There is a report in the Telegraph called Entire village suspected of mayor’s murder that caught my eye.
Although no official statement has yet been given, the Guardia Civil have indicated that they strongly believe those responsible for the murder of the 50-year-old mayor bore a grudge over his policies in the village. There is no shortage of contenders. During his 12 years in office, the mayor, a member of the conservative Popular Party and the owner of the village’s only guest house, had been involved in almost four dozen individual court cases with homeowners in Fago. He had taken out injunctions to prevent people making home improvements and closed down a bed and breakfast because it competed for business with his own establishment.
[…]
“He was an unpleasant man who ran this place like his personal kingdom. He made life difficult for most of us but for a select few he made life impossible,” he said.
I regard it as a truism that ‘the state is not your friend’, but it is easy to concentrate one’s attention on the outrages to personal freedom that come out of central government, the big sweeping laws that abridge liberties and which get talked about in the national newspapers. Yet in many ways the most fearful tyranny is the one which gets imposed by people living right next to you, because it is almost impossible to avoid or mitigate… well not entirely, as Mayor Miguel Grima discovered.
Has Inspector Barnaby been informed?
With a bit of re-writing
This could be a Midsomer Murder
Christmas special.
I’d have taken him out for a very reasonable price.
Me sat here with my City and Guilds in asassination, pretty much unused and all!
Aragon, used to be an anarchist stronghold in 1936… I see the spirit of direct action hasn’t been totally expunged there. 🙂
Out of curiosity I wonder how this loathed man managed to remain mayor for 12 years? Not by election I presume?
I did rather wonder about that myself. Surely mayors in Spain do not have twelve year terms and I assume they are elected rather than appointed? Anyone actually know? Still, I suppose this was much less fuss than a ‘recall petition’ or any of that malarkey 😛
This incident is life imitating art. “Who Shot Mr. Burns?” anyone?
According to Antena 3 he had been elected mayor 17 votes to 5. This seems ridiculously low and I thought that it was perhaps an election by members of a council. Then I found this which shows votes cast in the 2004 European elections. It seems that Fago is just a really small place or a place with a VERY low voter turnout.
The incident truly is “life imitating art”. Lope de Vega (Spain’s Shakespeare) wrote a play titled “Fuente Ovejuna” in 1619, in which the inhabitants of the eponymous village rebel against their overlord and kill him in revenge for his cruel and sadistic treatment of them. When royal investigators are dispatched to interrogate and torture the villagers, none will say anything except “Fuente Ovejuna killed him” – and finding only that the entire village can be blamed, and thus no individual convicted of the murder, the investigators depart, and none of the locals is punished. There’s a moral in there, somewhere. I think.
I eagerly await this trend’s arrival in the U.S. It’s time our social activists got some of the fear they’ve been dealing out.
You’re right about petty tyranny. The residents’ association where I live is about to embark on a crusade against satellite dishes. Quite what they have against satellite dishes or why exactly they think it is their business I don’t know, but the council is on their side because of some nonsense about an “architectural conservation area”.
It’s so miserable and futile fighting people like this.
And petty murder is still murder.
It’s good to see that the spirit of hypocrisy in which the left can spit venom at Pinochet whilst lauding Castro is alive and kicking even here. The idea that murder is acceptable as long as it is directed as people whose politics we dislike is one decried almost constantly on this website.
Thank God whichever plucky, helpless villager didn’t avail him- or herself of the electoral process. For those of you who assume that he wasn’t elected, the article is quite clear: “he was considering standing down as mayor of Fago at the next election.” having received threatening notes. He was ambushed on his way home from a council meeting, and shot four times in the head and neck.
Hooray for thuggery. It in no way is tyranny.
Now imagine these were Communists attacking and killing a local mayor because of his oppressive policies and see how many cheers you can muster.
Still, it all helps the macho posturing…
Thank you Nathan for your lesson in moral equivalence. So if a tyrant uses violence to repress people, it is always wrong to use violence to resist that repression… is that what you are saying?
In my view the fact he was elected does not make much difference. For example Chavez has been elected and that does not make the fact he has a majority mandate to throw his political enemies in jail any more acceptable or make resisting that by violence unacceptable.
The Jim Crow laws in the USA were perfectly democratic and they lasted for a very long time… and any black people who used force to resist their enforcement would have been perfectly justified, democracy be damned. If you are in a perpetual minority because the majority quite like to benefit from your repression, violence is often all you have left.
You see, I do indeed think it is okay for opponents of tyranny to kill people under quite a lot of circumstances whereas I do not think supporters of tyranny are justified in doing the same. Why? Because one is right and the other is wrong and if non-violent means have failed, violence is all that is left. At some point there comes a time when you just cannot take any more.
Excellent, it’s good to see that you think that a local mayor in a town of 90 people (37 permanent inhabitants, 22 registered votes), who was intending to stand down at the next election, was such a threat to liberty that his life was forfeit. And it’s good to know that you are the ultimate arbiter of such questions.
Or, and here’s a novel idea, maybe there are some objective standards by which we can judge tyranny (I felt that my headmaster was tyrannous, unfortunately he lives to this day). I never claimed that all violence against authority imposed by elected governments was illegitimate. I was saying that there was nothing in this case to suggest that an assassination was in order. The death threats had, apparently, worked after all…
Let’s take John Brown. To end the slavery in the USA, he killed four people. To stop fines being put on chairs outside cafes, these people killed a quarter as many.
John Wilkes Booth, of course, thought he was fighting tyranny. He was certainly fighting for states’ rights to decide how to dispose of their property. If only he could have emailed you to find out whether Abraham Lincoln was acting tyrannically or was on the side of liberty. Or maybe, just maybe, he was both.
And maybe, just maybe glorifying local vendettas, and imbuing the participants with the lustre of faux-Jeffersonian real men who knew how to deal with those who would dare to tread on them on the basis of very scant evidence is witless ideological non-thought.
Well I really don’t know if that Mayor deserved to die. Maybe not. Or maybe he did.
The fact is I do rather like the idea of excessive political power leading people on the receiving end of it to react in a more homicidal manner because if the 20th Century taught us only one thing, states sure do like to kill people to protect their right to tell them what to do.
When someone in power gets shot, maybe it was justified, maybe not, but I do not automatically assume the answer is ‘not’.
The funny thing now is that the one who appears to have killed him was the last candidate of the Socialist Party…and the media is not focusing at all on the political side.
It is easy to guess what would have happened in the opposite case.