IS THE RIGHT RISING, OR DID IT NEVER FALL?

by Mark Borland

A scant 32 years ago, after 35 years of repressive dictatorship, Spain officially entered the world of modern democracies. But how much has really changed? Though “democracy” is currently being packaged and exported by politicians like so much fast food, perhaps we should pause and try to figure out what this mystery meat is made of, and whether the chefs are up to specifications. As an American, I know quite well how carelessly burgers can be slung. For all the talk of freedom (to assemble, to speak, to protest, to vote), the reality of censorship and deception is thriving in the United States and in our philosophical exports abroad. Creating a democracy does not automatically wipe out longstanding mechanisms and people of power; moving towards a more democratic society demands support from the government and the people, and it is a process of constant negotiation between selfish predispositions and egalitarian ideals.

Like many Americans you’ll meet in Barcelona, I’m here in part because I’m trying to keep my idealistic flag flying. The last seven years in the States haven’t exactly been the model of social or political perfection and, well, in a lot of ways it just seems better here: universal health care, people (most people) against the war in Iraq, El Gordo... But because of where I come from, I’m also hypersensitive to disturbing tendencies en contra de the democracy Spain is trying to build. It’s very easy to get lost in theory while practice is off doing its own thing.

Perhaps it’s naïve, but I still think democracy is possible as long as we nurture it. And nurturing begins with analysis. Spain has serious problems with institutional abuse of power, and they’re not problems we should nervously laugh off as a consequence of Latin/Mediterranean passion. This isn’t like getting into a screaming fight with your lover, just because it’s cathartic and you can, then falling onto the floor where you fuck like sweaty animals, thinking how great it is to be in a savage place like Barcelona.

Alarum Bells

Madrid, November 11

On the way to protest a government-authorized Nazi party demonstration against immigrants in a working class area of Madrid, an anti-fascist minor was killed by a Nazi via a stab wound to the heart. Some reports say that the Nazi had been attacked first by the anti-fascist youths, demonstrating the perilous cycle of violence already in place. But this doesn't necessarily explain why the local government subsequently prohibited the public demonstration of mourning of the anti-fascist’s death. "La dictadura continúa, la resistencia sigue viva," proclaimed the anti-fascist group Coordinadora Antifascista de Madrid, who went on to accuse the Spanish government of tacitly endorsing a fascist force, as evidenced by the state of the housing market, the proposed law of historic memory, State-endorsed monopolies, and more.

El Jueves versus David Duke

Barcelona, November 24

Leftist voice Pilar Rahola sounds perhaps a more accessible alarm in her observations published in El Periodico as she refers to, “esta España que juzga a humoristas democráticos y, en cambio, recibe a violentos racistas, con mierda por cerebro.” In one corner, the illustrators of the El Jueves magazine cover that showed the Prince and Princess of Asturias doing it doggie-style; in the other, the arrival of white supremacist, anti-Semitic holocaust naysayer, ex-Ku Klux Klan leader, ex-American congressman David Duke. The latter was in Spain for a five-city book tour with a stop in Barcelona, the former were nationally censored and banned from selling their work.

Prejudiced Justice

Madrid, November 20

Two Catalan youths were recently fined 2,730€ each for burning inverted photographs of the King and Queen during their visit to Girona. Their trial was held in Madrid, and while it is a constitutionally defined right to use any of Spain’s official languages for court procedure, the judge, after recognizing that the court secretary was unable to understand testimony in Catalan, refused to ask for a translator. He instead took issue witht he fact that the defendants refused to speak Castilian.

Communal Metastasis

Barcelona, May 2007

But we’re in Barcelona, and in Catalonia things are different, right? Well, no one needs to be reminded of the recent xenophobic assault on the Metro or of the continual accusations of the Mossos’ racial profiling, if not outright abuse. But the story becomes much less us-versus-them when we force ourselves to recall that in the May 2007 general election, the majority of Vic’s seats were won by candidates with anti-immigration platforms. The people, too, are speaking.

The Devil in Gràcia

Barcelona, November 24

We return to the scene of Duke’s charla in Barcelona. Anti-fascist demonstrators came down Gran de Gràcia and were allowed space to chant their unease and burn an effigy of a Klansman before a riot-gear-clad battalion of Mossos no less than 100 meters from where the Librería Europa bookshop sat tucked quietly up another block. The press was corralled at a different street entrance off Diagonal with a plain-clothed Mosso acting as liaison and keeping us informed of events. The Duke supporters were ushered in through another entry further up Diagonal, I assume, because apart from a stray anti-Semitic who threatened a cameraman trying to film his small group of minions (a confrontation in which the Mossos took no interest), no other supporters made themselves known.

This marginalization of all the key players at the event only worked to cloud the reaction of BCN’s community. The protesters might as well have been chanting to a brick wall in Poble Nou and attendees slithered in unseen. The press? Absolutely isolated. How can a measure of the community’s reaction to Duke’s brand of hate be taken if the situation is so controlled that there is actually no interaction at all? I had been in touch with Duke himself and granted an interview, an interview that never happened because the Mossos decided I couldn’t attend the press conference that was held on the (public) sidewalk in front of the bookshop beyond their impenetrable forces. How is it a protection of the right to free speech and assembly if, effectively, the only thing protected was the privacy of Duke and his unfortunate supporters? With such a controversial man in the city, the press should have been allowed direct access, and demonstrators should have been allowed to make their statements plainly heard to those with whom they took issue, instead of to uncaring, ready-to-rumble Mossos. While avoiding conflict and violence was obviously the Mossos’ top priority, the event shouldn’t have been managed in such a way that secrecy and control became the dominant elements. What Duke got seemed more like celebrity treatment, with the paparazzi kept at bay. Ideas as dangerous as Duke’s must instead be openly allowed into the public forum, giving the people the opportunity to either reject, accept, or discuss them.

In the end, after two postponements, the event was cancelled by organizers who said, (though the Mossos deny it), that attendees were required to submit identification, an invasion of privacy that they were unwilling to tolerate. But we can’t know what really happened because no one was there to document the event.

Just Violence?

Barcelona, November 17

An anti-fascist demonstration ended in 6 arrests and harsh criticism of the Mossos’ behavior towards demonstrators: “Se dedicaron durante un par de horas a ‘salir de caza’, emulando a los perros que protegen, apalizando a cualquier joven sospechoso de ser antisistema,” stated the Communist Party of Catalonia. Yet the demonstration also ended with 22 Mossos injured (no official number was provided for the number of demonstrators who went home bruised and battered). While protesters may say that the Mossos provoked the violence against them, provocation does not equal justification, especially when one is trying to make a point about abuse of power. For every idealistic heart that marched that night, there were 100 much more complacent hearts watching scenes of destruction and conflict on national news programs seeing anti-fascists break and burn things and hurt police officers. With everybody taking on bad-guy posturing, good intent falls into the shitter.

So is the right on the rise or has it never fallen? A yes or no answer to these questions would be impossibly simple, but in our own community I think that there is more than a slight scent of fascism in the air. I recognize that it is difficult for a city whose very recent history was defined by oppression and control to rid itself completely of learned ideologies and to employ new ways of interaction and social exchange, but it is a difficulty, nonetheless, that must be overcome. Barcelona’s citizens must demonstrate their unity against whatever social ill presents itself, and this demonstration must be a reflection of their own hearts and heads. Further, the Ajuntament must allow this demonstration a stage. If city officials try to manipulate the way Barcelona’s residents understand and react, true steps towards a peaceful, multi-cultural, progressive society cannot be taken.

Remember Remember the 9th of November

by Mia Klein

What a fucking pity... At the beginning of November, on November 9th to be precise – unfortunately on the very day that also marked the 69th anniversary of the Reich Pogrom Night – Spain legalized Holocaust denial. On the Iberian peninsula, refuting the genocide of 6 million Jewish people during the Hitler regime is now officially permitted. Numb-minded folks may now declare that there are no eyewitnesses to testify to the truth of the gas chambers and that ergo there never were gas chambers. These people’s arguments are typically phrased like this:

Did you ever notice how many survivors they have? Did you ever notice that? Everybody - every time you turn around, 15,000 survivors meet here; 400 survivors convention there. I mean, did you ever notice? Nazis sure were inefficient, weren’t they? Boy, boy, boy! ...You almost have no survivors that ever say they saw a gas chamber or saw the workings of a gas chamber.... they’ll say these preposterous stories that anybody can check out to be a lie, an absolute lie.
(David Duke in an interview with Evelyn Rich, March 1985)

Ouch! The Spanish High Court justified the abrogation of article 607.2 of the Código Penal, established in 1995, with the argument that a law that forbids denying the Holocaust infringes upon the right of free speech. It ruled that free speech is to be valued more highly than the violation of the human dignity of the Jewish people. They reasoned that free speech would most always hurt somebody’s feelings, being as its essence is the right to dissent. It would be dangerous to make this fundamental human right dependent upon safeguarding the feelings of certain groups, according to the judges.

¿Qué dices? Who is talking about the feelings of certain groups? Admittedly, the Jewish community in Spain (whose dignity was surely very much hurt by this decision) is only one of many living their lives and practicing their religion in Spain. But no one needs to weigh their Jewish dignity against the “human” right to free speech when the perpetrators of the Holocaust were tried in Nuremberg for what came to be known as crimes against humanity. Knock, knock, knock! The Holocaust was genocide and doesn’t genocide concern todo el mundo?

Unsurprisingly, as soon as this new law had passed, not even two weeks later, a smiling David Duke comes charging into Spain. He stops in Madrid, then in Valladolid, Salamanca, Valencia, and finally in Barcelona at Pedro Varela’s right-wing bookshop, Librería Europa, to present his newest gibberish on Jewish supremacy. That’s 468 pages of paper wasted per book, a book that has been translated into Spanish and published by Ojeda this year; Ojeda being the publishing company of Pedro Varela Geiss, and Pedro Varela Geiss being a very special specimen: Barcelona’s model-nazi, with quite an interesting role in this spectacle:

April, 1988.
A crowd, saluting in the nazi-facist way, shouts the name of Adolf Hitler. Pedro VARELA, the alleged bookseller and historian, stands center stage, encouraging the audience: gas chambers never existed; black people invade and contaminate our Europe.

Barcelona, October 1998.
Varela is accused of Holocaust denial. During his trial, in a vibrant speech, he proclaims his innocence, insisting that he is a mere bookseller and historian concerned with finding out the truth about the alleged atrocities committed during the Second World War.

Eureka! And Hitler was a true democrat and Auschwitz...a great city. But that story didn’t work. He’s proven a liar and denier, arrested and given an unprecedented sentence of five years for his crimes (two years for denying the Holocaust plus three years for inciting hatred on racial or ethnic grounds).

Since Spain is a pretty stable democracy and an almost happy land, Nazi Varela could have passed as a bad joke if the story had ended there. But it didn’t. Reality is more complex and the clear distinction between good and bad only exists in Hollywood movies. So, Varela is released a year later and enters the court again, this time on his own free will, in the role of a freedom fighter arguing for his right to free speech and against paragraph 602.7. Last month, then, Varela wins, the case is closed and Holocaust denial legalised.

But the story turns out to have a happy end nonetheless. A group of left-wing intellectuals (journalist and writer Pilar Rahola; journalists Antoni Puigverd, Francesc-Marc Álvaro and Vicenç Villatoro; lawyer and ex-delegate Magda Oranich; and historian Joan B. Culla) filed an action against Duke’s book presentation based on paragraph 510. That’s the paragraph that says it’s not OK to have campaigns that incite people to lynch blacks and burn Jews. Because that’s not free speech. Free speech means the right to dissent. It doesn’t mean the right to promote hate towards a group of people or to justify genocide.

The court didn’t ban Duke’s performance, but did give the Mossos orders to shut it down if at any point he began to incite violence or otherwise break the law. Rahola was “indignant” that the event wasn’t cancelled but, in the end, due to the group’s complaint, the whole thing fell through anyway: On Saturday, November 24th, ex-KKK leader Duke and Holocaust denier Varela Geiss stood united in front of the TV cameras angrily voicing their objections against the imposed presence of the Mossos. ‘Free speech!!’ the couple cries. ‘This is not a free country,’ they whine, ‘and a dark day for Spain.’ But to no effect. Duke suspends the conference and the spook is over.

With David Duke out of the country and Varela Geiss back in his book shop making new plans for destroying tolerance and convivencia, things have returned to normal in the capital where the Catalans - united again in their quest for independence - are out on the streets to demonstrate for their Catalunya. You could think of the city as a happy multi-cultural melting pot that received a brief stir-up if the return to normalcy didn’t also entail the return to the daily discriminations that don’t make the headlines but determine the lives of immigrants here. One day you see a portero shouting at an African who tries to enter the building to visit a friend; the next day you try to explain to your British friends why, in Spain, it is alright to call Pakistanis pakis and Latin Americans sudacas. And later on you overhear a conversation between two Spanish ladies arguing about which country produces better cleaning women – Russia or Romania. What’s melting in the Catalan melting pot - prejudices or tolerancia?

Between Duke’s homecoming to the European mothership and the debate about “the right” and “the left” (and the right to be “right” and the right to be “left”), some other very pertinent issues have been drowned out: Over 50% of Barcelonins are unhappy with the current state of politics. Voter participation is forecasted to drop even further, and a recent EU-wide survey showed that 35,7% of Spaniards don’t give a flying fuck about politics (their level of disinterest only surpassed by that of the Portuguese). Let’s see where this growing disenchantment with politics will lead the Catalan paisos…