannot evict squatters for a period of years.

It doesn’t end there. Sánchez’s government has implemented a law reducing the sentences of more than 1,200 rapists and pedophiles, releasing more than 122 of them and counting. At the same time, however, they have encouraged general discrimination against the male sex and have established the presumption of guilt in the cases of men who are subjected to any accusation of abuse — except when it comes to the son of the Constitutional Court’s Chairman, who was elected by the current executive and is receiving very different treatment.

Among the multitudes of Sánchez’s unfulfilled promises is repealing the so-called “gag rule,” which he has made use of in repressing the current demonstrations.

Sánchez’s concessions

Under these circumstances, many people consider this government to be totally illegitimate. But the spark that has lit the fuse of the protests has been the impudent negotiation of all kinds of perks — including issues that are both illegal and unconstitutional — primarily with his secessionist partners in Catalonia. By giving in to all their demands, Sánchez has obtained the backing of eight parties. Especially onerous have been his concessions at the expense of all citizens in order to buy the support of the last seven votes — belonging to the Junts per Catalunya party — which he needed to reach the majority of more than 175 votes out of the 350 seats that the Spanish Congress of Deputies requires. This support only serves to reinstall him as Prime Minister; it is not even a legislature agreement.

Previously, Sánchez not only granted a general pardon to his secessionist partners but also eliminated the crime of sedition so that they can repeat — this time with impunity —  what they were tried for once before. He has also lowered the penalty for the crime of embezzlement to the point of not including cases in which it cannot be proven that there was a profit. This benefits him personally in the case of the Official Credit Institute (ICO) aid granted to Playbol, his own parents’ company.

In the current agreement — assuming it does not contain secret clauses — among the regrettable potentially permanent changes that Sánchez is conceding to his partners is amnesty for more than 300 secessionist politicians involved in the illegal referendum, both for those convicted and those not yet prosecuted, and the possibility of holding an actual self-determination referendum for Catalonia. In other words, the same people who broke the law, by organizing the farce that was the 2017 Catalan independence referendum are those whom Sánchez is allowing to write the law that will allow them to go unpunished for their attempted secessionist coup, and he is even rewarding them with countless privileges and concessions.

It was intended that the amnesty would apply not only to those who took part in the attempted secession, but also to those guilty of corruption offenses. It seems that this will not end up happening — not because this presidential turd was not willing to pay the price, but because of the complaints of the other secessionist party, Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, which has identical representation as Junts but which, unlike the latter, is not tainted with corruption cases.

The agreement also tries to protect the Committees for the Defense of the Republic and Tsunami Democràtic. In theory, it is not legal to grant amnesty to those who have practiced terrorism — something that Junts’ leader, Carles Puigdemont, has also recently been accused of — but of course a firm sentence is needed for that, and it is well known that justice has its own tempos.

Among other aspects included in the agreement are the cancellation of 15,000 million euros of Catalan debt (to be paid by the other peoples of Spain), new transfers of competences, the transfer of 100% of the taxes settled there, pardons for hate crimes committed against Castilians and other Spanish peoples, the withdrawal from the Foreign Ministry’s website of the reports countering the secessionist propaganda regarding their unilateral declaration of independence, the recognition of Catalonia as a “nation,” and so on. And this is only what its Catalan partners have obtained, Junts per Catalunya in particular; the other seven parties whose support Sánchez needed all received their own share.

Sánchez’s word

Pedro Sánchez does not do any of these things out of conviction, but rather because any price seems fair to him as long as he stays in office. He is merely a psychopath and shameless compulsive liar, devoid of all moral scruples, who would sell his own mother to fulfill his personal ambitions.

The first party he got support from was EH Bildu (the political wing of the terrorist group Basque Homeland and Liberty, or ETA), with whom he had no problem meeting in front of the cameras. Before the election, however, he said:

I am saying that we are not going to make a deal with Bildu. If you want, I’ll say it five times, or 20, during the interview. We are not going to make a deal with Bildu. With Bildu, I repeat, we are not going to make a deal. If you want, I’ll repeat it again.

Regarding any alliance with secessionist parties in general, he said:

I am not going to be Prime Minister of the government at any cost. For me, first and foremost, the country comes first. . . . I am not going to allow the governability of Spain to rest on pro-independence parties.

About his partner, Carles Puigdemont, he said that “I am committed to bringing Mr. Puigdemont back to Spain and to hold him accountable before justice.” Nor would there be a pardon: “I feel ashamed when a politician pardons other politicians.” Nor did he favor reduction of sentences for embezzlement.

Regarding the amnesty, he said:

The independence movement is not asking for a reform of the criminal code. What the independence movement is asking for — and you know it and the viewers know it — is amnesty; something that, of course, this government is not going to accept, and that, of course, does not enter in the legislation nor in the Spanish Constitution.

Now, after the election, he says he is going to carry out the amnesty — in the name of Spain and Spanish unity. His own investiture partners explicitly deny what he says, assert that they are not giving up the unilateral method of proclaiming independence (contrary to what a lying major American newspaper recently claimed), assert the legitimacy of the referendum of October 1, 2017, and reiterate that they will do it again in any case. In short, it is impossible to summarize the number of occasions on which Sánchez has insulted his voters’ self-respect and pissed on their intelligence. None of these were spontaneous, thoughtless comments, nor distant in time from the facts, but were reiterated constantly until a few days before he did the opposite.

Worst of all, he had already demonstrated his moral character after the previous election, so it did not come as a surprise to anyone. He had said that he would not form a coalition government with the neo-Communist Pablo Iglesias, Podemos’ leader, because “he would not sleep peacefully” at night. But the day after the election he decided to form a coalition government with them, giving several ministries to Podemos and appointing Iglesias himself as Second Deputy Prime Minister.

Since every minimally informed person knows that the word of this Prime Minister is as valuable as a Monopoly bill, permanent control measures have been required by the secessionist parties to ensure that his promises are being followed — or so they say. They know that Sánchez can try to betray them by looking for any excuse, if he believes that it is no longer in his interest to work with them. The secessionists have also forced him to shield the amnesty law in such a way that the Constitutional Court or the Supreme Court cannot suspend it with precautionary measures.

In addition, the European Union will have to also to pass legal judgement on matters in which Spain does not have competence, especially regarding amnesties for those accused of terrorism. In fact, the Right — as useless as ever — is pinning much of its hopes on the EU, which has been hard on Poland and Hungary for not bowing to cultural Marxism and refusing to receive more invaders on their territories, to take action on this matter.

The protests

Thus, all the associations of judges, prosecutors, and so on — even the Leftist ones — are astounded that some politicians are going to overturn these sentences so blatantly, and that they are going so far in destroying the separation of powers. Many people are calling for a general strike on November 24, starting with the Vox-linked trade union Solidaridad. Vox, a Spanish centralist and “far Right” party, has already filed a complaint with the Supreme Court against the acting Prime Minister for the commissioning of three crimes to that effect. A series of protests has already begun that has mobilized close to a million people all over Spain to defend the same thing that this illegitimate government was pretending to defend up to the time of the election.

Repression and popular anger

Several recent events have intensified tensions, leading to episodes of street violence, a rather unusual phenomenon within the so-called Right-wing political spectrum. Despite several days of entirely peaceful and uneventful mobilizations, police were dispatched to brutally repress demonstrators who were peacefully gathering near the PSOE’s headquarters. The next day this resulted in an increase in both the number of demonstrators and their anger.

Videos from the scene show how the officers used tear gas, without any provocation, against demonstrators who were scrupulously remaining on the other side of the barricades. Giving the excuse that some demonstrators allegedly had “Ultra aesthetics,” the police went on the attack against crowds full of elderly people and children, assaulting demonstrators who were retreating despite not causing any harm and arresting elderly people and women in heels. In fact, one of the most iconic images of these demonstrations has been that of an elderly man who has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease who was gassed by the police being treated in an ambulance and breathing with an oxygen mask. “This is the beginning,” he said. “They are charging at old people. Spain has just woken up, sons of bitches.”

The police used batons, tear gas, and rubber bullets against the demonstrators, which are not frequently used in Spain even against the most violent radicals. Some of these methods are so unusual that many people thought they had already been banned.

Comparative grievances

This unjustified savagery contrasts with the leniency with which the pawns of the government’s secessionist partners were treated. Unlike the minutes of endurance that police sources have spoken of on this occasion, in Catalonia in 2017 it took them six days to intervene — and it was only because they were close to killing a policeman.  It has also provoked outrage that the use of such weapons is absolutely forbidden for the Spanish border guards, who have to face the violent mobs of invaders that enter Spain nearly unarmed. (Unsurprisingly the police face them with very little success, and many officers are injured.) Thus, some of the most commonly-heard slogans were “With the Moors, you don’t have the balls” and “Take that police van to the border.” Legal action has been announced against Fernando Grande-Marlaska, the Interior Minister, for ordering the use of tear gas — but of course no one in the government is considering resigning.

The police unions themselves have admitted to receiving political instructions to put an end to these mobilizations. Some of them have called for the dismissal or resignation of the government official who is in charge of the police action. This attitude from the police is clearly insufficient for many people, who feel outraged by these ungrateful officers after having defended them against the mistreatment they suffered in Catalonia and against attacks by the Left. Many demonstrators shouted at the police sepoys, saying “On October 1, I defended you!”[1] ^[6] and “Police, defend your country!”

Attempted political assassination

Another issue that has exacerbated the mood of the demonstrators is that one of the founders of Vox, Alejo Vidal-Quadras, was the victim of an attack after having published a tweet against “the infamous pact between Sánchez and Puigdemont that crushes the rule of law in Spain and ends with the separation of powers.”[2] ^[7] That same day he was to participate in the demonstrations. The Leftist media rushed to make the ridiculous claim that, although a motorist had shot him in the face without a word and then fled, Vidal-Quadras had been the victim of a mugging. The possibility that it was an assassin working for the Iranian regime was also considered, but Iranian experts say that it is unprecedented for the Ayatollahs’ regime to attack a foreign citizen in a foreign country. Iran focuses its reprisals against Iranian citizens; moreover, it has relatively good relations with Spain and no reason to put that at risk. Vidal-Quadras’ survived only because the bullet, which was presumably aimed at his temple, passed through his upper jaw.

The meaning and outcome of the protests

Some are excited to see a return of the old strategic alliance that was forged during the Civil War when, roughly speaking, the Spanish Left allied itself with the secessionists of some ethnically distinct regions. Unlike what happened in other times and what happens in other countries, the Spanish Right is absurdly centralist and the Left is more or less indifferent to the unity of the state, or maintains a different discourse in each region. It is one of many things in which the Left and Right have exchanged roles, especially after Franco’s regime.

The demonstrations, which were called mostly by the Right-wing parties, have been described as a “15-M of the Right” in reference to the citizen protests of 2011, which were mainly held by the Left. This time people are also demanding a constitutional reform to reduce the parties’ power in favor of a more participatory citizen regime, criticizing the political caste’s corruption and immorality, demanding the separation of powers that the pseudo-socialists have always wanted to eliminate since former Deputy Prime Minister Alfonso Guerra said that “Montesquieu is dead,” and lashing out against the completely politicized justice system in which the judges (of the Constitutional Court, General Council of the Judiciary, etc.) are largely chosen by the parties. This can easily lead to a new populism led by the Right.

These demonstrations can hardly lead to a “civil war,” however, as is being claimed in some foreign media outlets. In spite of isolated violent events which were provoked by the unjustifiable police behavior of the previous day, the truth is that these demonstrations are tremendously moderate given that, among other things, they also include disappointed voters of the PSOE itself. It as often happened that salutes or flags that are too radical for the taste of some of the demonstrators have been booed, pretending in their centrist tyranny to deny a place to those who protest like them just because they have a genuinely different ideology and are not mere cuckservatives.

On the other hand, the perfectly coordinated and synchronized violence of small sectors within the protests makes it doubtful whether they were actually a genuine radicalized popular fraction rather than saboteurs and police infiltrators whose violent presence among the demonstrators has been proven. In fact, the police have even arrested some of their own infiltrators. Some actual demonstrators sometimes pointed to others wearing masks so that they could be identified by the police, while chanting “violence does not represent us,” “they are infiltrators,” and so on — which reminds us what happened at the United States Capitol, where some shouted “Antifa!” at the violent elements.

In fact, a good part of Sánchez’s own supporters, both within the ethnic regions and in the rest of the country, oppose this vote-trading and are disaffiliating themselves from him. Moreover, several of the party’s most historic leaders have spoken out against it. Even some party deputies oppose it.

Sánchez has reached an agreement with the same far-left Basque group that was killing PSOE members until just a few years ago — for being members of a statewide Spanish party. This infuriated many of Sánchez’s fellow party members, especially after he had promised not to go into a pact with this group. In reality, it would have been enough if only a few of the 121 PSOE deputies had voted against their candidate in the investiture. But one of the problems of the Spanish regime is precisely that, unlike in the United States, it has closed lists. Thus, no one dares to break the party’s voting discipline as dictated by its leader; they would face heavy fines or expulsion from the party.

Will there be secession due to this Prime Minister? Probably not. Note how the red lines of the agreement are amnesty for politicians, but the independence part is left in deliberate ambiguity, with only a “dialogue table” for a referendum on self-determination being referenced. Many of the demands in their negotiations and pacts display purely economic interests, and focus particularly on the interests of the politicians, such as amnesty.

It is likely that many of these pro-independence movements will never achieve independence because they do not even actually seek it, but only use the secessionist threat as a means of extortion to obtain perks and privileges.[3] ^[10] Puigdemont’s party did not even claim to be pro-independence until a few years ago, when it coincided with a larger than usual turnout for the Diada de Catalunya and the appearance of huge cases of corruption among the party’s historical leaders. It was necessary to divert attention — and they succeeded.

What does this mean from a White Nationalist perspective?

The unification-independence debate is indeed a distraction — unless, of course, there is a manifest strategic advantage for our racial cause, and it advances the interests of White Nationalism for a clearly identifiable endogenous reason. The first identitarian party in Spain with significant representation, the Plataforma per Catalunya, emerged precisely there. The fact that Catalan politics thereafter focused on the issue of secession was deadly for that party and caused its demise; its remnants subsequently integrated into Vox or other, very small parties.

As White Nationalists, we cannot defend “self-determination” or secession per se, but only in the interest of higher principles, in the service of the White Cause, globally conceived. Some of these pro-independence parties do not even define themselves as nationalist. There is nothing surprising about this, because the motives for defending independence can be very different, from the most idealistic or utopian to the most petty or hypocritical, while passing through the purely strategic ones — which should be ours, given that the appropriate political-administrative level is given by circumstances. (In today’s world it would be absurd to divide ourselves administratively into clans or city-states, for example, even if it made sense at one time.) No one should be misled into uncritically romanticizing independence movements by automatically assuming that they are somehow ethnonationalist. Very few of them are.

If an independence party such as Vlaams Belang or the former Lega Nord was to radicalize and succeed in making White Nationalism the hegemonic current in their respective regions, their secession would automatically turn them into the first white ethnostates (after which others would more easily follow). The same would happen if the Euzko Alderdi Jeltzalea (Basque Nationalist Party) in the Basque Country, for example, was to return to its biological identitarian origins and relegate secondary factors such as language to the background and abandon its hatred of brother peoples — although this is extremely unlikely. No doubt that would be an enormous gain for White Nationalism. But in the case of the current pro-independence parties, and specifically the Catalan secessionists, who intend to give away nationality to non-Spanish — and in general, non-white — invaders, then the balance is clearly negative.

As for the protests, from a White Nationalist point of view we should not exaggerate their value, either. (Elon Musk’s tweets, for example, are more valuable than this for the White Cause in Spain.) While they will strengthen populism, there is grave risk that they will degenerate into politically sterile conservative causes. Surely the most valuable thing in the longer term is that the usual silent majority is mobilizing, and the type of people who do not usually demonstrate in the streets are now doing so.

The fact that the state political caste is willing to traffic so frivolously with the future of society certainly also helps to destroy whatever confidence and legitimacy the regime may still have left in the minds of the citizenry. In fact, despite the defense of the Constitution by Vox and the center-Right PP, there are important sectors that are questioning the current regime’s legitimacy, which was born out of the negotiations of 1978 after Franco’s death. One of the iconic symbols used in the demonstrations have been Spanish flags with the part of the current coat of arms removed, imitating the anti-Communist demonstrators in Hungary against the Soviets in 1956 or in Romania against Ceaușescu in 1989, who also removed the Communist coat of arms from their countries’ flags.

Another important thing this points out to us is that, regardless of the shortcomings of the current Spanish secessionist parties, we have much to learn from them and their methods of pressure in terms of achieving our goals. For example, the Spanish Congress consists of 350 members, while the six different secessionist and regionalist parties from various parts of the state that have given their support to Sánchez number only 27 altogether. That is 7.7% of the Congress. It is not much in absolute terms, but when the electoral results are so closely balanced between the two big parties, this gives them immense power within the Parliament.

Electocracy — what they call “democracy” — is a system which ensures that, sooner or later, all sorts of unprincipled but gold-tongued amoral cynics end up needing the support of minority parties to come to power. When that happens by narrow margins, a party with 5% of the total vote can have even more leverage and extract more concessions — secretly or not — than one with 45% support. And even when it is not possible, at least one of the major parties will be forced to adapt its discourse — normalizing it, in the process — as a way of winning back the votes that have gone to it in favor of that ascendant minority party. In fact, one of the best things that has happened in Spanish politics has been the breakup of the two-party system, which began innocently enough as a protest vote against corruption and which has contributed enormously to the radicalization and mobilization of the people that we are seeing in recent years.

Strategically, the secessionist movements are our best model to follow, and should be one of our main objects of study concerning activism, second only to Jewry’s proven methods in gaining power among us.

^[11]

Notes

[1] ^[12] In reference to the illegal referendum of 2017, which was merely a propaganda pantomime held to obtain images of incidents with the police attacking “voters” in order to generate international sympathy — and indeed, they attracted great criticism against the police — and to get 90% of the votes in favor of independence, given that non-secessionists, who considered the referendum illegitimate, did not turn out to vote; there was only a 43% turnout. In the actual Catalan autonomous election, which had also been set up as a kind of referendum by the secessionist parties, they lost in terms of the number of votes to the remainers. They subsequently disregarded the fact that they had been proposed in this way. On the other hand, since 2014 support for independence has lost much of its support.

[2] ^[13] The Catalan Vidal-Quadras, who was the first president of Vox, is a moderate who was quickly replaced by the current party leader, the Basque Santiago Abascal. Abascal serves as a bridge between the “libertarian” and “traditionalist” factions of the party. Recently, after their poor results in the last election, the “traditionalist” sector, led by the Catalan Jaime Buxadé, which is related to the Falange has largely purged the party of elements of the other one. Basques and Catalans — and Galicians, such as Franco — have played an enormous role in the exacerbated Spanish centralist movement. We must bear in mind that the case of the ethnic groups in Spain is very different from the Irish case, for example. In Spain internal nationalisms, apart from the fact that they did not exist as a real political force until the twentieth century, are unserious groups representing victimhood reminiscent of the lying libels of Black Lives Matter.

[3] ^[14] Many are not sincere independentists, but only “processists” who seek to profit more from the path than from the supposed goal, just as Dr. William Pierce spoke of Israel’s peace “process” as a ruse designed merely to maintain the flow of aid from the white world to the Zionist state in order to reward it for its “progress,” despite the fact that Israel has been making as much progress for more than half a century as Penelope, the wife of Ulysses, who unweaved by night what she had woven by day.