"You remind me of when I was an asshole." In April 2013, Federico Jiménez Losantos found himself on a set of Intereconomía with a Pablo Iglesias in the middle of a self-promotion campaign by the television networks and he saw himself - a little, without going over - reflected in it. "I have been an asshole. I mean, I have been a communist. But when they were four years in prison and you lost the race," he reminded him of his past.

Jiménez Losantos recounted in a book the transformation process that led him from the most extreme Marxism to the fierce belligerence against it. Barcelona, ​​the city that was (published in 2007 and recently republished by La Esfera de los Libros), covers the decade that he spent in the Catalan capital between 1971 and 1981.

Federico arrived by vespa and left by ambulance. He started out as a maorrevoltoso artist, in a split from the PSUC called the Red Flag (Spanish Communist Organization, OCE) that looked to China. And he ended up with a shot in the leg after being kidnapped by the terrorist group Terra Lliure due to his role as editor and signatory of the Manifesto of the 2,300, which demanded equal treatment for the Spanish language in Catalonia.

In his Barcelona memoirs, Jiménez Losantos portrays the fascination of those communist readings from his youth. "Book I of the three of Capital, the only one properly by Marx and not by the Marx & Engels Ltd. factory, seemed to me to be of a diamond clarity, more sociological than economic, more political than sociological and more ideological than political".

Creator of literary magazines and artistic groups, the Jiménez Losantos of the 70s understood culture as a mechanism to achieve revolutionary transformation. But he soon discovered that he preferred girls and discos to the bricks of the Chinese Communists. "In good Maoist orthodoxy, permanent contact with workers and peasants was necessary to be truly a revolutionary. And that was a problem," he says in The City That Was. "The peasants that I knew, few and grim, were in Teruel, struggling with the climate and the fallow land, and there was not the slightest curiosity about Marxism-Leninism, whether Chinese, Barcelona, ​​Parisian or Zaragoza. The fetén proletariat, that of the factories, was not within our reach. "

He had to settle for aesthetics. Thus, in the saraos he wore "Mao-style Chinese suit, tall cargo gray, that is, with pockets, which I bought in Beijing taking advantage of the appropriate size, since in the final months of the big Mao only the Deng Xiaoping sizes prospered. It is a It is a pity that we do not have - that I do not have, at least - photos of that visual coven ".

However, it was precisely a trip to China that caused his disappointment. In the prologue to The Silent Dictatorship (1993) he recalls "a gloomy and rainy afternoon in April 1976, visiting a concentration camp - a political reeducation farm, they said - on the outskirts of Beijing."

"At this time I am still in the Party, with a capital letter, although Marxism has ceased to seem like the best substitute for the Gospel," he continues. "The night before leaving for the Mecca of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, I saw on television Soljenitsyn, recently expelled from the USSR, and whose Gulag Archipelago has been an important piece in the liquidation of my leftist ideology."

"Now I am there, on that frozen afternoon in Beijing, and I have before me a girl, more or less my age, who to entertain the 'young Western progressives' tries to remember some verses of the defense of Madrid during the Civil War" , evokes Losantos. "As we said goodbye to the barracks, night has fallen, and the prisoners, smiling, shake our hands. As they took the girl's hand, I saw in her clear eyes something that I had not seen before in any book: life in danger, the life that escapes from the hands of a person who, perhaps, in another circumstance, could have lived with me, but who now remains there, a prisoner for thinking or saying something that is not allowed. Meanwhile, I come back to life normal, full of the curiosities and uncertainties that she, who is like me, who at the moment when she looks at me is thinking the same thing as me, is absolutely forbidden. I do not know how long that look lasted, but I think I have been faithful to the purpose I made for myself: to always combat those who deprive a person of the most elementary political right, that of being able to say 'no' without suffering for it ".

His disappointment with communism goes hand in hand with the rise of Catalan pujolista nationalism. Both vectors will coincide in What remains of Spain (1979), a very controversial essay that would lead to his departure as a contributor to the newspaper El País. Umbral, who then wrote there, defended Losantos in the following way: "After Franco died, the anger ended and then it has been seen that those who were only Marxists in terms of their anti-Francoism, are no longer anything [...] perhaps the most sensible , those who tomorrow will be men of profit, the most urban, take up the old liberal republican, progressive, institutionalist, regenerationist, arbitrary (never fascist) tradition, and hale. Among the latter, Federico Jiménez Losantos, who is very young and very Teruel, and who develops his admirable intelligence from an original error [...]: assuming that things, whatever it is, are serious: the Catalan's fight against Castilian ... ".

Socialist candidate against Pujol

Jiménez Losantos and other intellectuals welcomed Alejandro Rojas-Marcos' project to sit in the first Catalan elections (1980) with his Socialist Party of Andalusia, to attract the emigrant vote. They joined, but it ended in failure: "Accustomed to anti-Franco militancy [...] we found ourselves with a totally different policy, in which financing, propaganda and behind-the-scenes agreements were essential."

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