(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. Los peligros en la ilusión)
Anyone who has followed the Spanish media, the television channels, the radio stations and the newspapers after the murder of the conservative youth leader Charlie Kirk will have remembered how ETA’s victims were slandered after being gunned down by the gunmen of terror. Some may not remember those victims killed by terrorists who today enjoy freedom, respect when not admiration from their neighbours, and often salaries from the public purse as politicians or pampered civil servants.
Afterwards others took charge of insulting and discrediting the dead man so that nobody would dare defend him and condemn the murder. Since Wednesday night we have seen once again what ETA used to do with rumours about the victims, spread by its organisations, by its newspaper Egin and by its banners and pamphlets, all of it orchestrated by those who today are partners, allies and close collaborators of the head of the government. ETA is part of the government in every sense. It is Sánchez’s most faithful ally. But beyond that it has imposed its way of treating dissenters on every outlet the government controls, which is nearly all of them.
But now we see and hear it in almost every media outlet in the country, all of them obedient because dependent on the government, public and private alike. Suddenly we realise that, with few exceptions, an immense majority of Spanish media today are what EGIN once was, outlets determined to defend what had never been defended by media considered civilised, namely that a victim is so contemptible that they end up being presented as deserving of and guilty for their own death.
It is clear that if the left reaches the conclusion that it has to kill again in Spain because things are going against it, and kills one, three or ten of us who are considered ultras or fascists by the socialist government’s apparatus, we will be duly slandered and criminalised until at least parts of society are brought to feel relief that we have disappeared.
So that the population reaches the essential conclusion they are after: that the political situation, call it hardship, misery, abuses, tension, far-right threat or polarisation, improves with the disappearance of certain protagonists. It is the small tragedy that brings great relief. It is a shame that he died, but it brings us much peace that it happened to him.
After all, that is what it is about, as TVE, the SER and so many others have told us these past days: it is a shame that someone has to resort to such methods, but the victim had done everything to deserve that it be him and not somebody else. And of course, deploring the violence, life goes on and it will be better without people who are far-right, fascist, misogynist, transphobic, Zionist, homophobic or white supremacist.
One has to go back to the communist and national-socialist press of the past to find this clear determination to explain, justify and legitimise the annihilation, the death, of political adversaries. In Spain it already seems normalised. And not only in Spain. In the United States we are seeing abominable reactions of celebration and even enthusiasm at the death of a man who has been caricatured to implausible extremes.
Those who hate Kirk and do not know Kirk hate someone who has nothing to do with the Kirk they have just murdered. But in any case they are pleased because he is dead. The world is facing a change of era that makes many people dizzy. Above all those who have controlled the last 70 years of discourse, power and privilege. We know that those who are afraid of losing what they believed they would hold forever are capable of anything. Many of them, our head of government included, if only to escape prison for the crimes committed by his gang.
That is why we must start from the certainty that, along with the hope of profound change so that Spaniards and all Western nations recover their rights, their freedom and their sense of promise, there comes an imminent danger from a left that believed it did not need to kill much in Spain and that may now reconsider in the light of those expectations.
Nor will it be only here. There have been attacks on Trump, on Villavicencio, on Fico, on Babis, on Kirk, on Uribe, on Bolsonaro. In Germany alone, 95 percent of the assaults on politicians have as their victims the so-called ultras of the Alternative for Germany. They call them extremists and they assault nobody, yet they are assaulted more than anyone. Political violence today is exercised exclusively from the left.
This change of era generates immense hopes, but nobody should conceal the risks it brings with it, because those who have killed in order to win in politics, ETA and the PSOE in Spain as the FARC or the cartels across the Americas, are going to want to kill again because their discourse does not catch on, the young are fleeing them, their failure is obvious and the ideological left is succumbing. That is why we must accept that in many places there will be blood.
Hermann Tertsch is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.
