Fight moth fight

Here I follow Slavoj Zizek (and Mao Tse-Tung). Read it carefully. It may seem heavy-going and complicated but it is crystal-clear:

This is Mao’s key point: the principal (universal) contradiction [real ram fight as class struggle] does not overlap with the contradiction which should be treated as dominant in a particular situation [Basque liberation struggle- butterfly vs moth fight ]. The universal dimension literally resides in this particular [principal & predominant] contradiction to which all other struggles should be subordinated (Zizek presents Mao,2007:6). ‘

So who said ‘ethnic’ nationalism? I don’t think so! What we must be clear about is that, at the end of the day, as members of a liberation movement we should never forget this: yes the Basque struggle for independence taking place between us (ugly “autoritatian/terrorist” moths) and the supporters of the French and Spanish states (beautiful ‘democratic/tolerant’ butterflies) is the appearance that global class antagonism takes in the Basque lands. Reducing the Basque question to a pure and simple ‘national question’ only accounts for a ’false’ dimension of the struggle in the classic Marxist sense ( i.e.: for an ideological displacement of the real struggle).

Once this is clear Richard Rorty’s extract below (Feminism and Pragmatism1995: 126) is instrumental to frame the nature of  ’the principal & predominant Basque contradiction’ regardeless of his own overall butterflyish political and philosophical positions:

Injustices may not be perceived as injustices, even by those who suffer them, until somebody invents a previously unplayed role. Only if somebody has a dream, a voice, and a voice to describe the dream, does […] what looked like fate begin to look like a moral abomination. For until then only the language of the oppressor is available, and most oppressors have had the wit to teach the oppressed a language in which the oppressed will sound crazy – even to themselves – if they describe themselves as oppressed.

Furthermore, this fairly old extract from the short story The Moths(1982) by chicana writer Helena Maria Viramontes is also helpful to describe the real power relations taking place in the Basque country as we speak:

That was one of Apá’s biggest complaints. He would pound his hands on the table, rocking the sugar dish or spilling a cup of coffee and scream that if I didn’t go to mass every Sunday to save my goddamn sinning soul, then I had no reason to go out of the house, period. Punto final. He would grab my arm and dig his nails into me to make sure I understood the importance of the catechism. Did he make himself clear? Then he strategically directed his anger to Amá for her lousy ways of bringing up daughters, being disrespectful and unbelieving, and my older sisters would pull me aside and tell me if I didn’t get to mass right this minute, they were all going to kick the holy shit out of me. Why am I so selfish? Can you see what is doing to Amá, you idiot?

There is an expression in the Spanish language that reads like this: no comulgar con ruedas de molino. It means, literally speaking that even if one is compelled to receive the holly communion, a wheel from a water mill is far too big a consecrated wafer to swallow. In short, that not everybody is prepared to buy what the catechism, or in our case, the sacred Constitution says. The issue, however, does not arise when the very act of resistance stems from an isolated individual such as Viramontes’ narrator; – who is not pretty or nice as the other sisters are, and is unable to do girly things because of her big “bull hands”. The issue arises when a considerable corpus of the body politics is compelled to “grab a missal and a veil” but instead of taking the road to church “turns left” and walks away. The issue arises, that is, when the “grotesque body” that the Basque pro-independence subject inhabits in and through multiple manifestations of popular rebellious consciousness still allows for an enactment of possibility to subvert and “shake” the official body politic through various cultures of resistance and disobedience.
      

However crazy  it may sound, particularly now that the  attempts to exclude the Basque pro-independence and socialist movement  from the mainstream “institutional” political process are increasing, consider all the same the case of swooping Miramontes’  Apá by “Spanish government/state”,  Amá by “the Basque autonomous government/assembly” and old sistersby the regionalist parties sustaining both these institutional arrangements. This situation does not only account for the old sisters’ convenient and subservient attitude of blaming the Basque pro-independence subject for her own problems rather than pushing Amá towards shaking her own docile complicity with Apá’s repressive excesses. (As Rorty’s quote goes: Only the language of the oppressor is available: repression, illegalisation, imprisonments etc are the outcome of your own strategic shortcomings, the outcome of your own choosing and if you don’t act straight, you selfish intolerant, totalitarian violent, we’ll make sure you do). It also accounts for Judith Buttler’s (2000:22) depiction in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality of Hegel’s view according to which Apá (the state) sets himself as the universal or claims to represent freedom and the universal will. What happens then is that…

The ‘will’ that is officially represented by the government is thus haunted by a ‘will’ that is excluded […]. Thus the government is established on the basis of a paranoid economy in which it must repeatedly establish its one claim to universality by erasing all remnants of those wills it excludes.

“In an apparently paranoid fit”, Buttler continues, universality and absolute freedom become “this abstract self-consciousness which understands annihilation to be its work, and effaces (annihilates) all trace of the alterity that clings to it”. The trouble is, however, that the haunting other and the will of the excluded can hardly be erased altogether, let alone annihilated. As a consequence,  paranoid Apá has no other choice but to directly engage the the alterity that clingsto the all-embracing and legitimate messages of freedom, justice and solidarity of the Basque liberation movement despite the hopelessly reductionistic attempts to discredit our own claim to universality and truth. The trouble is, furthermore, that Basque pro-independence claims have to be portrayed as bearing a ;”goddamn sinning soul” (Rorty again) which in turn upholds the ugly values of an intrinsically non-democratic collective identity. And yet to finish here is how writer Laura Mintegi wraps up (in Gara: 3 Oct. 2003) what this post was all about:

Damned those who emptied the dictionary, damned those who have made us believe that speaking is not worthwhile. Damned those who deploy a discourse of tolerance and, at the same time, impose upon us the force of violence. It will be difficult not to transmit the frustration of the people around us, that they do not notice the scope of injustice. It will be difficult to us not to build walls within us. It will be hard to tell our children that everything can be resolved with words, for we are not given the possibility to talk. And yet we are closer than ever to find a solution because we have the will to be. A will that cannot be traded off.