The racist and hispanophobic phrases of Sabino Arana, founder of the Basque Nationalist Party

@ElentirENG ES 8·21·2023 · 18:33 0

On July 31, 1895, Sabino Arana founded the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV), giving it a strong racist and anti-Spanish stamp.

A Separatist Group Compares Spaniards with Chimpanzees and Threatens with Aggressions
An African Who Made a Video Against Catalan Separatism Is Attacked With Racist Insults

The racism and hispanophobia of its founder do not prevent the PNV from vindicating him without shame: "Today we are proud of Sabino Arana", the PNV declared in 2015 on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the birth of its founder. "His thought of him was a powerful revulsion and his voice vibrated like the alarm clock of a conscience that seemed to disappear", the PNV stated in a manifesto aimed at whitewashing the figure of that racist thinker.

Sabino Arana's writings reveal the kind of party that is that PNV that feels proud of him. Arana's racism and hispanophobia is present in much of his work , being two of his main axes. You can see below some examples of racist quotes by Arana, indicating the origin of each of them.

A previous note: Arana refers to the rest of the Spanish with the term "maketos", a derogatory word that he uses in many of his racist quotes. All quotes indicated have been taken from the book "De su alma y de su pluma" (From his soul and his pen), published in 1932 collecting writings by Sabino Arana. The cited version is an edition digitized in 2011 by the Sancho el Sabio Foundation from Victoria.

"Original ancestry from Bizkaya: this is what clean blood meant for the Bizkaians of that time. Original ancestry from Euskeria: this is what purity of race meant for nationalists from Bizkaia today, because they know that their race, the Basque race, not only inhabits Bizkaya, but also other countries". (Sabino Arana, op. cit., chapter 2, page 45).

"Catalan politics, for example, consists of attracting other Spaniards to itself; Biscay's, for example, rejecting Spaniards from themselves, as foreigners". (Sabino Arana, op. cit., chapter 3, pages 62 and 63).

"In Catalonia everything coming from the rest of Spain is Catalanized, and its natives are pleased that even the Aragonese and Castilian municipal councils of Barcelona speak Catalan; here we suffer very much when we see the signature of a Pérez at the bottom of some verses euzkerics, we hear a coachman from La Rioja, a pasiego linenman or a gypsy speak our language, or when reading the list of shipwrecked sailors from Bizkaya we come across a maketo surname". (Sabino Arana, op. cit., chapter 3, page 63).

"We speak of race in the sense of a group of families that proceed directly from the same more or less remote origin. In this specific sense, race is the same as nation, people or town: designates a large family, and expresses a natural object, which exists independently of the will of men." (Sabino Arana, op. cit., chapter 4, page 80).

"If a foral and euzkeldun (or with Euzkera) Bizkaya were morally possible, but with a maketo race, its realization would be the most hateful thing in the world, the most lowly aberration of a people, the most iniquitous and the most stupendous falsehood in history." (Sabino Arana, op. cit., chapter 4, page 81).

"Your race, singular for its beautiful qualities, but even more singular for not having any point of contact or fraternity with the Spanish race, nor with the French, which are its neighbors, nor with any race in the world, was the one that constituted your Bizkaya homeland; and you, without a shred of dignity and without respect for your parents, have mixed your blood with the Spanish or maketo, you have become brothers and confused with the most vile and despicable race in Europe, and you are ensuring that this debased race replaces yours in the territory of your Homeland." (Sabino Arana, op. cit., chapter 4, pages 81 and 82).

"If we were given a choice between a Bizkara populated by maketos who only spoke Euzkera and a Bizkara populated by locals who only spoke Spanish, we would choose the latter without hesitation, because the substance is preferable Biscayan with exotic features that can be eliminated and replaced by natural ones, to an exotic substance with Biscayan properties that could never be changed." (Sabino Arana, op. cit., chapter 4, page 84).

"If there were a Bizkaya, free yes, but made up of the Spanish race, would it really be Bizkaya? Only on the maps; and of these on the political ones, not on the ethnographic or racial ones ; and it would be Bizkaya in those, only as an independent state, not as a state constituted and legislated in Bizkaia, since the maketa race could not live with the traditional laws of our race." (Sabino Arana , op. cit., chapter 4, page 88).

"We, the Basque people, must know that the Homeland is measured by race, history, laws, customs, character and language, and that this Euskeria of ours could be so Euskeria, based on the western foothills of the Pyrenees and the Bay of Biscay, as if transferred to a Pacific island or to the shores of the African Great Lakes; just as it would not be such Euskeria that, if things continue as they should, walking time, constituted by the suitcase race on this land." (Sabino Arana, op. cit., chapter 4, page 91).

When a party like the PNV proudly claims the author of these phrases, what other Spanish parties should ask themselves is what kind of people they are seeking pacts with. For the rest, it is worth asking with what legitimacy can streets and monuments be dedicated in some places in Spain to a racist and anti-Spanish like Arana.