Imprisoned Spanish bookseller Pedro Varella

Mr. Varela’s case does not in the least interest the literary snobs of New York, London or Paris. His politics are all wrong so his martyrdom doesn’t register and certainly deserves no publicity except for a sneering put-down (although we doubt he has even received that in the American press). Now if he were a practicing Kabbalist, a Talmid chacham, a Muslim-hating atheist or a capitalist usurer with a propensity for the world of letters, it would be different. But alas, he is not. Thus it falls to us, the unaffiliated, unorganized independents and eccentrics to raise the injustice of his imprisonment, offer a latter-day homage to Catalonia and cheer his spirit with letters.

What happens with Pedro Varela, the Spanish publisher?

By Maria Poumier

BARCELONA, December, 2010 — 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!...

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.

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.

Write this imprisoned bookseller in Spanish or in English:

 Señor Pedro VARELA

Centro Penitenciario Brians 1

Apartado de Correos 1000

08760-Martorell

Barcelona, Spain

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