This post continues from False Myth #8
False Myth #9. The non-nationalist Basques are renegade Basques
Well, if one reads history it could just be the opposite, I am afraid…Since the Basque nationalist/separatist movement exists, the most notable Basques have been….anti-nationalists
Let me bring some examples of the most powerful Basque brains of the 20th century. We can start for example with the famous writer from Guipuzcoa Pio Baroja. In one of the many texts he dedicated to scoff off the Basque nationalists, he said that "for its egoism and irrationality these ideas would be only attractive for low people". He also made reference to the fact that a "real Basque” (in the nationalist sense), is a “farce". And, moreover, he documented the pile of ridiculous historical lies and of all kinds and censured all the falsifications with which they wanted to build a new 'Basque identity' different from the Spanish one. His satiric book Momentum catastrophicum breaks the nerves of the nationalists. Ernst Hemingway, one of his best friends, carried his coffin during his funeral.
The best-known Basque literate, the Vizcayan Miguel de Unamuno, considered Basque nationalism as “un-cultural", he despised their publications as "full of foolish and fake ideas", and judged the nationalist militants as "rudimentary brains, dull-witted, animated by the hate to the intellectuality and the intelligence". "The bad Basques”- he wrote- “are the wretched that divulge lies, that talk bad about Spain with a lack of justice and truth, that publish weekly publications whose translation into the Spanish is full of vulgar comments, and that give air to all the ridiculous fictions and pseudoscientific blunders referring to linguistics, ethnology and history, that the only thing they make is to expose us to ridicule and expand a belief that harms us". He mastered the Basque language and wrote several books in this language.
By the way, the two globally-admired writers, regarded themselves as very “Basque”, thus logically “very Spanish” at the same time….
False Myth #9. The non-nationalist Basques are renegade Basques
Well, if one reads history it could just be the opposite, I am afraid…Since the Basque nationalist/separatist movement exists, the most notable Basques have been….anti-nationalists
Let me bring some examples of the most powerful Basque brains of the 20th century. We can start for example with the famous writer from Guipuzcoa Pio Baroja. In one of the many texts he dedicated to scoff off the Basque nationalists, he said that "for its egoism and irrationality these ideas would be only attractive for low people". He also made reference to the fact that a "real Basque” (in the nationalist sense), is a “farce". And, moreover, he documented the pile of ridiculous historical lies and of all kinds and censured all the falsifications with which they wanted to build a new 'Basque identity' different from the Spanish one. His satiric book Momentum catastrophicum breaks the nerves of the nationalists. Ernst Hemingway, one of his best friends, carried his coffin during his funeral.
The best-known Basque literate, the Vizcayan Miguel de Unamuno, considered Basque nationalism as “un-cultural", he despised their publications as "full of foolish and fake ideas", and judged the nationalist militants as "rudimentary brains, dull-witted, animated by the hate to the intellectuality and the intelligence". "The bad Basques”- he wrote- “are the wretched that divulge lies, that talk bad about Spain with a lack of justice and truth, that publish weekly publications whose translation into the Spanish is full of vulgar comments, and that give air to all the ridiculous fictions and pseudoscientific blunders referring to linguistics, ethnology and history, that the only thing they make is to expose us to ridicule and expand a belief that harms us". He mastered the Basque language and wrote several books in this language.
By the way, the two globally-admired writers, regarded themselves as very “Basque”, thus logically “very Spanish” at the same time….
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