Boycott

729 for those who are interested.

Picasso, again.

Plaça St Jaume. 10.01.2009

Picasso's Guernica was the last to arrive.

This version, a little the worse for wear, is, I think, the one
displayed for months in the window of a student hall of
residence when the US first began the war on Iraq.

Painted over 70 years ago.

Still denouncing the horror and destruction.

That continue.

Plaça St. Jaume 10.01.2009

18 days.

920 dead.

292 of these are children.

4,300 injured.

Last night on the news George Bush, laughing and joking, was
warning Barak Obama of his legacy: the possibility of a new
terrorist attack on the United States.

From the start of this war on Gaza, with the go-ahead, you can
be sure, of the Bush administration, it seems obvious that
this is exactly what has been planned.

The anger and radicalism increase as the days pass...

A new terrorist attack.

What better way to justify the violation of human rights, the
limits on freedom in the name of homeland security.

To ensure the proliferation of the arms industry.

In which they have such a large stake.

And most especially to sabotage the change that so many hope
for with Barak Obama.

Handala

There are now at least 700 dead and 3000 injured.


Since this war started, I have been trapped; impotent, horrified,
outraged, because it was obvious, from the beginning, what
would happen and that we could do nothing to stop them.

Obsessively looking at news feeds and webs and the photos.

The photos. . .



At the demonstrations and on some Palestinian blogs the symbol
of this little figure appeared. Today I read that it is Handala.

An iconic symbol of Palestinian identity and defiance.

He first appeared in 1969 and is the most famous of Palestinian
cartoonist Naji al-Ali’s characters.

In 1973, he turned his back to the viewer and clasped his hands
behind his back.

The artist explained that ten-year-old Handala represents himself,
forced to leave Ash Shajara, one of the 480 Palestinian villages
destroyed in 1948 to create the State of Israel, and that he would
not grow up until he could return to his homeland.

His turned back and clasped hands are a rejection of “outside
solutions.”

His ragged clothes and bare feet symbolise his allegiance to the
poor.

Naji Al-Ali was assassinated in London in 1987.


Earlier tonight I had to turn my back on the photos.


The decapitated head of a child was too much.

Protecting windows

Photo ANC

The aerial bombardment of civilians as a legitimate war strategy
really got to the point of no return during the Spanish Civil War.
Guernika, the raids on Barcelona in March of 1938, Madrid, the first
to suffer, though it is mentioned less as the battle front was on the
edge of the city itself at the university campus. Difficult to separate
civilians from the military.

Sounds familiar.


Shattered glass from windows can be lethal in explosions. I don't
know what caused the decapitation of the Palestinian child in the
photo but I do know who is responsible - and I'm still trying to
comprehend something I read yesterday: that some Israelis are
taking plastic chairs and cans of pepsi out onto the hills of Sderot
to watch the raids and cheer the explosions.

Then I remembered these other photos.

To be a spectator of this war is almost unbearable. To study a past
war in any depth is almost as bad, in spite of the ideals, the
solidarity, the hope that is tangible. Sometimes just a small thing
can help, some indication that people prefer to create rather than
destroy.


Protecting Windows

Some of the first civil defence instructions issued in the autum of
'36 by Manuel Muñoz.

Paper tape to be glued on all house windows.

In neat criss-crosses.


Until, perhaps, you start to think something else would look better.

Photo ANC.

I hope these two little children survived.

Ideas from Venezuela

Ideas. Weekly publication.
Read it and spread the word!
Libertarian voice of the Bajo Llobregat

Catalonia
1936-1939



Venezuela Expels Israeli Ambassador.

By Latin American Herald Tribune staff.

CARACAS -- Venezuela expels the Israeli ambassador and
part of his staff in Caracas to show its condemnation of the
Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip.

Communique from the Foreign Ministry:

"The Government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela,
along with the Peoples of the world, is witness, once more, to
the horror of the death of innocent women and children resulting
from the invasion of the Gaza Strip by Israeli troops, and the
systematic bombing by air and land perpetrated by the State of
Israel on Palestinian territory.

Indignant in this tragic hour, the people of Venezuela express
their unreserved solidarity with the heroic Palestinian people, share
in the pain of thousands of families for the loss of loved ones and
states that the Venezuelan government will work tirelessly to see
those responsible severely punished for these atrocious crimes.

The Government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela strongly
condemns the gross violations of international law that the State
of Israel has engaged in and denounces its planned use of state
terrorism.

For the above reasons, the Government of the Bolivarian Republic
of Venezuela has decided to expel the Israeli Ambassador and the
staff of the Israeli Embassy in Venezuela, reaffirming its mission
of peace and its call for respect for international law.

The Government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela has
instructed its Mission to the UN to press, along with the majority of
governments who so demand, for the Security Council to implement
urgent and necessary measures to halt this invasion by the State of
Israel on Palestinian territory.

President Hugo Chávez, who has held meetings with senior
representatives of the World Jewish Council, and has always been
opposed to anti-Semitism and all forms of discrimination and racism,
calls for the Jewish people throughout the world to oppose these
criminal policies of Israel that are reminiscent of the worst pages in
the history of the twentieth century. With the genocide of the
Palestinian people, Israel will never be able to offer their people
the prospect of a lasting and much needed peace."

Caracas. 6th January 2009.

On the 6th of January

AFP/ Getty Images

The day in Spain that the children, excited, happy, open
their presents from "Los Reyes" - The Kings - The Three
Wise Men.

There is no, absolutely no, other way to look at this war.

A doctor's testimony

Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian Doctor at the Al Shifah hospital in Gaza
talks of what is happening.


Later

By Azmi Keshawi and James Hider / London Times

Amid the tidal wave of human misery swamping Gaza City's central
hospital a horrified Norwegian volunteer doctor found a minute to
type a text message on his mobile phone to friends back home.


"We are wading in death, blood, and amputees. Many children. A
pregnant woman. I have never experienced anything so terrible.
Now we hear tanks. Pass it on, send it around, shout it out. Anything.
DO SOMETHING! DO MORE! We are living in a history book now, all
of us."

It was signed Mads Gilbert.

The emergency protest against the invasion of Gaza

Yesterday evening in Plaça St Jaume.

Again.

There were a lot more people, maybe three to four thousand.

Because the number of dead continues to rise: 512 at a conservative
estimate over 70 of whom are children. And with 2500 injured the
aggressors are refusing the entry of humanitarian aid.

Yes, you are right, Shimon Peres: "What country can tolerate this?"

Though your "this" is different.

There was smoke over the government buildings

But not like the smoke over Gaza

AFP Getty Image

It was just a flare

There were more messages

One for Obama

Because he has said nothing.

A poem

By Mahmoud Darwish.

A strange sad lament

Shia Muslims, I think.

Striking their chests as they stood and sang.

At the end the children played with the candles

Because here, today, we are safe from war.

Photo Fadi Adwan AP

This child isn't.

Used by Hamas as a human shield - claim the Israeli army.


Like Rachel Corrie.

I remember other shoes

AFP/Getty Images. London Demonstration

Don't they?

Photo Dan Maudsley. Auschwitz shoes


Other genocides.


Maybe that's it... the evil that continues and corrupts
and eliminates the light.


A thousand useless shoes now in Gaza.


The Israelis have prohibited the majority of international media
access to the strip.

But we know what they are doing.


For what solidarity is worth, the least, the very least, is to say: No


Another protest has been called for this evening in Barcelona:

Plaça St. Jaume 20.00h.


http://www.palestina.cat/

The balconies were empty on Friday evening

For the demonstration in Barcelona

Against what is happening

In Palestine.

The Generalitat, seat of the autonomous government of
Catalonia, in Plaça St Jaume.

With its discreet Christmas lights...the statue of St George
fighting the dragon.

Where the people of Barcelona always go when they have
something to say.

Remained silent.

And the Town Hall

On the other side of the square.


Where were they, the politicians, of this city?

They who, so often, speak of "peace" when there is an
opportunity for personal and party gain?

But the people, maybe 2000, were there

Not just the muslim immigrants.

As most of the media has shown.

Spelling out the Catalan word for peace

In candles.

"PAU"

"PEACE"

At least, now

For the dead.

Peace. Almost surely now impossible

I swear neither to forgive nor to forget.


With so many killed and injured.


And 60 years of occupation, aggression and humiliation.


But this is, of course, what Israel wants.

To justify the genocide.

Meanwhile Israel continues their PR campaign

Getty Images.

Al Shifah hospital Gaza.


Though their attempts to use Youtube prove problematic

"Trusting what we see" BBC News

And smile, still, as they invade Gaza

Getty Images

Tzipi Livni was smiling in Paris yesterday

Reuters.

But there is nothing to smile about

Photo Ashraf Amra AP

Nothing to smile about at all

AFP Getty image

Five Sisters

Mohammed Abed AFP

Jawaher, Dina, Samar, Ikram and Tahrir

Killed Monday December 29th by an Israeli air strike in the Jabalia
refugee camp

If you had contemplated the victim's face
And thought it through
You would have remembered your mother
In the gas chamber
You would have been freed from the reason for the rifle
And you would have changed your mind:
this is not the way to find one's identity again.

From: Under Siege

Mahmoud Darwish

Translated by Marjolin de Jager

I say: how is it my concern?
I am a spectator.
He says: no spectators at chasm's door
And no one is neutral here.
And you must choose your part in the end.
So I say: I'm missing the beginning, what's the beginning?

From: I Have a Seat in the Abandoned Theatre

Mahmoud Darwish

Barcelona:

Divendres 2 de gener 2009 concentració a Pl. St. Jaume 19h.

Dissabte 10 de gener 2009 manifestació a Pl. Universitat 17h.

http://www.aturemlaguerra.org/

But dead children look the same

Abid Katib. Getty Images

Though the wars are different and years apart.



The fourth day and still they continue:

Operation Solid Lead they call it and from some saner Jewish
voices I learn it comes from a children's poem by Nachman Bialik:

Teacher bought a big top for me
Solid lead the finest known.
In whose honour, for whose glory?
For Hanukkha alone.

Hanukkha is the Jewish winter Festival of Light...

Have they no shame, no compassion?

TV news says the dead are now 360 with more than
1500 injured.

And 4 Israelis.


But what can you do against the fourth military power in the
world, aided and abetted by the first?

Stand in protest?

Barcelona Travessera de Gracia. 29.12.2008

Imagine, these hours, in Gaza now?

Barcelona Travessera de Gracia. 29.12.2008

Pray?

Barcelona, Travessera de Gracia. 29.12.2008.

Or raise bare hands to say: Stop

Barcelona, Travessera de Gracia. 29.12.2008
Outside the Spanish-Israeli Chamber of Commerce.

Palestinian Firefighters. Look different.

Hatem Omar. Associated Press.

With the wonderful video of Barcelona Firefighters from Friday,
I was planning to post a little about their role in rescue operations
during the air raids on Barcelona in the Civil War.

The present gets in the way.

"Firefighters at the site of a bombing of a Hamas security
compound" said the caption on the New York Times' report.

Where are the helmets, the masks, the protective uniforms?

A search for "Palestine Firefighters" on the net frustratingly,
ironically, gives you Palestine, Texas.

It seems the real Palestine hardly has a fire brigade at all, relying
on trained civil defence workers and a few Japanese donated
engines.

But then, under siege since long before yesterday's brutal,
unjustifiable attacks, Palestine hardly has anything at all.



Imagine life under these conditions:

...Having your free movement denied by enclosed population
centers, closed borders, regular curfews, roadblocks, checkpoints,
electric fences, and separation walls. Having your homes regularly
demolished and land systematically stolen to build settlements for
encroachers in violation of international law prohibiting an occupier
from settling its population on conquered land.

Having your right to essential services denied - to emergency health
care, education, employment, and enough food and clean water.
Being forced into extreme poverty, having your crops destroyed,
and being victimized by punitive taxes. Having no right for redress
in the occupier's courts under laws only protecting the occupier.

Being regularly targeted by incursions and attacks on the ground
and from the air. Being willfully harassed, ethnically cleansed,
arrested, incarcerated, tortured, and slaughtered on any pretext,
including for your right of self-defense. Having no rights on your
own land in your own country for over six decades and counting.
Vilified for being Muslims and called terrorists, Jihadists, crazed
Arabs, and fundamentalist extremists. Victimized by a slow-motion
genocide to destroy you.

So begins an article:

Israel's Slow-Motion Genocide in Occupied Palestine

by Stephen Lendman.

There are other voices, if you bother to search.

And others.

As some news articles report: Israel has launched an intense
diplomatic and media PR campaign to blame Hamas and
justify the killings.


Truth and lies.

Hazem Bader AFP/Getty Images

"Hamas must stop launching rockets into Israel. The United
States holds Hamas responsible for breaking the ceasefire...

We understand that Israel is reacting to the hundreds of
rockets that have been fired upon the innocent people of
Israel... (1 fatality yesterday - after the attack on Gaza).

We want the ceasefire restored but we also understand
(repeat message) that Israel is responding (at least 271
dead 700 injured) to Hamas's repeated rocket attacks on
the innocent (repeat message) people of Israel."

Gordon Johndroe, spokesman for the National Security Council
from Texas where Bush is holidaying at his ranch.

And celebrating what he has done

to this world.


And Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni asks us to understand.


I must be stupid.

Barcelona Firefighters. Punk Not Dead.

Soundtrack: Nirvana Stay Away

Have just seen on the news that fire fighters have been called out
360 times in the last few hours - Catalonia is in the middle of
violent snow and sea storms.

I remembered had been meaning to post this video...

For the last few months Barcelona Firemen have been fighting
for better work and pay conditions. According to their web Plataforma Bombers Barcelona
just before Christmas they reached a beginning of an agreement.

Hope so.

Wouldn't want any of our dear city councillors to drown or freeze to
death in their SUVs.

Love the Poster David

The other Hitler
David Irving


Do talk to your press people.


I think they mean this is the title of the conference David Irving
will be giving, or trying to, in Barcelona this evening.

Same Nazi bookshop.

Same hate and lies.

Prefer this one

Shepard Fairey's poster defending the right of
same-sex couples to marry.

From the campaign against California' Proposition 8.

Spain was the third country to legalize marriage between
homosexuals, in July 2005.

I believe in freedom, so I suppose David Irving should
be allowed to speak, if only to show himself for what he is.

But you remember the millions who died, and it's hard.

Between 10,000 and 15,000 homosexuals were exterminated
in Nazi concentration camps.

Postscript

Lia Nickson illustration
for Edwin Rolfe's book
First Love and Other Poems

"And we must remember cleanly why we fought,
clearly why we left these inadequate shores
and turned our eyes, our hearts, Spainward. We must never
lie to ourselves again, deceive ourselves with dreams
that make sleep sluggish. Our world
is new now, clean and clear; our eyes can see
the perfect bone and tissue now, remembering
the flesh cut open, the gangrened limbs, the rot
that almost, almost...but did not reach the heart.

And if we find all known things changed
now after two years amid fabulous truth;
if we find dulled the once sharp edges
of trivial loves; even if we find
our truest loves indifferent, even false -
we must remember cleanly why we went,
clearly why we fought; and returning see
with truth's unfilmed eye what remains constant,
the loyalties which endure, the loves that grow,
the certainties men need, live for, die to build,
the certainties that make all living tolerable."

"Postscript to a War"

Edwin Rolfe

for Michael Gordon

iNeed

London graffiti by Mantis


According to UNICEF, 26,500-30,000 children die each day
due to poverty.

Each day.

They "die quietly in some of the poorest villages on earth,
far removed from the scrutiny and the conscience of the world.
Being meek and weak in life makes these dying multitudes even
more invisible in death.”

Oh yes we have a crisis.


Quotation taken from:

Anup Shah, Poverty Facts and Stats, GlobalIssues.org,

1938. 1968. 2008.

At the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, medal winners
John Carlos and Tommie Smith gave the raised fist salute during
the American national anthem as a sign of black power and protest
on behalf of the Olympic Project for Human Rights.


For this, they were barred from further Olympic activities.


"The raised fist which greets you in Salud is not just a gesture,
it means life and liberty being fought for and a greeting of
solidarity with the democratic peoples of the world."

Mary Rolfe.*

to Leo Hurwitz and Janey Dudley.

25 November 1938.

"Madrid 1937: Letters of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade from
the Spanish Civil War."
Cary Nelson & Jefferson Hendricks.


Great expectations indeed.


* To read another letter from Mary Rolfe describing an
air raid in Barcelona, click here.

And for a little about her life: Cary Nelson's article in

The Volunteer
Journal of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.
Volume XXI, No.2. Spring 1999 p18-20

Volunteers of America

Salaria Kee (O' Reilly)

Why Didn't You Come Yesterday?

Salaria Kee (O' Reilly) was one of the few Afro-American women
who came to Spain with the International Brigades as a nurse for
the American Medical Bureau to Aid Spanish Democracy.

She had graduated from the Harlem Hospital School of Nursing
in New York in 1934. After hearing a speech by a Spanish doctor
at the University of New York about what was happening
in Spain she volunteered.

"On March 27, 1937 she sailed from New York with the second
American Medical Unit to Republican Spain. A party of twelve
nurses and physicians. Salaria was the only Negro in this group.
Hundreds of Negro boys had preceded her. They had gone as
soldiers, physicians, and ambulance drivers. She was the first
Negro woman to go.

It was April third when the party reached Port Bou, Spain. A
huge delegation of Spanish men, women and children came
down to welcome them. A small boy left the crowd and came over
to Salaria. Taking her hand he complained softly,

"Why didn't you come yesterday?"

"Why yesterday?" Salaria asked him.

"Because yesterday the fascists came in their planes and dropped
bombs. My mother and my father and my small brothers died..."


Stationed first at the hospital installed in Villa Paz, former
summer residence of the abdicated King of Spain Alfonso XIII,
she later moved to a field hospital unit near Teruel. She was
captured by German troops but managed to escape.

In October 1937 she married John O' Reilly, one of the first Irish
volunteers to go to Spain.

Information (mainly) and quotation from the excellent web:

Ireland and the Spanish Civil War

http://www.geocities.com/IrelandSCW/index.htm

where you can read more.


And if you have the chance watch Julia Newman's
documentary:

Into the Fire. American Women in the Spanish Civil War

Afro-American members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade

"why I, a Negro, who have fought through these

years for the rights of my people, am here in Spain
today? Because if we crush Fascism here, [we] will
build us a new society - a society of peace and plenty.
There will be no color line, no jim-crow trains, no
lynchings. That is why, my dear, I am here in Spain."

Canute Frankson.
(to my dear friend).
Albacete, Spain, July 6, 1937.



And a song:

From Jefferson Airplane

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SboRijhWFDU

some 30 years later.

for a day, like today.

Manuel Muñoz and Barcelona Air Raid Shelters

From the cover of Defiendete del Peligro Aero-Quimico
Mariano Barrasa, Juliàn Castresana. Toledo 1935.

Manuel Muñoz' report of what the municipal authorities
had achieved by the time the Generalitat, the autonomous
Government of Catalonia, created the Junta de Defensa
Passiva and took over ARP in the summer of 1937 will
perhaps help to show that Ramon Perera neither invented
the air raid shelters nor was solely responsible for their
construction. The report dates from August 1937.*

The Junta had been created the previous June and after
some insistence by the council and the CNT Manuel
Muñoz was accepted as a member in representation of the
council. Surprisingly, given the persecution not to say
elimination of the anarchists after the Barcelona May days,
he maintained this position until the end of the war.

Manuel had joined the city council in October 1936 when
the anarchists began to participate in formal government.
In November he was named as liaison with the Generalitat's
Department of Defense for questions of air raid protection
and very soon the construction of shelters was under his
supervision.

Initially it was thought that basements, with a little
preparation, could provide sufficient protection during
the raids. So his department of Urban Planning and Public
Works organized the inspection of 17,000 buildings.
Only 700 were considered suitable and of these the
Generalitat quickly decreed a prohibition of the use of
some (below banks) as shelters.

Stronghold evidently having a variety of meanings.

Underground "mine" tunnels were also considered
suitable for shelters so, besides preparation of the existing
metropolitan tube stations he overseered the construction
of 24 new tunnels of 100 metres each (for posterior use as
sewage tunnels) 14 of which had been completed by August
1937.

For the 600 or so shelters that were being built independently
by the people of Barcelona, Manuel's department offered
technical advice and subsidised the cost of labour and building
materials and most especially published the excellent manual
"Air Raid Shelters" with instructions on how to build them.
Many of the calculations on the destructive capacity of the
bombs and the type of construction necessary to resist them
are based on information provided by Swiss and French ARP
organizations. The Spanish military had also published
recommendations prior to the war.

After the first raids had shown the real effects of the bombs,
the council began the construction of a number of larger,
more resistent collective shelters below city squares in
the different districts of Barcelona. 11 were in construction
in the summer of '37. But by this time the increasing scarcity
of materials and reduction of available labour force because
of conscription were already seriously affecting progress in all
the shelters.

In his 17-page report Manuel Muñoz gives credit to all of the
many different people and organizations involved to date in
the building of shelters and civil defence.

He, at least, knew that without the collective effort of every
one of them Barcelona's extraordinary achievement of over
1000 shelters would never have been possible.

*For those interested in consulting the report, the reference is:
Arxiu Administratiu Caixa 21411 Carpeta 1.5

Ramon Perera.

Strange.

If you google search "Ramon Perera" my previous post no
longer appears.

It did for a couple of days. Right on the first page.

Sixth down I think it was.

And first place if you searched

"Ramon Perera. The Making of a Myth"

I think someone has been meddling.

Ramon Perera. The making of a myth.

As I have said before, unfortunately I do not have a photo
of Manuel Muñoz Diez, chief councillor in charge of the
Department of Urban Planning and Public Works during the
Civil War in Barcelona.

So here is his signature.

He was an anarchist, a member of the CNT, which is probably why
as many people as possible chose to forget his role in the building of
Barcelona air raid shelters, a role, shared with many others, which is
now being solely attributed to Ramon Perera thanks to a documentary
made by two journalists from Catalan national TV3.

The documentary is based on solid research and would be excellent
except for the surprising presentation of Ramon Perera as the man
who single-handedly invented the air raid shelters and saved the
entire population of Barcelona from the bombs and then
unfortunately was unable to save the entire population of Great
Britain from the Blitz because the British Government did not listen
to him.

One fact: Ramon Perera did not take charge of the section of
plans and public works of the Junta de Defensa Passiva
(organization responsible for coordinating civil defence and
created in 1937 after the Barcelona May Days) until 26 February
1938 by which time most of the shelters were already in progress.

When I started the research I had no idea who was responsible
for civil defence in Barcelona during the war. The authorities of the
time seemed to suffer from the same problem. Very little had been
done in preparation to protect civilians from aerial bombardment
in spite of the increasing fears since WWI that this would be an
accepted means to the end in future conflicts. But by the autumn of
1936 the building of shelters was under the auspices of Barcelona
City Council and chief councillor Manuel Muñoz.

And mainly in the hands of thousands of normal citizens who went
out into the streets and built their own.

In August 1937 Manuel Muñoz, little suspecting an attempt 70 years
in the future to rewrite history, left a 17-page report about what had
been achieved to date in connection with the city shelters. Perhaps he
was concerned after the Barcelona May days that the Communists
would try to take the credit...

I will write more about the contents of his report in the next post but
felt obliged to take time to beg to differ with Montse Armengou and
Ricard Belis and express disapproval at their attempt to falsify the
past because now we have:

The book of the film.

Presented last week by the authors.

Credibility assured by the presence of Paul Preston.

As I remember when I approached Mr Preston 12 years ago to
ask for his support in the campaign to save Air Raid Shelter 307
and for any relevant information he had come across in military
archives (to which I had no access) he replied that they hadn't let
him in either and he had seen little about civil defence measures
taken in Barcelona. He was favourably inclined to saving the shelter
and am sure gave his verbal support in the right places but I would
ask him to check his facts before helping to create a myth, he is a
prestigious historian after all.

Ramon Perera was one of many who worked tirelessly to defend the
most vulnerable during the war.

A collective effort.

His story and his work, carefully preserved through documentation
donated on his death to the Abbey of Montserrat, is most valuable.
It is also very sad - forced as he was into exile as a refugee in
England for the rest of his life.

So far from his beloved Catalonia.

But I'm sure he would not have been happy with this attempt to
single him out from his colleagues as "the man who saved Barcelona."


Because I think he was an honest man and this simply isn't true.