Patriots and terrorists

 

Only the future will tell whether Hamas was the vanguard of patriotism that liberated Palestine or a band of terrorist. Only the future will tell if Israel carried out a genocide or was the expression of the European democratic garden in the Middle East.

 

The difference between a terrorist and a patriot is the difference between defeat and victory. The difference between a terrorist and patriot is control of the press and the story.

Historians knows it even if they don’t always say it. The Spanish resisters to the French occupier in 1808, those shot on May 2, the people of Madrid who attacked the French soldiers with knives, were terrorist in the eyes of the enlightened occupier. The children of the French Revolution against the “long live the chains” of the Spanish. Democracy against religious fundamentalism like now in the Middle East, right?

In that war of independence, the Spanish also invented the terrorist military technique par excellence: the guerrilla. It could well be said that ww Spaniards are the mothers and fathers of modern terrorism. But we ended up driving out French, so on May 2 Ayuso remind us again that Madrid is Spain for having expelled Napoleon and the Frech people from the country.

Washington, Bolivar or San Martin went down in history as patriots because they won, in the same way that the hero of the black Jacobins of the Haitian revolution. Toussaint Louverture, died forgotten in a French prison. That’s the story. Don´t look for justice in it.

Nelson Mandela is the father of South African nation because the African National Congress defeated, even partially, its enemies. But Mandela, before being the father of the country, was a imprisoned communist terrorist.

The Battle of Algiers, by Gillo Pontecorvo, was banned in France for years because it told many truths about politics, about colonialism, about patriotism and about terrorism. “Give us your planes and we will give you our baskets” the head of the Algerian National Front respond in the film when Western journalists ask him why they are attacking French civilians in the European quarter of Algiers. Arrested, tortured and executed by French paratroopers. Ben M’hidi was a terrorist. When Algeria was finally free, he became another father of the country.

In these days Hamas has taken a very important step in the eyes of the international community. Yesterday they were unscrupulous terrorists, their human condition was not even recognized. Today they sit at the same table with representatives of the Government of Israel and agree on a ceasefire. It has cost them more than 14,000 deaths, including almost 6,000 children. Worth? That question has never made sense to understand the history of humanity.

All homeland, all political system, even democratic ones, are built on murder. The great victory over Nazifacism was also built with the bombing against civilians in Dresden and with the humiliation of the racial pride of German women to which the Soviet and Jewish intellectual Ilya Ehrenburg appealed, addressing the soldiers of the Red Army advancing towards Berlin. And as a bonus, two atomic bombs form American democracy arrived on Japan.

Hamas once again acquires belligerent status when it is recognized as an interlocutor by Israel to negotiate a ceasefire. Was it worth it? A human arch that is horrified every time social networks show us children’s corpses tells us no, but the history of humanity, which in recent centuries is a history of terrorist and patriots, reminds us that this question does not have much sense to understand history and politics.

Only the future will tell if Hamas was the vanguard of patriotism that liberated Palestine or a band of terrorists fanatical about Islam. Only the future will tell if Israel was a colonial and criminal theocracy that carried out a genocide against the Palestinian people or the expression of the European democratic garden in the Middle East.

But rest assured that the future will be on thousands of corpses, to the grater glory of patriots and terrorists.