Which way is 'Left'? Spain, France, the U.S.

Now isn't this a curious image? A weary, desperately hopeful Bush, nearly friendless in the world and with no support from either the American people or even his party, seems to be leaning on Sarkozy, who is much shorter but at the moment much sturdier. Sarkozy has announced that France will always be "a friend of the United States" and, while making no commitment to Bush's lost war in Iraq, promises to maintain troops in Afghanistan "as long as necessary."

Contrast this with a March 2003 photo of a healthier, much more confident Bush with Spain's then-president José María Aznar, who had just committed Spanish lives to Bush's Iraq adventure in exchange for a little petting. Aznar reveled in that caress in his "best friend" role in Bush's western; Sarkozy knows that this show is not John Ford but Molière, where he plays the clever scamp who happily relieves the pretentious nincompoop of a good part of his fortune.

On Wednesday we flew back from Paris to Madrid, and then on Thursday took the train to Almería, an occasion to catch up on the papers and reflect on the contrasting "Rights" and "Lefts" of Spain and France.

In Spain, the Right can't agree on what direction to take, the major party riven by in-fighting while its supposed leaders take disastrously extreme positions that even many of its usual voters find ridiculous (claiming against all evidence that Atocha train station bombings were really a Socialist plot to take power, for example). In France, it's the Left that doesn't know where it's going, or to say the same thing another way, is trying to go in all directions at once. In both cases, disorganization is both cause and consequence of being out of power.

Aznar's phony nationalism (claiming to promote the ancient values of Spain while surrendering its sovereignty to the U.S. neo-cons) turned into an electoral disaster for his Popular Party in 2003, as many Spanish conservatives now realize, but the PP leadership has been reluctant openly to disavow Aznar's odd mix of neo-liberal economics and medieval social policies. The PP factions are at war with one another (notably in Madrid, with PP Madrid Community president Esperanza Aguirre v. PP Madrid mayor Ruiz-Gallardón, and in Valencia, with former Generalitat president and now PP spokesman Eduardo Zaplana in open conflict with current Generalitat president, also PP, Camps), and has alienated its some-time allies in the other nationalist parties. In contrast, the Socialists (PSOE) now in government have been able to establish the direction of the Left, holding together (mostly) its own internal factions and keeping the support of the other parties that define themselves as Left.

Sarkozy, who is as far right as Aznar economically but not as medieval -- he doesn't openly voice nostalgia for the Reconquista (i.e., expulsion of Muslims) or the Inquisition -- is seeking to impose his vision on France's fractious Right while exploiting the notorious divisions on the Left, seducing some of the Socialist Party's best-known figures to join his government. His successes reveal the utter confusion of the Left, that famous socialists such as Kouchner et al. could think that Sarkozy's echo of Louis-Phillipe's 1840 cry "Enrichissez-vous" could be a left slogan today. Sarkozy's gestures (mostly mediatic) so far have been possible because he faces no concerted, united opposition. The big strikes scheduled for next week will be a major test.

I haven't yet got to what I wanted to talk about here, the parallel and divergent histories of the two countries' Socialist and Communist Parties, which explain a lot of what is going on now and, I think, will help us predict where and in what form the new European Left will take. But this note is already too long and it's late. Those thoughts for a future note.

Les petites nouvelles.

Il fait froid à Paris. But otherwise, there are some great treats here. One is the free Internet, at Wi-Fi spots throughout the city and paid for by City Hall (that is, the taxpayers). Right now we're in the Mairie (town hall) of the 3rd Arrondissment, along with a couple of dozen other people all with laptops (Apple iBooks like mine seem to be the most popular). That's because the city government (one overall mayor, plus local mayors for each of the arrondissments) is all or mostly Socialist (Parti socialiste), in contrast to the national government under Sarkozy (UMP), pushing hard to the right. We are lucky to be here between strikes. The big one of the subway and other transit workers two weeks ago has been lifted, in preparation for a more massive one that threatens to paralyze the country beginning November 13.

My French is no where near as fluent as my Spanish or English but so far I've been able to make myself understood, and to understand most of the replies, in the brasseries, la pharmacie and, most complicated, with the hôte du logement, and I've been reading the papers. So far I haven't found any -- not Le Monde, certainly not Libération -- as good for world news as Spain's El País. Libération is very interesting on the labor conflicts and the effects of Sarkozy's new measures on local households, and carries interesting literary reviews, but has almost nothing on events outside France that don't directly affect France. Le Monde has a little more, including the other day an essay on the coming Mideast conference by, of all people, Henry Kissinger, noted Christmas bomber. More when I learn something interesting enough to share with you. À bientôt.

Spain: Movies and memories

Last night we saw one of the newest Spanish films, Las 13 rosas, a true story made into a perhaps overly sentimental film, but nevertheless effective because we recognize its truth, of both the immense human capacity for cruelty and the strength of those who resist it. In Madrid after the defeat of the Republic in 1939, thirteen very young women -- girls, really -- arrested by Franco's police for various reasons (some had been in the Socialist Youth, one had helped a Communist trade-unionist escape, and so on) were sentenced to death, along with scores of men, accused of complicity in violent acts in which they had had no part, not even remotely. As a work of art, it is far less extravagantly imagined than El laberinto del fauno, a fairy tale of Franco repression and anti-fascist partisan victory, but this film has the enormous advantage of realism: this really did happen, pretty much the way it's told. For a historic photo and a good summary of the true history of the 13 "red roses" (in Spanish), see La corta vida de trece rosas en El País, 11/12/2005.

Otherwise, the news from Spain this week is: nada. Which also happens to be the title of a very good feminist novel of those hard, early years of the Franco dictatorship: Laforet, Carmen. Nada. 1944. (Clásicos Españoles. Madrid: El País, 2004.) No news, just olds. For example, this week an unemployed Spanish youth on a Barcelona subway car screamed at, punched, pinched the breast and then kicked in the face a slender Ecuadorian girl he'd never seen before (this was all recorded on security cameras), was quickly found and arrested, and then freed by a judge; he's on the street, but the girl is now afraid to leave her house. More North Africans and sub-Saharan Africans risked their lives and many lost them in attempts to reach Spain; and Mariano Rajoy, the terminally mediocre leader of the opposition Popular Party, made another grotesquely idiotic statement, this one so clueless that the Spanish press compared him to George W. Bush (he said we shouldn't really worry about climate change, because there were bigger problems such as CO2 emissions; he said this on the same day and in the same forum where Al Gore was about to show his movie). But racism in Spain, immigrant desperation and Rajoy's idiocy are not news.

Next week I'll be in France, so I can't promise any new report on Spain. I've already touched on some of the big issues. (Click on keyword "Spain" below to see the lot.) These include two essays on immigration 2006/10/07 and 2006/9/27, plus the notes of the past three Fridays on Spain's entanglement with Bush's Iraq war and its internal "nationalisms" (2007/10/5, the overbuilding crisis and Rajoy's "Día de la Hispanidad" idiocies (2007/10/12), and "Historical Memory" of the civil war and the Franco dictatorship (2007/10/19). And my compañero Baltasar and I have written many other notes on Spain on our Spanish-language blog, which you may want to visit. Hasta pronto.

Becoming brutal

And do you think this isn't happening to our boys (and even our girls -- remember Abu Ghraib) in uniform in Iraq? Not to mention the un-uniformed Blackwater guys and their kin. Israel shaken by troops' tales of brutality against Palestinians

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.