For almost three months now, Spaniards have been subjected to an arbitrary emergency order that has put democracy on hold.
For almost three months now, Spaniards have been subjected to an arbitrary emergency order that has put democracy on hold.
N ever trust a socialist. And never trust an idiot. But never, never, never trust a socialist who is such an idiot that he seems harmless. Nicolás Maduro is the paradigm: A guy who is allergic to big books and claims that Chávez talks to him through a little bird (as Maduro himself claimed) seemed too dumb to be dangerous. But years go by, and in the Helicoide prison in Caracas, opposition leaders are still tortured with electric shocks to the testicles.
In Spain, the social-Communist government of Sánchez-Iglesias has yet to send dissident citizens to prison, but it is treating them with (figuratively speaking, thank God) extended electroshock therapy to the balls. The coronavirus is of Communist origin. Perhaps that is why it immediately allied itself with the Spanish government. Under the pretext of national security, the government has kept Spain in an unnecessary and illegitimate state of alarm for months, an exceptional arrangement allowed by our Constitution that permits the extreme and arbitrary limitation of fundamental rights and freedoms.
It cannot be denied that the government is working hard on this pandemic. In fact, it would be better if they would just stay put for at least five minutes. Every day new measures are taken: They have a problem for every solution! The recent approval of a guaranteed minimum income seems destined to discourage employment, encourage fraud, and feed the underground economy. As if that were not enough, they have announced the repeal of the labor reform with which former president Mariano Rajoy managed to save the Spanish economy. Pablo Iglesias, the second deputy prime minister, before he even dreamed of coming to power, when he was nothing but a loudspeaker for Chávez, used to say in his university that only by taking advantage of an exceptional situation will Communists rise to power in Spain. And that situation is the pandemic. Well, the pandemic, and Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.
When the first State of Alarm was declared, in March this year, Sánchez showed his true colors, taking advantage and modifying the National Intelligence Center (CNI) laws to allow Iglesias a seat on the supervisory body of the Spanish espionage service. It seems unlikely that the plan was to spy on a coronavirus. So we can conclude that Iglesias demanded that Sánchez let him into the CNI. (What self-respecting Communist doesn’t have secret services?) After all, Iglesias had previously requested control of the Spanish public television station, TVE, which has subsequently become such an immense propaganda machine that it makes Fidel Castro’s six-hour speeches on Cuban TV look like child’s play. Socialists think they are talented in the art of propaganda until they put a Communist in the cabinet and let him play with his junk for a while.
In Spain, silent coup-makers don’t leave loose ends. They put the director of a socialist magazine in charge of the government’s Center of Sociological Investigation (CIS) and published a study claiming that eight out of ten Spaniards want the other parties to praise the current government for everything and avoid issuing any kind of criticism. And we should probably be grateful that our government is a modest one and that it was not actually 15 out of ten Spaniards wanting to dissolve all political opposition. They also use the CIS to advance their totalitarian obsession. A month ago, a CIS survey by the highest sociological authority of the Government of Spain included a question that was quite the Communist manifesto:
Do you think that in these times, the dissemination of fake news, misleading and unsubstantiated information on social networks and media should be prohibited, with all information about the pandemic coming from official sources, or do you think that total freedom should be maintained for the dissemination of news and information?
While Trump is trying to ensure social networks’ political neutrality, Sánchez and Iglesias are working hard to avoid social-network neutrality. Recently, in a controversial government press conference, the head of the Civil Guard said that the police were working on the Internet to “minimize the adverse climate toward the government’s management of the crisis.” One of Sánchez’s ministers said the same thing a few days later on Spanish public television: “We cannot accept negative messages.” That day also saw the launch of a campaign against the two main opposition parties, PP and VOX. The government is using the same tactic that Maduro used in Venezuela: They claim that the opposition, in this case VOX, is preparing a coup d’état.
But what is it that bothers the Sánchez administration so much about criticism in general and social networks in particular? The gradual leaking of documents proving their incompetence and negligence in the face of the coronavirus crisis — the reason that relatives of some victims are trying to hold the government accountable in court. Let me pause briefly here to highlight three dates:
On February 10, the Centre for the Coordination of Health Alerts and Emergencies gave the government a report warning of the deadly spread of the coronavirus.
On March 8, the government encouraged massive feminist rallies throughout the country.
On March 14, the Spanish government declared the State of Alarm.
Might they have concealed the alert of February 10 because the upcoming feminist demonstrations on March 8 were central to their political agenda? They did not want to suspend them, even though chaos was already breaking out inside hospitals. Just 24 hours earlier, on February 9, the top government official in charge of health alerts had told reporters with a chuckle: “If my son asks me if he can go to the March 8 rally, I’ll tell him to do whatever he wants.” Meanwhile, Carmen Calvo, the first deputy prime minister, accidentally told the truth. Encouraging women to participate in the feminist marches, she exclaimed, “You must go to the march, it’s your life on the line!” And indeed, 239,000 infected with COVID-19 and more than 27,000 deaths give us reason to suspect that yes, their lives were “on the line.”
The minister of equality, Irene Montero, is Pablo Iglesias’s wife, and I’m not suggesting that the two facts are related. In a TV appearance before the demonstration, Montero endorsed a strange March 8 slogan for female empowerment: “Alone and drunk, I want to get home.” But I suspect that if you’re out drinking, going home alone is the last thing on your mind. Anyway, after seeing that all the government ministers who participated in the March 8 rallies tested positive for the coronavirus, Twitter rehashed the slogan: “Alone, drunk, and with coronavirus, I want to get home.” By the way, “borracha” (drunk) and “casa” (home) rhymes in Spanish, although it is the sort of rhyme that Hunter Biden could write at dawn, floating through the front door on the fumes from his night on the town.
In the end, the problem with the Left is that they spend the day talking about conscience — environmental, class, race, gender — but they lack an individual conscience of their own, having bent it to fit their principles, which you can read, if you were so inclined, on any blank sheet of paper. This makes lying easy for them. It doesn’t weigh too heavily on their conscience, because, for leftists, the ends always justifies the means. We are seeing proof of this once again with the radical Left’s instigation of violence in protests and riots across the United States, and the moderate left’s justification of the violence. They are two sides of the same coin. They each need the other.
Spain today is governed by a man who seems dangerously aroused by power — like a mixture of the Marquis de Sade and the World Cup winner Diego Armando Maradona. Sánchez’s first scandal was using a private ministerial Falcon jet to attend his favorite music festival. His only reasonable line of defense would have been to push the fact that the festival wasn’t bloody reggaeton, but for reasons I can’t quite grasp, it’s the only defense he didn’t use. When the opposition asked him for detailed information about this blatant waste of public funds, the government, without so much as blushing, declared that the trip was an “official secret.”
And that is the sum of Pedro Sánchez’s political credo. The rest is empty. This is someone who has probably never read a lengthy book in his life. So it is the Communist Iglesias who fills the gap, as I explained in another article in these pages — Spaniards are suffering a government that we did not vote for. Unlike Sánchez, Iglesias does have something in the space between his ears. The bad news is that that “something” is sinister.
Sánchez, who plagiarized his doctoral thesis to obtain a cum laude, is known over here as Dr. Fraud or President “Cum Fraude.” To list his lies would take hundreds of pages. It is easier to talk about the one time he told the truth. It was when he returned to politics in 2015, after being kicked out of his own party for trying to rig the primaries: He told the newspaper El Mundo, “I’ve returned to politics to shake things up.” And indeed, he is causing more havoc than a monkey with a gun at a party for gas canisters.
As I write these lines, Sánchez is addressing the nation. He does it every weekend at news time. Here they already call it “Aló Presidente,” in reference to the propaganda program with which Chávez tortured Venezuelan viewers for hours every Sunday. Sánchez is announcing that he wants to extend the State of Alarm until June 21 — for our security, he says, trying once again to make his audience believe that the State of Alarm has something to do with health measures against the pandemic. On hearing this, I’m reminded of something H. L. Mencken said that, in light of what we’ve seen, seems to be a prophecy regarding the Spanish government: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”
Translated by Joel Dalmau