SMART FREEDOM, STUPID FREEDOM

One of the more spectacular drives in the world is traversing the Pyrenees mountains, which separates Spain and France, from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic.

 
Jackson and I started in Barcelona and ended in Bilbao, but we went up through Andorra and stayed mostly on the French side, taking La Route des Cols over a succession of high passes such as the Col de Tourmalet, the toughest challenge in the Tour de France bike race.

Can you imagine pedaling a bicycle up this?

But it sure was fun to drive.  And hike to places like this amazing foot bridge flung across the Gorge d' Holcarte:

It was also educational.  For while Barcelona and Bilbao are both in Spain, the difference between them is stark.

Barcelona is the capital of Spanish Catalonia, while Bilbao is the capital of Euskal Herria, the Land of the Basques.  Both regions have struggled for freedom from the control of Madrid and the Spanish government.  One has been smart in doing so, and the other really stupid.

Over 3,000 years ago, sea-faring Phoenicians founded trading colonies along Spain's Mediterranean coast, which they called i-shaphan-im, the land of hyraxes (a furry critter that looks like a rabbit with tiny ears).  A thousand years later, Roman colonists Latinized this to Hispania – España to the Spanish, Spain to us.

The civilization that Rome, and later the Roman Catholic Church, deeply established in Hispania endured until the 5^th century AD, when it was conquered by two waves of Germanic tribes.  The first was the Vandals, who called their conquered territory Vandalusia.  Next to come were the Visigoths.

The Kingdom of the Visigoths, who adopted Christianity, survived until 711, when it was conquered by an invading horde of Berber Moslems from Africa.  By 718, the Moslems (called Moors after the Latin maures – itself after the Greek mauros – for dark skin) had conquered almost all of Hispania, calling it Al-Andalus, an Arabic pronunciation of Vandalusia.  Southern Spain is called Andalusia to this day.

The Moslem invasion of Europe was stopped at Tours (now in central France) on October 10, 732, when Emir Abd-er-Rahman's 200,000 Berber-Arabs were wiped out by Charles Martel's 30,000 Franks.

Charles' son Charlemagne (742-814) liberated all of southern France from Moslem rule, crossed the Pyrenees, and began the process later called Reconquista, reconquering Christian Hispania from the Moslems.  One of the places he liberated, in 801, was Barcelona.

Named after its founder, Hamilcar Barca of Carthage (270-228 BC, father of Rome's famous enemy Hannibal, 247-183 BC), made a rich Roman city in the 2^nd century BC after Rome's defeat of Carthage, a Visigothic city in the 5^th century AD, a Moslem city in the 8^th century, Barcelona was now a Frankish city.  But not for long.

Barcelona and the region surrounding it, Catalonia, gained its independence in 878 when the Frankish King Louis the Stammerer (Charlemagne's great-grandson, 846-879) surrendered it to the Count of Barcelona, Wilfred the Hairy (857-902).  You couldn't make these names up.

The Reconquista continued as other Christian kingdoms emerged and kicked the Moslems out of their territories:  Asturias in Hispania's far northwest, Navarre south of the central Pyrenees, Aragon between Navarre and Catalonia in the 9^th century.

On May 25, 1085, Alfonso VI liberated Castile when he conquered the Moorish city of Toledo.  The real turning point, however, was on July 16, 1212, when Alfonso VIII of Castile got his Christian rivals Sancho VII of Navarre and Peter II of Aragon to join him, enabling the destruction of Caliph al-Nasir's entire Moslem army at the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa.

Within a few decades, one Moslem stronghold after another fell to the Kings of Castile, so that by the end of the 13^th century, all that was left of Moslem Al-Andalus was the Sultanate of Grenada in the far south.

Castile had expanded to control most all of central and southern Hispania, while Aragon had done the same in the north.  So when Ferdinand, King of Castile (1452-1516) married Isabella, Queen of Aragon (1451-1504) in 1469, they decided to rid Hispania of the last Moslem vestige.

Their siege of Grenada began in the spring of 1491.  On January 2, 1492, they entered the captured city and reconsecrated the principal mosque as a Catholic church.  Seven months later, they set Christopher Columbus across the unknown ocean blue.

At last, after 774 years, all of Hispania was liberated from the Moslem invasion and united as a Christian nation.  Except that the Catalans and Basques didn't agree.

While Castilian became the language used throughout Spain, the Catalans of Barcelona insisted on retaining their own version.  "Castile" means land of castla or castles, so folks in Barcelona pronounced it Catalunya, later Catalonia, and adopted the name as their own.  For the next five centuries, the Catalans struggled to distinguish themselves from the rest of Spain.

Naturally, then, the Catalans joined the Republicans fighting Francisco Franco's Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39.  When Franco emerged victorious, he never forgave them.  During the years of his rule from 1939-1975, all specifically Catalan institutions were banned, the Catalan language was forbidden in schools, no Catalan language newspaper or magazine was allowed, and over 4,000 Catalans were executed for political subversion.

After Franco's death in 1975, a Catalan terrorist group known as Terra Lliure (Free Land) sought to achieve independence from Spain through violence.  The Catalan people responded by electing a medical doctor, Jordi Pujol, as their leader in 1980 and in every successive election until he retired in 2003.

Pujol achieved democratic autonomy for Catalonia, with a Catalan police force, courts, schools, a vibrant culture – and did so peacefully, without any threat or use of violence.    Catalonia thrived, with Barcelona hosting the 1992 Olympics.  Terra Lliure vanished.

Today, Barcelona hosts some nine million visitors a year and is one of the most enjoyable and energetic cities in the world.  It's what Bilbao wishes it could be.

The Basques are the original inhabitants of Europe, the descendants of the Cro-Magnon men who replaced the Neanderthals 30 to 40 thousand years ago.  The Basque language, Euskara, is unrelated to any historical or modern language in the world.  Their homeland has always been the western Pyrenees.

They called themselves Euskal (you-skahl), which the Romans changed to "wasco," and the Franks to "basco" – Basque.

Up in their mountains, they fought off the Romans, the Visigoths, and the Moors.  They inflicted Charlemagne's only defeat, at the pass of Roncesvalles in 778, romanticized in the most famous poem of the Middle Ages, the Song of Roland.

As Spain and France came out of the Middle Ages, the Pyrenees became their natural border, and with the Basques straddling that border, they divided Basque lands between them.  This division holds today.

The French area, called Pays Basque (Basque country) is captivating and peaceful.  The capital is St. Jean Pied-a-Port (St. John at the foot of the mountain pass), a totally cool village overflowing with tourists eating great food, drinking great wine, and having a great time:

I had such a good time I even let Jackson have a glass of sangria:

The French Basques seem completely at ease being both Basque and French, and feel quite free to be either and both.  For some reason, Spanish Basques are not, no matter what Madrid does to placate them.

Franco suppressed the Basques, forbidding any sign of Basque separateness, as he did with the Catalans.  In response, a Basque terrorist group was formed called Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (Basque Homeland and Freedom) – the ETA.

While the Catalans rejected violence as a means to achieve political autonomy and cultural freedom, the Basques tolerated it.  After Franco's death and Spain democratized, ETA violence continued and escalated with numerous assassinations, car bombs, robberies, thuggish property destruction, and mafiosi protection rackets.

Further, the ETA was explicitly Marxist, advocating a rigid socialism.

No Jordi Pujol emerged as a Basque political leader denouncing the ETA and rejecting violence.  Anyone who tried was killed, like María Dolores Katarain in 1986.  The bombings and murders continued through the 90s.  Finally, in the last few years, Basque tolerance for the ETA has waned.

With help from the US, which officially designated the ETA as a Terrorist Organization in 1999, Spanish security forces have broken numerous terrorist attempts.  On Christmas Eve, 2003, an ETA attempt to blow up a railroad car in the Madrid train station was blocked.  A few months later, a truck bomb with over 1,000 pounds of explosives meant to cause a massacre near Madrid was found in time.

This past March, the ETA announced a "permanent cease fire" and its intention to seek its Marxist goals through "peaceful democratic means."

The results of the tolerance for violence can be seen in the Basque capital of Bilbao.  Basques have as much autonomy and cultural freedom as the Catalans, every sign is bi-lingual (Basque and Spanish), the Basque flag waves everywhere.  But there is no life to the city, no exuberance.  Compared to Barcelona, it is lifeless.

Visitors come to the place for one reason – to see the astounding Guggenheim Museum.  Yet even this is contrived, a foreign non-Basque object designed by a Canadian (Frank Gehry), and plopped into the city in 1997 as a tourist attraction for the local economy.

The building, covered in sheets of titanium, takes your breath away:

But you go to see the building itself, not the great art it houses, for there is no great art (like, say, at the Prado Museum in Madrid, with Goya, Reubens, Rembrandt, on and on).  The main feature right now is an exhibition of Russian art, including laughable "Socialist Realism" Soviet trash idolizing Stalin:

Compare the foreign architecture of the Guggenheim to that of native Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi (1852-1926, rhymes with howdy).  Here is a home-grown genius who built homes for wealthy businessmen to live in, like the Casa Batllo on Barcelona's main street:

and the Sagrada Familia (Sacred Family) Catholic Cathedral (unfinished at Gaudi's death and now being completed):

As a Catalan national icon, Gaudi is an organic part of Barcelona as the Guggenheim is not of Bilbao.  Barcelona fits together, Bilbao doesn't.  The Catalans went about achieving their autonomy smartly, the Basques stupidly.  You can palpably feel the difference when you're in both places.

The Basques have been around for longer than anyone else, so maybe they'll get smart someday and learn from the Catalans.  The main lesson is the terrible legacy of violence.

We are cursed to live in an era of folks trying to achieve their political, cultural, and religious ends through violence.  Most of them are Moslems, but certainly not all – like the Basques, or Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, or the IRA in Northern Ireland. 

We need to realize how incredibly stupid these folks are.  Unless you're faced with such totalitarian oppression like the Nazis or Soviets that you have no option but to use force, violence almost never gets you what you want.

There are plenty of shrewd and diabolically cunning terrorists, but none of them have the brains or moral courage to figure out the counter-productive consequences of their actions.

This lesson is clear in Bilbao, where the Basques have been accommodated, appeased, and given just about all they asked for, yet the residue of violence has rendered them not nearly as happy as the Catalans of Barcelona.

Smart peaceful freedom beats stupid violent freedom hands down.