“ETA is a Marxist organization”

Post-prandial drunk, I’m afraid, but here are a couple of quotes from a being called Poser on some other universe out there beyond the stars:

• As to the politics of Euzkadi Ta Eskatasuna, the organization on which the Spanish government is trying to pin the Madrid bombing, from Professor Halliday’s comments you’d think that it was a politically and intellectually isolated organization whose positions and actions were comprehensible only in the special Basque linguistic and cultural context, like the Oriental cults in Sax-Roehmer’s Fu Manchu stories. This is hardly the case.
• ETA is a Marxist organization whose leadership is well aware of the political situation around the world and in other parts of Spain and which makes fine distinctions among the policies and behavior of the various Spanish political parties, the national government, and the regional governments.
• You may or may not agree with ETA’s positions, but they are hardly those of some strange and isolated cult.
• The racism and extreme Catholicism have been toned down, but even so, mainstream Basque nationalism is far from the revolutionary Marxism of ETA.

If you prick us, do we not bleed? Nah, sod it. You can think - and say - what you like, but I’m heading off for just one more glass before I stagger up the Passeig de Gracia and expire gracialessly under whichever tree will have me.

Related posts

• Betting on secession
• Arana’s El Catalanismo
• Kurlansky / Basques / Wikipedia
• Official languages
• Ethnic tagging

Comments

1. Geoff sez:
   12 March 2004 at 4:49 PM

   And al-Quaeda is really nothing more than a kind of big folk club.

2. J. Cassian Bloggerfeller sez:
   12 March 2004 at 6:13 PM

   Hey, if ETA are true Marxists shouldn’t they be fighting for an end to Basque identity? You know how worked up Marx and Engels got about the existence of small “unhistorical” peoples. I know Engels publicly called for the genocide of Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes and Croats so they would be “exterminated down to their very names”. IIRC He also looked forward to the complete disappearance of the Bretons amongst others. So I can imagine what his and Marx’s attitude to the Basques would be. If ETA were following a correct Marxist line they should be encouraging Basque “autogenocide” (maybe like Pol Pot did in Cambodia).

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