Thursday 16 December 2010

Reflections from the damaged life (Exile) Theodor Adorno

ADORNO:
13

Aid, assistance and advice. – Every intellectual in emigration is, without exception, damaged, and if one does not wish to be taught a cruel lesson behind the airtight doors of one’s self-esteem, would do well to recognise this. One lives in an environment which necessarily remains incomprehensible, even if one can manage to find their way among trade union organisations or automobile traffic; one is forever getting lost. Between the reproduction of one’s own life under the monopoly of mass-culture and objective, responsible work there lies an irreconcilable breach. One’s language has been expropriated and the historical taproot from which one derived their powers of cognition has been taken away. The isolation becomes worse, the more that closed and politically-directed groups form, suspicious of their own members, hostile towards those branded as the members of others. The share of the social surplus allocated to foreigners is never enough to go around and drives them into a hopeless secondary competition amongst themselves, in the midst of the more general one. All this leaves telltale marks on every individual. Whoever escapes the shame of being reduced to the lowest common denominator [Gleichschaltung: “levelling,” notorious term of Nazi propaganda] bears this exceptional condition as their particular brand: as an illusory and unreal existence in the life-process of society. The relations between those who have been expelled are even more poisoned than between those who are long-standing residents. All metrics become false, the vision blurs. That which is private asserts itself improperly, hectically, vampire-like precisely because it no longer really exists and convulsively wants to prove otherwise. That which is public is consigned to the unspoken oath of fealty on the public platform. The gaze takes on the aspect of that which is manic and at the same time cold in all grasping, devouring, commandeering. Nothing helps outside of the steadfast diagnosis of oneself and of others; the attempt, through consciousness, to not so much elude the calamity as to deprive it of its catastrophic violence, that of blindness. One should exercise the most extreme caution in choosing one’s private circle, insofar as one has a choice at all. One should beware above all of seeking out influential types from whom “one can expect something.” The eye for potential advantages is the mortal enemy of the construction of relationships worthy of human dignity; though solidarity and consideration for others may ensue from these latter, they can never originate in thoughts of practical deals. No less dangerous are the mirror images of power, the lackeys, toadies and leeches who make themselves agreeable to those better off than themselves, in an archaic manner which could only flourish in the economically extraterritorialised conditions of emigration. While they bring their protector small advantages, they drag him down as soon as they are accepted, an ever-present temptation which is exacerbated by his own helplessness while abroad. If the esoteric gesture in Europe was often merely a pretext for the blindest self-interest, the concept of austerité [French: austerity], though far from being completely sea-worthy, remains nevertheless the most suitable lifeboat. Only a very few have, of course, an appropriate craft at their disposal. Most of those who climb aboard are threatened with starvation or madness.

Thursday 9 December 2010

"... las represaliadas por el franquismo sufrieron por rojas y por mujeres....".

TODOS LOS ROSTROS 
http://todoslosrostros.blogspot.com.es/2008/07/las-represaliadas-por-el-franquismo.html


Lugar de la memoria visual de los prisioneros y presos republicanos y antifranquistas, construido como homenaje a todos los represaliados por el fascismo y el franquismo en la España de la guerra civil y postguerra.

"Las represaliadas por el franquismo sufrieron por rojas y por mujeres"

Les Corts, 15000....

Saturrarán, 6000....

Ventas, 14000....

Segovia, 1000....

Alcalá de Henares, 5000....

Sevilla, 3000....

Málaga, 4000....

Amorebieta, 1500....

Valencia, 5000....

Palma de Mallorca, 2000....

Melilla, 2000....

Amorebieta, 2000....


etc., etc., etc., ...........
¿Cuántas mujeres republicanas o familiares de republicanos fueron presas de los franquistas desde 1936 hasta bien entrados los años 70? ¿60.000? ¿70.000? ¿Cuántas fueron torturadas, violadas, maltratadas, asesinadas...? ¿A cuántas les fueron arrebatados para siempre sus hijos?

A pesar de los excelentes trabajos de Tomasa Cuevas, Juana Doña, Ricard Vinyes, Fernando Hernández Holgado, Xavier Basterretxea Burgaña, Arantza Ugarte Lopetegi y de las investigaciones de algunos historiadores o de un@s poc@s voluntaristas más, el mundo penitenciario femenino en la dictadura franquista sigue siendo un área de conocimiento en gran parte ignorado por los memorialistas y olvidado por la sociedad y por sus próceres.

Y es difícil creer que este desconocimiento sea posible tras leer testimonios como el de Mercedes Nuñezen el libro "Carcel de Ventas": "sentadas en los petates o en el santo suelo hay muchas mujeres jóvenes, y con ellas un enjambre de niños. Son pálidos, delgaditos, muchos de ellos están llenos de pupas. Estos niños, menores de cinco años, viven día y noche encerrados, hambrientos, temblando ante las funcionarias, presenciando "sacas", oyendo los fusilamientos al amanecer y todo esto se refleja en su mirada. Tienen una expresión en los ojos que hace daño".

Mikel Arizaleta nos recuerda en http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=68807 que "la alimentación era mala y escasa: un bollo de pan para todo el día, una pastilla de chocolate para el desayuno, caldo con alguna patata para la comida y lentejas para la cena. Los víveres que traían las presas quedaban confiscados y se trasladaban en grades canastas a la cocina de las monjas, que traficaban con el dinero y la comida de las reclusas y de sus hijos. Asunción Rodríguez Pulgar sostiene en una entrevista que "las monjas especulaban con la comida. Vendían en estraperlo la comida de las presas. Arroz, sacos de azucar... los sacaban por el monte de noche hacia Galdona". Carmina Merodio recuerda: "No querían que comiéramos para mantener a los cerdos, que luego los vendían.... Cogían hasta la comida de los niños, la leche condensada, y todo lo vendían fuera¡" Las malditas monjas de las cárceles de la dictadura española, que tanto daño hicieron a presas y a niños!".

En el mismo artículo, Arizaleta hace un breve resumen del martirio padecido por las mujeres presas de los franquistas: "... las represaliadas por el franquismo sufrieron por rojas y por mujeres. Muchas mujeres recibieron por aquel entonces y años posteriores un castigo ejemplar e inaudito: muchas fueron hacinadas en cárceles inmundas, tratadas como alimañas, se les rapó la cabeza, se les obligó a beber aceite de ricino, fueron paseadas por calles, caminos y plazas para sentir el escarnio de los vecinos mientras se iban cagando por las patas. La menstruación se convirtió en un problema, "obtener agua caliente para limpiar un paño higiénico en pleno invierno no era gratuito sino moneda de cambio, humillación y chantaje... La menopausia precoz fue ridiculizada por monjas y funcionarias, presentada y atribuida a un castigo -probablemente divino- merecido por su condición política".

"... las represaliadas por el franquismo sufrieron por rojas y por mujeres....".



Presas políticas antifranquistas en el patio de la prisión de Alcalá de Henares, Madrid, en 1963.



Presas antifranquistas en la Prisión de Alcalá de Henares, Madrid. Sentadas, Mercedes Gómez y Juana Doña, según el libro "Presas políticas", de Ricard Vinyes.



Presas antifranquistas y algunos de sus hijos e hijas en la Prisión de Segovia, en 1953. En el centro de pie, María Salvo, según el libro "Presas Políticas", de Ricard Vinyes.



Taller de confeccion en la prisión de mujeres de Segovia 1952.



Taller de costura en la cárcel de Amorebieta 1941, según el libro "Presas Políticas", de Ricard Vinyes.



Mujeres y sus hijos en prision, probablemente en Saturrarán.



Patio de Mujeres de la cárcel de Sevilla. Al fondo a la derecha, Josefa Vallejo y Carmen Monge. Archivo de J.M. García Marquez.



Prisión de Amorebieta (Vizcaya) en 1942. Sentada, a la derecha, Tomasa Cuevas.




Archivo personal de María Salvo. Taller de la prisión de Alcalá de Henares, 1956.




Carcel de mujeres de Durango, Vizcaya, durante una festividad, posiblemente el Día de La Merced, según una información publicada en "Deia" en la que consta la filiación de los fotografiados, entre los que se encuentran algún funcionario y la directora de la prisión.




"Agustina Sánchez, Angelita Gutiérrez y Antonia García, Toñi, con un grupo de conmutadas de la pena de muerte, cumpliendo condena en la cárcel de Palma de Mallorca en 1940. Arriba en el centro y marcada con una X, Matilde Landa, la compañera que tanto trabajó en la cárcel de Ventas en defensa de de las penadas a muerte. Por agotamiento, aislamiento en celdas y vejaciones en general, se suicidó en la cárcel de Palma de Mallorca. Este pequeño grupo de mujeres suman en total de 1320 años de condena". Texto de Tomasa Cuevas en su libro "Mujeres en las cárceles".



Personal de dirección y seguridad de la Prisión Provincial de mujeres de Valencia. Ministerio del Interior. Biblioteca de la DGIIPP.



Presa ante la Junta de Libertad Vigilada de la prisión de Barcelona, formada por varias monjas, un cura, un falangista, un militar y un funcionario (ver en la entrada "Iglesia, Fascismo y represión" de 29 de junio de este blog, otra imagen de la Junta de LIbertad Vigilada). 1944.

Monday 6 December 2010

Short Novela about the Double Agent : E2162 ( published at BCNProducció/10)


Love: Called Eros the God, is so attracted unavoidably to Death. 


Thanatos: A huge black hole of nothingness like the most warm embrace ...

It is never the person we give the privilege of causing disturbance on our hearts the real culprit, it is us.. we know this by now after the likes of Freud or Lacan, it's our transference, our projections. 


On the blank screens of appearances we see things, symbols, signs, and we eventually find lost parts of ourselves, of our forgotten past and dreams.

And this is exactly what happened to her when she meet him, and after the meeting.. that trail he left.. that scent that for some reason seemed to take her, to guide her in to the deep nights of secret meetings for briefings about the real exact Revolution, as it was so much needed at those times.

So please, don't even think that due to some extra powers this man had, whom she did loved once, that she then decided to put her self on a list to go and jump in to death, to disappear.


As it was irrelevant where he was now, because it was what happened then, the essence of that times and the subdued influence he exerted over her unwillingly.

This is what was mysterious, thrilling, and fascinating about the fate of agent E2162



How was her to be involved on all of this could have not ever been  explained if he will not had crossed her path at a very special moment of her short life. As simple as this may sound, him or he: Appeared out of the bluest blue, as that unexpected being influencing her throughout his embraces and his deep bright black Mapuche eyes. 


It was about those unfair deaths, far away during his childhood that he carried as a shadow. 

An immense shadow overpowering all and anyone who had a heart: His mother and her sisters and their husbands and his grand father too, had been sequestered, tortured and ultimately dispatched. Being getting rid off. This systematic slow cleanse of leftist intellectuals of Rojos was an enduring praxis.

Very easy for the system and the military police all knitted and perfected every year. With all the Nazi intelligence residing in their new lands, a re-colonised or borrowed República Argentina.

All these persecutions and tortures just for being considered subversive on a time and a place where this disappearances could just happen overnight, quietly. 

The national secret police will came and will take you. And as this on a snap, they will make you go.

They did not enjoyed such long times together, most of it was(as she pointed out after his proposal)like love in war times, love in a short time, a timing and a context, and then a long distance, a long spacetime of nothingness passing by. 


As she had also said then, like loving before we are about to die.

She agreed, even knowing she would regret it both ways: if rejecting it, the whole emptiness up on her for ever: Unbearable, impossible and desolate. And if agreeing as she did, having almost for sure(will she had not already knew ??) having to live with that passion, that memories, that burning desire for "that", which had gone for never ever come back here or to her again.

So all this happens on his absence, on how this shape-up on a reconstructed figure. And how all this could transform in to politics and then later in to a total militancy ?

Love as blood? as violence for justice, as deep will to finish up all that should not be there anymore.

Still a mystery as the one of that so called saint trinity. 
A sort of transubstantiation maybe? From love to hate.

She was more aware now, she had been for a while, but this feeling of loneliness mixed up together, make her inner senses open wide and feel the pain of unfairness to heights she could not have ever fathom. 
And her being, awaken and alert for things, intense feelings and issues that before seemed pointless or just impossible to reach.


One of them been revolution here and now...Revolution or revolt(she used to think till then)is not possible any more.


We are too much under control, we love too much our little easy narcissistic lives and superfluous comforts and even if I know (she said so many times)we are just bloody happy slaves, there is not much we can do about it, no? 

But she developed this un-comfort, this aggressive feeling, this sickness to what she witnessed, slowly more and more as the every day life of squizo extreme poles of everywhere around her. 

And one day, as if this was just also coming on her way, next to how unexpected and ephemeral had been her meeting with that man she knew she will not forget for at least a long long while if ever, this other man appeared (a man who was almost as a negative version of her by then so long ago tasted unknown hero, a man so feminine, hermetic like an sphinx and excitingly dangerous) and this was by then how she got recruited and how she did give her self to all this risk and commitment and ultimately to her own death. 


Her own death as an exchange for her believes and also(she did not know this )as the part of the deal she silently made when she gave her self to that man who carried the shadow of a monstrous crime perpetrated by the nation where his grandfather grew-up, married and had its three beautiful hopeful daughters, who then married and had hopeful lives and believes, had babies of one, two years old.Given to other military couples to be raised by the perpetrators families while their world was sunk in the mud and thrown on to the Ocean.


Like her own Argentinian ancestors, they both knew how long it taken crossing the Atlantic, emigrated back or forwards from Buenos Aires to Barcelona.

II


Marlene was a man, and he had an immense ambitious agenda:

Revolution against the Fascist once more again.

Can you believe it?




She was baptised agent E2162 and her mission was of a double direction as herself was a mix of quite small little "petit burguesa", of Cuban creole's workers in to the industrial navy and Argentinian immigrants with an orphan grandfather who could have been a Moor or Berber(a Morisco from the forced converts of Spain)as many in that ghostly poor inlands came from.  

E2162 had Bipolar loves and hates: deep down or not so, as an intense despise of high society and its cruel vacuousness.A deep sadness over the leftovers, her own lumpen bohemianism for all the queer and unadapted bodies and minds, the fringes and the un-rested. As she knew deep down all her ancestry had a series of points of coincidence:Converting to another faith by force of circumstance, hiding, negated, persecuted, fear and panic, loss, poverty, humiliation, trauma, illness.   

So she did started and she did got drip by drip, day by day, more involved and more hard headed. Her heart still bleeding between the steel that she needed in order to work it all trough. And drip by drip, even if all we do anyway is going to the same place, her death was getting closer and closer like a mathematic diagram she had traced a kiss after a kiss that one night, at that one humid harbour with that man she had promised to die for, after their ritual made and sealed.

Saturday 4 December 2010

Scandal of the Spanish Civil War mass graves

Time is fast running out for descendants who are desperate to identify the victims of Franco's death squads
BY ALASDAIR FOTHERINGHAM  Sunday 14 November 2010

When "A M", a Spanish lawyer in her forties, talks about the Franco death squads who murdered her grandfather and tossed his body in a roadside ditch where it remained hidden for the next 74 years, any hatred or anger at the perpetrators is either long gone or deeply buried. But a huge reservoir of sorrow remains, together with resentment at extreme bureaucratic insensitivity.

"In the records of the government office where he worked, he's still noted as 'absent from his work station for unknown reasons'," she says. "We want those records put straight, with recognition of what really happened."

She has requested anonymity for herself and her grandfather because "that's what my late father would have wanted". But, in any case, remaining nameless is all that is on offer to the vast majority of the 120,000-plus victims believed to have been killed and buried by Franco's militias – and who are still waiting to be dug up. That wait is coming dangerously close to becoming permanent.

Today, 71 years after the Spanish civil war ended, 35 years after Franco's death, and four years after a law was passed authorising exhumation of the war's mass graves, barely 10 per cent of the estimated 2,052 sites have been investigated.

In the province of Seville, 102 out of 104 have not been unearthed – even though, as A M says, "everybody who lived through the Franco years knows where the sites are; it was part of what our parents grew up with". Juan Luis Castro, an archaeologist who has been present at more than half the exhumations of civil war graves in Andalusia, says: "The graves and execution sites were mainly at the sides of cemeteries, where the atheists and suicides, as well as huge numbers of unbaptised children, were buried during the Franco years."

Roadside ditches, according to Mr Castro, were another favourite spot. Spain's most famous "missing person" from the civil war, the poet Federico Garcia Lorca, is believed to have been murdered along with 4,000 Republicans by a ditch on a hillside above Granada. "But in other cases the bodies have been found in pits in forests or in wells. At the concentration camp in Castuera, they'd rope up a prisoner, throw them in a well and then throw in a hand grenade," Mr Castro says.

With time and encroaching urban development, some burial sites from the period have disappeared, hidden under huge rubbish tips or inside the gardens of plush housing estates. A children's play park was recently developed over one, at La Palma de Condado in Huelva, south-west Spain. About 200 bodies are estimated to be buried beneath the concrete.

However, some mass burial sites are quite unmissable, such as Franco's Valley of the Fallen, a vast mausoleum in a lonely valley in the sierras west of Madrid, some 50km from the city. A cross, 150m high and 46m wide, marks the spot, ensuring it is visible for miles around. This, the last national monument in democratic Europe to a former dictator, contains the remains of the Spanish Fascist Party founder, Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, as well as those of the general. Also present, due to Franco's macabre wish to fill the crypts with civil war combatants, are another 33,847 bodies, more than a third unidentified.

Some are Nationalists, others Republican prisoners from battalions of forced labour who died during the monument's 20-year construction. Yet others were exhumed from mass execution graves in the 1950s, purely to "top up" the crypts after Nationalists failed to find enough unidentified massacre victims from their own side. Thus, murdered Republicans now lie next to the man responsible for their deaths.

Extracting any of these from the most notorious mass grave of the Franco years, as the families of nine former Republicans requested earlier this year, may prove particularly difficult. The government, uncomfortably aware that the Valley of the Fallen remains sacrosanct to Franco's dwindling but vociferous band of supporters, ordered a covert four-month investigation. This initially declared that the state of the coffins was so decrepit that an excavation was impossible. However, some of the victims' families say they have been told that a final verdict will be given in three months' time.

The blurry government reaction has done little to quell persistent rumours that there are plans to shift Franco himself to the Madrid cemetery where his wife, Carmen Polo, is buried and convert the entire Valley of the Fallen into a genuine memorial to his victims. The site attracts six million visitors a year.

The closure of the building this spring, ostensibly for repairs, is believed to be a possible cover to enable the first step towards shifting Franco out. It could also mean that the extreme right will not be able to hold its usual commemorative mass there in honour of Franco and Primo de Rivera, who both died on the same date, 20 November. If they are kept out, expect fireworks.

Either way, the continuing politicisation of what should be a simple, if lengthy, process of exhumation is widely believed to be responsible for the current snail-like process.

"The problem with the 2006 law is that it doesn't give the bodies we exhume any clear legal status, and there's no official organ overseeing the whole process," Mr Castro points out. "With legal status, the victims would have to be investigated as missing persons presumed murdered; theoretically, the inquiries would have to override the post-Franco amnesty laws of 1977, which absolved anybody of any responsibility for crimes during the dictatorship. That, in turn, could make life very difficult for the government.

"At the same time, right-wing town councils across Spain frequently oppose the exhumation of the mass graves in their areas. In some cases, they will not even permit investigations to see if such sites exist."

AM adds: "When the excavations started you'd hear all these comments from right-wingers in my town about 'Why are we wasting good money on digging up reds' bodies?', and 'Why don't we concentrate on the living?' What I find hardest to understand is that some of the criticisms come from a generation that wasn't even politically active in the Franco years."

With all the recriminations, lack of financial support and foot-dragging, time is running out, and not just because the generations that remember where local Republicans were "taken for a ride" are starting to die. In some cases where bodies were badly mixed up – such as in the Castuera concentration camp wells and in the Valley of the Fallen – DNA testing is vital for identification. But there are fears that its reliability starts to decrease after several decades.

AM admits that her chances of finding her grandfather's burial site are dwindling fast. "The authorities have had one full investigation into the area around the mass grave where he was buried, which failed, and that was after promising three or four others, which went nowhere. Each time, it's as if he's gone missing all over again."