Of Basques and Moors
The Rio Film Festival is still on here, and I just got back from a rather bizarre double feature: the very appropriately named The House of Flying Daggers (highlights: wicked kung-fu-in-the-bamboo fight scene even better than Crouching Tiger; heroine accurately described as “beautiful, but cunning”) and The Basque Game, a documentary on the Basque conflict and the ETA by Julio Medem. Medem directed Lovers of the Arctic Circle and Sex and Lucia, both great films, but I have a special soft spot for The Red Squirrel ever since seeing it, strangely enough, in Bangkok.
The Basque Game, made up almost entirely of interviews with something like 70 people, isn’t exactly as alluring as his narrative work, and at 115 minutes it might be a little bit more about the Basque issue than you really wanted to know (the film was a phenomenon in Spain, the most widely seen documentary in that country's history). But it’s well shot and cut, and it’s sincere in its efforts to make some sense of the situation. It certainly cleared up some of my doubts about what exactly was and is the deal with ETA, as well as the 2003 elections, the fall of Aznar, the pulling of Spanish troops from Iraq, etc..
I can’t sum up 200 years of history or even two hours of testimony (if you're interested and understand Spanish, you can watch hours of footage from the film at the official site), but the basic picture I got goes something like this: ETA has its roots in resistance to Franco, who had it out for the Basques. After Franco fell and there was a transition to democracy in the late 70s early 80s, the Basques thought their demands for autonomy would be met, but the transition was slow and partial. ETA had its heyday then, killing up to 100 people a month, mostly generals and police chiefs, occasionally politicians. They enjoyed moderate support from other sectors of society hoping for strong social change post-Franco.
By the late 90s ETA had brought so much anger and repression down on the Basques that many of them had repudiated it. In response, ETA began to threaten and assassinate Basques who spoke out against it. They no longer enjoyed public support, and the scale and number of their attacks was diminishing. In 1998, ETA offered an open-ended truce to lay the foundations for negotiations with the government. However, government made no gestures or efforts to further those talks, leading to a resumption of hostility in 1999.
It turns out that the Jose Maria Aznar’s conservative Popular Party (PP), which had been in power since 1991, had for some time been running on a platform of fear and outrage at ETA’s terror attacks, promising and delivering hard-line tactics while refusing to negotiate with even moderate Basques until all violence had ceased. Furthermore, it made a practice of vilifying any party or person who did not follow its policy of publicly denouncing ETA and refusing to negotiate, accusing them of aiding and abetting the terrorists. This recipe stymied the Basque's own peace initiatives and virtually guaranteed that there would be no end to violence, since the radical Basque separatists could use the government’s intransigence as an argument for militant action.
And yet, for what were probably their own calculating reasons, ETA offered a truce in 1988. The PP government could have made any number of peace offerings, such as the return of jailed ETA members to prisons in Basque territory (whose family have to travel across Spain and to the Canary Islands to make visits), and cashed in on a peace settlement. Bizarrely, it antagonized the Basques further, essentially scuttling the negotiation process and all but asking ETA to end the truce.
Since then, the PP has continued made a campaign issue of – guess what – the war on terror, more specifically, the war on ETA. It has made public heroes out of those threatened by ETA, and made great political use of the suffering of victims of ETA’s attacks. It has also come to control a great deal of the Spanish media (this was said in the film, I don’t know what the media situation in Spain is), and has played up the risk of impending attack. It passed legislation banning one popular Basque party from the March elections (forcing out a number of incumbent mayors and representatives), and tried to have The Basque Game itself banned.
Hmm, let’s see here: fearmongering, manipulation of the media, no interest in negotiations or peaceful solutions, a preference for violent action, impugning the patriotism of your critics, anti-democratic tendencies... any of this starting to ring some bells?
Is it any wonder these guys were willing to go along with Bush?
The film was made before the March 11 Madrid bombings and the election that brought down Aznar, which is a shame. But it is clear that the PP’s support had been eroded by growing dissatisfaction with a government “crackdown” on terrorism that seemed interminable. In the run-up to the election, the PP, with its conservative base, was just barely able to maintain an edge over the socialists by constantly accusing them of weakness towards ETA (read: sending the wrong message).
Then came March 11.
In the David Brooks / William Safire version, the bombings turned the Spanish overnight from brave, willing allies to sniveling yellow appeasement monkeys. Leveler heads pointed out that the population had largely opposed the war, and that this had already eroded Aznar’s support. But judging from the film, what probably happened, and I think Krugman may have pointed this out at the time, is that much of the PP’s majority was based on its perceived strength in the fight against ETA. (Spaniards too are more worried about their own safety than Iraq). When the government was caught lying about the bombing, blaming it on ETA when evidence pointed to Al Qaeda, they instantly lost their credibility with their “swing” supporters on what was their key issue. The socialists were already on the PP’s heels; the scandal over the bombing investigation tipped the scales.
The parallels are many and unpleasant. For one, it sounds like the PP has essentially been relying on the same technique of scaring the crap out of people and cracking down on civil liberties in order to act on an unpopular conservative agenda that the Bush administration is. Moreover, the PP, like Bush, seems to have an aversion to diplomacy, and has actually effectively torpedoed negotiations before they could off the ground. Instead, they advocate violent confrontation, and make heavy use of coercive, you’re-either-with-us-or-against-us rhetoric.
It starts to seem like a number of governments in a number of countries are all using the same plays out of the same playbook. Certainly Sharon has appropriated Bush’s preemption and no-negotiating-with-terrorists talk to accomplish his own ends. Berlusconi, I wouldn't know, but he certainly controls the media. Maybe what we have here is a kind of technology, a set of best practices, transferable across national borders, for disarming political opposition and implementing a radical conservative agenda against the will of the people.
But then, this technology really isn’t really so new. It goes back at least to 1933.
The other parallel, also unpleasant, is with the Iraqi militants, and really all terrorist groups. ETA has learned to propagate itself, indoctrinating youth, funneling adolescent rage and discontent into violence, using each new government attack or crackdown to recruit new members and sympathizers. It’s almost 30 years since ETA was born, most Basques are opposed, but it has yet to be stamped out. Force alone will simply not work, ever. It only perpetuates the cycle. Unfortunately, that makes force a perfect policy for those who benefit politically from the conflict. And there will always be those who benefit from conflict. (If you are Allawi, unpopular among Iraqis and digging the powers you granted yourself under martial law, do you really want peaceful, legitimate, all-inclusive elections?)
In any case, the fact that the Spanish ended up throwing out the PP does offer some hope. A democracy can get fed up of being manipulated. It could happen here: imagine if on October 30, somebody blows up Grand Central or Union Station. Bush says “We know its Al Qaeda,” insists it was Bin Laden, but the next day we find out that it was some kind of Timothy McVeigh and that Bush knew it. What would be the effect? Bush would lose all but his most ardent supporters, just like the PP.
But would that ever happen? Is the American media at this point capable of calling a lie a lie?
I think we already know the answer to that one. We don’t have to wait for Bush to lie about another attack: he already blamed Saddam for 9/11. That’s no worse (nor less ridiculous) than blaming ETA for March 11. The difference is, the press let him get away with it. It's two years and 1,000 U.S. deaths later, and they still can't bring themselves to say it.
The Basque Game, made up almost entirely of interviews with something like 70 people, isn’t exactly as alluring as his narrative work, and at 115 minutes it might be a little bit more about the Basque issue than you really wanted to know (the film was a phenomenon in Spain, the most widely seen documentary in that country's history). But it’s well shot and cut, and it’s sincere in its efforts to make some sense of the situation. It certainly cleared up some of my doubts about what exactly was and is the deal with ETA, as well as the 2003 elections, the fall of Aznar, the pulling of Spanish troops from Iraq, etc..
I can’t sum up 200 years of history or even two hours of testimony (if you're interested and understand Spanish, you can watch hours of footage from the film at the official site), but the basic picture I got goes something like this: ETA has its roots in resistance to Franco, who had it out for the Basques. After Franco fell and there was a transition to democracy in the late 70s early 80s, the Basques thought their demands for autonomy would be met, but the transition was slow and partial. ETA had its heyday then, killing up to 100 people a month, mostly generals and police chiefs, occasionally politicians. They enjoyed moderate support from other sectors of society hoping for strong social change post-Franco.
By the late 90s ETA had brought so much anger and repression down on the Basques that many of them had repudiated it. In response, ETA began to threaten and assassinate Basques who spoke out against it. They no longer enjoyed public support, and the scale and number of their attacks was diminishing. In 1998, ETA offered an open-ended truce to lay the foundations for negotiations with the government. However, government made no gestures or efforts to further those talks, leading to a resumption of hostility in 1999.
It turns out that the Jose Maria Aznar’s conservative Popular Party (PP), which had been in power since 1991, had for some time been running on a platform of fear and outrage at ETA’s terror attacks, promising and delivering hard-line tactics while refusing to negotiate with even moderate Basques until all violence had ceased. Furthermore, it made a practice of vilifying any party or person who did not follow its policy of publicly denouncing ETA and refusing to negotiate, accusing them of aiding and abetting the terrorists. This recipe stymied the Basque's own peace initiatives and virtually guaranteed that there would be no end to violence, since the radical Basque separatists could use the government’s intransigence as an argument for militant action.
And yet, for what were probably their own calculating reasons, ETA offered a truce in 1988. The PP government could have made any number of peace offerings, such as the return of jailed ETA members to prisons in Basque territory (whose family have to travel across Spain and to the Canary Islands to make visits), and cashed in on a peace settlement. Bizarrely, it antagonized the Basques further, essentially scuttling the negotiation process and all but asking ETA to end the truce.
Since then, the PP has continued made a campaign issue of – guess what – the war on terror, more specifically, the war on ETA. It has made public heroes out of those threatened by ETA, and made great political use of the suffering of victims of ETA’s attacks. It has also come to control a great deal of the Spanish media (this was said in the film, I don’t know what the media situation in Spain is), and has played up the risk of impending attack. It passed legislation banning one popular Basque party from the March elections (forcing out a number of incumbent mayors and representatives), and tried to have The Basque Game itself banned.
Hmm, let’s see here: fearmongering, manipulation of the media, no interest in negotiations or peaceful solutions, a preference for violent action, impugning the patriotism of your critics, anti-democratic tendencies... any of this starting to ring some bells?
Is it any wonder these guys were willing to go along with Bush?
The film was made before the March 11 Madrid bombings and the election that brought down Aznar, which is a shame. But it is clear that the PP’s support had been eroded by growing dissatisfaction with a government “crackdown” on terrorism that seemed interminable. In the run-up to the election, the PP, with its conservative base, was just barely able to maintain an edge over the socialists by constantly accusing them of weakness towards ETA (read: sending the wrong message).
Then came March 11.
In the David Brooks / William Safire version, the bombings turned the Spanish overnight from brave, willing allies to sniveling yellow appeasement monkeys. Leveler heads pointed out that the population had largely opposed the war, and that this had already eroded Aznar’s support. But judging from the film, what probably happened, and I think Krugman may have pointed this out at the time, is that much of the PP’s majority was based on its perceived strength in the fight against ETA. (Spaniards too are more worried about their own safety than Iraq). When the government was caught lying about the bombing, blaming it on ETA when evidence pointed to Al Qaeda, they instantly lost their credibility with their “swing” supporters on what was their key issue. The socialists were already on the PP’s heels; the scandal over the bombing investigation tipped the scales.
The parallels are many and unpleasant. For one, it sounds like the PP has essentially been relying on the same technique of scaring the crap out of people and cracking down on civil liberties in order to act on an unpopular conservative agenda that the Bush administration is. Moreover, the PP, like Bush, seems to have an aversion to diplomacy, and has actually effectively torpedoed negotiations before they could off the ground. Instead, they advocate violent confrontation, and make heavy use of coercive, you’re-either-with-us-or-against-us rhetoric.
It starts to seem like a number of governments in a number of countries are all using the same plays out of the same playbook. Certainly Sharon has appropriated Bush’s preemption and no-negotiating-with-terrorists talk to accomplish his own ends. Berlusconi, I wouldn't know, but he certainly controls the media. Maybe what we have here is a kind of technology, a set of best practices, transferable across national borders, for disarming political opposition and implementing a radical conservative agenda against the will of the people.
But then, this technology really isn’t really so new. It goes back at least to 1933.
The other parallel, also unpleasant, is with the Iraqi militants, and really all terrorist groups. ETA has learned to propagate itself, indoctrinating youth, funneling adolescent rage and discontent into violence, using each new government attack or crackdown to recruit new members and sympathizers. It’s almost 30 years since ETA was born, most Basques are opposed, but it has yet to be stamped out. Force alone will simply not work, ever. It only perpetuates the cycle. Unfortunately, that makes force a perfect policy for those who benefit politically from the conflict. And there will always be those who benefit from conflict. (If you are Allawi, unpopular among Iraqis and digging the powers you granted yourself under martial law, do you really want peaceful, legitimate, all-inclusive elections?)
In any case, the fact that the Spanish ended up throwing out the PP does offer some hope. A democracy can get fed up of being manipulated. It could happen here: imagine if on October 30, somebody blows up Grand Central or Union Station. Bush says “We know its Al Qaeda,” insists it was Bin Laden, but the next day we find out that it was some kind of Timothy McVeigh and that Bush knew it. What would be the effect? Bush would lose all but his most ardent supporters, just like the PP.
But would that ever happen? Is the American media at this point capable of calling a lie a lie?
I think we already know the answer to that one. We don’t have to wait for Bush to lie about another attack: he already blamed Saddam for 9/11. That’s no worse (nor less ridiculous) than blaming ETA for March 11. The difference is, the press let him get away with it. It's two years and 1,000 U.S. deaths later, and they still can't bring themselves to say it.
posted by Benjamin Lessing at 3:24 AM
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