The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [73]
But Aguirre could project himself to the world as “the Basque”—not only a Basque speaker, with a Basque face, who could appear in a beret with a makila, the Basque walking stick, but someone who contradicted the outside world’s Basque stereotypes by being moderate and nonbelligerent.
He was a devout Catholic but believed in a gentle Christianity, disavowing self-proclaimed defenders of the Church such as the Carlists and the Falange. “I dream with all the nostalgia of a Christian,” he wrote years later in exile after having endured the assaults of Franco and Hitler, “in the evangelical precepts of the Sermon on the Mount, a return to primitive Christianity which would have nothing in common with the opportunistic and spectacular affiliations with which we Christians rush to disfigure the most august of doctrines.”
He also preached a gentler Basque nationalism: “Our nationalism should be universal: if we don’t want to become selfish and petty, it should not be turned into a source of discord between peoples.” Unlike Arana and many other Basque nationalists, Aguirre never spoke badly of Spain or the Spanish.
In 1931, Aguirre understood that the Republic, for all its leftist anticlericism, might still be friendly to Basque nationalists. The new Republican government had been elected with the nationwide expectation that it would bring Spain into the twentieth century, into Europe. To accomplish this, it needed the Basques and the Catalans, the only Iberians who enjoyed a European standard of living. Catalan nationalists were closer, politically and culturally to the leaders of the new leftist government than were the Basques, and the Catalans had already negotiated their own statute of autonomy at the start of the Republic.
While polarized Spain was splitting even farther apart into a leftist and a rightist camp, Aguirre had the political courage to lead his conservative Basque Nationalist Party toward the leftists in Madrid. Neither the leftists nor the rightists of divided Spain could understand the seeming contradiction of this party—a conservative, pro-business, Catholic movement that in calling for Basque independence was embracing what to other right-wing movements was the worst of all heresies. To this day, the position of the Basque Nationalist Party, known in Spanish as the PNV, is little understood, but it was never more clearly articulated than in 1931, when Aguirre addressed the Cortes in Madrid:
I am affiliated with the Basque Nationalist Party, founded by Sabino Arana Goiri. The PNV has for a motto: Jaungoikua eta lagizarra, God and the ancient laws. In naming God in the first word, we understand that the party wishes to be religious, and in the phraseology of the left and the right, ridiculous phraseology, we have a well defined position: We are Catholics, virile and upright, in a human Catholicism, not a bigoted sentimentality. For us, in this phraseology to which I have alluded, if you are on the right, you are opposed to the legitimate progress of democracy, since it opposes absolute power. If that is what being on the right means, then we are leftists. If being on the right means defending any kind of regime, as long as it is identified with religion, and against the absolute separation of powers of church and state, than we are leftists. And if by being rightist, it is understood that in social matters we oppose progress for the working class, if that is what is meant by being on the right then we are leftists. But, on the other hand, if to be a leftist means we are going to be against family, against the holy principles of the Catholic Church, whose rules we observe, then in this phraseology which I find ridiculous, we are right-wingers.
THE NEGOTIATIONS FOR a Basque autonomy statute were difficult. The composition of the Republican