(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. Sánchez decide morir matando)
The cold drop — let us call things by their name — DANA and the rest, which has devastated towns, hamlets, roads and bridges above all in the vicinity of Valencia and caused the terrible human tragedy of hundreds of dead and thousands of shattered lives, ought also to be a colossal deluge that sweeps away a large part of the Spanish political class.
In the first place, of course, it ought to sweep away and sink forever the delinquent government of Pedro Sánchez, which has shown, even more if that is possible than on the countless other occasions in six years, that it will walk over corpses to achieve the only thing that matters to it, which is its survival as a government devoted to systematic abuse and to the enrichment of its members and of related individuals and groups.
Never has the maxim been more true that the government finds no time to govern because it is fully devoted to business. As also that the only thing the government does not steal is time to devote to effective management for the sake of the common good, time for what used to be understood as governing. They are too busy buying loyalties, plundering funds to pay for them, and cutting deals with organized crime to multiply their fortunes across Caribbean islands.
But it is not only negligence, indolence and corruption. This socialist government and its ideological partners in Brussels — who are the People’s Party, the Greens, Macron’s short-skirted liberals and the ultra-left — bear great responsibility for the severity of the floods and of other harmful phenomena of climatic origin. Because they have all embraced the green-climate ideology or theology, they destroy the habitat in the countryside with their regulatory jungle, they prohibit the cleaning of forests and watercourses, they demolish dams and weirs and other resources for taming precisely the excesses of nature in our European landscapes, built up and learned over thousands of years. Now some semi-educated, when not illiterate, politicians, allied with bureaucrats appointed to decide in fields wholly foreign to them, about which they know almost nothing, arrogate to themselves the right to repeal the results of millennial labor and knowledge, to scorn wisdom, customs and common sense, and to issue directives and regulations without cease to fine, repress and persecute practices that had been imposed by experience. And when, as a fruit of their Adamite, arrogant ideology and their contempt for reason, a disaster occurs, out they come — like the truly contemptible Ursula von der Leyen — to use the dead and the waters to turn their mill of the climate-change refrain that would vindicate all the barbarities they perpetrate in the name of preserving the planet.
Barbarities that serve, on the one hand, to curtail freedom and personal autonomy, to impose codes of social discipline in order to subject society to behaviors neither desired nor requested by those affected, and, of course, so that the elites whom those politicians serve may do lucrative business without much competition and always from a position of absolute advantage. The face masks of the Spanish politicians during COVID are only the smallest ice cube of the tip of the colossal iceberg of corruption that accompanies all that ideological verbiage.
These crimes are abominable and, on their own, already deserving of disqualification and prosecution and criminal punishment. But, grave as they are, they pale before what has been demonstrated by this government in these days. With its refusal to impose the state of emergency and to send, as would have been logical, the army and other security forces massively to the region for a great rescue and aid operation, what the government of Pedro Sánchez has wanted is, literally, to let the dead rot in the hands of the Valencian regional government. So as afterward to blame it for the monstrous resulting situation. This has been made crystal clear in the nauseating statements of the defense minister Margarita Robles and other members of that government, as well as by the para-official organ of the Sánchez government for the outrages of disinformation, which is the newspaper El País.
We are not going to speak of the ineptitude of the general services of the State, nor of the incompetence of all the socialist cronies of the favor network who occupy the managerial posts in the administration, because it is a fact that under Sánchez and after the pandemic nothing works except tax collection and propaganda.
And little comment is deserved by the impotence shown by the president of the Valencian regional government, Mazón, and other lamentable behaviors of his government, such as the cruel impertinence of the regional minister Nuria Montes in her orders to the relatives of the dead. They only demonstrate that terrible mediocrity of the Spanish political cadres, brought about by the discrediting of politics, which drives so far away from it the best-prepared and most qualified Spaniards, technically, culturally and perhaps humanly.
The state of emergency, which was inexcusable from the very first moment because of the gravity of the tragedy, plainly national — because it affects several regions and because the effects of the tragedy have a massive national impact. But the Sánchez government has wanted to pass the dead on to the PP government, even if in doing so it multiplied their number. And there lies the crime. Because we will probably come to confirm that many of the dead are not drowned but died in their homes, isolated, or perhaps we can say “murdered by the delay” of a rescue that in every European country without exception would have come sooner. And that was deliberately impeded. Because this murderous delay, which is still going on as this is being written, was avoidable with an immediate deployment of the army to open the supply routes and pull the population out of their entire homes from under tons of mud, reeds, trees and rubble.
This immense Spanish tragedy is set within a process of general degradation under a dictatorship of plunder and lies that already objectively governs and that will soon exercise greater violence with the militia-like turn of the screw at RTVE. This goes from being the propaganda machinery to being the war machinery of a government that, besieged by its corruption, its crimes, abuses, illegalities and its betrayal of the nation, has reached, like Nicolás Maduro, the conclusion that power is the only guarantor of its impunity. If they lose the one, they lose the other, and all those who have been the praetorian guard of the adventurer Pedro Sánchez end up sitting on the bench beside him. To Sánchez we Spaniards do not matter at all, neither alive nor dead. But now Sánchez and his coup-plotting and corrupt government have decided to hold out, to bunker down and to die killing. In the cold drop of Valencia they have just proved it.
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.
