Month: February 2024

This is less about the man than about the country Russia and the people of Russia and their departed saviour, Alexei Navalny.

As to the overflowing praise of and for him, pause.

Incipient in the conundrum of his death, an inevitable one once he decided to return to Russia after recovery in a German hospital from poisoning by Russians, are these questions.

What was he, what would have happened if he had been allowed to live – which he could be not be allowed, at least not in Russia, all of which, of course, he knew?

In life, death and in Russia’s history in all ways a classic Russian dissenter, Navalny knew that over and over, again and again, throughout time, Russians submit to one-man rule like sheep.

Call him Tsar or, as in the cases of Elisabeth and Catherine the Great, Tsarina – with only the checks of a simmering nobility and/or plotting spouse to threaten assassination as a last resort – or actually do it as in the deaths of Tsars Peter III in 1762 and Paul I in 1801 – Russia’s emperors ruled with absolute authority.

With their absolute authority they absolutely ruined their nation and their mostly enslaved people – enslaved by them – sheep with no more freedom than the livestock they were, maybe less since unlike sheep they were not mute, dumb animals.

The last Tsar, Nicholas. II, was overthrown in 1917. In 1918 along with his German wife besotted by mindless superstitious religion, with their hemophiliac son and heir apparent, and with their three daughters, he was murdered by the Bolsheviks in the basement of a small house in Yekaterinburg as the Russians fought a civil war.

Their intention went beyond killing the last Tsar. The Bolsheviks meant to kill Tsarism for good and all.

The civil war pitted the Russian White Army, allied with up to 100,000 Czech mercenaries, the British and, yes, 13,000 American troops on one side, and a score of other nations, against the new Red Army led ruthlessly by Leon Trotsky for the Bolsheviks.

It ended with the Red Army victorious in Russia though the Poles defeated the Reds in 1920,forcing Russia to settle for eastern bounaries of the restored Polish state favoring Poland. In August 1939 the Nazi-Soviet Pact dissolved those boundaries.

Victorious against the Whites, the Boleheviks then gave what to Russia? They gave it a new Tsar after all. First Lenin, then after him out of the lunacy of divisions among the Bolsheviki, a new title emerged to embody their new, improved auotcratic, insular despotic repression.

From their internecine struggle emerged triumphant Joseph Stalin, nee Joseph Dzhugashvili, born not in Russia but in Georgia in the Caucuses, a man ruthless beyond ruthlessness.

The new title of this non-Russian new Tsar? General Secretary – not of the nation but of the ruling Communist Party. First taken by Stalin, the title and the power survived until Mikhail Gorbachev. He, the last General Secretary, was discarded because he tried modestly to change the rigid, totally despotic, very failed Russian state the party ruled.

After the fall of the last General Secretary for a short time, as short as after 1917, came a void that gifted Russia with a chaotic, drunk, Boris Yeltsin, with the title President, an honorific born of Russia’s sudden pretense of democracy.

He was quickly overcome by the old party apparatus as it moved surreptitiously under the guise of democracy, fomented by the scheme of a schemer, a former secret police officer, a onetime mid-level KGB functionary from Petersburg Vladimir Putin:

In the vaccum, a momentary void of history, the wholly imoral, thoroughly corrupt and corrupting Putin took all power driven by his demonic, demagogic determination to restore the Russian/Soviet empire and rule it as – as Tsar.

In such momentary voids, history has a way of vomiting up the worst men and standing aside as they seize power or try to – Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao, Orbin, Putin, Trump.

As devious as Stalin, as imperious as Lenin, as performative as Kruhschev, more single minded than Brezhnev, Putin became the new Tsar/General Secretary with, again, a different title. Like Yeltsin, he calls himself and the world calls him president. He isn’t. He is the general secretary, qua Tsar.

He is 71. After him comes what in Russia? No one knows, but it is a reasonable bet that whatever it is in very short order will resolve into a new statism, a new reign of the strong man as despot, who is the law, the one and only law in Russia.

Had he lived, would Navalny, who in his way begged to die, have led Russia into democracy, liberty and freedom? Or? Or cloaked in that aura would he have become the next strong man of Russia?

We can never know because his death wish is fulfilled. But we do know that he tempted that wish, having returned there with the certainty that by going back he did not merely beg his fate, he determined it. He would die – or he would survive to be enshrined in some new fashion in the Kremlin. Most likely he would die, murdered as he is now.

There is no real movement in Russia for those things we praise – democracy and liberty. There are dissidents, very much mostly in exile. It has been ever thus. Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky spent decades outside Russia looking and wanting in until, arriving there, they sent others into exile or to the same prisons where they had been sent or, worse, to death in untold thousands.

Russia has a population of 143 million. The opposition there had one face, one name, that of Navalny. So now what? Don’t promise yourself you know. The only thing history knows is that despots wear Russia like a tight glove inside which, the fingers that are the Russian people barely wiggle but otherwise hardly move.

Was Navalny, a man very much about himself, a Democrat, was he a liberal? Or was he the next autocrat? Given the firmly settled history of Russia and Russians to seek and submit to an autocrat, we should not assume Navalny represented a different Russian. But, given his choice to return to his death, neither we nor history can know or will know.

What we can glean from all of it and more is this. Never expect different or better from Russia or Russians.

You will be disappointed.

In 1912 Spain and France divided the kingdom of Morocco, until then independent under its sultan (today Morocco is a united, independent kingdom).

The Spanish got the worst of the deal but did get the territory opposite the Rock, Gibraltar, held by the British since the Napoleonic wars on the Iberian Peninsula (the Napoleonic king of Spain, Joseph Bonaparte, half-brother of the emperor, fled Spain, ending up, same as me a few years later, in, of all places, Bordentown, N.J.). 

Spanish Morocco held a strategic position on the African side of the Straits of Gibraltar (today Spain still holds two Moroccan cities on the Mediterranean, Ceuta and Melilla). Under Spain, the Spanish Army of Morocco and the Spanish Foreign Legion ruled the colony.

These forces in Melilla sprang rebellion against the Second Republic of Spain on July 17, 1936.  Led by four generals, it inspired a song of loyalist Spain, “Los Quatros Generales”, an anthem for all Republicans loyal to the Republic.

The action spread to Spain the next day. By October it had become the full-blown Spanish Civil War in which 1,000,000 died. In the war 100,000 foreign volunteers served. Called in the International Brigades, they included 3,000 Americans of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion of the Fifteenth International Brigade, and several hundred others in the affiliated John Brown Artillery Battery. As a kid later, I met two of them.

Like the vast majority of the Internationals, these Americans were committed men of the left – many were Communists answering a ringing idealistic call to fight Fascism. 

The American survivors came home to ostracization, persecution and hounding for years. (In this piece published in 2016 ago on the New York Times Op-ed page, the late Sen. John McCain pays the homage of the brave to the brave in a tribute to the last member of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion to die (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/25/opinion/john-mccain-salute-to-a-communist.html).

Loyalist/Republican Spain and its battle epitomizes all great lost causes. It may have been the most romantic of them all. Certainly, as Sen. McCain observed, Ernest Hemingway made it so in “For Whom the Bell Tolls”. 

The insurgent generals were called  Nationalists. With their far right supporters and Spain’s Roman Catholic Church they created the Falange – the Spanish Fascist Party. It allied nationalist Spain with NAZI Germany and Fascist Italy, which quickly sent 100,000 Italian soldier “volunteers”. Germany sent the air force Condor Legion. It carried out the bombing of Guernica in the Basque Province.

That event is seared in human memory by one of the masterpieces of the 20^th Century, Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica”, depicting the first mass bombing ever of a civilian population. Picasso was a Basque. He was a Communist. He was a Republican in the full meaning of that word in and beyond Spain. 

He refused to set foot there again until after the death of Gen. Francisco Franco 40 years later. Today “Guernica” is displayed at the Museo Reine Sophia in Madrid. You think you know what to expect when you see it. But it surpasses expectations, stuns and reminds.

Why Franco? Another general intended to lead the rebellion died in a plane crash. It is reported the plane could have crashed because he insisted literally on moving all his weighty worldly goods with him when he flew from Africa to take command. 

The plan devised by its chief planner, Gen. Francisco Franco, called for rebellion through southern Spain from Ibiza to Majorca, to Sevilla and Valencia and across Andalusia, and then to take Madrid and so quickly to conquer Spain for Fascism.

But the plane crashed. The general died. Leadership changed.

Franco commanded the Spanish Army of Morocco, made up mostly of Moroccans led by Spanish officers. It was the seedbed of the rebellion. Franco immediately became the new leader. Within a year he proclaimed himself El Cuadillo, the Leader, the equivalent of Il Duce in Italy, Der Fuhrer in Germany.

The first 500 American volunteers were blooded at the Second Battle of Jarama on the Jarama River near Madrid in late February 1937, immortalized by Woody Guthrie in his song “Jarama”, sung to the tune of “The Red River Valley”. 

In the First Battle of Jarama, the 15^th International Brigade, a composite including British, Canadian and German volunteers (the Germans were in the Thalmann unit, named for the concentration-camp incarcerated German Communist Party leader Ernst Thalmann, who died at Buchenwald in 1944).

The Brigade fought tenaciously. The Republican forces held, counterattacked, then absorbed the second Jarama assault by the Nationalists in which the Americans fought. 

The rebels failed and the Republic for a time kept Madrid. There a leader of the Republic, Dolores Ibarurri, the Communist daughter of a Basque father who came to be called “La Passionara” (the passionate flower) raised her fist in the Loyalist popular front salute to declare “No Passeron” – “They shall not pass.” 

They did not pass that winter but ultimately with aid to Spain embargoed by the democracies, England, France and the United States, and provided only by the Soviet Union, the Fascists with the aid of Italy and Germany won the ugly civil war. 

When Madrid fell to his forces, Franco cynically declared “Hemos passada” (“We have passed). 

La Passionara went into nearly 40 years in exile in Moscow, returning to Spain in 1977 after Franco died. She died in 1989 after a life spent as a hardline, un-repenting Stalinist. A Stalinist, she bore considerable responsibility for savage infighting and persecution during the Republic by Communists against anarchists and others who remained loyal to the fallen Bolshevik, Leon Trotsky. 

Like it is today, the world is complicated. Always and never more so than in Spain from 1936 to 1939, when the Republic fell.

Terror and dictatorship spread across Spain and ruled it until 1975 when Franco died and the present Spanish constitutional monarchy was born with the consent and, indeed, the active participation of the late King Juan Carlos, who was determined the nation have a democratic constitution.

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So yes, this is  all interesting. But what has it got to do with us today, here in the United States of America?

It has to do with this – with the ethic that underlay the revolution that propelled the Falangist dictatorship that smothered Spain.

In retelling the events there is this moment that resonates loudly today in the United States of America – that reverberates through all of American public life today.

Miguel de Unamuno, like Picasso a Basque (interesting the influence of that province on Spanish political, artistic and intellectual life) has been described by many as perhaps Spain’s greatest, most world-renowned 20^th Century scholar, writer and philosopher. I don’t know. I don’t speak or read Spanish. I take history’s word for it.

When the rebellion began Unamuno, then 72, was Dean of the University of Salamanca, which had been founded in 1164, 68 years after Oxford, 45 years before Cambridge. The dates alone suggest its Olympian standing in worldwide academia at the time and thus Unamuno’s standing in that world.

On Oct. 12, 1936 a great crowd attended a university celebration of Día de la Raza (now called Día de la Hispanidad), celebrating what we call Columbus Day. The day Columbus made landfall in the New World became the day the Spanish language and culture began its conquest and spread throughout the Americas.

As Unamuno watched the rebellion spread first he supported it. But as the horrors of war with no quarter given by either side moved across Spain, he began to doubt and finally to believe it to be a terrible mistake. 

Presiding at the Día de la Raza celebration, which heard also from several vehement supporters and participants in the rebel Fascist cause, Unamuno saw in the audience the crippled, greatly feared Gen. Jose Millan-Astray. 

As a commander of the Spanish Foreign Legion , Millan-Astray was a key Franco general. He had been permanently injured in 1920 fighting Moroccans in their failed, bloody rebellion against merciless Spain.

From somewhere in the crowd a voice shouted “Viva La Muerte!”, which means “Long Live Death!”. Millan Astray responded “Espana!” (“Spain!”) and the crowd responded “Libre!” (“Freedom!”), and then the same again.

Unamuno rose, acknowledged the crowd awaiting his words, including this:

“…Now I have heard this insensible and necrophilous oath, “Viva La Muerte!”, and I, having spent my life writing paradoxes that have provoked the ire of those who do not understand what I have written, and being an expert in this matter, find this ridiculous paradox repellent.”

He then singled out Millan-Astray, noting his war injuries. Unamuno said:

“But unfortunately Spain today has too many invalids. And, if God does not help us, soon it will have very many more. It torments me to think that General Millan-Astray might dictate the norms of the psychology of the masses. It should be expected from a mutilated who lacks the spiritual greatness of Cervantes to find solace in seeing how the number of mutilated ones multiplies around him.”

Incensed, Millan-Astray responded with this: “Muerte a la inteligencia! Viva Muerte!”, which means “Death to Intelligence! Long Live Death!”

Historical sources say this account of the events is disputed but the weight of history finds historians like Hugh Thomas, the renowned, respected historian of the civil war, confirming it happened. 

In the prevailing accounts, Unamuno answered Millan-Astray by declaring: “You will win but you will not convince” (said to be the slogan of the city of Salamanca). 

The rebels won and instituted the terror dictatorship that, indeed, murdered intelligence.

If this has a familiar ring today in the United States it should. 

Like Millan-Astray, Donald Trump is mutilated – mentally, emotionally and socially mutilated.

If there is a single phrase that captures the ethos and ethics of the Trump era, of  how it has transmuted the Republican Party,  it is that – “Muerte a la Inteligencia” –  “Death to Intelligence.” 

The roots and tentacles are in history, but how far back?

66 A.D., when the Romans sent Jews into centuries of diaspora?

The next 18 centuries of Christian hate and persecution of Jews in myriad ways and forms?

632, Mohammed the founding of Islam

688, the Battle of Karbala

1896 when Theodore Herzl issued his call for a Jewish homeland?

1916 in the dessert with Lawrence?

1917 and the Balfour Declaration?

1943, the Tehran Big 3 Conference what did the FDR and Stalin see there?

The war, the Holocaust and all it wrought?

The Holocaust, the Holocaust, the Holocaust, always and forever, the Holocaust?

1947, the Partition?

1948 the first war won by Israel?

1953 when the CIA arranged the removal of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran, replacing him with? With the Shah (is it too late to laugh)?

Israel’s victory in 1967.

Israel’s near destruction in 1973?

1978, the Iranian Revolution?

1978, the Israeli/Egyptian peace?

1990, George H.W. Bush and Kuwait?

2002, George W. Bush’s benighted wars against – and then in Iraq?

2011, the “Arab Spring”?

2024, Oct. 7, and every minute since?

Every other year in between when something happened?

Yesterday, today and tomorrow.

Does this, can this, will this history ever have an end?