And on September 15, French police arrested Ignacio Gracia Arrequi, a top leader of ETA, in the French town of Bidart, in an operation assisted by the Spanish cops. For Marxists, these killings are not crimes against the working class. Marxists oppose the desperate petty-bourgeois strategy of individual terrorism but when the oppressed act against the bourgeoisie and its state, we defend them against capitalist repression. A single isolated hero cannot replace the masses. But we understand only too clearly the inevitability of such convulsive acts of despair and vengeance.
People come cheap who are capable only of fulminating against injustice and bestiality.
But those who, like Grynszpan, are able too act as well as conceive, sacrificing their own lives if need be, are the precious leaven of mankind. And today the French government also represses Breton and Corsican nationalists. Spanish chauvinism is used to divide the working class and weaken it in the face of massive attacks by the right-wing government against living conditions and job security, and targeting in particular more vulnerable immigrant workers. This has culminated in a racist pogrom against North African workers in El Ejido in the beginning of the year. At least several hundred are estimated to have drowned in recent years in an attempt to cross the Straights of Gibraltar.