Sometimes it is simply amazing to listen to Americans when they call on to talk shows and voice their opinions. The one dimensional, narrow thinking and xenophobia is often quite stunning. If one listens to such shows, one hears the following thoughts being expressed. “You know, those Spaniards are just a bunch of cowards. Know what I mean? They let a bunch of terrorists push them out of the coalition. Hey, them damn socialists are just doing the same thing that Chamberlain did to Hitler. It’s the same thing. It’s appeasement!” Or “Those Spanish over there, they should know that they’re just letting the terrorists win. They need to stick with our president.”
The recent electoral win of the Socialist Party over the popular party’s resigning Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar has sent American nationalists into conniption fits and into a tizzy of verbal assaults against the Spanish people. Most accept, almost uncritically, that the recent election returns were based almost solely on the Madrid bombings. They presumably forgotten, or chosen to forget, that the Spanish had among the highest opposition levels to the Iraq War, nearly 90%. Few sane political parties that wanted to stay in power would have dared to oppose 90% of their populace on anything. The socialists simply utilized basic political ideas to appeal to the greatest number of Spaniards on a burning issue of the day, the war in Iraq.
The first public comments by the new elected Spanish leader, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, made his position quite clear, “The war has been a disaster. The occupation continues to be a great disaster.” Prime Minister elect Zapatero announced that his party will keep a key campaign promise to remove 1300 Spanish soldiers from Iraq, the administration is not pleased. Of the Iraq War, Zapatero said, “It hasn’t generated anything but more violence and hate.” In Iraq, meanwhile, the shattered state with its puppets of an alleged Governing Council, which can be overruled at the slightest whim of Paul Bremer, the U.S. overlord, has as its highest and only credential that they are acceptable to the United States.
Iraq stands on the brink of civil war, and now, unless things change drastically, the Zapatero government has pledged to pull out all Spanish troops; the fracturing of the so called coalition. The American presence in Iraq, founded on the quicksand of false pretenses, can only be seen as the occupation that it is. It cannot be the midwife of a democracy that is in tatters in America itself. Undemocratically selected, Bush has ruled like a prince of the blood, an autocrat born to send thousands of lesser beings to their deaths to ensure the domination of his class. He is repulsed by the very notion of democracy, and regards Congress as little more than a mild annoyance. Meanwhile, the Spaniards are practicing democracy in a form far purer than anything we have seen in years in America. We have little to teach and much to learn from them. From death row, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
These commentaries are produced by Noel Hanrahan for Prison Radio.
