Tag Archives: Spanish

Chavez On Aznar

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I recently posted on Afoe about the frivolous ways in which people tend to throw around the N*Z* word these days. Latest on the list is Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez:

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez called former Spanish Premier Jose Maria Aznar a “fascist,” saying Aznar once told him to forget about the poor nations of the world. Chavez recalled late Thursday that Aznar had urged him to get on “the train of the future” and distance himself from Cuba’s Fidel Castro.

Chavez, who met Thursday with Spanish Labour and Social Affairs Minister Jesus Caldera, said he once asked Aznar what he thought of the situation of poor African countries and Haiti. “He told me, ‘Forget about them, those nations missed the train of history. They are condemned to disappear.'” recalled Chavez, saying such ideas remind one of Adolf Hitler. “He is a true fascist. That is the thinking of this gentleman who continues attacking us over there,” said Chavez, who also called Aznar an “imbecile.”

Obviously I am not privy to what Aznar may or may not have said, once upon a time to Chavez. What I do know – despite the fact I have very little respect for Aznar – is that he is no fascist. Neither for that matter is Chavez. Indeed the clip Spanish TV showed of Aznar criticising Chavez publicly was a model of reasonableness.

What is far less clear is what Caldera is doing in Venezuela, and why Zapatero has occupied his time selling arms to Chavez.

Spain: Is An End To Eta Imminent?

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“The insurgents in Iraq are very violent, but you defeat them not just through military effort,” Ms. Rice told reporters traveling with her on Sunday. “You defeat them by having a political alternative that is strong.” Now, she added, Iraqi leaders are “going to have to intensify their efforts to demonstrate that in fact the political process is the answer for the Iraqi people.”

These words from US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, which are extremely welcome as the daily death toll in Iraq only continues to emphasise the need to break the spiral, also has a resonance somewhere nearer home: in Spain, where tomorrow the Spanish parliament are to debate a motion which may be a major step in bring the epoch of ETA inspired violence to an end.

But not everyone is happy.
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A Question of Identity

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“I can’t really say that I’m myself,” he thinks. “I don’t know who I am. . . . I am the late Mattia Pascal.” So speaks the anti-hero of one of Italian writer Luigi Pirandello’s better known novels “Il fu Mattia Pascal” (The Late Mattia Pascal).

Mattia Pascal endures a life of drudgery in a provincial town. Then, providentially, he discovers that he has been declared dead. Realizing he has a chance to start over, to do it right this time, he moves to a new city, adopts a new name, and a new course of life?only to find that this new existence is as insufferable as the old one. But when he returns to the world he left behind, it’s too late: his job is gone, his wife has remarried. Mattia Pascal’s fate is to live on as the ghost of the man he was.

Having long been an admirer of this story, you can imagine my surprise when yesterday I found myself watching a real life version of it on local TV. The man behind the case: Enric Marco, 84 year old head of Amical de Mauthausen. Amical de Mauthausen is a Spanish association dedicated to commemorating the victims of the notorious death campwith that name. What is really incredible about Marco’s case is that he passed himself off for over thirty years as a concentration camp victim, whilst the real life ‘Enric Marco’ never set foot inside any such camp till he entered as a victims representative sometime during the later years of the twentieth century.
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Sheffield a la mar

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I have to confess to having had a fairly sucky 2004. Most of the causes are personal, and frankly not very interesting. But, as an example, my plan to spend the holiday season in Tunisia was abruptly cancelled because my wife got chicken pox. So, needless to say, I’ve been looking forward to 2005.

The wife got over her pox just a few days before Christmas, leaving us scrambling to find a vacation that both fit our respective work calendars, didn’t cost too much, and wasn’t booked solid. Consequently, I found myself at Zaventem airport at four in the morning on Christmas day fighting a miserable crowd so I could spend a week at Benidorm, Valencia, Spain.

I can’t claim I wasn’t warned. I did know that Benidorm – and the rest of the Costa Blanca – is something of a joke in the Dutch speaking part of Europe. After a week there, I still haven’t been in Spain. As far as I can tell, thanks to daily discount charter service between Sheffield and Alicante, the Costa Blanca is simply a warm, low-tax part of Yorkshire.
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Nationalism, regionalism and Spanish football

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The Independent has an interesting article today entitled ‘Why will a quarter of Spain be supporting England tonight?’ (for those of you who aren’t aware, there’s an international football friendly tonight between Spain and England in Madrid) which looks at how the Spanish national football team is not supported by many of the people of Spain because of the strong currents of regionalism and nationalism.

In so far as Catalans will be taking an interest in tonight’s Spain v England game in Madrid, they will be – most of them – supporting England. Should England score, the whole city will know about it. It happens every time, just as it does when Bar?a score a goal: in every neighbourhood there will be someone guaranteed to set off a celebratory firework or two.

Now, admittedly, things could get a little complicated this time around. What if Owen or Beckham score for England? The spontaneous reaction will be jubilation, but a moment’s reflection will yield the alarming truth that they play for the most detested enemy of them all, Real Madrid.

At which point the mental systems of Catalan football fans everywhere may dangerously short-circuit. Or not. Love for England may momentarily trump loathing for Spain. Whatever the case, it will yield an interesting new twist on the complex tribal impulses that animate the otherwise sane and impressively civilised Catalan people.

The Catalans are not alone. The Basques are at least as zealous in their desire that the Spanish football team be beaten. And as far as tonight’s game is concerned, because they haven’t got as much of a thing about Real Madrid as the Catalans do, they’ll be cheering on Beckham and Owen with as much abandon as the rest of the England team.

There are other, smaller nationalist enclaves in Spain where they’ll be rooting for England too. A number will in Galicia, in the Celtic-rooted north-west (they play the bagpipes out there, the fields are green and they look Irish); some diehards will in the Valencia region; and the Balearic islanders (Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza) will be happy for the most part to see perfidious Espa?a defeated.

Update: Unfortunately, the match was marred by some pretty despicable racist chanting from an element of the Spanish fans – see this discussion on Crooked Timber for more.

Visca la difer?ncia

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Catalan, Basque, Valencian and Galician as EU official languages? That’s what Spanish foreign minister Moratinos proposes. You’d think the famously proud Catalans would be purring with cultural satisfaction.

You’d be wrong. Last week the Economist observed the astonishing reaction of some Catalans to this suggestion. They’re furious that Valencian might be given status equal with Catalan. One of them, Josep Lluis Carod-Rovira, is even willing to cut off Catalunya’s nose to spite Valencia’s face: if Valencian is granted official status, he says, Catalans should refuse it.1 The Economist thought the irate Catalans need to have a nice lie-down, and I agree.

In this week’s issue, though, a letter-writer from Barcelona takes up the cudgels once more. How dare those Valencians imagine they have a language of their own?

Experts unanimously recognise Valencian as a variety of Catalan (as many Valencians call their language).

Well, perhaps; though I daresay there will be some experts in Valencia who disagree.
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Daniel Pipes on Tariq Ramadan: Why French literacy still matters

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Readers of my previous comment on Tariq Ramadan will no doubt have come away with the impression that I don’t much like Daniel Pipes. This is not an entirely accurate assessment of my opinon of him. I think Pipes is an unreconstructed bigot and xenophobic fanatic whose academic work fails to meet even the lowest standards of scholarship, whose career has been built on politically driven attacks, and who has set up with his “Campus Watch” as a terrorist front designed to intimidate academics and ensure that there is as little debate, discussion or rational thought on Israel, US foreign policy or Islam as possible. His reseach and scholarship are not intended to better inform action but to support specific agendas, usually revolving around hating some foreign force or people. Instead of fostering debate, his work is intended to intimidate. Pipes advocates religiously targetted surveillance, he supports making federal university funding conditional on ideology, and he has helped to terrorise professors who are named on his website. In short, I think Pipes is swine.

He is a second generation right-wing tool, the son of one of the men most responsible for America’s “Team B”, which grossly overblew the Soviet menace in the 70s and 80s – causing massive US defense spending and resulting deficits – and complained that anyone with a better sense of reality was soft on communism. Normally, Pipes’ parentage would constitute poor grounds for condeming him as having a pathological relationship to facts. But keep this in mind, since it constitutes one of his arguments against Ramadan.

All you need is Google to find out why I think these things about Daniel Pipes. It’s not a lot of work. His own website provides ample examples.

But, today, I will be targeting something a little more specific. Pipes has put up on his website his comment on Tariq Ramadan’s visa denial, originally published in the New York Post on Friday. In it, he makes specific points against Tariq Ramadan, linking, in some cases, to articles on the web in support. These articles are primarily in French. As a service to our non-francophone readers, we will be translating the relevant sections, since they lead one to the conclusion that Pipes assumes his readers will just take his word on their contents.

We report, you decide.
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Al Quaida, a Learning Organisation?

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Spiegel Online claims to be in possession of a 42-page arabic language document that, according to the magazine’s author, Yassin Musharbash, suggests not only that Al Quaida had strategically targeted Madrid just before the elections, but, moreover, that the organisation’s intellectual and thus strategic capacities seem to have risen significantly. According to Musharbash’s article (in German), international experts who analysed the document – which was allegedly found on the internet by a Norwegian defense research agency in December 2003 – assume it to be authentic.

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Six Moroccans Identified in Madrid Bombing

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Well, little by little the details are getting clearer. According to the Spanish daily El Pais the police now know the identity of six Moroccans who are thought to have participated in Thursday’s bombing.

According to the newspaper one of those responsible is Jamal Zougan from Tangiers who has been identified from photographs by two passengers from one of the bombed trains. These passengers have also identified two more people who accompanied Zougan that day. These latter two are thought by police to have been combatants in Chechenia and Bosnia. Zougan also shared a flat at one time with Abdelaziz Benyaich who is under preventive detention in Spain for his presumed association with the bombing of a Spanish cultural centre in Casablanca last year.

Oh, what a tangled web they weave!
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A Videotape and A Recantation

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At one o’clock in the morning Spanish time Angel Acebes appeared on TV here to inform Spanish citizens that the authorities were in possesion of a video showing a man who purports to represent Al Qaeda. In the words of the New York Times:

The man in the video, who was speaking Arabic with a Moroccan accent and wearing Arab garb, identified himself as Abu Dujan al-Afghani, evidently a nom de guerre, and claimed to be the military spokesman for Al Qaeda in Europe.

Since nothing here is ever clear, and it is impossible to know at this stage with any reasonable degree of certainty either who this man is, or who he really represents, caution would seem to be warranted.

What is clear, however, is that the whole course of events has turned from Thursday (and remember this is still only Sunday). It now appears reasonable to assume that this is the work of an Islamic fundamentalist group, probably one with links to Al Qaeda. Even if it seems strange to use this expression in the context of a terrorist organisation, a presumption of innocence in this atrocity must now hang over ETA and all its splinters until such time as evidence to the contrary appears on the table.

This being the case you all deserve an apology from me. I read it wrong. Whether this was a reasonable reading given the events and the background or not I leave to you.

I would also like to indicate that commentors Factory and Talos have both had their initial instincts confirmed. Does this suggest that being closer to the events is not always an advantage?

Whatever the rights and wrongs of what we all thought two things seem clear. Firstly the dimension of the problem just changed: this is no longer a ‘local’ Spanish affair, but is now something which concerns the whole of Europe and our relations with the Unites States. Secondly the problem of Eta is still there. Maybe Eta is ‘innocent’ this time: but how long will it be before we are burying the next victim of an Eta inspired assasination or bombing?

I therefore ask you to truly have sympathy for the Spanish citizens today. Especially for the most humble and least sophistocated of them. Their world has just been shattered in a way which must seem to many of them irreperable. Many have have found themselves in recent years hovering between fear and indignation in the face of Eta terror. They now find themselves parachuted without warning into the front line of a battle with the most important terrorist menace on the planet. They have just lost 200 innocent fellow citizens. Think of them this day, and let your hearts go out to them.