“Yes we need more cuts … But with the guillotine” -Pablo Iglesias Good Read

[malaise]

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/18/pablo-iglesias-guillotine-french-revolution
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Pablo Iglesias, the leader of Spanish leftists Podemos, is a man stalked by history. Or, more specifically, the history of the French revolution. Much has been made in the Spanish media about Iglesias’s fondness for guillotine imagery. In June 2012, Iglesias reacted to civil service cuts by tweeting: “Yes we need more cuts … But with the guillotine.” A year later, he published an article entitled A Guillotine on the Puerta Del Sol. The same year Iglesias asked in a TV interview: “Do you know which act symbolises the historic advent of democracy? It is when a king, Louis XVI, had his head chopped off by a guillotine.”

“How many horrors would the Spanish have spared themselves if they had relied on the tools of democratic justice,” he lamented, before quoting Robespierre. “To punish the oppressors of humanity is clemency; to forgive them is barbarity.” Not a week passes without reference to these statements in the Spanish media: only the other week, the founding editor of the centre-right daily El Mundo sarcastically dubbed Iglesias “The incorruptible senor X”, a reference to Robespierre’s nickname. Iglesias himself has made no effort to renounce these comparisons.

Inviting comparison to Robespierre, one of the most vilified political leaders in history, is a bold move for any politician. And yet, for Iglesias, it is also a wise move, as the way in which we understand the French revolution sheds much light on Europe’s current situation.