Date: Thu, Dec 16, 2010 at 6:18 AM
[Pedro Varela, my Spanish publisher is a very unusual idiosyncratic person: tall, with high forehead of a thinker and manners of a Spanish grandee, mountain climber, admirer of Yukio Mishima, a bachelor and vegetarian, a man of great learning and modest habits, indifferent to comforts like Don Quixote, connoisseur of arts and a friend of Palestine. He was squarely against American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and published and promoted my books on this subject. Politically he is a maverick: he tends to radical right, is friendly to Muslims, an antipode to Geert Wilders and Zionist far right . He published many sorts of books, including books about the World War Two, and that was his undoing: they dropped him into a dungeon, the worst in Spain. Maria Poumier, our friend and my translator into Spanish, a poet who lived for years in socialist Cuba, wrote this short memoir about the man whose freedom we demand today.
Israel Adam Shamir]
What happens with Pedro Varela, the Spanish publisher?
By Maria Poumier
He is in jail near Barcelona, incarcerated since Sunday December 12th (1) 2010 being sentenced for fifteen months. This is the end of a long run: the Catalonia's court was after him since 1996, for publishing, selling and promoting books that the Jewish lobby dislike. At first, he was sued for H denial; but the supreme court of Spain decided in 2007 that this is not punishable in Spain, because "democracy relies on freedom of investigation and scientific knowledge, and history of WWII is a matter of science". So now he was found guilty of promoting hate, and worse than that: he supposedly approved of the big H! Pedro Varela argues, how can you approve a genocide which you don't believe it ever happened?
Usually, at present, in Spain, you don't go to jail if the sentence is for less than 2 years, tells his lawyer. Pedro's new sentence is for 15 months, still they sent him to jail.
The prosecutor, called Miguel Angel Aguilar, is a well known friend of SOS Racism, a Jewish-led body that needs to find racists in order to justify its existence, and find public funding by taxpayers. So is the principal judge, Mrs Estela, as Pedro explains.
The sentence punishes Pedro for his supposed intentions, not for any precise offence; but even accepting such a non-legal claim, it is not logical at all: it recognizes the right to sell any kind of books, but not the right to sell + publish + promote some of them, even when our society is based of the supreme law of marketing goods; the matter is not one particular book or another: there was no previously a list of forbidden books in Spain; most of the listing have already been published by other publishers, or are available for free on internet.
On the list of incriminating literature you can find a book by the psychologist Hans Eynseck (available on the shelves of the big Spanish store "El Corte Ingles"), a book against vivisection of animals, and some classics of the far right by German and Rumanian authors as well as the Spanish ones. But it is not a definitive list, and through the successive trials, it has grown or shrunk!!! In one of the early versions of the list even a collection of pro-Palestine essays by Israel Shamir, a Christian Israeli citizen, was found, though later it was dropped. None of the authors has been sued… until now.
So, as Pedro insists, this is much worse than the Inquisition of old: then you could obtain a list of forbidden books, and stay away from them, but now the list comes afterwards, it is absolutely foggy, and doesn't come from any official desk, but from some mysterious foreign forces through their local servants.
As a matter of fact, Catalonia has always been seen by the rest of Spain as a Jewish enclave, with tight links with Genoa, next to its coasts. Barcelona has the only important Jewish community in Spain, with some 5000 persons. Bauer, Rothschild, Danone, are still important families of Barcelona, and the popular Catalan leader Jordi Pujol has sent his sons to a kibbutz. The Zionist thinker and art critic Max Nordau (son of Hungarian Sefaradi rabbi and poet Gabriel Sudfeld, of an old family from Saragossa) published in Barcelona his bright History of Spanish Painting, so he is considered a Catalan there. The book by Angel Pulido, an important writer who gave an intellectual renaissance to Sefer in Spain, has been translated to French by Max Nordau.
At the same time, Catalonia has strong anti-Israeli tendency: the projected Sarkozy's conference on extending the European structures to the Mediterranean States (which means first of all institutionalizing the presence of Israel in the midst of these structures) was cancelled by the Catalan government, as a protest against the new settlements ordered by Netanyahu; last year, the Home Minister of Catalonia had lead the demos against the Gaza slaughter, and cancelled a H celebration on January 29th. This year, a popular sculptor called Eugenio Merino woke Israel's wrath showing his "Ladder to Paradise" a prostrated Muslim under a kneeling Christian, under a standing up and laughing Rabbi http://eglise1piege.unblog.fr/files/2010/03/lescalierduparadis.jpg). ADL and others of its ilk consider Spain as the most anti-Jewish country in Western Europe. The Jewish State was not recognized until 1986.
The US are not popular, but Wikileaks cables show that the government recently was ready to submit to the US ambassador Aguirre's request when he asked to drop the charges against the US marines who murdered the cameraman Couso at the balcony of Hotel Palestine in Baghdad; the cases of using Spanish airports for the US "flying prisons", and of torture in Guantanamo will be probably dropped as well. Spain considers it has "universal jurisdiction", as Belgium claimed, until Belgian judges tried to judge Ariel Sharon … See all the details on http://www.elpais.com/articulo/english/US/Embassy/conspired/to/derail/cases/in/Spain/s/High/Court/elpepueng/20101130elpeng_2/Ten
In such a hot battlefield, the old-fashioned Nazi literature Pedro was selling is not a real danger for anybody, mostly because Spaniards cannot claim to belong to the supposedly sublime Nordic race: real hyperborean master folk have always laughed at the Spanish, and considered them "degenerated African bastards". Catalans indeed have a tendency to a scornful and racist nationalism, but Varela is not a separatist Catalan. The reference to German self-adoring mythology is used against Varela because it allows viewing him as a Halloween ghost from a remote past.
Pedro Varela enjoys his peculiar fame: he is catholic, vegetarian and alpinist; he wishes to advance further in his quest. As he says, he is guilty of a kind of sin no one can withdraw or repent: the search for freedom of mind, not only for his Nazi fellows, but for whole Spain.
(1) One can write to Pedro, in Spanish or in English, at Señor Pedro VARELACentro Penitenciario Brians 1 Apartado de Correos 100008760-Martorell Barcelona -ESPANA
(2) Here is the final list of books Varela should not have offered in his modest bookstore, on Seneca 12, in the ancient core of Barcelona:
Audiencia Provincial de Barcelona
Sección Segunda
Rollo de Apelación nº AP79/10
Procedimiento Abreviado nº 150/09
Juzgado de los Penal nº 11 de Barcelona
Sentencia nº 259
Barcelona, 26 de abril de 2010
- "Guardia de Hierro. El fascismo rumano", de Corneliu Zelea Codreanu. Editorial: Asociación Cultural Ojeda. ISBN 84-932851-9-6.
- "El hombre nuevo", de Ion I. Motza. Editorial: Asociación Cultural Ojeda. ISBN 84-920591-7-6.
- "Nobilitas", de Alexander Jacob. Editorial: Asociación Cultural Ojeda. ISBN 84-931390-7-6.
- "Fundamentos de biopolítica: olvido y exageración del factor racial", de Jacques de Mahieu. Editorial: Asociación Cultural Ojeda. ISBN 84-931390-6-8.
- "Manual del jefe. De la Guardia de Hierro", de Corneliu Zelea Codreanu. Editorial: Asociación Cultural Ojeda. ISBN 84-932851-8-8.
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