A reply to the attacks against Vox published by the Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita

@ElentirENG ESPL 6·07·2021 · 19:27 0

It is already common for different media to publish falsehoods against Vox. It also happens in Poland, as demonstrated last week.

Spanish party Vox joins the Group of European Conservatives and Reformists with Polish PiS
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A crude attempt to present Vox as a Francoist party

On Friday, the influential Rzeczpospolita newspaper, usually considered center-right, published an article by Jędrzej Bielecki lashing out at Vox with lies. As is customary in the articles by this author, he calls Vox an "extreme right" and links him to the "ghosts of Francoism", a dictatorship which he accuses of murdering 200,000 opponents "in cold blood", despite the fact that the number of murdered during the Civil War and the following years does not come close to that, not even adding up the tens of thousands of murdered by the red side in that war.

Immediately afterwards, Bielecki begins to speak about Franco, Hitler, Mussolini, the Blue Division and World War II, as if that had some relation with the current Spain. Significantly, the author speaks of the "virus of the extreme right" but does not say anything about the extreme left, despite the fact that Spain has the only government in the European Union with ministers who support a totalitarian ideology, communism, which does not I think it is among the happiest memories of the Polish people. The most striking thing is that Bielecki talks about Francoism in his article more than Vox does, and forgets to point out a fact: in all its years of existence Vox has not praised Francoism even once. Other Spanish parties, including the two rulers (PSOE and Podemos), have praised communist dictators, but Bielecki does not mention that.

He attacks Vox because Abascal is a friend of Franco's great-grandson

Bielecki also states that "Vox follows the path of historical revisionism exactly against the historical policy of PiS," the ruling party in Poland and partner of Vox. "There is no shortage of evidence for this," the author says, but his arguments on the matter are rather poor and sparse. For example, he affirms that Franco's great-grandson, Luis Alfonso de Borbón, is a friend of Abascal, as if it were something reprehensible to have such a distant relative of the dictator among your friends (I have friends on the left: will Bielecki consider me a leftist? ).

What Rzeczpospolita does not say about the Law of Historical Memory

Bielecki also criticizes Vox for calling for the repeal of the Historical Memory Law, which according to him "should allow the families of the victims of Franco to identify the graves of their relatives," but he forgets to say that this law is serving to impose the vision of history held by socialists and communists, hiding their crimes in the Spanish Civil War, including the murder of thousands of Catholics and rightists, among them dozens of children.

He attributes to Abascal a statement that he has not said

In addition, Bielecki attributes these words to Abascal: "Life was better under Franco." The contributor to the daily Rzeczpospolita does not say from what source got that statement, but the truth is that the president of Vox has never said that. There is not a single reference in any Spanish media that attributes those words to Abascal. The only thing I have found is an opinion article by Elsa García de Blas in El País entitled "The back of “with Franco it was lived better”", in which she talks about Abascal despite the fact that reading the article itself shows that the leader de Vox did not make that statement. I wonder if this is the level of rigor that Rzeczpospolita allows its collaborators on its pages.

Hides that Hermann Tertsch's father was in a concentration camp

Finally, Bielecki claims that Hermann Tertsch's father "worked closely with the Austrian Nazis." This sentencing children or even great-grandchildren for the deeds of their ancestors is not something new: they already did it in some communist dictatorships and they continue to do so in North Korea. The fact is that Bielecki forgets to say that Hermann Tertsch's father was imprisoned in the Gestapo prison in Moabit and in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp until 1945. Vox's MEP recounted it last year, noting: "There has been a house in Spain with a deeper anti-nazi consciousness than mine. With a father who lived through the Austrian, German and European tragedy. That he learned with pain and taught his children the lesson that the truth is the only antidote to yoke and crime."

In his attempt to portray Vox as a dangerous far-right party, Bielecki also forgets to say that last March, in a session of the Congress of Deputies, Vox voted in favor of a condemnation of the crimes of Nazism and communism, while the socialists and communists who rule in Spain voted against. But who Bielecki accuses of "revisionism" is Vox. It is even comical.

Bielecki has already attacked Vox for opposing abortion and euthanasia

It must be said that it is not the first attack that Bielecki launches against Vox. In November 2019, the Rzeczpospolita collaborator lamented the rise of Vox stating that Spain "was at the forefront of changes in European civilization, from abortion to same-sex marriage and euthanasia. Now all that could change." In other words, a contributor to a supposedly conservative newspaper laments that the "extreme right" threatens two atrocities - abortion and euthanasia - that the left and the extreme left are promoting throughout Europe. In that article, Bielecki also praised the socialist Pedro Sánchez. That said, I wonder: is Rzeczpospolita still a center-right newspaper or is it listing to the left?

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Photo: Vox. Vox meeting to close the campaign in Madrid on November 8, 2019.