We’re Not Talking about the Planet of the Apes…

…we're talking about the modern man. In Spain, that is. On Wednesday, June, 25, 2008 the environmental committee of Spain's parliament voted to pass resolutions calling for the government to adhere to the Great Apes Project. According to the Reuters article, the Great Apes Project was

…devised by scientists and philosophers who say our closest genetic relatives deserve rights hitherto limited to humans.

"This is a historic day in the struggle for animal rights and in defense of our evolutionary comrades, which will doubtless go down in the history of humanity," said Pedro Pozas, Spanish director of the Great Apes Project.

Oh it will go down in the history of humanity all right, Mr. Pozas. As yet another act of monumental stupidity by a country whose leader, Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, began his first term of office by kowtowing to al-Qaeda back in 2004 after the Madrid train bombings. Astonishingly, a plurality of Spain's electorate voted to re-elect this limp-wristed, anti-American, socialist clown earlier this year.

As I've written before, I love Spain. My maternal ancestors were from there, my grandfather was the project manager for the building of a nuclear power plant (Spain's first) north of Madrid in the 1960s, and my mother attended graduate school at the University of Madrid. My family maintains close ties to Spain to this very day.

Thus, it is heartbreaking for me to see a once-proud country reduced to a mere province of the gutless socialist kleptocracy known as the European Union. This is the country that in the past gave us such heroic men as Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar (El Cid), Hernán Cortés, and Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. This is the country whose people successfully undertook a centuries-long struggle – La Reconquista – against Muslim invaders in their own homeland and later broke Turkish control of the Mediterranean at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. This is the country that by the mid-1500s had established a global empire, unequalled in might and reach. And this is the country that gave us such great place-names as Matamoros (Spanish for "Moor-killer") and Despeñaperros (literally translating as "throw-dogs," the "dogs" in question being Moors).

Nowadays, instead of raising an army (like the fictional Legion del Cid in Tom Kratman's A Desert Called Peace) to fight the scourge of Islamic fundamentalism, Spain's government prefers to fret over the "rights" of chimps, orangutans, and bonobos. Just pathetic.

Legend has it that as Boabdil (King Muhammad XII – the last Arab king of Granada) and his family were leaving Granada after having lost the kingdom to the invading Spanish, Boabdil began weeping as he looked upon the Alhambra (his palace) for the last time. His mother scolded him, saying "You do well to weep for like a woman what you would not fight for like a man." The spot upon which this occurred came to be known as The Moor's Last Sigh.

I hope that Spain soon comes to its senses, for I would not care to see the legendary event repeated as The Iberian's Last Sigh.

Update:

Some perspective from Bruce Bethke and Vox Day.