Today, almost
everyone knows that during the Spanish War of Independence against France and
the French-affiliated Spaniards, it was the common and anonymous people, acting
independently, who made the decision to fight against the enemy until victory.
They executed and carried it through to the end, paying with their own lives in
a war also fought against the complicity and collaboration of their ruling
elites with the invading enemy. That complicity and collaboration must be
called by their name: betrayal. More specifically, betrayal of the homeland or
betrayal of the State, to be less epic but equally realistic.
It's crucial
never to confuse the ruling elites with the elites. This metonymic observation
is key because one shouldn't confuse the whole with one of its elements. The
whole can never be reduced to one of its parts, let alone to one of its most
fleeting and irrelevant parts: the politicians.
The people of
Spain won the war against the invading France, the first war against the
hitherto invincible Napoleon, that supposed ultra-narcissistic Polyphemus.
Although that victory was internationally decisive for Europe, it was
politically irrelevant for Spain. This people made an error back then that we
still pay for, surrendering the victory again to the worst of their elites—
their ruling elites, I mean— who returned to power as if nothing had happened,
now even disguised not as French-affiliated but as romantic liberals. Many bore
the likeness of don Mariano José de Larra, one of the staunchest conservatives
of Spanish Romanticism, now adorned with the liberal tag for those ignorant of
history. Once again, the military victory of the Spaniards became a political
defeat for Spain: what was gained with arms and at the cost of popular human
lives was politically lost by handing it over to an elitist administration that
squandered and destroyed it as aristocratically as bureaucratically.
The history of Spain has known two major periods, marked by two political dynasties: that of the Catholic Monarchs—until Charles II, that great unknown, the last of the Habsburgs— and that of the Bourbons, descendants of the French Louis XIV, one of Spain's greatest historical enemies. These are indisputable facts. What began with the Catholic Monarchs in 1492 and ended in 1700 gave rise —whether agreed upon or not— to the most powerful and essential aspects of Spanish history, from Cervantes' Quixote to the political organization of an entire continent, Latin America. What began with the first Bourbon, Philip V, marked the beginning of an incessant and dramatic decline: civil wars, internal divisions, endless corruption, ecclesiastical conflicts, educational, economic, and scientific problems, and so on. Today, Spain's future is ...
