Bilbao Letter: The heroic myths of revolutionary organisations are often built on the mistakes of counter-revolutionary governments. Think of 1916, and the IRA Hunger Strikes, here at home.
Think of the fatal decisions taken in the last months of the Spanish dictator, Gen Francisco Franco.
Thirty years ago last Tuesday, 21-year-old Juan Paredes Manot, known as Txiki because he was so small, was taken out from prison and into a wood near Barcelona in the early morning. A volunteer firing squad made up of the Guardia Civil tied him to a kind of tripod. Ballast sacks were placed against it, a thoughtful gesture to prevent his falling over as the first volley hit him.
The story goes - and there are good witnesses, his brother Mikel and two reputable lawyers - that he was singing as those bullets struck home. The song was Eusko Gudariak, the song of the Basque soldiers who defended the democratic Second Republic against Franco's insurgents in the first years of the Spanish Civil War.
The song was appropriated as the anthem of Txiki's organisation, the revolutionary group Eta, which had been fighting for "Basque independence and socialism" throughout the late Franco period. But Txiki's heroism gave Eta more than the right to sing a good song. He bequeathed an invaluable icon to his comrades.
First on illegal mimeographed propaganda leaflets, and today on designer T-shirts, Txiki's smiling and idealistic young face is as familiar in the Basque Country as Bobby Sands's image is in Belfast. Curiously, he was not immune to such imagery himself. Several photographs before his arrest show him sporting Che Guevara vests.
Txiki's commitment to the Cuban revolutionary was obviously very different to that of a fashion victim. His last written message to his family is made up of the following lines: "Tomorrow, when I die/do not weep for me/I shall never be under the clay/I am the wind of liberty." Many Basques learned these words off by heart under the impression Txiki had composed them. In fact, they are the words of Che himself. Somehow, they sounded less overblown in those more passionate times.
On the day he died, another Eta member, Ángel Otegi, and three members of the Maoist group Frap, were also executed. All had been convicted by military kangaroo courts, on flimsy and often obviously fabricated evidence, of killing policemen.
World leaders and mass demonstrations across Europe, including Ireland, had sought in vain to persuade Franco to commute these death sentences, as he had in similar circumstances in 1970.
But his heart had hardened along with his arteries, and Eta's 1973 assassination of his prime minister and close confidante, Luis Carrero Blanco, added an element of vengeance to these judicial murders. The regime showed its true colours when it dismissed an appeal from the eminent Swedish politician, Olaf Palme, as "the words of a drunkard and homosexual". Txiki's death had a particular significance for Eta and Basque nationalism, because he was not an ethnic Basque. He was the son of immigrant labourers from far-off Extremadura, and had only come to the Basque Country when he was nine-years-old.
His commitment to Eta indicated that this movement was attracting support well outside the traditional nationalist heartlands. By executing him, the regime created a martyr whose appeal to a large sector of Basque youth has been consistent in the very different political climate that has emerged since his, and Franco's, deaths.
"My son was a man and they shot him down like a dog," his mother said after his execution. "All the world should know this."
What the rest of the world knows today, however, is that most of those who have died like dogs in the Basque Country since 1975 have not been members of Eta, but victims of that organisation. As Spain shifted painfully but steadily towards democracy, a hardline sector of Eta persisted in an increasingly indiscriminate terrorist campaign. The group became part of the problem, not the solution, to the continuing conflict. Many of Txiki's closest comrades recognised the futility of terrorism, hung up their guns and joined the democratic mainstream. Whether he would have agreed with them or not is as futile a speculation as whether Bobby Sands would have supported the Belfast Agreement.
What is more to the point is that the 1975 executions were instrumental in ensuring that the 1978 Spanish constitution outlawed the death penalty in almost all circumstances, as Txiki's defence lawyer has recently argued.
And perhaps the best hope for the future is that Eta has not killed for more than two years, and seems at last be preparing its own farewell to arms, a move which should be facilitated by the IRA's historic disarmament this same week.