The Feast

Jean Michel Folon. The Feast.


Last Friday the UN reported that world hunger has
reached a record high of one billion people.

One-sixth of the world's population.

"The first time in human history that we have so many
hungry people in the world."

And "a serious risk" to world peace and security, said the
director general of the FAO.

Needless to say the majority are not from the "developed"
countries (the report cites a mere fifteen million).


I get repetitive but no doubt NATO (see below June 10th)
not to say total inanition of the risk, will justify their
scandalous budget and save us from the starving hordes.

The Flix Shelter

Miguel Carrillo and Oscar Bosch
Flix June 2008

We also wanted to see the Civil War air raid shelter that
had recently been refurbished and opened to the public.

But weren't sure where it was.

Miguel went into the market hall to ask and, one of those
lucky coincidences, found one of the Flix town councillors,
Sr. Oscar Bosch, having breakfast.*

He was kind enough to leave his family and meal to come
outside to show us where to go. During the conversation
I had an idea. Cities and towns are always being twinned for
cultural exchanges - why not twin our air raid shelter in
Poble Sec with the one in Flix? Sr Bosch was very open to the
idea. calling cards were exchanged and we all promised to work
on the idea and get in touch after the summer.

We left in search of the shelter.

*For those visiting Spain, it is often a very good idea to eat in
the cafés and little restaurants inside or around the markets.


Saturday 20th June

I have just read that Sr Bosch has just been elected Lord
Mayor of Flix. Congratulations!

The subterranean shelter that runs between carrer
St Josep and plaça de la Música. Flix. June 2008.

The shelter, one of several documented in the town, was
locked - visits have to be booked in advance.

No matter, there would be occasions in the future to visit,
we thought, once our twinning project got off the ground.

But I took some photos through the railings of the door.
You can just see the typical zigzagging of the tunnel,
designed to minimize the effects of possible bomb blasts,
and the subsequent shock waves and fragmentation.


Flix was one of the first towns in Catalonia to suffer an attack
from the air.

It was a strategic target with its hydro-electric power station,
the electrochemical plant which the fascists said was
manufacturing mustard gas (thought the experts in this field
were Franco's German allies) and the iron bridge was an
important transit point for troops and supplies across the Ebro
River.

On the night of 23rd february 1937 a raid on the chemical factory
part of which had been converted to a military hospital, and the
town began. It lasted four hours. Eight dead, numerous injured
and a terrified civilian population that took to the caves in the
hills.

We, the lucky ones who have never lived a war, are so used to the
virtual experience via assorted screens it's hard to imagine the
horror and the panic these first air raids caused. Not surprisingly,
the town with a population, then, of around 3,300 quickly organized
the construction of eight shelters.


What has been a little surprising is the success of my idea to twin
the shelters. But then Flix seems to be a town with a sensitivity to
historical memory that dates from well before the recent vogue to
recuperate the Republican experience in the Civil War - just the
date of the installation of the monument to the International
Brigades, 1990, is indicative. Most of Catalonia at the time was
more concerned with the imminent celebration of the Barcelona
Olympic Games.

But then Flix seems to display a felicitous good taste in its choice
of lord mayors. Information above on the February air raid is
from the book Alemanys al'Ebre by the historian, and previous
lord mayor of Flix, Pere Muñoz.


Next Saturday 27th at 12 o' clock there will be an inaugural act
at Refugi 307 in Poble Sec to celebrate the twinning of the
shelters.

Flix

Stork nesting. Flix. June 2008


Shelter from the Storm

Flix is a small town.

On the Ebre river in Catalonia.

Where so many died that summer of 1938.

The battle lost, here, against fascism.


I am privileged.

My life always lived at a safe distance from conflicts.

That continue.

I am privileged.

I have a student, a friend, Miguel, who took me, 70 years later,
to find the memories.

The forgotten battlefields.

Remembered friends.

Wild rosemary in the hot blue afternoon.

So silent

In this sunlight

There are no bombs now

To stop

The storks nesting.

Inscription on the base of the monument to the International
Brigades. Flix. June 2008.



We had gone to Flix to photograph the monument to the
memory of the Italian (and other) antifascist volunteers
for an exhibition Miguel was preparing on the Battle of the
Ebro.


The inscription reads:


1938

Here, on the Ebro


Antifascist volunteers from Italy
And from all over the world
Fought beside the Spanish people
For Justice, Liberty and Democracy
In the last great battle of the Republican Army

25.10.1990

At the foot of the monument there is a commemorative plaque,
installed 15 years later, in homage to Milton Wolff, who died
last year, and the Lincoln Brigade.

In recent years he and other surviving members of the
International Brigades had returned to Spain for diffferent
acts in recognition and celebration of their solidarity.


THE PEOPLE OF FLIX
TO MILTON WOLFF AND THE INTERNATIONAL
LINCOLN BRIGADE
WHO FOUGHT FOR FREEDOM
AND THE REPUBLIC

6 NOVEMBER 2005

Putting out the fire with gasoline

Duality of Humanity
Shepard Fairey

"Whenever I hear the word culture, I reach for my Browning"

Hermann Göring.
(Again)


Last April, in Strasbourg, they celebrated the 60th Anniversary
Summit of NATO.

With pomp and ceremony and Obama.

And riot police armed to the teeth.

Because members of anti-war and peace movements from
19 different countries had planned a counter summit with
cultural events and demonstrations in protest as they believe
that NATO has become the "key vehicle for the US and its allies
to pursue their wars."

And sell themselves the arms they produce.

Only the violent protesters got media coverage.

Of course.

One has to justify the €150 million cost of policing the 3-day
event.

Some figures from the NATO Defence Expenditure Report
(Estimated for 2007)

• USA.......... 545,328,000,000 dollars
• France........ 44,283,000,000 euros
• UK............. 31,629,000,000 pounds
• Germany...... 30,739,000,000 euros
• Spain.......... 12,771,000,000 euros

Guns and Butter

John Heartfield (Helmut Herzfeld).
1891-1968.


"We have no butter... but I ask you, would you rather have
guns or butter?"

Hermann Göring.


According to the Stockholm peace institute SIPRI

in a press release today

global military spending reached a record $1,464bn in
2008.

"The global financial crisis has yet to have an impact on major
arms companies' revenues, profits and order backlogs."

Oh I'm so relieved, thought we'd all be out on the streets soon
because of the crisis.

Diego Camacho - Abel Paz.

At a homage to Andreu Nin and the POUM
Palau de la Virreina Barcelona 16.6.07

(Which of course he said was a waste of time.)


Diego Camacho Escámez. "Abel Paz"
Las Chocillas, Almeria. 12 August 1921
Gracia, Barcelona. 13 April 2009.

A fighter, a writer.

Of what happened.

And what should be.

An anarchist.


Such a wise, clear, generous heart.

To the end.



"Si la esperanza se apaga
Y el Babel se comienza.
Que antorcha iluminará
Los caminos de la tierra?

Si el azul es un ensueño
Qué será de la innocencia?
Qué será del corazon
Si el Amor no tiene flechas?

Si la muerte es la muerte
Qué será de las poetas
Y de las cosas dormidas
Que ya nadie las recuerda?
Oh sol de las esperanzas!
Agua clara! luna nueva!
Corazones de los niños!
Almas rudas de la piedra!
Hoy siento en el corazon
Un vago temblor de estrellas
Y todas las rosas son
Tan blancas como mi pena."

Federico Garcia Lorca. November 1918.

Accountability. Francesc Boix.

Francesc Boix Campo 1920-1951
With his Leica at Mauthausen


Francesc Boix Campo was born in Poble Sec just round the
corner from the small local library which now bears his name.

Just 16 years old when the civil war broke out, he was too young
to enlist, but he had a passion, inherited from his father, for
photography, and a camera - his inseparable Leica. A privilege in
working-class Poble Sec in the 1930s.

A militant in the communist Unified Socialist Youth movement,
he collaborated as a photographer for the magazine Juliol and
served in the Republican army during 1938.

In January 1939 he left his homeland for France with the thousands
of other refugees who, quite rightly, feared for their lives when
Franco and his fascist hordes won the war.

He was young and he survived, though so many did not, the terrible
conditions of the French internment camps set up for the Spanish
Republicans.

Though one war was lost, he knew the fight against fascism had
barely begun. He volunteered and was incorporated into the 28th
Foreign Workers Battalion of the French Army. Sent north he was
caught by the invading Nazis in 1940 and deported to the
Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp complex in Austria.

It was the camp for the Spanish Republicans (60%) along with the
gypsies, the homosexuals, the Jehovah's Witnesses and of course the
Jews.

In his book "Spaniards in the Holocaust: the Horror on the Danube"
David Wingeate cites 23,400 registered Spanish prisoners in
Mauthausen, though some sources cite less.

But all coincide that over two-thirds died.

Francesc was lucky.

At the request of another Catalan prisoner, Antonio Garcia Alonso,
he worked in the camp´s photographic laboratory. Prisoners were
photographed on arrival, for identification and when they died, for
the record. More incriminatingly for those who would later deny
participation, official visits to the camp by Nazi officials were also
photographed.

Garcia was a professional photographer. When he arrived at
Mauthausen he was sent to work in the laboratory where a Polish
prisoner, Grabowski (who would commit suicide before the camp
was liberated) had started making secret copies of key photos.
Garcia collaborated with the clandestine archive, as did Francesc
when he joined them. It was Francesc who passed the photos and
negatives to the well-organized Spanish Communist underground
in the camp. Two young Spanish teenagers, Jacinto Cortes and Jesus
Grau, working with the brigades in the quarries outside the complex,
gradually passed the photos into the hands of Anna Pointer, a brave
and all but forgotten Austrian socialist - one of the few, so they say,
who realized what was really happening in the camp. She hid the
archive behind loose stones in her garden wall.

When Mauthausen was liberated Francesc retrieved the photos
and took them to Paris where some were published in the press.
They were used as evidence of Nazi war crimes in the Nuremberg
Trials and at Dachau during which Francesc was called to testify.

A witness. To help bring some, few, of the criminals to account.

He continued to work as a photographer in Paris after the war, but
the hardship and the suffering had taken their toll.

He was just 30 years old when he died.



There is no lack of photographic evidence of what recently happened
in Gaza.

Enough to prove war crimes.

Yesterday UN human rights investigators presented a detailed
report, questioning the legality of the Israeli offensive. The Guardian
have just published their own investigation.

Even the Israeli military have twice issued reports in the last week
which include testimonies of the criminal tactics employed.

But who will bring these new Jews to account?

Free Gaza. A love song

Plaça Sant Jaume 20th January 2009

Gaza Razed to the Ground


There weren't so many people at the last demonstration.

Maybe because of the ceasefire.

People think it's all over.

Maybe they were watching the inauguration, the world has
placed so much faith and hope in this new President...

But there were children

Plaça St Jaume 20th January 2009


The eyes of a child...

How can you look into the eyes of a child and continue
with this hatred?

It didn't take them long to get up on the stage

Plaça St Jaume. 20 January 2009

With a message for Obama

Plaça St Jaume 20th January 2009


Obama Stop arming Israel.

And one for Bush

Plaça St Jaume 20th January 2009

Bush you arrived with a war and you're
leaving with a war.

But fame and asking the world to listen gets tiring in the end.


According to the UN

More than 1,300 Palestinians have been killed and over 5000
injured.

More than 4,000 buildings destroyed and 20,000 severely
damaged.

There are 50.800 Gazans homeless and 400,000 without
running water.

Around $1.9 billion worth of damage.



And so, yes, I will blatantly use photos of children

Because israel has just killed 300 of them

Photo Gaza Graffiti Mark Seager 2007

A letter for Obama

As part of the ongoing campaign in Solidarity with the People
of Palestine, on Tuesday 20th of January at 18h. there will be
an attempt to deliver a letter addressed to the new President of
the United States at the US Consulate in Barcelona asking him
for a change from the war-mongering policies of George Bush
and specifically to stop arming and financing Israel.

At 20h. the same evening there will be a demonstration in Pça.
St. Jaume, with saucepans as they seem to be deaf, to demand
that the Governments of Catalonia and Spain break off relations
with Israel.

Criminal Complicity

The F-16 jet fighter was originally developed by General
Dynamics for The US Air Force.

It is now manufactured by Lockheed Martin.

The bombers have been sold to 25 countries.

Including Israel who have used them in their attack on Gaza
to kill 1300 people and injure 5340. And now, with this fragile
ceasefire, they are still pulling the dead from under the rubble.



The Shipload of Arms for Israel.

The ship carrying US munitions for Israel that was blocked from
Greek ports on Friday has a name: the Wehr Elbe. It's a chartered
German-owned vessel. It has now moved away from Greece but
has turned off its transponder tracking to prevent its location
being identified.

The sale of arms is, of course, totally legal.

Even to rogue states.

The Pentagon insists the sale was arranged last summer and
approved in October. I have read Israel has been planning this
attack on Palestine for months, obviously with knowledge of the
Bush administration. Criminal complicity.


So yes, Mr Obama, we want a change.