Horizon

The SFGate story is here.

Very sad.

Insisting on remembering things hurts.

Hope this doesn't seem entirely like a digression, but I was reading something last night on a similar theme -- this NYRB article about Spanish war memories & memoirs and the painful shortage thereof. Unfortunately the review, by Colm Toibin, is behind a four-dollar barrier online, but it might be worth paying for. A key section in the review follows his discussion of a Socialist mayor in Barcelona who refused to allow any splash beyond a quiet suburban ceremony for a fifty-year reunion of International Brigade veterans, and who was meanwhile daily working with an ex-Franco administrator on preparations for the 1992 Olympics. The Ex-Franco man had been taunted by democracy protesters in the immediately post-Franco years, and then "Eleven or twelve years later, as I watched him being cheered by the crowd, the young especially, as the man who brought the Olympics to the city, I wondered whether I was the only one there whose memory lasted longer than a decade. The Spanish way of forgetting, their skill with the airbrush, gave them their silky transition to democracy; it also made certain public gatherings surreal and almost unbearably strange..." And he wrote that for an October NYRB issue, hence a few days before Spain's very, very strange National Day '04 ceremony, which involved side-by-side veterans who had fought on opposite sides in both the Civil War and WWII. News reports of the National Day event suggested the two veterans had been ideologically committed volunteers, not mere draftees. Essentially the ceremony honored a Republican and a F*scist as though their personal histories were equivalent, and as though "balance" could be achieved by honoring both.

Another look at memory politics -- this one involving a U.S. survivor of Japanese atrocities -- is in s'morning's Chron. This one about a man who spent years speaking to U.S. audiences about the terrible things that were done to him, but who derived all the emotional peace he's likely to get from traveling to the very much changed site of his imprisonment and meeting a Japanese pilot who spared his life.

Dunno what to say more. Anything I can think of to say here sounds stupid.

Essentially the ceremony honored a Republican and a F*scist as though their personal histories were equivalent, and as though "balance" could be achieved by honoring both.

Although from the outside this might seem nauseating, I think that from the Spanish perspective it might be seen as a necessary compromise. To begin a process of fullscale historical revision over events so recent and so divisive is not necessarily in Spain's interests right now. Remember that it was only twenty five years ago that there was a full-fledged attempt at a neo-Fascist coup, suppressed in part by the personal intervention of the King. No doubt one day a more realistic picture of 20th Century Spain will emerge, but it might have to wait until all of the participants are dead and passions have sufficiently dampened. (I know this didn't happen in Germany after 1945, but then Germany's state and society was completely levelled and rebuilt from scratch; there was a unique historical opportunity to start afresh. That's not the case in Spain).

This seems an entirely appropriate discussion in a thread about Iris Chang, BTW.

More on events preceding her death in this morning's SF Chronicle. She was clinically depressed.