Gregorio Ordonez: the possible life

Gregorio Ordonez was killed by ETA in cold blood, in 1995, in full democracy. He was only 36 years old, he was in a restaurant with friends and colleagues around a table and the Etarra murderer approached from behind and shot him in the neck . His widow, Ana Iríbar, his son Javier Gregorio, his sister Consuelo and his family and friends and colleagues, can never forget that tremendous image of his murder, witnessed or told and reproduced in our mind with the force of a tragedy sustained by an organization propaganda terrorist of hatred, destruction and fierce power struggle, ideologized by an exclusive and totalitarian nationalism.

If this image should be remembered, it is never to forget Gregorio Ordonez as an exemplary person and citizen, who lost his life in defense of freedom. Likewise, the reconstruction of those events and that time is important because they are part of our history as a country , of historical facts that should serve to never be repeated again. The exhibition that reminds Gregorio Ordonez on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death provides us with a historiographical narrative based on that inescapable need that "the dead are not owed anything but truth and justice", and that an individual life like that of our protagonist is always «an element of essential judgment to understand a time and a society".

Since the years of lead in the Basque Country, since that ignominy of the burials of murdered without prayer support by the ecclesiastical authorities; of that impostor language for years when few dared to speak of "terrorists" and modestly said "the violent", at most; from an era of almost international indifference or, as in the case of France, of null aid to a young Spanish democracy; of a frightened society that looked the other way (that ignoble and cowardly something they will have done ); from those dark years, some voices and actions of citizens aware of what ETA cancer represented in the Basque Country, warned that the resistant struggle of that first minority that risked their own life in the Basque community was the shield of democracy and freedoms for all throughout the Spanish territory. Those voices and courageous and reasoned actions educated many and we will never thank you enough. The example of Gregorio and his relatives, friends and related citizens, direct victims of terrorism, are an essential part of it .

Here is not the place to trace the complex history of the police defeat of ETA and, at the same time, the survival of a story and a project of totalitarian power of its supporters, sponsored more or less consciously or unconsciously, by some decisions of Politicians at certain times. There is an excellent bibliography, both historical and novel, about the process and the sinuous paths of metastasis that the "bleaching" attempts of the enemies of democracy and freedoms meant ; of the fundamental Basque nationalist environment that took advantage of "the nuts that fall from the tree that moves ETA"; of the pusillanimity or lack of judgment or indulgence of certain politicians of different signs; of the complicit confusion of a society by sometimes condemning only the means - violence, terror - and not the ends - the exclusion and domination and annulment of others . Anyway, the lack of repentance of the murderers - not asking for forgiveness for a crime that will never return us to the dead, but something deeper than delegitime an ideology based on an always totalitarian nationalism - that repentance that, as I pointed out with his usual lucidity Fernando Savater, is only credible in those who recognize their failure: "those who win, never regret; those who lose, almost always", "repentance came to so many German or Austrian Nazis after Hitler's defeat" . That metastasis of exclusionary, supremacist, totalitarian nationalism (with Nazi or Stalinist borders, since the serious self-criticism of Stalinism has always been lacking in a certain left), we are currently living in different ways in several places in Spain , of course in the Basque Country itself , mainly in small places, where a veil of fear continues to beat and we see the unrepentant inserted in democratic institutions and using them for their purposes, or in the seriousness of what has been happening in Catalonia for quite some time. In the same way - Savater also affirmed - that there was no so-called "Jewish problem", but that the real one was "Hitler's problem", we cannot talk about "Basque problem" or "Catalan problem" or any other, but about ETA problem or problem of supremacist nationalism .

Especially, we are seeing it in the eagerness to appropriate a historical and symbolic account falsifying the events that have occurred and trying to implement an equidistant idea of ​​a struggle between two sides with different and confronted ideologies. But the reality was never like that, and it is important that new generations of young people know it. Simply, a terrorist band, in the name of their nationalist ideology, killed or intimidated fellow citizens who did not think like them and, despising the institutions of a rule of law such as ours, condemned them to fear and deprived them of their freedom or , as in the case of Gregorio Ordonez and 800 other people - men, women, children - were murdered in cold blood with shots, bombs or kidnappings. How could we get to this? The fact that the rule of law has been stronger than these destroyers without conscience should give us enough confidence to continue fighting for freedom and equality.

I believe, as a historian, that an important form of struggle is to restore the truth of historical facts. Faced with the militant attitude of nationalisms to use unscrupulous historical or fictional narratives in education and the media, which lead to mental reveries and perceptions outside of reality and beliefs of non-existent paradises in the past of peoples, with political and economic consequences that affect us all, we must return to that "truth of the facts" , of which Hannah Arendt said that when they are replaced by opinions, we must run (so she fled from the Nazis in Germany).

The historical lies they spread, the use of language as an instrument of discrimination and that of history as an element of eternal conflict, those falsehoods and concealment of the facts, "all these lies," Arendt continued, "whether or not their authors know, they contain an element of violence. Organized lies always tend to destroy what has been decided to deny , although only totalitarian governments have consciously adopted the lie as a pre-murder step. " The Etarra wake, after having to interrupt the murders for its defeat before the rule of law, continues with its organized lies, more or less consented by short-term beneficiary sectors of those lies and trying to extend it to other areas, as we are currently supporting In our country.

In the face of these lies and inventions of the history that has taken place, it is important that we know that there is a factual truth and yes there can really be independent facts of opinion and interpretation, as Arendt fears: the facts have happened and can no longer be change. When someone maintains that "nothing can be known," rest assured that they try to impose their own story on us. What needs to be done is to rescue those facts from the chaos of mere events and order them with historical rigor in a narrative that demands a professional ethical and imperative perspective and search for truth (truth with lowercase, not absolute ever, but objective ). Our human world is a world of meanings, without which we cannot live, as the current cognitive sciences show, but this does not constitute any justification for trying to erase the dividing lines between fact, meaningful objectification and opinion or fiction. . And less can justify the manipulation of the facts by ideological interests or power struggles.

Precisely, the history and remembrance of Gregorio Ordonez allows us, as I said at the beginning, to better understand the history of our country and therefore of our own present, but very especially it is the history and its example that serves as an incentive for May we continue to resist and fight, for each and every one of us, for life, freedom and justice.

Carmen Iglesias , of the Royal Academy of History and Royal Spanish Academy.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

• ETA
• Basque Country
• Adolf Hitler
• Spain
• RAE
• France
• Catalonia
• Germany
• Parot doctrine

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