This morning driving through the snow watching BMW ‘s shunting into each other, and their owners leaping out to hysterically inspect the damage to their pride and joy, I was listening to Frederico Lorca‘s niece talking about the death of her poet uncle at the hands of the Falangists in the Spanish Civil War.
The Lorca family do not want his body to be disinterred from one of three possible mass grave sites. He lies where he lies and we would learn nothing from his remains if they were found. Lorca was executed by a right wing grouping intolerant of his homosexuality, his left wing views and above all his writing. Despite being one of the major writers of the twentieth Century, his works were banned in Spain until Franco’s death.
At the other end of the scale of political executions we have the destruction of the Polish officer and intellectual class at Katyn. For decades it was argued who had carried out these massacres, the SS or the NKVD, in the end it was confirmed by eye witnesses as the NKVD, but my point was that it was entirely plausable that either side could have carried this out in the name of their ideology.
Since then we have had Pol Pot’s exterminations, that extolled leftist ‘back to being peasants’ ideology that first found root in the Left Bank of Paris ‘bohemia’ in the thirties. The Right Wing death camps in former Yugoslavia, and ethnic massacres in Darfur and Rwanda.
All of these State ideologies, Left wing, Right wing, Ethnic and Religious have two things in common. A complete disregard for the value for human life and an utter intolerance for any other viewpoint or value system.
Lorca’s niece said for her father there was a complete ‘heavy weight of his abscence’ for fifty years. This is true I feel for every relative of a victim of political murder.
We are in a perilous position at present, the economic order that we have known for sixty years has collapsed. We have an extreme Government that believes that it is right that it should know everything about us, to discern any threat of politcal dissent, and Tories should also remember that Thatcher talked about the enemy within, about her fellow citizens who opposed her policies. Those that are at the top of the current political tree are unconstrained by anything approaching a written Constitution were we can declare their actions unconstitutional. At present we should be grateful they have not turned against the people, and the people have turned against them. That way leads to mass burial pits.
The Government have interned without trial before, and this led to a bloody backlash, do not think it will never happen again.
The BMW drivers I saw this morning alternately weeping or raging over the damage to their precious cars, have been bought off by the trinkets of life by the State, what will happen when these trinkets disappear with their jobs and homes. They will look to any extreme party that will give them back their sense of security, if that means the destruction of a couple of hundred lives that will not agree to be coerced by the State, they will either ingore it or sanction political murder.
I value human life above all, I respect other peoples points of view, even though I may disagree with them- that is why I am a Libertarian. I want to be left alone. However unless the State Left or Right reforms itself with a respect for the Liberal values that made it great, it will have to be compelled to reform for our own self defence against an oppressive State.