Spain, NATO, and the Left

When you were a child, the war took you away
Then the youth of hunger and suffering
Until they opened the door wide open in the sixties
And you saw yourself in Germany with your tail between your legs
Day after day tied to the conveyor belt
Your imagination traveled without paying for it
Every morning you thought the same thing
I’m returning home, this is none of my business.
Returning has brought you the first blow
The word “comrade” of the Workers’ Commissions
Brochures and meetings
The first clubs, the first sidewalks
They caught you on May Day
and you spent the first two May Day’s behind bars
From cell to courtyard and from courtyard to cell
Between plates of lentils and intense reading
And you went out on the street, your true homeland
And you saw that although the dog was dead, the rabies was not
Puppies with guns were tearing up the winter
On that January night on Atocha, time stood still
You’re back at the factory, you’re back in the pit
District Association, Union
Demonstrations, neighborhood parties.
Start with the foundation, not the roof
With the first election and the first pacts
The disappointments have come
It feels like the ship is sinking
Cognize yourself as a puppet of higher flights
And in a unilateral referendum
You played your last card.
And forever defeated
you’ve seen yourself sitting at home and retired
Where’s the horizon?
Where is your life headed?
Captive and unarmed,
owner of nothing

Facts Against Decorum. Owner of nothing

This text responds to a question from Alessandro Cassieri about the relationship of the Spanish left with NATO, about its absolute alignment. How is such unanimous support possible, from Borrell to Sánchez, for a war like the one we are witnessing? Where are the Spanish pacifists and antimilitarists that we have met in the past? It is not easy to answer, but here we are. To make my approach clear, I will begin this article with the verses of a rap group from Madrid called “Fatti contro il decoro”. This musical group disappeared many years ago, and its musical and cultural influence never extended beyond certain Spanish “extreme leftists.” Quoting verses from some rappers who never approached the Spanish musical mainstream and who only influenced the politically sentimental memory of some of us is justified, however, in their wild clarity. The song we bitterly quote tells the sad story of the defeat of any Spanish communist activist born in the 1920s; it is a tribute to the minority of anonymous heroes and heroines who have always been defeated, who have always been the unarmed and captive Red Army of the last part of General Franco’s war, and who, in the referendum on Spain’s permanence in NATO held on Wednesday, March 12, 1986, lost their last battle. There’s a first key to everything.

This referendum was called in January 1986 by the PSOE government under the presidency of Felipe González. His party, the PSOE, until recently advocated that Spain should never join the Atlantic Alliance. The change of position of the PSOE and its leader resulted in much smaller losses than sectors to its left had expected, and in the referendum the supporters of NATO membership won with 56.85% of the valid votes. The victory was due to the actions of the Socialist Party, Felipe González himself, and the media, both public (the PSOE controlled what was virtually the only television station in existence at the time) and private. Among the latter is the newspaper Pais, flagship of the PRISA business group, which is still the most prestigious Spanish newspaper in the world and whose orientation can be defined as “center-left.” This newspaper is read daily by Borrell, Pedro Sanchez, and Yolanda Diaz.

That 1986 referendum was, of course, until the emergence of Podemos (“We Can”) in 2014, the last battle in which the Spanish leftist radicals thought they could win, and, in fact, in the midst of nearly 7 million votes against (over 43 percent), the United Left was born as a coalition of leftist parties led by the Communist Party, one of the main distinctive features of the coalition was precisely the rejection of NATO and the US military bases in our country, as political-military instruments of the United States.

As we know, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disappearance of the Warsaw Pact did not entail the disappearance of NATO, whose purpose of creation was in line with the geopolitical keys of the Cold War, but rather consolidated the Alliance as a kind of global police force – military and ideological – of the United States, capable of showing its teeth on European territory, as happened during the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999.

In some of the most important European countries, we have seen a rejection of the European Union’s military subordination to the United States through NATO, even from political traditions outside the left. Recall that Macron said in November 2019 in an interview with the British newspaper The Economist that “what we are experiencing now is the brain death of NATO”, which was interpreted as the French president’s desire to arm some sort of defense system or European army (which Merkel quickly stopped). In Spain, by contrast, NATO is not only a military and ideological system, it is also an ideological point of respectability, even more important for the PSOE than for the formations on its right.

Russia’s military action in Ukraine has only strengthened NATO and further subordinated Europe to US interests. This is obvious, but in the case of Spain, this ideological process that makes NATO untouchable has affected even the party born out of the anti-NATO mobilizations of 1986 that I mentioned earlier: United Left. They have always been a very critical group towards NATO, and I remember how the fact that Podemos included professional soldiers in the party was heavily criticized. This was the case with former Chief of Defense Staff Air Force General Julio Rodriguez, a member of the Podemos leadership, who apparently, as a professional soldier, took park in NATO operations our army participated in and who, when retired and given a freedom of expression that active soldiers logically do not have, criticized NATO like no other soldier in our country. Despite this, Rodriguez has always been suspicious of the United Left because of his status as a professional military officer.

However, when the war in Ukraine took over all media space and the United Left found itself in a business government with PSOE and Podemos, the militancy of the United Left towards the Alliance became the responsibility of the state. The then general coordinator of the United Left and Minister of Consumer Affairs, Alberto Garzón, criticized in an extensive article the position of two Podemos ministers in the government, Ione Belarra and Irene Montero, who have publicly criticized arms transfers and NATO. Garzón, who in addition to being head of the United Left was a member of the Central Committee of the Spanish Communist Party, criticized the critical stance of Podemos on the arms supply, understanding that it was in the corporate interests of the party and contrary to the interests of the “Spanish working class” (as the original says) to the extent that it would damage the electoral chances of Yolanda Díaz and the Podemos coalition in a possible general election. The approach was to point out that it was a mistake to criticize the arms shipments when a large part of society, due to the Russian invasion and effective media action, supported them.

I leave to you the political and ethical judgment of the wisdom of the analysis by the then United Left’s leader, who understood politics as a demand market. But beyond judgment, the key to answering the question before us lies in his approach. Garzón expressed the huge inferiority complex of part of the Spanish left towards the Natism of the progressive media and the PSOE. When criticism of NATO and the logic of war ceased to be an element of identity for domestic consumption, Spanish communists with governmental responsibilities closed ranks with the PSOE and left their militancy to be criticized without media exposure. In doing so, they revealed the immense power of the cultural structure of what at Canal Red TV we call “media progressivism” to discipline the entire state left. They achieved it in the transition, they achieved it in the 1986 referendum, and they have achieved it again by engaging in media violence against Podemos. This violence carried with it a warning: if you say and do the same things that Podemos says and does, we will do to you what we did to them. This mafia logic of the Spanish government explains why almost no one in Spain dares to speak ill of NATO membership.