Good news, after all

The fall has brought its share of good news: Gaddafi has gone and ETA says that it is going. But not everyone is happy. Some have said that last month's ETA announcement is just a trick, to regroup and come back later. Not to trust them seems a prudent course. But the claim that it is all a trick seems a little more twisted. Not even the police believe it will be easy for ETA to make a comeback; and it has been the police, along with a courageous section of Basque society, who have defeated ETA. Did anyone think that ETA was going to give up its weapons overnight, and beg forgiveness? Did anyone really think that these killers, who for years have seen themselves as soldiers of an oppressed nation, would accept the role of criminals overnight? Can anyone think of a case in history where such a thing has happened?

As for Gaddafi, we can only be glad of his end, though the manner of his demise was disturbing. Concerning the famous end of Mussolini, Reyes Mate has written: "Today there is more discussion than ever about resistance movements, which move in a no-man's land where nobody is responsible." Indeed, moral rectitude stands quite apart from political rectitude. The moral abjectness of the rebels who beat Gaddafi to death does not annul the legitimacy of their cause. Nor does the abjectness of the Hiroshima bomb. The government's GAL death squads of the 1980s (who illegally murdered known ETA terrorists) do not annul the political cause of Spanish democracy. All good causes have their scoundrels; all bad ones their heroes. An uncomfortable truth, but one never to be forgotten.

Especially at this time. Since ETA announced that it would never kill again, it has been said that, now that ETA has lost the battle of bombs, it should not be allowed to win the battle of words and impose a dishonest version of history, in which the roles of victim and killer are reversed, or simply an equidistant version in which everyone in the Basque Country was right, at least to some extent, because it was not a case of right and wrong. This is what Daniel Innerarity has called "the threat of symmetry." Just so: we must not permit it. We must prevent the occurrence in the Basque Country with ETA of what has occurred in the rest of Spain with the Civil War and the Franco regime, where the threat of symmetry has come true, and many accept an equidistant version of history in which nobody had all the right on his side, and there was no good side and bad side. We must all combat equidistance concerning the Civil War and Franco, just as emphatically as we combat equidistance concerning ETA.

Meanwhile, the demise of ETA will no doubt see a recrudescence of Weberian confrontation between the partisans of the ethics of conviction and those of the ethics of responsibility: that is, between the partisans of pure, clear and radical solutions - fiat iustitia et pereat mundus - and the partisans of gray, negotiated, moderate solutions. This makes sense. What doesn't make sense is to see the same people who praised the gray solutions of the post-Franco transition to democracy, now clamoring for black and white solutions in the Basque Country. True, some of those who now praise the flexible spirit of the transition are also the same ones who in those days abominated flexibility and clamored for pure, clear, radical solutions - let justice be done, though the world perish.

Of course I don't know what the Basque politicians are doing. People like premier Patxi López and PP leader Antonio Basagoiti who have lived for years under threat, and have seen their friends killed; who know the feeling of those years, and are proving equal to the situation. This is good news, too: that there are politicians who are not about to fan the flames just to get in the news, or to garner a handful of votes; in short, that there is still hope.