Intolerance

People usually think that WWII started on September 1, 1939. That is the day that Nazi Germany invaded Poland. The truth is, Nazi Germany started their murderous campaign years before that, years before the anexation of Austria and the Sudetenland.

They started all on the Iberian Peninsula, they started by providing an obscure military thug with the logistics and the weapons to attack the Spanish Republic and the newly formed Basque and Catalonyan Republics. Basques and Catalans spent most of the 30's negotiating with Madrid for full independence, they had obteined the status of autonomous regions when the war broke up. They had their own flags, their own currency, their own armies, their own national antems, they were issuing their own passports but most important of all, they had legal recognition of their own languages.

War came and took all that away, and a Basque army that was supposed to last days against the combined forces of the Spaniards, Germans and Italians managed to stand up to the formidable enemies and lasted weeks, and then months. And the Germans and Italians had time to realize that the Basques were not only fierce combatants, they also were not communists nor atheists. Franco couldn't allow that to happen, so he ordered the destruction of the very heart of the Basques, their sacred town of Gernika. Bilbo came next and when it fell the Basque Government had to go into exile, not before the Spaniards had murdered all the Gudaris that had been spared on a deal brokered by the Italians to accelerate the surrender of the Basque capital city and were on board of a british ship that was supposed to take them to England.

With Franco's fascist and illegal regime came 35 years of persecution of everything Basque, the language and the culture were suffocated and many Basques paid with their lives when they dared to stand up to this. And then there is the ones that survived torture, and the ones that were expelled from Euskadi and Spain, and the ones that were relocated to other places within Spain.

A couple of days ago that horror came back to the Basque Country, the Spanish government on an all out attack on Euskara, the Basque language closed down the offices and seized the computers and servers of Egunkaria, the only news paper printed in Basque. But that was not all, they also raided the main office of the Ikastolas, the Ikastolas being the elementary schools were children receive all their education in euskara, they are saying that these schools are "hotbeds of terrorism".

They also raided the office of an internet server called Plazagunea which is the core for a number of Basque cultural web sites, including the web site to the Arantzazu Sanctuary. All those web pages are doing desperate efforts to put their sites back since they represent the voice of the Basques and a window to the world.

And why did I start this note mentioning Nazi Germany?

Simple, to many, Nazi Germany is the epitome of intolerance, racial intolerance, cultural intolerance. Franco was able to get in power thanks to Hitler, one of the Francoist ministers was Manuel Aznar, they met in Africa were Franco brewed his rebellion. His son, Jose Maria Aznar is the Spanish Prime Minister today, and he is behind the events that took place in Euskal Herria last week, his party, the Partido Popular was founded by former Francoist ministers and many of the members today are the children of those same Francoist ministers. You do the math.

At the end of WWII someone said after we witnessed the horror of Hitler's death camps: "Never Again".

He ment never again to no one.

Bakea!

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