(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. Periodismo, acción política y esperanza)
I turn to these pages of El Debate to greet its readers and to announce that I will be here regularly to set out my opinions on what is happening. Not too often, do not be alarmed. But it is a good moment to speak to you from a very definite perspective about events in Spain and beyond. I assure you that many things are going to happen in the near future, and I also guarantee that not all of them will be bad. That is why, when my dear friends Bieito Rubido and Ramón Pérez Maura, the chiefs at this outlet, invited me to give my opinion and analysis as a member of the European Parliament, I accepted.
We are at a decisive moment for the future of us all, of our grandchildren and of future generations. And not because planet Earth is going to explode, as those who make business and totalitarian politics out of the fear of the end of the world would have it. What is at stake is the survival of our civilization, of our memory and our way of life and of our understanding of the human being.
Some say the die is cast and that we who defend a civilization that believes in freedom, in conscience, in the sacred and transcendent character of the human being, in history, in the family, in the nation, in honor, in tradition, in love and forgiveness, have already lost. We know that we are in danger, but in addition to all the treasures just enumerated we also have the treasure of hope. And we believe that we can win this contest and save, defend and strengthen this way of human life in which the beautiful, the good and the true are possible.
When I bade farewell to journalism back in the summer of 2019, in a Tercera column of an ABC that still had something to do with that conservative, monarchist and national newspaper which is already great history of Spain, I feared that I would greatly miss the craft of daily writing that I had practiced for almost forty years. I had just accepted Santiago Abascal’s offer to go to the European Parliament as a VOX deputy, to do politics, not to narrate it.
Today I assure you that I do not miss journalism. And that I am infinitely grateful to Abascal and to VOX for the opportunity to take part in this historic project of reconquering freedom, rights, integrity and prosperity for Spaniards. It is a thrilling undertaking that barely leaves me any desire to write in the press or in books. And I read the press with far more stinginess of time. Born in a house that was a newsroom, to which 20 or 25 newspapers in four languages and magazines from all over the world arrived every day, today I read less press than ever. I do not think I am less informed. Today many challenges press upon us.
I do write for our Fundación Disenso, in support of its commendable and increasingly effective work of promoting both thought and political activism at once. I write something in its Gaceta de la Iberosfera, which has changed the way of reporting on Ibero-America, or when parties allied with VOX ask me to explain the preposterous political situation of a kidnapped Spain or the delirious drift that some want to impose on everyone else in the European Union toward a totalitarian, interventionist, hoarding and impoverishing socialist project.
Today I am delighted to come to El Debate, one of the few media outlets in Spain that withstands the challenge of resisting the total debasement and cheapening of the message and of purpose. Cardinal Herrera Oria must have something to do with all of that.
It is true that my disaffection toward the evolution of journalism in general, and especially in Spain, which arose decades ago, has by now turned into open aversion to the barbaric abuses, the vileness and the shamelessness in the habitual practice of so very many members of those militia hordes that have taken over most of the media. After the March 11 bombings, when the prior conspiracies of caseríos and Perpignans triumphed, there came to power in Spain politicians who often border on criminal abuse and always on the totalitarian vocation of a socialism proper to societies far more primitive than ours. Their foremost representatives are the felon who today ruins us and bullies more than he governs, and the one who came to power over 192 corpses of Spaniards and today is the surrendered servant of that greatest murderer of America, Nicolás Maduro. The others, those who should have defended us from them, were busy with their businesses and their sports pages. Journalism adapted fully to the character of the rulers, and today the servility of the vast majority of the media and the obsequiousness of their journalists toward power are as offensive as they are sickening.
There is much to write about. We are already in the reconquest of all those spaces that were handed over, out of indolence, ignorance, neglect or cowardice, to a left that did come with elaborate plans, concrete objectives and finely tuned messages. The cultural battle has not been lost because it has not been fought. Here there have only been false defenders of civilization who surrendered the strongholds without a fight. Education, information, communication, culture, the church, (supposed) science, urban planning and ecology, all taken over by the well-organized cadres of a left that has used them to keep mutilating common sense, rationality, dignity, probity and integrity and, of course, freedom.
The cultural battle has begun now and it will be bloody, because those who have won all these conquests without a fight will try to resist and use all their resources to annihilate us. But today we are much better off than fifteen or ten years ago, when there was barely any awareness of the threat or perception of the enemy. Today the battle is already unfolding across all of Spain, across all of Europe and across all of the West. Nothing guarantees that we can win in the short or medium term after so much yielding and so much advantage senselessly granted over the past half century. But we have truth, reality and common sense as weapons that they can never wrest from us. And with fear of nothing and no one, the times of prostration before abuse, lies, injustice and vileness are coming to an end.
Hermann Tertsch is a Distinguished Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.