Pablo Iglesias intends to put the right wing “in jail”, like in North Korea

I've been saying for years that there's nothing more like a fascist than a communist (and vice versa), and the examples are plentiful.

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Yesterday, at a public event for that far-left party, the communist Pablo Iglesias proposed his own solution to Podemos's continuous electoral failures: a dictatorship. He didn't say it explicitly, but he did so by formulating a proposal that would only be compatible with a totalitarian regime. You can listen to his words at this link (point 1:16:35): "It takes courage and guts to tell this right wing that we want them in jail and that we are going to do what others didn't dare to do to put them in jail."

What Pablo Iglesias is proposing doesn't require "courage and guts," but rather an absolute contempt for democracy. What he's proposing, basically, is to imprison millions of people for daring to disagree with the left. This is nothing new: it's exactly the same anti-democratic garbage that communists have always spouted. What Pablo Iglesias is announcing is what already exists in places like North Korea, Cuba, or China, where disagreeing with the official ideology is the surest path to prison. From its beginnings, communism has established more than fifty dictatorships, to tell people what they should think and what they can or cannot say, and to imprison - as Pablo Iglesias now claims - those who dare to disobey.

Of course, the founder of Podemos is content, for now, to talk about putting us in prison, because openly announcing what comes next would sound even worse and might land him in legal trouble. Communism didn't just imprison dissidents: it has killed more than 100 million people, competing with Nazism in its eagerness to liquidate all those who didn't agree with its ideology.

History shows us what happens when democracies fail to defend themselves against totalitarians, that is, against anti-democrats like Pablo Iglesias and his friends in Podemos. If Nazi and communist parties are banned in some European countries, it is for a basic reason of democratic survival: those countries have already experienced the bloody consequences of giving free rein to the enemies of freedom. In Spain, our laws do not offer that level of protection to our democracy, but they do establish some basic guidelines. In Article 6, the Spanish Constitution states regarding political parties: "Their creation and the exercise of their activities are free within the limits of respect for the Constitution and the law. Their internal structure and functioning must be democratic."

A party cannot be considered to respect the Constitution and the laws if it openly advocates for imprisoning the entire right wing, that is, turning millions of Spaniards into political prisoners for the "crime" of disagreeing with the left. A party that proposes such a flagrant violation of human rights is openly anti-democratic, and therefore those of us who want to continue living in a free Spain have every right to demand that the State act against those who want to reduce our democracy to rubble, whether they are Nazis, communists, Islamists, or of any other anti-democratic ideology.

With statements like those made by Pablo Iglesias yesterday at that public event, Podemos has made it clear that it is not a political party: it is an organization that aims to destroy democracy. Such an organization should have no place in our institutions and deserves to be outlawed, just as other organizations that also sought to destroy our democracy were outlawed before. Of course, if Podemos dares to utter such outrageous statements, it is because it has the support of Pedro Sánchez and his government, who cling to their alliance with the worst extremists to remain in power at any cost, pushing the social fabric of Spain to its breaking point.

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Image: Podemos.