(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. Palabra y dignidad)
In Spain we have spent twenty years directly confronted with the lie as a form of government, with the principle of contradiction abolished and semantics kidnapped, prostituted and gang-raped.
The matter of the despicable, illegal and perverse Amnesty Law, by which a majority of parliament intends that politicians pardon one another’s crimes in order to create a regime of impunity for the gang of wrongdoers that governs and hands out favors, is a criminal operation that comes from far off, in time and in space.
The massacre that ended 192 lives and cut short thousands, the same one that brought us José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero, was the initial moment of the process that now seeks to close and armor-plate itself with the definitive and violent exclusion from the system of half of Spanish society. No one right now can assure that it will succeed. There is too much moral misery and overflowing corruption in a power that behaves like a band of outlaws. But let no one dare to rule it out.
I always remember Ferdinand Peroutka when there is talk of the semantic perversion that accompanies criminal socialist regimes. And of the detachment from every commitment of honor that comes with the rejection of the lie and the value of one’s own word. A journalist exiled from communist Czechoslovakia, he used the radio from Munich to encourage his compatriots in the daily step of resistance, which was the defense of the meaning of words and respect for them. Because that is what marked, what marks, the difference between those who resist and those assimilated into the system — the thin line over the abyss that separates having dignity and honor as one’s reference from, on the contrary, the sordid drive for abuse, the power of impunity and the greed of resentment.
In this Spain, once again the vanguard of the worst, no one is surprised anymore if someone promises one thing and does the opposite without the slightest self-reproach. What is more, often without reproach from others. It does cause astonishment, yes, to see rulers assert something before the cameras in the morning and in the afternoon deny it and swear the opposite. But it has no social effect whatsoever. The networks are full of recordings of solemn declarations by Pedro Sánchez, his government and other cronies in which they assert that what they perpetrated this Thursday in the Congress of Deputies is immoral, illegal, criminal and unviable.
This is probably the greatest collective self-incrimination of rulers since the show trials of the Moscow of the terror years under Stalin. With the difference that here in Spain all the accused acknowledged, appraised and characterized their crime — of high treason and coup d’état — before committing it. Right up to consummating it on Thursday. And they did so cheerfully and without any coercion or pressure. Nor, of course, the tortures suffered by the many Bukharins who stammered out their crimes, real or invented, through toothless mouths and faces turned into a mass of bloody flesh.
The crimes we are witnessing now — this nauseating betrayal and the conspiracy for a coup d’état and the overthrow of the legal powers, especially the judiciary — are cheered and applauded by public and private media turned into pamphlets of the worst agitation ordered by the powerful. This is only possible after decades of degradation in political debate and the penetration of moral misery and the cowardice of convenience into every segment of society.
The reconquest of the dignity of an apathetic and indolent society is the titanic but necessary task for those of us who do not want to leave our children and grandchildren in a nightmare of a life. That is why we must restore legality, abolish impunity and fight the lie until we bring to the dock the wrongdoers who have perpetrated this crime.
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.
