Two videos have been circulating on thousands of social media accounts in the last few hours. In one you see Esperanza Aguirre, president of the Community of Madrid for a decade, stating that the beginning of the fateful Civil War in Spain was a coup d’état [sic] that the left carried out in 1934 for not assuming a victory for the right in the elections a year earlier. “The PSOE did not accept the alternation in power,” says a former leader still with some prestige in some sector of the central PP and who was one of the first people to block Ferraz Street on the Ides of autumn, around the federal headquarters of the socialists.
The other video is an interview with Pello Otxandiano, the candidate for lehendakari by EH Bildu. Asked by Aimar Bretos about whether ETA was a terrorist group, the leader of the Abertzale candidacy assures that “we can discuss the considerations of what is terrorism and what it is not” and refuses to call the murderous organization what it was.
Aguirre and Otxandiano’s words will probably have no effect on the electorate of their political parties. But they should make anyone get up from their seat: anyone who doesn’t know his story is condemned to repeat it.
The worrying thing about both statements is the effect they can have on younger generations. Aguirre spoke before a group of young PP activists and EH Bildu has a strong appeal among the new Basque generations.
Part by part. ETA no longer exists and the Basque Country enjoys peace. But, not so long ago, the daily life of society was marked by a terrorist gang that killed almost a thousand people, destroyed thousands of families and forced many others to leave. Some young people don’t know this happened. Few tell them. There are those who even want it to go unnoticed. They don’t know who Miguel Ángel Blanco was. That is why memory is so important.
What about Esperanza Aguirre is an attempt at textbook revisionism. Her words could confuse some brain. Javier Durán took it with humor in X by publishing a photo of Franco and Mussolini: “Now it will turn out that everything was a coup d’état except mine. “I’m dead, Benito,” the comment said. That is why memory is so important.
Machado said that “of ten heads, nine attack and one thinks.” The goal is for that thinking mind to tell the truth.
