Every book by Joxe Azurmendi is a gift, and the last one, Barbara, kondena, torture harribitxia. Joxe has put words, arguments, historical, philosophical and ideological context to rage and helplessness that we have not so far been able to convert into words and arguments, or for fear, for justified fear, for not wanting to convert them. Azurmendi knows German, and this is not the first time that the ignorance and the tendency to manipulate the philosophers and intellectuals of the regime who do not know a word in German is revealed; on this occasion it is a Jaspers manipulated to spread suspicion and the feeling of guilt among us. The three parts of the book are anthological, but the one devoted to condenamia should be read by those who during these years are forced to move from the syringe to the baltin. It is the historical custom of the States to violently invade consciousness and thought, and in the case of the Spaniards it has been carried out through a paradigmatic institution and punishes: Inquisition. In the words of Azurmendi himself, in this historic line of consciences control comes and we must see the present American fanaticism. At the heart of a stubborn official discourse is only the ideology of St. Augustine (“the “democratic” political variant of the old Theological Renunciation to the heresy of St. Augustine, which opened the door to the Inquisition”), and paradoxically there are many Spaniards supposedly progres and laymen who defend this discourse when they refer to the problem of the Basque Country (it is when they refer to other topics). According to Joxe Azurmendi, “a bad smell of church emerges from all the condemnation of inquisition”, since “the problem the state has with violence is not moral, it is political. But for politicians, the best way to escape from liberation is to exchange the question from the political to the moral, because then the solution becomes a task of the consciences of all citizens, not of the duties of the State”.

The echo of those words, which had not yet been erased, was the massive and successful demonstration in favour of the prisoners in Bilbao, and the subsequent reactions. José Antonio de Ardanza (i.e. a high political representative from a secular state): “Prisoners should do an act of repentance”; (“contrition” or).

Ah! What is going to be to demand the conversion of unbaptized prisoners? Sometimes reading a book is liberating and clarifying.