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Old December 17th, 2010 #1
alex revision
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Default What happens with Pedro Varela, the Spanish publisher?

What happens with Pedro Varela, the Spanish publisher?



http://libertadpedrovarela.over-blog...-63147729.html


[Pedro Varela, my Spanish publisher is a very unusual idiosyncratic person: tall, with high forehead of a thinker and manners of a Spanish grandee, mountain climber, admirer of Yukio Mishima, a bachelor and vegetarian, a man of great learning and modest habits, indifferent to comforts like Don Quixote, connoisseur of arts and a friend of Palestine. He was squarely against American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and published and promoted my books on this subject.

Politically he is a maverick: he tends to radical right, is friendly to Muslims, an antipode to Geert Wilders and Zionist far right . He published many sorts of books, including books about the World War Two, and that was his undoing: they dropped him into a dungeon, the worst in Spain. Maria Poumier, our friend and my translator into Spanish, a poet who lived for years in socialist Cuba, wrote this short memoir about the man whose freedom we demand today. Israel Adam Shamir]


What happens with Pedro Varela, the Spanish publisher?

By Maria Poumier


He is in jail near Barcelona, incarcerated since Sunday December 12th (1) 2010 being sentenced for fifteen months. This is the end of a long run: the Catalonia’s court was after him since 1996, for publishing, selling and promoting books that the Jewish lobby dislike. At first, he was sued for H denial; but the supreme court of Spain decided in 2007 that this is not punishable in Spain, because “democracy relies on freedom of investigation and scientific knowledge, and history of WWII is a matter of science”. So now he was found guilty of promoting hate, and worse than that: he supposedly approved of the big H! Pedro Varela argues, how can you approve a genocide which you don’t believe it ever happened?

Usually, at present, in Spain, you don’t go to jail if the sentence is for less than 2 years, tells his lawyer. Pedro’s new sentence is for 15 months, still they sent him to jail.

The prosecutor, called Miguel Angel Aguilar, is a well known friend of SOS Racism, a Jewish-led body that needs to find racists in order to justify its existence, and find public funding by taxpayers. So is the principal judge, Mrs Estela, as Pedro explains.

The sentence punishes Pedro for his supposed intentions, not for any precise offence; but even accepting such a non-legal claim, it is not logical at all: it recognizes the right to sell any kind of books, but not the right to sell + publish + promote some of them, even when our society is based of the supreme law of marketing goods; the matter is not one particular book or another: there was no previously a list of forbidden books in Spain; most of the listing have already been published by other publishers, or are available for free on internet.

On the list of incriminating literature you can find a book by the psychologist Hans Eynseck (available on the shelves of the big Spanish store “El Corte Ingles”), a book against vivisection of animals, and some classics of the far right by German and Rumanian authors as well as the Spanish ones. But it is not a definitive list, and through the successive trials, it has grown or shrunk!!! In one of the early versions of the list even a collection of pro-Palestine essays by Israel Shamir, a Christian Israeli citizen, was found, though later it was dropped. None of the authors has been sued… until now.

So, as Pedro insists, this is much worse than the Inquisition of old: then you could obtain a list of forbidden books, and stay away from them, but now the list comes afterwards, it is absolutely foggy, and doesn’t come from any official desk, but from some mysterious foreign forces through their local servants.

As a matter of fact, Catalonia has always been seen by the rest of Spain as a Jewish enclave, with tight links with Genoa, next to its coasts. Barcelona has the only important Jewish community in Spain, with some 5000 persons. Bauer, Rothschild, Danone, are still important families of Barcelona, and the popular Catalan leader Jordi Pujol has sent his sons to a kibbutz. The Zionist thinker and art critic Max Nordau (son of Hungarian Sefaradi rabbi and poet Gabriel Sudfeld, of an old family from Saragossa) published in Barcelona his bright History of Spanish Painting, so he is considered a Catalan there. The book by Angel Pulido, an important writer who gave an intellectual renaissance to Sefer in Spain, has been translated to French by Max Nordau.

At the same time, Catalonia has strong anti-Israeli tendency: the projected Sarkozy’s conference on extending the European structures to the Mediterranean States (which means first of all institutionalizing the presence of Israel in the midst of these structures) was cancelled by the Catalan government, as a protest against the new settlements ordered by Netanyahu; last year, the Home Minister of Catalonia had lead the demos against the Gaza slaughter, and cancelled a H celebration on January 29th. This year, a popular sculptor called Eugenio Merino woke Israel’s wrath showing his “Ladder to Paradise” a prostrated Muslim under a kneeling Christian, under a standing up and laughing Rabbi


ADL and others of its ilk consider Spain as the most anti-Jewish country in Western Europe. The Jewish State was not recognized until 1986.

The US are not popular, but Wikileaks cables show that the government recently was ready to submit to the US ambassador Aguirre’s request when he asked to drop the charges against the US marines who murdered the cameraman Couso at the balcony of Hotel Palestine in Baghdad; the cases of using Spanish airports for the US “flying prisons”, and of torture in Guantanamo will be probably dropped as well. Spain considers it has “universal jurisdiction”, as Belgium claimed, until Belgian judges tried to judge Ariel Sharon …

See all the details on http://www.elpais.com/articulo/engli...30elpeng_2/Ten

In such a hot battlefield, the old-fashioned Nazi literature Pedro was selling is not a real danger for anybody, mostly because Spaniards cannot claim to belong to the supposedly sublime Nordic race: real hyperborean master folk have always laughed at the Spanish, and considered them “degenerated African bastards”. Catalans indeed have a tendency to a scornful and racist nationalism, but Varela is not a separatist Catalan. The reference to German self-adoring mythology is used against Varela because it allows viewing him as a Halloween ghost from a remote past.

Pedro Varela enjoys his peculiar fame: he is catholic, vegetarian and alpinist; he wishes to advance further in his quest. As he says, he is guilty of a kind of sin no one can withdraw or repent: the search for freedom of mind, not only for his Nazi fellows, but for whole Spain.

(1) One can write to Pedro, in Spanish or in English, at

Señor Pedro VARELA
Centro Penitenciario Brians 1
Apartado de Correos 1000
08760-Martorell
Barcelona
SPAIN



 
Old January 12th, 2011 #2
alex revision
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Anyone can help us in many ways. Be active.

· Promote Pedro Varela's blog: libertadpedrovarela.over-blog.com.

· Send your letters to him in prison, but avoid using coarse language, battle cries, or anything that could make his situation worse. The prison address is:

Centro penitenciario Brians 1,
Apartado de Correos 1000,
Martorell (Codigo Postal 08760)
Barcelona,
Spain.

· Send letters and emails of protest to politicians; link provided below.

· Send letters to the the editors of different newspapers; the best written tend to be published due to pure eagerness for controversy. With these especially you should use appropriate language, they should be brief, and if possible be related to another subject in the news at the time of writing (for example, another case where somebodies freedom of expression has been disregarded, or something similar).

· Collaborate with our collection of signatures for the abolition of laws that restrict or impede freedom of expression, and that are used as a pretext to put publishers in prison.

· Equally, you can help us by organising in your city an information point with a signature collection in favour of freedom of expression.

· Protest against the public prosecutor Aguilar. Join the protests that will be organized against this ideological prosecutor and his politicized section, that only prosecutes his most hated political rivals and ideological sectors, never having acted against the far-left, Talmudists, Islamic gangs, or immigrants (Latin Kings, etc.), etc. You can also send letters to the mass media, pointing out the public prosecutors ideological and political motives. Between us all we can make him know what it feels like to be on the defence, the same way that it happened to the corrupt “star-judge” Baltasar Garzon.

· Encourage your friends to come to the protests that will take place every first Sunday of each month in front of the prison where Pedro is being held. The protests have to always be an example of civilized people, with slogans and placards based on the disregard of freedom of expression.

· Collaborate financially with Pedro's judicial defence, and the support of this project that is the LIBRERIA EUROPA, which has to continue on as an oasis of freedom that provides everybody with the books that the modern inquisition wants to censure. In either case the bank name is La Caixa, and the account number is 2100-3003-56-2109609958.

· Ask us for stickers, and display them in your area and wherever you travel. In any case, whatever happens, they'll never silence us; and we'll make sure that the repression against us doesn't become politically profitable for them.

· Wear our badges and t-shirts.

· If you know foreign languages help us to translate our official statements so that they reach a wider audience.

· If you live outside of Spain, you can organize protests outside the Spanish consulates or embassies in your area.

Present your complaint to the ombudsman: www.defensordelpueblo.es


 
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