George Verstrynge

Jorge Verstrynge Rojas (Tangier, September 22, 1948) is a Spanish-French former politician, political scientist, and geopolitician. He has been a tenured professor at the Faculty of Political Science and Sociology of the Complutense University of Madrid. He regularly collaborates with the political magazine El Viejo Topo and in various television programs on political debate.

Biography

Childhood and training

Jorge Verstrynge was born in Tangier on September 22, 1948 with French-Spanish nationality. He is the son of a Spanish mother and a Belgian father, Willy Verstrynge-Thalloen, a follower of Léon Degrelle during World War II. His youth was spent in France and later he moved to Spain to study Political Science and Sociology (specializing in International Studies). from the Complutense University of Madrid, graduating in 1972. Doctor in Political Science and Sociology from the Complutense University of Madrid in 1976, with the doctoral thesis: The effects of war on industrial society. He currently resides in Madrid and is a professor at the UCM Faculty of Political Science and Sociology.

Political career

As a teenager his ideas brought him closer to French neo-fascism as well as to national-Bolshevism, as he confesses in his book Memories of a damned man. He was a "close person" to the neo-Nazi organization Círculo Español de Amigos de Europa, according to César Vidal.He was linked to the Guerrillas of Cristo Rey.He was initially an admirer of the Falangist minister José Antonio Girón. A student of Manuel Fraga (of whom he says perhaps had a Gaullist, populist and social democratic side) at the university, he began collaborating with him in the Orientation and Documentation Office, which later gave rise to Democratic Reform, Verstrynge being one of the founders; Democratic Reform would be one of the embryos of the later Popular Alliance (AP). He was also one of the promoters of the Club del Sable within Alianza Popular. He was a national deputy for AP between 1982 and 1989 and secretary general of this between 1979 and 1986, although he had previously held the Secretariat of Territorial Action (1976-1978). and the Organization Secretariat (1978-1979). In 1983 he published Madrid, my challenge .

Head of the list of the coalition between the Popular Alliance, the Popular Democratic Party and the Liberal Union (AP-PDP-UL) facing the municipal elections of May 1983 in Madrid, the candidacy obtained 11 percentage points in the elections less than the PSOE candidacy headed by Enrique Tierno, who obtained an absolute majority. Verstrynge preferred to continue as an MP.

Departing with Alfonso Guerra in 1982

Over time his similarity with the left is more and more evident, especially in the economic and social spheres, and also his opposition to his party and Fraga, internally and externally, ending with his confrontation with Fraga on the 1st of September 1986, when he is forced to resign. Ido de Alianza Popular founds his own party, Renovación Democrática, which is integrated into the Mixed Group of Congress.

I remember that once a lady approached me and said, “Oh, why didn’t you stay? He would have been president instead of Aznar.” I laughed, and Mercedes Revol, my current woman, said: “Look, madam, if Verstrynge became president, he would have nationalized the banking, insurance companies, highways... and after three months they would have put a bomb under the car” (laughter). This moves me from neo-fascism to a little-known thing in Spain called national-Bolshevism: “A socialist revolution is not possible if the country is not independent of all economic ties.” Jorge Verstrynge

In October 1987, it was rumored that he would be transferred to Adolfo Suárez's Democratic and Social Center (CDS), but finally in May 1988 he applied to join the PSOE, finally being admitted in 1993. He ended up resigning from this due to its support for the Yugoslav wars and the Gulf War. Later he was a political adviser to the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) and Izquierda Unida. Of his Secretary General, Francisco Frutos, he said that he considered him "a sincere and intelligent politician."

Verstrynge in 2013

In 1999, he published an autobiography entitled Memories of a Damned Man, in which, despite his "sincerity", he was criticized for being "ballasted by a subjectivism" characterized "by a radical attitude anti-system". In May 2012 he was one of those evicted by the National Police from a squatted social center in Madrid. In March 2013 he participated in an escrache called by the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages (PAH) in front of his personal home of the Vice President of the Government Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría, of the Popular Party. Finally, a judge in Madrid files the complaint after not seeing a crime in the escrache carried out at the vice president's home. In 2013 he published Against whom to fight , a work that Jon Juaristi called a "revolutionary self-help pamphlet" and "a weak dissertation with an accumulation of citations".

In 2014, supported by spokesman Pablo Iglesias, he joined the Podemos initiative, partly gestated in the classrooms of the faculty where he teaches, without the intention of being part of the electoral lists for the European Parliament elections. However, his intervention in presentations by this formation is frowned upon by some circles, who label him "xenophobic" due to his opposition to mass immigration and his sympathies for the National Front of Marine Le Pen (whom he describes as Gaullist and denies that he is fascist or far-right), which is why he passes into the background within this formation. At the beginning of 2016, he collaborated with the party in the drafting of an investiture document for the formation of the Government.

In 2017, the Provincial Court of Madrid acquitted him of the crime of attacking authority and injuries for the alleged assault on a national police officer during the rally called by the 25-S Coordinator at Puerta del Sol in Madrid in favor of the Republic, coinciding with the proclamation of King Felipe VI in June 2014.

Academic Life

After his first withdrawal from political life, he resumed his teaching activity, obtaining a tenured professorship at the Faculty of Political Science and Sociology (Complutense University of Madrid). He has also been a professor at the European University of Madrid, a professor at the San Pablo CEU University, a visiting professor at numerous foreign universities such as the Autonomous University of Mexico, the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (Mexico), Unifacs of Salvador de Bahía, the Institute of Advanced Studies of National Defense of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, etc; and professor of numerous master's degrees. He participated in the Fundación de Investigaciones Marxistas and the Research Group THEORIA-Critical Project of Social Sciences and was a professor of & # 34;Comparative Political Systems & # 34; in the Faculty of Political Sciences of the Complutense University of Madrid. He taught a Leadership course with University 2015 Training Association at the Center for Management Studies of the Complutense University of Madrid.

Thought

He declares himself a protectionist, statist, and an admirer of De Gaulle ("the last great true resistance to the American empire"), Robespierre, and Hugo Chávez: "De Gaulle himself affirmed that you have to go to a system of command economy. That the capitalist system does not work, that the communist system is not convincing, and we must go to a system of controlled economy where the interests of the State and its citizens must be above all the trusts that have been and will be. to the alterglobalist left: «I don't like it at all; part of the fact that globalization is good, when I believe that it is bad, period". Although he is akin to the protectionist economic ideas of Le Monde Diplomatique , he does not agree with its third worldism. Other authors they see influences from the French "Nouvelle Droite" in his thinking, especially Alain de Benoist.

Consistent with this, he is opposed to open borders and uncontrolled immigration, since he understands that they are used by capital to first suppress wages, affecting natives and first newcomers, generating constant instability in workers and thus destroying the market internal due to the decrease in internal demand and the suppression of prices that affects small merchants the most; and 2º to capture the human wealth of other peoples who lose number for use by other states and their companies. In 2007 with Gema and Rubén Sánchez Medero he gave the report "Immigration, capitalism, protectionism and identity: The Spanish case&# 3. 4;.

The ideal of Anglo-Saxons, who do not win the war militarily in 1945, but economically with the fall of the Berlin Wall, is to go to a great world market: the process of globalization: freedom of movement of total goods, freedom of movement of capital also total and freedom of movement of non-total but almost total people, from the moment when you can add to immigration the delocations.

Thus, the Spanish government has to compete with the Malay government. But of course, the wage differential that the Malay worker collects is not intercontinental, is interplanetary. The difference is so great that the Spanish worker can never compete with the Malay worker. Before, when such situations occurred, you could defend your borders. Not now, because the EU is the most open space on the planet. Or you could devaluate, but not now, because you can't devaluate because you don't have your own currency and the Euro doesn't want to devaluate either.

Thus, there is no way to correct this wage imbalance by devaluation, so they have made an internal devaluation, lowering wages. First, importing cheap immigrant labor evidently throws wages down. Reason for which no employer is against immigration or illegal immigration, which is wonderfully good for them. The one who does not do well is the Spanish worker who suffers within his own borders a competition that is not exactly that of Malay, but who throws the wages down. In addition to the monetary salaries, wages in kind are also thrown: health, education... so that the Spanish worker is less able to rival the Malay worker. The result of this is a contraction of demand because the wage mass goes down: there is less paid wages and logically there is less demand because people have less money to buy.

Now, the capitalist system works on the law of realization, which detected Marx very well, If I make this light, it gives me no benefit until I sell it, someone buys it and pays it. Thus, consumption is essential. If there is no consumption, the peta system. As we have to keep inciting people to consume, and besides people need it to cover their needs, they were told: “Well, you bastard.” And there begins the pyramid. It's not a financial crisis, it's a crazy free exchange crisis and where the banks have done what they want. There, the responsibility of politicians is abysmal, obviously.

He spoke that the previous assimilation in France, conversion of the foreigner into French, was better than the modern integration, in France since Lionel Jospin, which is cheaper to the state and does not bind foreigners and generated today's France in which a part He does not feel like he belongs to the French people or his home town, but rather a Muslim. "De Gaulle said that individuals can be assimilated, but not entire peoples. The amount is such that France is now on the brink of civil war. [...] There are neighborhoods in Paris where people tell you: 'this is war'. The French call them "non-law zones" because the law does not apply. After 7 p.m., neither the police, firefighters nor ambulances enter."

On the growth of Vox and other right-wing parties, in December 2018 he said:

the extreme right prohibits political parties, which populism does not do. Populism is the direct heir of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, be it populism of left or right. Since 1945, a system has been established, which is the liberal parliamentarian. [...] I don't consider Vox extreme right, but populism. The populist parties are parties whose essence is that the people "is God in their country" (quote of the index of their book). It is not fascism, it is not extreme right and is not authoritarianism. It's not racism, nor communism. Of course, it is neither left nor right "government." What happens is that countries are different. Marine Le Pen is populism, if you want right, but stateist and is contrary to globalization. It also favours a high degree of social distribution. Vox is populism "to the Spanish". Spain has a curse, it is called the Catholic Church. That is why in Vox they are contrary to abortion or divorce and not in the National Front. France is a real secular country. In Vox they do not look like Alternativa for Germany, nor does Matteo Salvini.

In October 2021 he spoke:

history is happening to the European left the bill of collection for its mistakes. The first mistake, and the most serious one, had played the letters of globalization, with an absurd migration policy that allowed the entry of thousands of outside workers who plunged the French working class into misery. If the socialist parties and the communist parties had defended the working class exposed to those threats, they would never have sunk. The Socialist Party in France, and here too, is dedicated to minorities, such as homosexuals, emigrants and other collectives, while the French working class is out of its radar, it remains without anyone defending its rights. The process that follows is that this workers' vote ends in the hands of the extreme right, in the National Front of Le Pen, which is, everything must be said, the first workers' party of France. The left is reaping what sowed the fruit of its inconsistencies."

His federal vision of Spain has been influenced by the book Spain as a problem by Pedro Laín Entralgo.

He has criticized the liberal libertarian left.^{[citation needed]}

He understands that the United States has died as a hyperpower, although not as a power: «USA. It is no longer an ideological model, nor is it an economic model (the American financial crisis is brutal, it cannot repay its debt). The problem is what countermodels do you have? There is the Chavista model, and Europe is not on that path at the moment. The second is the Islamic model, inapplicable in Europe. The last one is the Chinese model, which is not an alternative. Another alternative model has to emerge, and when it emerges, the US will no longer be the leading power."

He is critical of the United States, a country he accuses of never having been a democracy:

It's just that what happens in Guantanamo is only incredible for those who believed that the U.S. was a democratic country, and has never been a democratic country. Never in history. The US has been a predator since it exists. And a predator also on behalf of WASP, who went there to become an empire. But unlike Hitler, who in the Second World War loses it, they do not lose it and follow.

The Italian historian Steven Forti places him as one of the defenders of red-and-brown positions, that is, with right-wing values and left-wing ideas.

Asymmetric Warfare, Militant Muslims, and America

In January 2005 his book The Peripheral War and Revolutionary Islam was published. Origins, rules and ethics of asymmetric warfare; in April he was invited to the Military Forum on Fourth Generation War and Asymmetric Conflict, held at the Military Academy of Venezuela; in May the Venezuelan Army publishes a special pocket edition and 30,000 copies are given among generals, chiefs and officers of the National Armed Forces (FAN) of Venezuela. Among the reasons for its publication by the Army, its use in the Institute of Higher Studies of National Defense. This reception is "probably because the author revalues asymmetric warfare as a highly efficient option for weak actors to defeat infinitely more powerful enemies." If Verstrynge and Raúl Isaías Baduel indicated that Chávez's asymmetric warfare doctrine aimed at the mode of warfare in Southeast Asia, Muslim regions, and the North American intelligentsia, "Chavez and various Venezuelan authors maintain the opposite and indicate that asymmetric warfare in that nation constitutes a manifestation of sovereignty. a with strong roots in local history.”

Because of this the author is prohibited from entering the United States.

In February 2012, in the Western Hemisphere, Peace Corps, and Global Narcotics Subcommittee of the United States Senate, Douglas Farah testified that: the Venezuelan Ilich Ramírez Sánchez (author of the homonymous book L& #39;islam révolutionnaire, 2003), publicly prized and loved by Chávez as a "friend", "true revolutionary" and "distinguished compatriot", was among the first to articulate the possible fusion of Shiite thought with Marxist aspirations to destroy capitalism and American hegemony; Verstrynge's book, a continuation and exploration of Ilich Ramírez's ideas, including the use of biological and nuclear weapons, was adopted by Chávez as his military doctrine; In December 2008, in an interview on Venezuelan state television, Verstrynge praised Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda for their new type of deterritorialized, destatized, and denationalized war; in Univision he said that his model is modeled on Hezbollah; the military doctrine of asymmetric warfare of the Bolivarian revolution, official in Venezuela, was rapidly spreading to Bolivia, Nicaragua and Ecuador while Hezbollah was growing on the continent; copies of Verstrynge's book were found in FARC camps in 2011 for the first time.

Private life

He is the father of Lilith Verstrynge, appointed organization secretary of Podemos in June 2021.

Work

• A society for war. The effects of war on industrial society. Sociological Research Centre. Madrid, 1978.
• Between culture and man, Author Editor 3, Madrid, 1981.
• Democratic normalization, Alianza Popular, Madrid, 1982.
• Madrid, my challenge, Editorial El Burgo, Madrid, 1983.
• A society for war. The effects of war on industrial society, Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, Madrid, 1988.
• The Euberian dream. Essay on the future of Europeed. UCM, Madrid, 1992.
• The new barbarians: center and periphery in today's politicsGrijalbo, Barcelona, 1997.
• ElogiosEl Viejo Topo, Mataró, 1998.
• Memories of a damned (autobiography), Grijalbo, Barcelona, 1999.
• About the power of the people, El Viejo Topo, Mataró, 2000.
• A: Rebels, revolutionary and refractory: essay on dissented. El Viejo Topo, Mataró, 2002.
• The peripheral war and revolutionary Islam. Origins, rules and ethics of the asymmetric war, El Viejo Topo, Mataró, 2005.
• Faced with the Empire: Asymmetric War and Total War, Foca, Madrid, 2007.
• Protectionism and Economy of Great Space", El Viejo Topo, 2009
• Long live disobedience!, Editions Península, Madrid, 2011.
• Against who to fight, Editions Península, Madrid, 2013.
• Populism. The veto of the peoples, El Viejo Topo, Mataró, 2017.