Blood and Freedom
It's communism, citizens. Terror and lies. Two weeks after Vladimir Putin's invasion, Ukrainians have given us a lesson in dignity and heroism. Volodimir Zelenski has taught the EU that living in democracy has a price to pay every dawn. The Soviet Army, that is today's USSR, has reduced entire cities to rubble, threatened nuclear power plants, killed innocent people - almost 100 children - but has not managed to break a proud people who look hopefully and without adequate response towards Brussels and NATO. A brave people fleeing the totalitarian yoke and wanting to be free.
Ukraine has won the battle of public opinion around the world and is winning the war because it will not surrender. The example of the Spanish people against Napoleon's armies and that of Viriato against the Roman Empire show that "a people who know how to die can never be slaves".
Ukraine has always been a land to go everywhere. It has access to the Mediterranean from the Black Sea through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits, via the Aegean. It existed before the county of Moscow. The life of Ivan the Terrible (16th century) is reincarnated today in Putin, lord of all wars (Afghanistan, Chechnya, Georgia, Afghanistan, invasion of Crimea and now extermination of Ukraine). Kiev will be the new Syrian Aleppo. The new Tsar of all Russias has lied as dictators always do.
Cruelty and repression will not be enough this time to occupy a country of 603,548 square kilometres and 45 million people. The exodus in the middle of the 21st century will awaken Western values. And from now on, the citizens of the Union will have to defend our democracy and our land tooth and nail. Peace is neither free nor for rent. Ukraine has suffered famines such as the 1932 famine under dictator Yosef Stalin with 4 million dead. And, later, massive displacements after World War II. And the Nazi scourge in 1941. The images that are reaching us now confirm a genocide. Moscow must pay for the dead and for the ravages of its planes and tanks that reduced everything to ashes.
Putin is a war criminal and will have to sit before the International Court in The Hague. He is the new Hitler of our time. The blood flowing down the Dnieper River will not be shed in vain this time. The worst is yet to come after the humanitarian corridor-traps that the Soviets have laid for the besieged populations leading directly to Belarus and the Federation to be used tomorrow as hostages or human shields.
Now begins the new time of desolation, of body to body, street to street and neighbourhood to neighbourhood. More blood, more lives. A permanent guerrilla war where snipers will make the difference. And here tanks and planes are no longer of any use. Zelenski today embodies the freedom of the entire West that awakens after the nuclear threats and hurricanes of fear against Finland and Sweden. The justification for burning Ukraine, presided over by a Jew, (demilitarisation and denazification) confirms the desperation of a dictator. Ukraine is not alone. It must be shouted loud and clear. "We fight Putin as you fought Hitler", Zelenski proudly reminded the British Parliament.
After the coronavirus pandemic this is the new face of communism. Violence, terror, lies, murder of civilians, burning of basic structures, bombing of hospitals. The aim is clear: to leave defenceless citizens without water, gas, heating and food in the middle of winter. We already know that the UN is of little use. And the North Atlantic Treaty will have to reinvent itself because if it does not stop this satrap this time, it will finish us all off. Escalating repression in the streets. 8,000 arrested for peaceful demonstrations in Moscow and St. Petersburg. New Duma laws sentencing journalists who do not tell the official truth to up to 14 years. We want them to know in Red Square that Ukrainians are not alone in the face of totalitarianism.
The first casualty of wars is always the truth. I hear on the BBC that Russia may have already lost more than 3,000 soldiers, mostly military; mercenaries, Chechens, Syrians and Georgians. The Kremlin can't stand coffins. The Ukrainian Red Cross has asked for the bodies of the aggressors to be collected under the Russian flag, but no one is claiming them. Special trucks cremate the dead so as not to hand them over to their families. Disappeared. Corpses are always uncomfortable in a foreign land. Because here it is necessary to distinguish between aggressors and attacked. This fortnight the unequal war has claimed more than 5,000 victims without counting the more than 2 million refugees who are being placed in EU territory with the example of Poland, Romania and Germany. In Spain, the Zendal awaits the most vulnerable Ukrainians. It is time for solidarity with the victims.
At the moment, soya oil has run out on the shelves of supermarkets; maize, wheat and fertilisers are in short supply. Everything came to us from the fertile plains of Ukraine. It was the breadbasket of the world. The Spanish stock market has lost 40 billion and the shopping basket has risen by more than 23% since February. Our economic recovery has stalled and sanctions against Russia will boomerang against our own exports. But there is something even more dangerous: the dependence on Russian gas and oil in Central Europe. More than 40 %. Germany is paying dearly for the surrender of social democrat Helmut Schmitd and Christian Democrat Angela Merkel. Lots of Agenda 2030, lots of green, lots of sustainability. Now we know that all these environmental movements were subsidised by the Soviet Union, just like the Catalan coup. We have dismantled nuclear energy in the last 20 years - except in France and England - and now our lord and master is and will be Putin.
I write on this 8th March watching on the news the bravery of the women who have joined the regular army to stop the invader. Teachers, nurses, economists, housewives, all want to serve their country. They take up arms to defend their families, children, parents and siblings while their husbands enlist by signing two-year contracts of loyalty to the homeland. Too much accumulated pain that we will have to share from now on because this war is going to be endless. The provisional damage assessment made public by the legitimate government seems meagre: 15 billion dollars. Putin and his oligarchs should be held accountable with their personal assets. It is not the fault of the long-suffering Russian people.
Borrell's fiery speech in the European Parliament has forced governments like ours to send offensive weapons to Ukraine to stay on the right side of history. In Strasbourg the vassals of Podemos, the slaves of Bildu, the wretches of Puigdemont and some unredeemed Greens voted in favour of Putin. Half of the government, with Belarra and Montero at the head - what a bunch of cattle - have accused their own Council of Ministers of being a "party of war". Then Isa Serra, condemned by the SC for assaulting cash machines and seriously insulting a policewoman, denied it, but they have continued in the budget manger turning this feminist day into a day of "No to war" and precision diplomacy. Infantiloid bullshit from '68.
They are the Muscovite agents, pacifists and anti-American, that Pedro Sánchez protects while our prestige fades in the world and condemns us to be figureheads on the international stage. And then he complains that Biden does not call them for consultations. The dramatic thing is that the doctor president cannot remove his own Putinesque ministers. Sánchez lives hostage to his podemite, bilduetarras and separatist partners.
That is the problem that prevents us from acting in parallel in our cities of Ceuta and Melilla, invaded by the Moroccan and sub-Saharan hordes with the acquiescence of the Alaouite monarch. The news of the uncontrolled "squatting" of the Canary Islands opens up another breach of instability in the Atlantic, while tourism is moving away for the third consecutive year and the Minister of the Interior, Grande Marlaska, claims to have delivered defensive material to the FSE to be able to repel the aggressions of common criminals whom we do not expel either hot or cold. National Security warned the government of the real threats to our territories in North Africa three months ago. They looked the other way. The stratospheric cowardice of this unpresentable guy - the worst Interior Minister in democracy - is only comparable to the mistreatment he habitually gives to the Police and the Guardia Civil. To sum up: the greatest enemy of civil liberties is in the Moncloa.
After the PP crisis, Feijóo will take charge of the main opposition party. Even if he gains access to the Senate after his appointment at the extraordinary congress in Seville, the government will take care of neutralising his message. For the time being, Sánchez's demand not to make a pact with Vox in Castilla y León seems not to be listened to by those who are kept in the Palacio de la Carretera de La Coruña by the worst of each house. García-Page has asked his secretary general to be consistent with his policy of pacts. We will be attentive to his "national message" because Galicia during his terms in office has been as exclusionary as Pujol's Catalonia. Of course, if his knight errant is going to be González Pons, maximum organiser of the congress and protector of the undesirable Casado, García Egea and Casero, let's turn off the lights. Free rein for Sánchez until the next decade.
If he really wants to banish frivolity from political life, the Galician should devote himself to putting together a good electoral programme for the regional and municipal elections in May 2023. There is little more than a year to go and Isabel Ayuso and Juanma Moreno must make a difference in order to promote change. For the time being, the PP-VOX combination is not an alternative to Sanchezstéin. Alberto Núñez Feijóo has shown himself to be a good manager. It is not enough. He is the great hope of the centre-right as Ciudadanos dies out. Either he renews his leadership and parliamentary groups on Easter Monday, banishes the terror of the secretary general in the party and leads an exciting Factory of Ideas with ethics and austerity as the backbone, or the progressive demagogy of La Moncloa and Ferraz will continue to unbalance spending over income, increasing debt and impoverishing families and businesses. Education without political approval and employment. A lot of employment. A sharp reduction in public spending. With this immoral war, ruin awaits us on the other side of the street. But without masks.
Just two years after the demonstration that infected and killed hundreds of people by coronavirus, the official figure for the pandemic exceeds 100,000 people. 140,000 according to the National Institute of Statistics. They deceived us then with non-existent expert reports and they are deceiving us now by using the war in Ukraine as an excuse. Women must be defended against unconstitutional laws and positive discrimination. It is the time to bet on equal opportunities policies.
The spectacle of Spanish feminism is feminazi. Textbook communism. Salon leftism. Scrap material. Just today it was announced that the government will spend 21,319 million on domestic welfare policies until 1925. That is impossible. That figure is similar to the Justice and Education budgets combined over the next three years. It's all a lie. But it doesn't matter. Montero and Belarra are political corpses. Maybe she won't even go on Yolanda's transversal lists. Because the elegant Yolanda without a party still can only aspire to be Sánchez's number 2 for Madrid, leaving Podemos on the count. The spectacle of the demonstrations in Madrid has been shameful. Disunity is the best virtue of dismantling militant purism. But let's go back to the beginning. To the days of blood and Freedom.
International Women's Day should be celebrated in homage to the 146 people who died in a shirt factory in New York in 1857. Not in calling for No to war. With Bread and Roses. This year, no one embodies this desire for peace more than the Ukrainian women (in blue and yellow), far from their husbands and with their children in exile. Let us remember José Antonio Labordeta in his honour and let us sing his immortal hymn in defence of democracy and life. Because this war is also our war. "There will be a day when we will all/ look up/ and see a land/ that says Freedom". Glory to the people and the Republic of Ukraine!
Antonio Regalado directs Bahía de Ítaca at:
aregaladorodriguez.blogspot.com.