Farewell to Franco?

"Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense." -- attributed to Mark Twain

The Socialist government's 2005 proposal of a "Law of Historical Memory" has been a sharp poke in the myths of both sides in Spain's great Civil War of 1936-39. This is because the war and its aftermath are remembered in diametrically opposite ways by Right and Left, and because each has huge emotional and even economic investments in its version.

It's easy to see why the emotions are so involved; it's impossible to remain indifferent after looking at the photographs of combat, destruction and suffering, or the posters of the Republic (which had the best artists) or of its enemies the Nationals, or listening to radio recordings (hysterical sermons, tense bulletins, impassioned speeches) or the marches or folk songs given new, revolutionary or nationalist lyrics ("Ay, Manuela", "Los cuatro muleros/generales", etc.).

For the Falangists of the 30s and 40s and their contemporary defenders, the war against the Republic was a Crusade that saved Christian Spain from Godless Communism, and those who opposed it deserved whatever punishment they suffered. All their guys were heroes, all their fallen "martyrs."

For defenders and sympathizers of the Republic, the heroes and heroines were all on their side, defending democratic legality with the support of other heroes from all over the world in the International Brigades. Together they expanded, liberalized and de-ideologized education, extended medical service to those who had never had it, opened the vote and elective office to women, empowered trade unions and civic associations in an intense and active democracy, and made possible a great cultural flowering in drama, poetry and all the other arts. In this view, the Franco dictatorship was inhumane and antihuman, and any resistance, whether by words or bombs, was more than justified.

The two great myths were constructed to solace the survivors and descendants on both sides, ways to "make sense" of real events that were complicated and contradictory. The truth, as usual, makes less "sense": heroes viewed from another angle -- or at another moment in their history -- become monsters, and glittering ideals turn into caricatures of themselves. The Falangist Nationalists killed many more Spaniards than their foes, and did so with the aid of German Nazi and Italian Fascist troops and arms and Muslim Moorish infantry, making their "nationalism" suspect. Also, their denial of basic civil freedoms and even of food to the needy makes their version of Christianity hard to defend. But the Left also committed outrages, including the massacring of prisoners during the Falangist siege of Madrid (far fewer than the other side, but still indefensible), and arrests and killings by one leftist faction against another -- not everyone defending the Republic was a Republican, that is, a true believer in the institutions of a democratic republic.

Until Franco's death in 1976, Republican exiles in Mexico, Russia and other countries and other sympathizers constructed their memorials mainly out of words, building a library of novels, stories, plays and tracts. Those supporters of the Republic who had remained in Spain and survived hunger, imprisonment of close relatives and other humiliations, including many widows, were so traumatized that they tended to keep their memories to themselves, too ashamed or frightened to tell their grandchildren what they had seen and suffered.

The Falangist myth was much more solidly constructed. Its "historical memory" was implanted in Spain by school texts, obligatory hymn-singing in class, the renaming of streets for Falangist generals, heroic statues of Franco, and, especially, the enormous monument outside Madrid known as the "Valle de los Caídos" ("Valley of the Fallen"), constructed by Franco's prisoners of war, and dedicated to "...perpetuating the memory of the fallen of our glorious Crusade," according to the 1940 decree of its founding. And there lie the tombs of Generalísimo Francisco Franco and the founder of the Falange (Franco's fascist party), José Antonio Primo de Rivera (1903-1936), attracting commemorative ceremonies of present-day falangistas, complete with the stiff-armed salute.

Then, after the sweeping Socialist Party electoral victory in in 1982, some town governments began to commemorate Republican and other leftist heroes by putting their names on a few streets and parks. And some of the grandchildren began digging for information in archives of the dictatorship, struggling for access with curators who opened them only reluctantly and partially, and only to those who could demonstrate a personal connection to the papers sought. And with the aid of elderly peasants who now felt empowered to speak, they also began digging into the ground, uncovering unmarked mass graves of school teachers, trade-union members, town officials of the Republican period, poets and others -- even priests, killed by the Falangists for feeding or hiding suspected Republicans.

Even today the Right, including the Catholic hierarchy, wants only its own martyrs remembered, conveniently forgetting those priests slaughtered by Franco's people. And sectors of the Left will not be satisfied by anything less than thorough condemnation of the Falangist mutiny and dictatorship it established, the annulment of all summary trials that condemned opponents of Franco to prison or death, and compensation for the dictatorship's victims and their descendants -- pensions and indemnities that will run into millions of euros.

So it was an important and rather surprising achievement this week when the Socialists and other left parties gained the support of even the opposition Popular Party (which includes Franco's political heirs and other rightists) for parliament to approve legislation to open all the archives to any researcher (as in other European countries), increase indemnizations to Republican veterans and their heirs, permit the children and grandchildren of exiles to opt for Spanish nationality (which should benefit many in Latin America), and -- of greatest symbolic importance -- to redefine the Valle de los Caídos as "a memorial to all the fallen in the Civil War and to those who suffered repression" in the following years. The place will need some serious design reforms. A hammer-and-sickle beside the huge cross may be too much to ask, and a Socialist Party fist with a rose could hardly compete with either of those images. Or better yet: Just pull down the cross -- which in Spain has become a partisan banner -- and set up a representation of Spain's now-democratic constitution.

Photo, top: A crane removes the statue of Francisco Franco from the main entry to the General Military Academy of Zaragoza- EFE, from El País, 24/08/2006.

Photo, side: El Valle de los Caídos, from Falange web forum

Widget

I put this new widget thing up at the top of the page ("Bookmark") because an announcement said it would bring me more web traffic. But how do you use it? When I mouse-over, everything I click invites me to create a new account, but I can't see how I could use any of them. So I haven't, but maybe I'm missing something. Can anybody tell me if I should bother? Do YOU use it?

Bolivarian Alternatives

A reader has asked about "Hugo Chávez' ALBA" which I mentioned as an example of inter-state associations that can limit multinational corporations' activity (see below, under headline "Globalization"). Here goes:

The Alternativa Bolivariana para los Pueblos de América is one of a half-dozen or more political-cum-trade associations among Latin American countries, in their attempts to establish policies and resources independent of the United States. In name and intention, "ALBA" is a direct response to "ALCA" (Área de Libre Comercio de las Américas ), Spanish acronym for the U.S.-sponsored Free Trade Area of the Americas.

ALCA/FTAA was founded at U.S. initiative in 1994 to reduce tariff barriers among 34 countries of the Western Hemisphere, that is, all of them except Cuba. Few, however, have actually joined, though the U.S. is still pushing the idea. Hugo Chávez has denounced it as another tool for imperialist exploitation by the U.S. The presidents of Brazil (Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva) and Argentina (Néstor Kirchner) have conditioned their participation on U.S. elimination of its agricultural subsidies (which appears unlikely), and there has also been loud objection to ALCA/FTAA's attempts to impose U.S. principles of "intellectual property" and patent protection, which the critics fear (with some historical basis) would be used to prohibit independent research and even exploitation of native plants which have been "patented" by a U.S. chemical company.

ALBA is the "alternative" proposed by Hugo Chávez. It does not exclude Cuba -- in fact, it was founded in Havana in 2004. (Just this week, Chávez surprised his Cuban hosts by proclaiming that "Cuba and Venezuela are really one government.") It does however exclude the U.S. It is "Bolivarian" both because Simón Bolívar (1783-1830) imagined a union of Spain's ex-colonies in America (he wanted to put its capital in Panama) and because it is Venezuela's treasury of bolívares (the national currency) that give it some plausibility. So far, besides Venezuela and Cuba, ALBA has negotiated agreements with Nicaragua, Bolivia, Haiti, and "bilateral agreements" (something less than full participation) with Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, etc.

Along the same lines, but with more radical implications, Venezuela and Cuba (with Venezuela's money) have created a new alternative to the International Monetary Fund, from which Cuba was excluded and which Venezuela recently abandoned. It was launched in Haiti with with $1 billion of Venezuelan money. Most of the countries of South America have already agreed to participate in what has now been redefined as a development bank which (at Brazilian insistence) will limit its lending to South America (thus leaving out Nicaragua and Haiti and other Caribbean countries -- Venezuela presumably will continue lending to them outside of the new bank).

Newsvine & new media

I just discovered Newsvine & am using it in two ways: Posting articles to see if I get any more readers, and reading some of the interesting stuff they collect. (You can see my page, with the articles posted, here.) It's free and easy. Makes me worry about the future of news media, though. If newspapers disappear, or morph into electronic diffusion of free info, who's going to pay for serious investigation?

There will be a solution -- we humans have always found a way out of whatever jam we've created for ourselves -- but I don't yet see what it will be. Probably a mix of things: university-based think-tanks, foundations (like the Fund for Investigative Journalism only bigger?), or funds gathered by interested NGOs (which would include all the neo-fascists as well as the people we like). The changes in our world of information are immense. The pretense of objectivity of the select few papers (Le Monde, New York Times, El País, Herald Tribune, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and a couple of others have always insisted on their independence), while maybe never more than a pretense, will erode to nothing. Maybe that's all right -- in a free-for-all of people shouting at each other, some few thinkers may be able to filter the sensible from the insane. Diderot did it, in the 18th century, so maybe we can too.

See Poynter article, Facing the News Business Model Crisis.

Globalization: Ours & theirs

A friend writes, à propos my review of Ulrich Beck's book on globalization (also at Newsvine ): "I remain skeptical of globalization, a neo-capitalist plan to push American, British and other corporate countries markets into small countries around the world. With global warming, there may be a counter trend of people taking care of their own needs on a smaller scale as global trade may be come less and less plausible."

Here's my response:

Globalization: Since we can't beat it, we've got to figure out how best to use it. Interconnectivity among people all over the globe is not a neo-capitalist plan, or any kind of plan at all. It's been happening since the first navigators began exploring, or even earlier, and has been happening faster and faster since the steam engine, telegraphy, aviation and now electronic, wireless media. Our problem is that corporations know how to use it more effectively than most of us, but they are vulnerable in several ways that make them subjectable to pressure from citizen groups and even from states. Chiefly, they must sell their products to survive (in competition with other corporations), making them vulnerable to consumer boycotts and receptive to any "good" publicity that gives them an edge over the competition (My friend Charlie Kernaghan's National Labor Committee exploits this vulnerability brilliantly). Secondly, corporations can pressure governments by threatening not to invest, but they MUST invest somewhere, so states and combinations of states (Hugo Chávez's ALBA, for example) can severely limit their activity. And there are other vulnerabilities (the precariousness of CEO's positions, for example) that smart trade unions (Reuther was a genius) have been able to use.

Beck points out that the "anti-globalizers" are themselves enthusiastic globalists, organizing NGOs world-wide. Focusing on smaller scale, local needs while taking into account the the global is exactly what he advocates : "glocalization" is the ugly word for it, "cosmopolitanism" is (to my ear) much better. He uses both words, but emphasizes cosmopolitanism, which, he reminds me, is an ancient Greek concept: loyalty to and concern for the "polis", the local city-state, AND for the "cosmos", i.e., everything. Global organizations he mentions for praise most often include Amnestiy International and Greenpeace.

Beauty and the beast

In preparation for a visit to Paris, I wanted something to read to revive my half-forgotten French, and among the dozen or so things in French abandoned by tourists in our public library in Carboneras, I found this little bomb of a book. Very short (87 pp.) and very intense, the story of a monster of the civil wars in Russia, 1917-18, how he got that way and the girl who (at least partly and at least for a moment) transformed him.

Kessel, Joseph. Makhno et sa juive. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1987. See my note in Fiction Readings.

Nestor Ivanovich Makhno was a real anarchist guerrilla chieftain and there are those who defend his reputation and denounce Kessel for the bloody, horrific portrait. His defenders see him more or less the way Sonia, the Jewish girl in the novel, does -- "un homme dévoué au peuple, le sauveur des moujiks, le martyr de Sibérie que vengeait sur les riches et les seigneurs les souffrances que lui et ses frères avaient subies." (A man devoted to the people the savior of the muzhiks, the martyr of Siberia who was taking revenge on the rich and the lords of the land for the sufferings that he and his brothers had undergone.)

But this is a novel, not history or biography, and we know the writer has made up stuff. Whether or not the real Makhno was such a monster as Kessel's narrator claims (and the narrator is nearly hysterical and certainly unreliable), it's a terrific story and a very effectively written one. It is also a very old story, going back to Enkidu and the maiden in the Epic of Gilgamesh. But this is an especially vivid telling. And good practice in reading French.

For something about the historical Makhno, here's a socialist take, The Makhno Myth from the International Socialist Review.

Spain: Bubbles, bombs & bombast

It wasn't the story that got the most media attention in Spain this week, but it may be the one with the most serious long-term impact: The combined debt of builders, realtors and families for housing in this country is now as big as the entire gross domestic product of Spain! Un billón de euros -- that is, a million times a million, or what in the U.S. we call a "trillion." Which means, at current exchange rates, about one trillion four-hundred million dollars.

The double-digit yearly inflation of housing prices for the past 5 or 6 years and the mad pace of building -- 850,000 housing units last year, more than Germany and France together (and both are larger countries) -- created an economic bubble that got so big that the building & realty sector accounts now for nearly one-third (32.5%) of all outstanding bank loans, up from about 10% eight years ago. It couldn't go on indefinitely, and the mortgage crash in the U.S. (where Spanish banks had bought bonds that are now plummeting in value) has finally pricked it.

Now suddenly mortgages are more expensive, housing prices are falling, and buyers are disappearing. Realtors who had taken out big loans backed by the expected sale prices of over-valued land and buildings are defaulting. So far no major bank in Spain has come close to failing, as we saw recently in Britain (they say it's because they are more cautious in their mortgage policies), but one significant realtor, Llanera, has collapsed.

Slowdown in construction is expected to cut Spain's 2008 economic growth rate from an impressive 3.4% (predicted in May) to 2.7% (El Mundo, 3 Oct. 2007), and investment growth in construction will drop from 3.8% in 2007 to 0 -- yep, zero -- in 2008, according to the bank Caja Madrid. There go tens of thousands of the semiskilled jobs that have been filled largely by Rumanians, Lithuanians, Senegalese, and South Americans. And lots of other jobs and expectations.

Spain's rapid economic growth in recent years has been almost entirely due to the construction industry, mainly second homes for the wealthy. As economist José García Montalvo put it, "It's a disaster for the economy that a sector with such a low productivity is absorbing so much of our resources." (El País, 7 Oct.)

The building frenzy has wreaked havoc with local ecology, not to mention the scenery of the coastline covered with brick and cement hotels, apartment complexes and shopping centers. The disastrous flooding in Almuñécar less than two weeks ago, when the rain was heavy but no greater than normal, was largely due to "invasions" of riverbeds by eager builders. (The monstrous floods in Alicante today were probably aggravated by similar causes -- we should know later this week.) Almost all new building has been for high-priced second homes, most of which are empty most of the year (and when they're not, the first home is empty). Meanwhile, organizations of youth are organizing massive protests because they can't afford to buy and can't find anything to rent.

No other country in Europe has been building so much for such little purpose or with so little concern for the environment or for the social needs of its population. What has caused such a distortion of the economy? A combination of forces: an eccentric land-use policy legislated under the Aznar government (giving local governments the power to declare almost all land "urbanizable," meaning buildable), Spanish local nationalisms demanding ever more authority over land-use (and thus permitting the well-connected to make fortunes turning farmland and parkland into luxury housing), the growing prosperity of a certain class of Spaniards and the influx of well-pensioned foreigners, all seeking homes on the coast and near golf courses, and a local, city-government financing system that depends on sale of licences to builders (and thus a strong incentive to "urbanize" everything). The inertia is too strong for all the building to stop suddenly, but the slowdown will be felt.

The bombs you no doubt know about. ETA is back with a bang. It all seems so atavistic, violence for "national liberation" at a time when the nation-state is losing its relevance (see the note on Ulrich Beck, below). The problem for ETA is that, if they became a legal political movement and put Basque independence to a vote, they almost surely would lose. But that's a subject for another essay.

And bombast. Today is Spain's "national fiesta." Today, 12 October, Spaniards celebrate -- well, what, exactly? Columbus's encounter with the Arawaks in 1492 and the beginning of Spain's American empire? No, that didn't turn out all that well. Maybe the day of the Guardia Civil? Well, sort of. But really it's for Spain's patron saint, the Virgen del Pilar, who appeared atop a pillar in Zaragoza in the 13th century. Big party (military parade, appearance of all the royals with the government, and opposition leader Rajoy waving a flag to show he's more Spanish than anybody). A great occasion for attention-grabbers of all sorts, including far right-wingers who booed the president right when he and the king were honoring Spain's war dead, and in Basque country, the self-styled "Abertzale (Basque for "patriot") left" trashing everything they could in San Sebastián.

This is just a bit of what seems to me important in Spain this week. More next Friday.

Photo from today's "Desfile de la Hispanidad" in Madrid: EFE, El Mundo

Talking heads

Don't miss this insightful newscast by the Onion reportorial team, telling everything the media experts know about Africa's biggest country: In the Know:The Situation in Nigeria.

This week in Spain

Cartoon by Peridis, El País 5 Oct. 2007

The fallout from "Crawford"
José María Aznar (the mustachioed face above) must have been really stung by the revelations of his private conversations with George Bush, in Crawford, Texas, on 22 Feb. 2003, just before Bush launched his "Operation Iraqi Freedom" -- transcripts that showed that he knew Bush had made the decision to invade, even while he was claiming that he and Bush and Blair were still seeking a diplomatic solution. The transcripts were unearthed by a British lawyer who passed them on to El País, which broke the story last Tuesday. (Here's Ernesto Ekaizer's original 25 Sept. front-page article, accompanied by a wonderfully goofy photo of Aznar being petted by Bush.)

The Crawford transcripts compound an enduring embarrassment to Aznar's Partido Popular, the party's responsibility for dragging the country into an unpopular and disastrous war. This famous photo of the Azores meeting with Blair, Bush and Aznar grinning about the easy victory they expected in Iraq is republished every time the Partido Popular tries to duck responsibility.

But Aznar is far from repentant. Just yesterday he delivered what El País describes as "un furibundo discurso", a hellfire and damnation tirade against the now-governing socialists and President José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero in particular, for "rustling through old files to find something diffamatory." Wow! Most amazing, he condemns Zapatero for getting Spain out of Iraq and ending Spain's lapdog subservience to U.S. policy. According to him, Zapatero has taken Spain out of the front ranks of international diplomacy, relegating it "once again to the corner of those countries that don't matter, the club of irrelevant countries." And this man (Aznar) presents himself as a Spanish patriot, defending Spain's integrity and sovereignty. But not, apparently, its independence.

Conflicting nationalisms
Lots of media space has been taken up by some very minor and silly outbursts in Catalonia (the burning of photographs of King Juan Carlos I by young men demanding Catalonian independence) and some potentially more serious confrontations in the Basque country, consisting of threats to the mayoress and a refusal to allow the national flag to be flown at city hall in one small Basque town where nationalists claim to belong to another, non-Spanish country. These smaller nationalisms (Basque, Catalonian, Galician -- and there are others in this very diverse country) get harder and more aggressive in reaction to the kind of Spanish patriotism that Aznar and his cronies demand and that the party's current leader, Mariano Rajoy (shown above reclining upon the "rock" of Aznar) constantly reiterates: exclusivist and denying legitimacy to some very deeply felt and long-standing traditions and loyalties to the respective "patrias chicas" (small homelands). The democratic Constitution of 1978 doesn't let the PP go as far as Franco in suppressing them, but the party has organized huge rallies against the proposed revision of Catalonia's statute of autonomy. This attitude drives many Catalans and Basques, and some Gallegos and other national groups, up their respective walls. And the predictable, if regrettable, aggressive outbursts by Catalans, in their ways, and Basques in other ways, are magnified by the PP to claim that, under the Socialists, "Spain is breaking apart." As though it were any more together when Aznar governed.

Pending issues
Many other things have occurred in Spain this week. They include events related to overbuilding, urban corruption and the crisis of the real estate industry; the huge and amazingly stupid opposition of the Catholic Church and its allies to the proposed "Education for Citizenship"; Spain's involvement and casualties in Afghanistan; the struggle over the official "Historical Memory" of the 1936-39 Civil War. But since all these are ongoing issues, I ought to be able to address them in future dispatches.

I'm going to try to put together a summary like this every week. Let me know what you think of it, and what else you'd like to know about regarding Spain.

Everything really is going to hell...

... if Bush & Cheney carry out the attack on Iran that they've been planning. Since the last two invasions (Iraq & Afghanistan) have proven so disastrous, the only thing that occurs to the Bush Administration is to create another, even more dangerous war. Before that happens, listen to these Iran experts interviewed by Amy Goodman.