Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [170]
Migration to the cities - Bilbao had trebled in size by 1900 - meant that Spanish became the lingua franca of the streets. Unlike Catalan, which is easy for a Spanish person to acquire casually, Basque is so sui generis that it requires major effort, on a par with learning Finnish or Hungarian. Although Euskera survived in the countryside, the language was dying a death where society was most dynamic, to the horror of the Basque middle class. They felt marginalised in their own country by socialist Spanish-speaking proletarians, whose profanities also outraged their faith, and by an avaricious local oligarchy with more time for their British business partners than for their fellow countrymen.
Enter Sabino Arana (1865-1903), the son of a shipbuilder who founded the Basque Nationalist Party or PNV in 1895. Arana believed that the Basques were a distinct race, with big noses and a higher proportion of RB negative than found in the Spanish population. He was on what, to us at any rate, seems less sticky ground when he argued that the Basques had unique laws and their own language, although this overlooked those urban liberal Basques who had campaigned to abolish the fueros as an impediment to industry. Arana used the British Union Jack as a model for the ‘ancient’ Basque flag or ikurri$nMa except that it is red, green and white.
Sport was integral to the distinctive local culture. There were communal games, resembling those of the Scottish Highlanders. Games included lifting and rolling around one’s shoulders huge round rocks, mountaineering, and the Basque version of pelota, known as jai alai, in which a ball is flung around a walled court at high velocity with a curved wicker-basket extension to the hand. Other fun activities include ocean-rowing, tug-of-war and headbutting one another (a national pastime in Glasgow too) or hauling and pushing a vast rectangular rock attached to two oxen. The Basques also go in for rap-like poetic extemporisation, and have a peculiar musical instrument called a txalaparta, the double consonants being typical of Euskera. There is a distinctive cuisine, often involving ox and seafood, which may explain why ETA bombers have twice struck at a restaurant complex set up near Biarritz in the French Basque country by award-winning chef Alain Ducasse, forcing him out of business in the area. He had allegedly been guilty of reducing Basque culture to the folklore industry.2
Basque Catholicism was also of the dogmatic northern Counter-Reformation variety, eschewing the superstitious semi-pagan Andalusian south, in ways that would be familiar to a northern Frenchman or Italian. In contrast to Ireland, where Catholic priests have been IRA cheerleaders, with only a tiny contingent offering logistic support to terrorists, ETA has included a substantial number of lapsed seminarians who brought moralising single-mindedness to killing people. Seminaries and retreats were also used to hold covert ETA meetings. Finally, economic facts undermine any general association between economic deprivation and terrorism. Arana described Spanish migration as ‘an invasion by Spanish socialists and atheists’, suggesting that if this was colonialism it was that of the poor. Historically, the Basque provinces have been much richer than Spain as a whole, with the exception of Catalonia which has a powerful (non-violent) separatist movement too. Both the Basques and the Catalans were industrious folk who looked down on the backward, sluggish, and snobbish Castilian heartlands from a position of commercial superiority. The Basque country was a wealthy place, with arms firms, banks, iron-ore