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We protect you from yourselves: police, oppression and the rule of law

The following essay is part of We Protect you from Yourselves: The Politics of Policing, a series of articles with an accompanying photo exhibition compiled by Colectivo Democracia in Spain. We Protect you from Yourselves deals with policing and how it affects our politics, explicitly examining the historical relationship between policing and the perceived social order. The book features articles by Felix Trautmann, Democracia, Luis Navarro, Alf Lüdtke, Kendra Briken, Didier Fassin, Vanessa Thompson, Francesca Raimondi, Fabien Jobard, Daniel Loick, Anja Lemke and Daniel Villegas. Guerrilla Translation translated some of the Spanish originals to English. Here is Luis Navarro’s contribution (Originally titled “Order: Police, Democracy, Revolution)

Intro

What’s behind a uniform? Who am I hiding from? What do I tell my children at night? Your breath clouds my helmet’s visor, the smell of alcohol penetrates and sticks to my skin, the insults sound muffled, empty, faraway gestures. Why can’t I look you in the eye?

It’s a childish challenge, fit for creatures used to lulling themselves in the safety of their routines, who believe in the tale of “democracy” while skipping over the fine print of morality. Citizens who uphold sterile cities built on foundations bored through with rats, turning up to jobs they don’t believe in, holding the ground for an order that expropriates them, turns them violent, so they are not ejected, who only obey for fear of others not doing so. If you defend the State, why attack the police?

We are the black flowers of the trash heap, the cruel bleach of democracy, the cement of liberty. We guarantee your peace and your work. We ensure the flow of products and services, we patrol the schools, protect your women, we clean the scum off the streets. We risk our lives to uphold the laws you’ve given yourselves, but only after losing our humanity through them.

And yes, we search offices, combat fraud and corruption, close down lucrative illegal businesses. We make no distinctions of any kind before a judicial order. Every mission has its own specific protocol. Don’t ask us for eloquence, tact or humanity; ask it of your leaders. Dignity and principles have no place when artifice breaks down to reveal the human condition; that is when our action is required. We defend your rights with our tools.

The “State of rights”, rule according to higher law, doesn’t exist, it has no essence. We are the right of the State. The word “citizen” is no more than a helmet or a bullet-proof vest. The citizens we lose sleep over have no guarantees. Citizens live and die without conquering the right to live.

You think yourselves strong, for you have abducted reason to crucify it on a placard. Reason is an old man with glasses, an expectant mother, a man trapped in a hideout: your reason is speculative. Things are what they are and how they should remain. We don’t have the right to dream or to be irresponsible. It takes centuries to build a civilization that can collapse with a nudge.

 We are the force of reason. We are perfectly aligned, we have an objective, follow a strategy, take care of our team, maintain discipline. Before me I only see a stampeding herd, an irascible mob, formless reason imbued with corrupt feelings treading unchecked. Sound and fury.

We protect you from yourselves. Whoever thinks that “rule according to higher law” can defend itself through principles, whoever uses proprietary methods to question the State and its raison d’être is, therefore, mad. There is a permanent conflict between the means and the ends. Our work is a meta-discourse beyond premises. Only those breaching the rules can understand it in all its scope. In reality, it is no more than a conflict of perception. Only those sharing the same gaze inhabit the same world. Our gaze is not blinded by dreams nor by false affect, but by sufficient reason, the urgent reality that torments you.

You could possibly make great strides in your struggles were you capable of penetrating the shield to decipher the person, the distinct similarity expressed in resemblance. People who share your needs and affects, who hope for a peaceful, disarmed world, who laugh with their neighbors and hug their daughters, who only want to patrol in peace and return to their caves at night with nothing out of the ordinary marring the daily dispatch. Animals in the end, because even the life of an abandoned dog has incalculable worth, and only guard dogs can defend that worth.

But you’re too human. You don’t want to know what’s behind the peaceful, the stable; you don’t recognize the savage violence that can be sparked by a breach in the order of things, you won’t listen to the voice of misery and ambition that falls from your mouths. You only seek to justify yourselves, cry like children, symbolically attack your frustration, yet you remain on the surface, the war machine limited to my carapace. With this you hope to conquer a sort of artificial nobility placing you above us in the human scale. You think yourself better than I, you teacher, doctor, student. And you must be, because you live better than me and you probably earn more than me.

This is why I feel no scruples when it comes time to charge. I carry out a duty concerning us all and do so under your divine mandate. But, above all, I also feel the emotion of that brief, unrepeatable instant, the instant that justifies and gives meaning to months of unproductive efforts, to insults and humiliation, to a life of dedication and service. When all the barriers come crashing down and Maya’s veil is torn is when the self comes alive, forming part of the event. When the creature is stripped, it feels rage and fear and is redeemed by pain. The streets are burning, the animals lie in wait, danger could arrive from any angle. It is only then that we inhabit the same world and speak the same language.

History advances through blows, under the protective gaze of guardian angels. As chaos extends, order prevails. You don’t know how to live unless you’re against us.

Who are the Brain Police?
Frank Zappa, “Who are the brain police?” 1966

It’s not often that the very existence and functions of “State Security Forces and Corps”[1] is called into question. As an institution, its existence is deemed necessary to ensure the upkeep of the “social contract”; in other words, to guarantee citizen protection and safeguard compliance with a set of basic “game rules” through all levels of public administration. In practice, no modern society lacks some sort of police force, and not even those communities that arose in spontaneous rebellion against institutional order such as the Paris Commune or the recent 15-M occupations[2], dispensed with the formation of their own corps and security commissions with varying degrees of means and responsibilities. Extending this affirmation to military defense structures, it could be said that FCS’ very existence signals some degree of collective legitimacy that must be preserved and which lends them credence. This source of legitimacy originates in the populace which it supposedly serves and defends.

I. The policeman is a worker

Lots of cops, little fun, this is wrong
Eskorbuto “Mucha policía, poca diversión” (Lots of cops, little fun) 1983

In any case, few figures are as reviled by the general community or as scorned by those who “benefit” from his services as that of the policeman. Under the riot cop armor, we stop seeing the human being stifled within, most likely a good neighbor and head of the family, and solely perceive the embodied representation of an “authority” we despise: the political domination of the state and the deep-rooted patriarchy that we identify with it. This characterization is somewhat ironic, given that the police officer occupies one of the lowest rungs on the social ladder. The policeman is one of the lowest paid public servants, and a type of worker who has made obedience his only task and way of life. The policeman has no authority beyond that of his immediate superior within a pyramid that reproduces the command structure of the society whose order he is called to defend.

A life dedicated to obedience and the mechanical application of general principles as interpreted by others doesn’t require a great education. A profound knowledge of values or a theoretical understanding of the social relationships he simply upholds would hamper the ideal practice of his functions. Not even the highest echelons of these staunchly hierarchical outfits, those assuming some type of responsibility and expected to take decisions, are awarded any type of personal autonomy, which would even be dangerous amongst those who wield and monopolize the power of weapons. The collective imaginary often associates the police officer with a dog, and there certainly are police dogs with a high sense of duty. Just like the dog, the policeman sniffs through the underworld, protects property, and harkens to his master’s voice in exchange for a medal or a kick.

Not needing much in the way of qualifications, a career in policing serves as a refuge, especially in times of crisis, for low ranking social profiles unable to afford an education or seeking to escape unemployment and precariousness. Officers are generally recruited from the working class, which they finally identify with due to their origin and lifestyle. Who can deny that the police officer is but another worker, a public servant whose tools happen to be weapons? Certainly those with property to protect are not willing to risk their lives for it, preferring to use workers as a strike force, often against other workers sharing the policeman’s fate. In the May 1968 clashes between police and students, communist Pier Paolo Pasolini aligned with the former, seeing them as the true representatives of the proletariat as opposed to the privileged preppies being courted by the system and groomed as future squares.

It is also true that the policeman isn’t so different from the rest of workers when carrying out his purpose, a purpose for which he has not only surrendered his labor power, but also his humanity: his time for living, his personal world, his capacity to reason and judge. More or less passively and with everyone in their place, we’ve agreed to pool our talents and efforts into the preservation of the same system that exploits us and, where applicable, excludes us, instead of rebelling and harnessing our capabilities for the construction of a different model. But this is a worker confronting his own particular destiny, always the last in having his rights recognized, and even then only relatively. His participation in suffrage is still limited in certain countries. In Spain he conquered the right to form unions little over 30 years ago, but only as long as the unions don’t reflect any ideological or class ties and also renounce the right to strike. Apart from relinquishing the better part of his labor rights, this special type of worker is forced to intervene against other workers when the latter try to exercise their own rights, even when the demands made affect them too, as was the case in the public worker protests against the austerity cuts taking place in Spain in recent years.

To wit, the police officer is made to act against his own corporate interests while denouncing and repressing those that share his fate. It is no surprise that the latter don’t consider the former as sharing the same condition or worthy of sharing their fury. As such, more than estrangement there was true social outrage when the police took to the streets in November 2012 to protest against the government’s austerity measures, now that these also affected their guild. Those who had previously acted with excessive force against public workers protesting to defend their rights now reclaimed their own within a context of generalized social mobilization. And they did so wielding the same slogans and mimicking the style of the previous mobilizations, expressed as “citizen tides” [3]. After repressing the Green Tide of education workers and the White Tide of public health workers, the police launched their own Blue Tide, claiming that “security is not for sale, it has to be defended”.  

II. The policeman is a citizen

“He used to be a man and now he’s a fucking cop”

La Polla Records “Era un hombre” (He used to be a man) 1984

One of the most singular aspects of these citizen tides is that their demands not only affected the workers of each sector, but actually assimilated those of the larger population also affected by public service cuts. Thus, the Green Tide not only included teachers but also a student movement (which on other historic occasions, such as May 1968 or 1986, grabbed most of the spotlight) as well as student and parents associations, and 15-M activists who saw the Green Tide as a continuation of their own struggle. The same could be said of the White Tide, spearheaded by public health workers, but supported by senior citizens and disabled persons who rarely took part in these sorts of protests. In reality, this added support originated from the actual users of the public health system, or, in other words, the entire population. However, the Blue Tide didn’t attract the beneficiaries of the “security” they proffered. On the contrary, people sarcastically questioned who’d be repressing the police on this occasion, or whether they’d beat themselves up at the high point of their protest.

In this case, the policeman not only has to confront himself as worker, but also as a citizen. On July 23rd, 2011, at the height of the occupation of the public squares, a policeman named Javier Roca Sierra became famous for speaking at the assembly at Sol (Madrid’s main square) to avow his support for the 15-M movement, and declared that many of his coworkers “shared their worries and concerns”. His intervention was spurred on and frequently interrupted by loud cheering, earning him the moniker of the Policía Indignado. Although the policeman wasn’t on duty or in uniform at the time, the Security Area for Madrid’s City Council reprimanded him months after the fact for serious offenses against the Municipal Police’s regulations, which “forbid crediting police officer status when manifesting opinions”. That same summer, the police took it out on 15-M members and secular protesters manifesting against Pope Benedict XVI’s visit during World Youth Day. They acted well beyond their mandate, employing a type of violence normally associated with dictatorial regimes, as evidenced by the various videos posted on YouTube where riot police are seen wiping the streets, evicting protesters with extreme brutality. In spite of this, they were immediately absolved.

Some police officers questioned those acts. The Sindicato Unificado de Policía[4], the largest police union, condemned the actions and petitioned an internal investigation to determine accountability and restore the image of the department. Their leader at the time, José Manuel Sánchez Fornet, self-described on his Twitter profile as “a defender of human, civil and political rights and of 15-M”, seized any available media appearance to declare his conformity with the demands being expressed at street level. His attitude was criticized by his peers for favoring political interests over the defense of the workers he represented. Admittedly, union politics often lead to questions of appearances. In reality, and based on the comments in police fora after his interventions, his leadership was anything but homogenous, and police actions continued to gain intensity.[5]

However, there were exceptions, even within the riot police[6]. After the citizen “Seizing Congress” actions of November 2012, the chain of command demanded yet more severity in their interventions. This led to brutal training exercises at the Linares Riot Police Academy, resulting in wounded officers and shattered polycarbonate shields due to the unlawful firing of rubber slugs. These exercises along with a tripled budget allocation for riot squad equipment (ratified by the right-wing government despite generalized cuts in all other areas) represented a de-facto declaration of war by the government against the citizenry. SUP representatives went as far as to question whether the government was looking for a death to serve as a distraction to the economic situation, or perhaps to unleash chaos in order to justify more extreme actions, as transpired in Geneva in the year 2000.

More and more policemen began to feel not only dissatisfied, but simply fed up, unsure whether to project their frustration on the movement’s activists or on their political superiors, as they man the front lines in a process of social reform which smothers the populace along with their own families. On the other hand, the situation is at times so dire that few can even consider laying down their weapons (their jobs) against the background of rising unemployment and social misery.

Following the principles of inclusivity at the root of the 15-M movement, part of it has often tried to attract the police force by appealing to their conditions as workers or citizens, or even as human beings with their own moral principles and rights. The stance taken by the police force and the armed forces in relation to social and political struggle has been historically crucial to the overthrow of expired regimes, such as the Portuguese post-Salazar dictatorship in what’s known as the “Carnation Revolution” of 1974. In Spain there is a precedent for this, although it has been either overlooked or purposefully ignored by the media. During the protests against the Iraq War following the terror attacks on March 11th 2004, police refused to disperse the protesters outside Partido Popular’s[7] headquarters on the night preceding the general elections that would put an end to the PP’s absolute hegemony in government. The crowd bellowed “Tomorrow we’ll vote, tomorrow we’ll kick you out”, while the police exceptionally disobeyed the orders of political leaders.

In spite of the good intentions that inspire them, these interpellations amount to nothing and reflect a profound lack of knowledge regarding the internal dynamics of ― and the police’s concrete role within ― the current ordinance. It’s essential to understand the context in which these military revolts took place and what made them “take sides with the people”. This context was characterized by governments that were in fact extinguished, having previously lost all support and any chance of imposing themselves by force against those who, with a certain conspiratorial slant, seemed to have sketched out alternate solutions while actually already dictating a new set of orders. Additionally, these orders were never anything but orders, still dictated by the chain of command. They weren’t initiated by agents, nor did they rebel against the orders of their superiors.

III. The policeman is a person

We have to exterminate the plague with blows of freedom
Leño “Cucarachas” (Cockcroaches)

Many police-citizens who want to seem reasonable often sympathize with the objectives of social movements but not with their methods. This is the defusing argument maintained by the SUP towards the latest mobilizations. But it is hard to imagine how a movement fighting against forced evictions in Spain could achieve its goals without resorting to civil disobedience, even when these goals defend a fundamental human right and cover a necessity that should be provided by the State. Almost as hard as believing that the police always maintain legality when fighting crime, or that they cannot mold that legality at will by enacting ad-hoc regulations to quell certain struggles. In this way, the problems derived from neighborhood groups opposing forced evictions have recently led to the creation of the Prevention and Reaction Unit (Unidad de Prevención y Reacción or UPR in Spanish) in Madrid to support the riot police (UIP). The new unit is known as “los bronce” [8] and one of their main functions is dispersing these emerging conflicts by the use of force.

The good cop who empathizes with a movement’s expressed goals is always overshadowed by the bad cop who, bereft of principles, wouldn’t think twice about doing whatever is necessary to satisfy a superior objective. Maintaining law and order before all other considerations often necessitates the incitement of disorder and circumventing the rules that society imposes on itself. In this respect there is a great hypocrisy at play in democratic states; in the end, citizens know that the fragile structure their lives are lived upon could not be upheld without trespassing the limits the police seek to impose on the rest of the citizenry. Methods such as torture, forced entry, infiltration, arbitrary identifications and detentions, and even accidental death are part of the police’s repertoire, guaranteeing results. The citizen knows that social peace is borne on pillars of dung and looks the other way, comfortably expressing lukewarm indignation every time Harry Callahan’s[9] antics are reflected in real life. In the end, those types of scandals are absorbed into the information flows they help sustain, while Harry is secure in the knowledge of being absolved and meriting his superior’s approval, because he’s a hero.

The police officer, like the soldier, is expected not only to have valor, but to lack constituent values. His appearance signals the moment when values crumble and order materializes stark naked. The bravery of the police is the mythic counterpoint to the social horror that senses the fragility of its foundations, the paternal response to childhood nightmares, a simple slash to undo the knot of a B-movie climax. Creatures bereft of the ability to decide, much less act, we call on the police when the world crumbles and we need to be saved. Salvation always “happens” thanks to extreme intervention: the policeman is an angel, sent in extremis to restore social determinism and “uphold order”. His mission is to condense all violence into one unified, imperial, pure block[10]. It’s not only a monopoly, but the ultimate purpose of the State, even when democratic.

We are accustomed to seeing the police force as an institution of the State when representing its essence: its way of governing. In its origin[11], police science recognized itself as a sibling to politics, given their common etymological root. Its area of influence was all pervasive (justice, finance, military), monitoring man as “living, productive, active”, ensuring the “splendor and power of the State” by “controlling communication”. Man and life itself were “police objects”. In a society of entertainment, the police represent the modern state, the interface through which the State communicates with its subjects, with the full cruelty of a reality beyond any discourse. The State’s ultimate purpose and raison d’etat is not the art of governing according to divine, natural or human law. It need not respect the general way of the world, it only needs to extend the power of the State.[12]

This representative function lets itself be seen and described against a backdrop of revolt, a subproduct of revolutionary folklore. The permanent motive is the repression of disorder, the institution of order. It’s the corroded tale of power understood as imposition, as the domination of men and women over women and men, the final solution to all conflict. When garbage containers don’t spontaneously combust in the heat of the revolt, fire can be woven into the tale through all manner of strategies: unjustified charges, explicit provocations, infiltrators…violence is necessarily unleashed so the State can once again assert its monopoly with impunity as a last resort.

But, what is the State today, in this global coup led by financial markets? The extreme (ideal), unmasked expression of what it always was in societies marked by the modern conditions of capitalist production: a mere, albeit fundamental, tool of the financial elite. “The army, the police and the other specialized detachments of the state’s monopoly of armed violence are the commodities’ last resort. What is a policeman? He is the active servant of the commodity”[13]. Now that commodities are immaterial (as are works of art) and value has been abstracted from objects, States limit themselves to the progressive dismantlement of all of their structures, under the tutelage and dictates of financial power. States ruled by liberal democracy have only served to consummate the metamorphic stage separating a primitive and savage leviathan from a fierce, more terrible fiend, leaning on communication technology, social engineering, war and the internal repression of citizens, eliminating all traces of freedom or personal autonomy.

Such is the disgraced condition, the misery of the policeman: the insurmountable contradiction between making citizens happy and protecting the order of the State amidst all its conflicts, as understood by Turquet. State or populace? Citizens, workers and dependents, or the individual interests of ownership? Once rationalized, the policeman can only circumvent this contradiction by finally giving in to nihilism; nothing is worthwhile, the world is what it is, and no social initiative will change it. Any attempt at overcoming the conditioning and impositions of the social order he must embody can only be be the work of scheming agitators with no objectives or principles, or worse, by an instinct ceaselessly swayed by chaos and destruction. Any attempt at self-organization, any questioning of the prevailing order would only amount to a display of a natural disorder, a conflict of all against all, endangering his own position (so weak and threatened) within the structure.

The specialization of functions turns every worker into a functional mechanism which, apart from being attentively executed, is also furiously guarded. Upholding his own activity above all other considerations both justifies and sustains the system it’s embedded in. The education professional isn’t there to ponder reforms to the education system, but to espouse the existing model, which ensures her a place in society. Public health workers simply don’t question the western paradigm of external intervention, invasive medicine, and the power over life and death held by the pharmaceutical industry. Rather, and through their practice, they ensure the existence of a sufficiently extended quota of sufferers to warrant their occupation. The artist becomes a policeman of language, the politician a professional of power. For this reason, police don’t intervene with comparable harshness when facing big capital, those creators of wealth-based exclusion. Whoever makes the laws, creates the crimes.

This formula, based on the preferential defense of private property and on the specialization of labor, is at odds with another, characterized by horizontality and which defends the participation of all in the management of what’s common. Commons like our natural wealth: the air we breathe, the roads we travel, the water than runs over the land. But there are immaterial commons which sustain and give meaning to the reality we inhabit: language, technical innovation, culture, not to mention the laws we give ourselves, our sense of security. Commons cannot be the ascription or the object of a private initiative, nor of a public organism holding some sort of monopoly primed to eventually become profitable as a commodity. Commons can only be discussed and managed in assembly, and the police of the people shouldn’t obey any other mandate but that of an assembly. If security is a commons, all must contribute to its sustenance and to the establishment of the principles that govern it.

Police misery is but another part of the general daily misery enveloping our existence, yet it is also the paradigmatic projection of such misery, the synthesis of a social model based on domination and the exploitation of raw force. It is requisite to occupy a space within this generalized police state or risk conscious exposure to persecution and exclusion, the reestablishment of danger from the perpetual sidelines. By actively or passively participating in this order, we’re collaborating with the police. It isn’t enough to dream while dragging our chains with the resignation of slaves; we should start by not tightening the shackles any further, and open spaces for the free production of what’s human. The police aren’t human. It isn’t so much an expression of a necessity as the negation of all possibility.

When he identifies as a worker or citizen, the policeman also identifies as a traitor. Whoever betrays his group, his struggle, his feelings or his principles becomes an insubstantial being, a trump card for unpredictable reactions. Beneath the carapace of the riot cop lives and thinks a helpless citizen, an expropriated worker; possibly, an agonized and broken man. Thus his wretched condition: a uniform, in whatever job it may be required, is the humiliating mark of depersonalization, dehumanization, heteronomy. When there’s a man in uniform, the man doesn’t exist, the uniform does; and the space, the ranks, the corresponding articulated movements. The policeman, by being a policeman, relinquishes both his personal identity and positive participation in any collective form of social construction. He’s anonymous, ill-grounded figure, bereft of objectives, criteria and peers: the living image of a dead man and the purest form of replicant.

 

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Produced by Guerrilla Translation under a Peer Production License.

 

Footnotes:

[1] “Fuerzas y Cuerpos de Seguridad”, or FCS by its Spanish initials

[2] The article was originally written in 2014, when 15-M was still recent.

[3] The Citizen’s Tides Movement (or “Mareas” in Spanish) is a group of mobilizations in Spain in reaction to the austerity policies imposed by the EU and enforced by the ruling party, Partido Popular (PP). Among others, it affects basic social services such as healthcare and education (the White and Green Tides, respectively). These Tides have been the most significant counter movements to the austerity policies, with widespread mass repercussions. However, it is also important to highlight the Yellow Tide for library workers (one of the sectors hardest hit by the cuts), the Black Tide for miners (who as a sector had previously benefitted from state assistance despite not being public workers), the Red Tide for the ever increasing number of unemployed, and the Violet Tide for women and sexual minorities, also affected by other types of cuts evidencing the prolonging of a tradition of exclusion while reversing the progressive achievements made in this field by the previous social democrat government (PSOE). Although the scope of their demands goes no further than defending the welfare state and the upkeep of a series of rights validating state protectionism, their most significant characteristic is the abandonment of the old ways of union-led mobilization and political framing, preferring to adopt the style and practices established by the 15-M movement.

[4] Sindicato Unificado de Policia or “SUP” by its Spanish initials (Unified Police Union). Leadership in the SUP has more to do with the limitations of the police force as an employment sector than with its objective activities. Barred from creating class- or ideology-based unions, and in response to the prevailing militaristic regime found in the force, a group of agents from Seville instigated a semi-clandestine struggle to democratize the police force in 1978. Their efforts led to the recognition and legalization of a single, unified, police union in 1985. This solution was reminiscent of the vertical unions prevalent during Franco’s dictatorship.

[5] One of the gravest examples was the incident involving Esther Quintana. Quintana lost an eye due to a rubber slug fired by the Autonomous Catalan Police (Mossos d’Esquadra) during protests held for the General Strike on the 14th of November, 2012. It is one example of a series of systematic actions resulting in scores of wounded citizens, many of them underage, as denounced in Amnesty International’s devastating October 25th report. The Mossos, however, hold a specially vicious record in this regard, having been involved in numerous cases of abuse and torture which recently culminated in the death of passerby Juan Manuel Sánchez Benítez, which transpired after a violent detention in Barcelona’s Raval neighborhood on the 6th of October, 2013. There are video recordings of the arrest, made public on YouTube.

[6] The official name for the riot police in Spain is Unidades de Intervención Policial, (Police Intervention Units) or UIP by their Spanish initials.

[7] The ruling political party at the time, (and, again, since late 2011, after 8 years of PSOE government).

[8] “Bronce” means “Bronze”.

[9] Inspector Callahan, played by Clint Eastwood, is the leading character in the film Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, 1971). Callahan has come to represent the heroic paradigm of a policeman willing to break the law in order to enforce it.

[10] Word play on “España: una grande y libre” (Spain: One, Great and Free). Fascist propaganda phrase which expressed the nationalist concept of Spain as being Indivisible (against the separatism of the Basques and Catalans), Imperial (for the lost Empire of South America, and to expand the African one), and not submitted to foreign influences in reference to the alleged Jewish-masonic-Marxist conspiracy against Spain.

[11] Turquet de Mayenne (1611), La ciencia en el gobierno de Luis XIV.

[12] Foucault (1980), Sécurité, territoire, population, (Paris, Gallimard, 2004). Published in English as Security, Territory, Population.

[13] Guy Debord: Le déclin et la chute de l’économie spectaculaire-marchande, in Internationale Situationniste nº 10. Translated into English as The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy.