Category Archives: Spain

Cuban-born columnist Carlos Alberto Montaner remarks in the Miami Herald on the remarkably unremarkable election of Michelle Bachelet (interviewed last night on the NewsHour) as Chile’s next president.

Michelle Bachelet and Sebastián Piñera carried out good election campaigns, both colorful and modern. Shortly before Election Day, the pollsters made their predictions: Bachelet, a 54-year-old socialist physician, multilingual, former minister of health and defense, should win by about five percentage points….

By now, of course, the news is not who won the presidency but that, in the electoral field, Chile behaves as a developed and predictable nation. This allows us to make the following observation: Chilean society happily has crossed the threshold of common sense….

The Left that rules Chile is the Left of Tony Blair and Felipe González. It is a Left that, instead of nationalizing the sources of production, stimulates private enterprise and adopts measures to facilitate the functioning of the market. A Left that signs treaties for trade openings with the United States, the Mercosur, the European Union and South Korea because it has learned that Chile’s growing prosperity depends, in large measure, on those intense exchanges. A Left, in sum, that governs honestly with the ideas of the Right — which explains why it is so difficult to defeat it.

What is that desirable “threshold of common sense” and how can it be reached? In essence, the threshold of common sense is that point in history when a decisive percentage of the ruling class agrees on the diagnosis of the ills that plague society and the measures that must be taken to excise them.

In Spain, for example, that point was reached in the late 1970s, after the death of Francisco Franco, when the Right and the Left agreed to respect the basic, successful economic rules of the capitalist model tried out by the dictator, beginning with the reforms of 1959. To those rules they added democracy as a way to form a government and make collective decisions.

Something similar happened in Chile in the early 1990s, during the administration of Patricio Aylwin, the first democratic government post-dictatorship, when the Christian Democrats had the good sense to not renounce the good aspects of Pinochet’s economic policy and to add to them the component of a liberal democracy.

That is why the Coalition for Democracy repeated its election victory for the fourth time: Chileans view Bachelet as a moderate and trustworthy person who will [not?] imperil with extravagant experiments the relative prosperity that Chileans have managed to achieve.

This is not to say that the Chile Bachelet will govern doesn’t face serious problems. Yes, Chile in its 16 years of democratic rule, and continuing a previous trend, reduced poverty from 42 percent to 18 percent. But it is becoming increasingly difficult to further reduce those levels of misery and to bridge the enormous gap that separates the poor from the rich.

In contrast, Montaner has nothing good to say about Cuba after 47 years of Castro.

At this point in history, only two interesting questions remain about the failed experiment staged by Castro on that poor island:

• First, why has a man as eccentric and absurd as he — capable of carrying out feats as improbable as the destruction of the centenary sugar industry, multiplying by 10 the number of prostitutes, executing or eliminating 16,000 people, and pushing into exile 15 percent of the Cuban population — lasted so long in power?

Nobody doubts that his administration is the worst the country has ever endured, incapable for the past half century of allowing Cubans to have drinking water, electricity, food and shelter in minimally reasonable amounts. [But what about the health care?]

• The second question also is obvious: What will happen when he disappears? After all, we’re talking about an ailing 79-year-old man with Parkinson’s disease who exhibits very clear symptoms of senile dementia and has been struck by several cerebral ischemias that have affected his ability to communicate. He mumbles, repeats himself, becomes incoherent and confused, and displays aggressively bad temper at the slightest contrariety.

He can still talk for eight consecutive hours without the slightest concern for his listeners’ bladders. What’s important is not his staying power but the content of his speeches. He is a pitiful man who never stops uttering nonsense, to the embarrassment of a ruling class that has been trained to obey a charismatic and presumably infallible leader and now doesn’t know what to do with this addlebrained and neurotic old geezer who just as blithely designs pygmy cows as he expounds on the unfathomable scientific secret of pressure cookers.

The Thomist school grew from the consequences of the penetration into the Paris University around the middle of the twelfth century of the vast corpus of Aristotelian science and philosophy through the medium of Arabic and Jewish schools (also writing in Arabic) in Spain and Sicily.

The Aristotelian corpus was translated in the eastern Mediterranean by Byzantine monks and Arab Muslim scholars into Arabic between 800 and 1000 and found its way, accompanied by various mathematical and medical texts, into Cordoba, Spain, and Palermo, Sicily, by 1050. Previously only Aristotelian logic was available in the West, which was thoroughly dominated by the Platonic idealistic and mystical rather than the Aristotelian scientific and rational frame of thought. By the middle of the thirteenth century Aristotle’s writings were being translated directly from Greek into Latin rather than through Arabic mediation, and these improved translations were available to the corpulent and good-humored Dominican friar at Paris, Thomas Aquinas.

What drove the Thomist mission was a concern that Catholic doctrine was founded on the Bible, church authority, and the more mystical and irrational part of ancient culture, not on reason and Aristotelian science. It was to defend this established faith and high culture–something that the Cairo rabbi Maimonides had already attempted for Judaism, to deep resentment from the Orthodox rabbinate–that Thomas Aquinas, following his Parisian Dominican mentor Albert the Great, set out to show the large-scale compatibility of Catholic faith and Aristotelian reason and science.

SOURCE: In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death & the World It Made, by Norman F. Cantor (Harper Perennial, 2002), pp. 116-117

Regions of Mind directs attention to a very interesting post by Ann Althouse. Here’s Geitner’s summary.

One of the most affecting aspects of the Jewish experience in Inquisition-era Spain was how many Jews professed to have adopted Christianity but in secret maintained the rites of Judaism. Ann Althouse has a terrific post on a 21st-century tangent of this story: Some present-day Latino residents in the United States are discovering that, despite their Catholic heritage, they are the descendants of those Iberian Jews. The comments at Ann’s site are quite interesting, too.

One of Ann’s commenters notes that the hidden infidels who fled the Spanish Inquisition to the New World after 1492 were just as likely to have been Muslim as Jewish.

Fraser Weir’s A Centennial History of Philippine Independence, 1898-1998 gives an account of Islam’s arrival in coastal Southeast Asia in the 14th and 15th century, closely followed by the arrival of the first Portuguese and Spanish Christians.

Regular coastal trade in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea linking Mesopotamia and the Indus valley dates from at least the time of the Assyrian Empire (729-612 BC). Arab and Persian merchants are reported in the southern Chinese port of Guangzhou (Canton) in the 8th century AD. However, after Mahmud of Ghazni’s invasions of the Indus valley (997-1030), the Sword of Islam added a vigorous religious and political dimension to the commerce.

On his return to Venice from the court of Kublai Khan, Marco Polo noted in 1292 that Pasai in northern Sumatra had converted to Islam. The Sultan of Pasai, the first Muslim ruler on Sumatra, died in 1297 and Pasai returned under Majapahit’s Hindu ambit in 1350. Despite this reverse, Islam was moving steadily through the archipelago.

Islamic inscriptions in Malaya date from 1326. A Muslim scholar, Mukdum, from Malaya is reported in the Philippine’s Sulu archipelago in 1380. In 1400, the northern Sumatran province of Aceh converted to Islam.

When Majapahit captured the Sri Vijayan capital Palembang in 1377, a prince of the royal house, Parameshwara, escaped to Malaya. In 1402 he chose the choke point where the Straits of Malacca narrow to 53 km in width to found his new capital, Melaka. Parameshwara moved quickly to protect his fledgling state. He sent a mission to the Emperor Zhu Di (Yong Li) seeking Ming protection from his Majapahit enemies. Admiral Zheng He (Cheng Ho) arrived at Melaka in 1409 with the Ming’s Dragon Fleet. Parameshwara paid a personal visit to Beijing in 1411 to cement his alliance with the Ming Empire.

In the same year as a Muslim mission was attracting converts far to the east on Ambon in the Moluccas, Parameshwara announced his conversion to Islam in 1414 and proclaimed himself Sultan of Malacca. The appeal of Islam was strong. The Sultanate’s arch rival, Majapahit converted in 1447. Hindus who wanted to retain their faith were under siege. From mid-century on, Javanese Hindus concentrated on the island of Bali where they have succeeded in preserving their religion to the present day. In 1475 the Moluccan islands of Ternate and Tidore converted to Islam.

Through the 15th century the upstart Sultanate of Malacca grew from strength to strength. It successfully repelled overland and seaborne attacks from the Thai Empire in 1445 and 1456. The Sultan Mansur Shah put down the Thai’s peninsular allies Kedah and Pahang in 1459. Finally in 1498, by the efforts of its Admiral Hang Tuah, Malacca had secured the monopoly. All the trade in the Straits, and especially the spices from the Celebes and the Moluccas, moved under its protection and through its markets.

Considering that in over a thousand years, Buddhism and Hinduism had barely made an impression east of Borneo, for Islam to have travelled the length of the archipelago from Sumatra to the Moluccas in under two centuries is remarkable. As a religion, Islam had popular appeal. The Hindu and Buddhist religions had been used mainly to deify the rule of the Rajas. Islam offered its converts a personal salvation.

Islam was also carried with the mobility of the merchant community. The landed Hindu-Buddhist Rajas were content to let the trade come to them and tax it as it passed through their ports. Lacking a fixed land base, the Islamic merchants followed their commercial instincts knowing that the best profits on the trade were to be made at source. The trail of conversions led straight to the spices.

Perhaps most important of all, Islam brought with it gunpowder, firearms and cannon. Recalling how smartly the Sultan of Malacca accepted the new faith and how quickly others followed his lead, access to the new weapons may have been restricted to the faithful. The religion’s rapid progress through the islands may have been, at least in part, an arms race.

The year that the Sultanate of Malacca finally consolidated its hold on the Straits was fateful. That same year, Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope from Portugal with four ships, crossed the Indian Ocean and landed on 27 May 1498 at Calicut on the Malabar coast. Indian Hindus and Portuguese Christians shared in common a deep animosity for Islam. In 1510, Affonso de Albuquerque, the Viceroy of India, by treaty with Krishna Deva Raya, the Emperor of Vijayanagar, secured the port of Gao [sic] as a naval base for Portuguese operations in the Indian Ocean.

Albuquerque had already learned of Malacca’s strategic importance to the spice trade. The very next year, in 1511, he took with him eighteen Portuguese warships from Gao [sic] and ended the Sultanate of Malacca. The loss of Malacca shattered the Islamic trade network at a blow. From so far away, though, Portugal was operating at the very limit of its power and was never quite able to rebuild the trading network it had destroyed. Ten years later, the Portuguese were greatly alarmed to see Magellan’s flagship Victoria returning to Spain – westward from the Philippines.

One other symbol in Spain was Ernest Hemingway, by far the most famous of the English-language writers there during the war, an influential figurehead in the fight against Fascism–“How could this fight be lost now, with Hemingway on our side.” Hemingway had already worked on one propaganda film, Spain in Flames, and had agreed to help with another, The Spanish Earth, when he accepted an offer from the North American Newspaper Alliance [NANA] to report the war. He arrived in Spain for his first visit in March 1937, and altogether made four trips. He travelled widely, usually with Martha Gellhorn, Herbert Matthews, and Sefton Delmer, saw a lot of the fighting, and got to know many of the Republican leaders and supporters. Yet his performance as a war correspondent was abysmally bad. On a technical level, his descriptions of battle and bombardments are monotonous; his emphasis on his own close location to the action smacks of boastfulness; his accounts of blood, wounds, and severed legs are typical of his desire to shock; and his reporting of conversations is so totally Hemingway in style as to make the reader doubt their authenticity. NANA had to ask him to confine his work to human-interest features and, when that failed, to report only developments of vital importance. As his biographer, Carlos Baker, puts it, “His eye for telling details and individual traits was not nearly so sharp as that of Dos Passos, nor did he commonly rise to the meticulous exactitude and inclusiveness which characterised the best work of Matthews and Delmer.”

True, Hemingway grew up politically in Spain and believed it was the place to stop Fascism, before Hitler’s Brownshirts and Mussolini’s Blackshirts could precipitate a second world war. But he was unjustifiably optimistic about the Republicans’ chances of doing this. One of his principal informants was Mikhail Koltzov–the Pravda and Izvestia correspondent who quarrelled with Louis Fischer over an accurate but pessimistic dispatch Fischer had written–and this might explain the views Hemingway expressed to reporters in New York in June 1938. Franco was short of troops, Hemingway said, and handicapped by friction among the foreign elements in his army; the Republicans were well organised and their chances of winning were good. Actually, at that moment the Republicans were only six months away from defeat. But these criticisms are the least serious of Hemingway’s shortcomings as a war correspondent. The most important concerns his total failure to report the Communist persecution, imprisonment, and summary execution of “untrustworthy elements” on the Republican side, when he knew this was happening and when disclosing it might well have prevented further horrors like this….

In the end, Hemingway did write it all, in For Whom the Bell Tolls, but from a war correspondent the reader has the right to expect all the news the correspondent knows at the time, not as interpolations in a work of romantic fiction published when the war is over. The truth was that Hemingway, for all his compassion for the Spaniards, for all his commitment to the Republican cause, used the war to gain a new lease on his life as a writer. As Baker says, “Refusing to waste the best of his materials in his newspaper dispatches … he had gathered and salted away a body of experience and information which he described to [his editor Maxwell] Perkins as ‘absolutely invaluable’.” For a novelist, this was understandable. For a war correspondent, it was unforgivable.

SOURCE: The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-maker from the Crimea to Kosovo, by Phillip Knightley, with an introduction by John Pilger (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2000; first published in 1975), pp. 230-232

Okay, the price for this second excerpt from the chapter on the Spanish Civil War is a total embargo on excerpts from several chapters on the two world wars.