Spain erupted in free speech protests this week over the arrest of Pablo Hasel for the crime of writing poetry. When they dragged him out of his barricades at Lledia University in Barcelona, he shouted a final message; “You will never defeat us! You will never overcome us, we will resist until we are victorious.”
As with Franco’s assassination of Federico Garcia Lorca or the Nazi persecution of Picasso, it is not the first time the transformational power of poetic vision has been feared by a Spanish government as subversive to its authority and hegemony of power and privilege, and met with brutal repression of dissent.
The autonomy of Catalonia and its capitol Barcelona was bombed into a ghost of liberty by Mussolini as a centre of Republican organizing and the legendary International Brigades during the Civil War, but it was never conquered and driven into abject submission by the fascists.
The firestorm of protest raging in the streets for the past week are an echo of that historic conflict, though our own International Brigades have no George Orwell or Ernest Hemingway to immortalize and inspire their struggle against state terror and tyranny, some of the young radicals at the barricades may one day become a new generation’s Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo, or Octavio Paz, all of whom saw action at the front over seventy years ago, and they have both an eminence grise in the great auteur Pedro Almodovar and a heroic unifying figure in Pablo Hasel.
Who is Pablo Hasel, and why would the arrest of a rapper plunge a nation into chaos?
Hasel was imprisoned for his statements of solidarity with the First of October Anti-Fascist Resistance Groups or GRAPO, a major Spanish direct action organization of the Communist Party of Spain since 1975 which hunts fascist infiltrators in the police and other security forces of state repression in the wake of the collapse of Franco’s regime, whom I regard as brothers in a sacred cause. There can be but one reply to fascism; Never Again.
Other revolutionary causes and torchbearers which he has championed through his poetry include the Catalonian independence group Terra Lliure, the Basque separatist ETA, and Germany’s Red Army Faction or Baader–Meinhof Group. As many of those he lionizes have long vanished from the stage of history, they may be intended as examples of resistance and refusal to submit to tyranny and authority, though the revolutionary struggle for the liberation and independence of Catalonia for which he was imprisoned and then denied work for a decade is very much alive.
Catalonia is distinct from Spain in its language, culture, and history, sharing equal parts of all three between France and Spain as a legacy of its membership in the empire of Charlemagne. It was autonomous before Franco seized it, and many of them want to reclaim their independence.
In the context of the Spanish resistance to fascism and the historical legacy of the International Brigades, this week’s protests bear a unique weight of history, for this was a forge of Antifascism and among the primary shaping forces of the Resistance of the Second World War, as it exists today throughout the world, and as I have lived it in the 39 years since I was sworn to the Oath of the Resistance by Jean Genet in Beirut.
And so I offer to all of you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me by the great Jean Genet in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a time of force and darkness, in a last stand and an act of defiance beyond hope of victory or survival; “We swear our loyalty to each other, who answer tyranny with Liberty and fascism with Equality. We shall resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”
Remember always that we who challenge and defy unjust authority, and who refuse to obey and to submit to force and control, cannot be subjugated, dehumanized, and mastered, for in resistance we become free. We can be killed but not defeated; imprisoned but not enslaved, deceived but not falsified, for force cannot win against disobedience and control cannot survive exposure of the truth.
Who cannot be compelled is free.
Freedom means seizure of the ownership of our identity and liberation within ourselves, and from this inviolable citadel of being and fulcrum of change we reach out to unite in solidarity with others against the force and control of those who would enslave us to change the balance of power in the world and engage in revolutionary struggle for the liberation of humankind.
We are the Unconquered, each of us an Autonomous Zone; join us.
Resist and be free.
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/08/monarchism-spain-king-corruption
https://jacobinmag.com/2017/04/guernica-anniversary-spanish-civil-war-franco
https://jacobinmag.com/2017/05/george-orwell-spain-barcelona-may-days
https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/17/europe/rapper-pablo-hasel-protests-catalonia-intl/index.html
Torch of Liberty 
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