A poem for ex-Judge Baltasar Garzón

ex-judge, Baltasar Garzón

Terrible crimes were committed during and after Spain’s 1936-39 civil war that no court has yet examined or judged. No one knows how many people were taken away, tortured and murdered. Now, one of Spain’s top investigating magistrates, Baltasar Garzón, is on trial for daring to open an inquiry into those atrocities. Editorial - New York Times

Baltasar Garzón, Spain’s internationally renowned investigating magistrate, is being prosecuted on charges that could end his career. The case has the hallmarks of a politically motivated attempt to smear and disbar a courageous public official who has fought terrorists and state-sanctioned death squads, corruption and tyranny. It is without merit and reflects poorly on Spain’s increasingly politicised judicial system. Editorial - Financial Times

A Spanish judge famed for his investigations into international human rights abuses has been found guilty of ordering illegal wiretaps during a case involving corruption within the country’s ruling Popular party. Baltasar Garzón was on Thursday unanimously convicted of overstepping his jurisdiction and was barred from the bench for 11 years by a panel of seven judges of Spain’s Supreme Court – a ruling that, if upheld, would effectively bring an end to his career. Financial Times

Villages of bones (for ex-judge Baltasar Garzón)

Under the ditches, fields and highways of Spain, there are tiny villages of bones

Sinews, tendons, loves, ideas and dreams,

Simmered in the broth of earth

Nothing is left but the bones


In the villages of bones

The warm blood and the warm tears

Long since turned to thistles, flow no more

Nothing is left but the bones

DS

Pan’s Labyrinth - Financial Times

David Seaton's New Links

I just want to bring to your attention this wonderful film, "Pan Labyrinth". It is by far the best 'fantasy' film I have ever seen. It is also a neo-realist film, a historical-costume- political thriller. A surrealistic masterpiece and about a dozen more things. Even if you have to get in your car and drive through the snow to find the nearest movie theater where it's playing, don't miss it. Really, it is price/quality; for the price of one ticket it will haunt your dreams for weeks. If you don't believe me, read this critique by Nigel Andrews, the Financial Times film maven. DS

Pan’s Labyrinth, written and directed by Mexico’s Guillermo del Toro, is bewitchingly bonkers. Coming from anywhere but Spanish America it would be hospitalised with advanced whimsy. Critic-doctors would shake their heads at the Lewis Carroll-style plot set in 1940s post-Civil War Spain, in which a fascist officer’s stepdaughter (Ivana Baquero) meets a faun in a stone maze who sets her fantastical tests and tasks. The film’s blend of historical realism and dippy make-believe would be diagnosed as fatal. The patient would be taken off life support and the body burnt to prevent infection. But magical realism is the province of mad Latins. Del Toro made Cronos and The Devil’s Backbone, films that subjected reality to gothic aerobics and midnight mythopoeia. Pan’s Labyrinth is deadly earnest in its portrait of a time: the aftermath of war, when Franco’s soldiers pushed north to purge the last resistance. Captain Vidal (Sergi López) is a handsome sadist whose new wife, pregnant but ailing, and stepdaughter must get in step with the counter-rebellion. But little Ofelia, a virtual orphan riding into the storm, starts to live in her redeeming imagination and so do we. Here is the ruined labyrinth, here the garrulous faun. Go further to encounter the monster toad, the mazy challenges and the Pale Man, an albino humanoid with eyes set into his hands who presides over a banquet from which no one may eat. Del Toro, a lapsed Catholic, has hinted that this forbidden repast symbolises the Church. It does and doesn’t. The labyrinth does and doesn’t stand for the Spanish Civil War. And the girl does and doesn’t embody the dawn of a new Spain. As in dreams, the obvious interpretation is just the iceberg’s tip. A vast hull of mystery and poetry remains unsounded, unfathomed. What about the girl’s supernatural stick-insect guide, a dadaist Tinkerbell? Or the chalk outlines she draws in walls to create real passages and doorways? It could have been feyness, pure and simple-minded. But few other moviemakers have the talent to suggest there are many mansions in make-believe, or the nerve to twin the pantomimic with the implacable. There is a torture scene you want to watch only through your fingers. (Is that the meaning of those eye-implanted hands? “See no evil”, while allowing it to happen?) And there is a DIY lip-stitching, performed on himself by the injured Captain, that will put the heebie-jeebies into the squeamish. Yet that scene is another hint at the denial theme – “speak no evil” – in a magisterial movie that sees truth as the greatest challenge of all, the final mystery and mandate at the heart of the human maze. LINK

Sectarian Strife in Iraq Imperils Entire Region - Washington Post

David Seaton's News Links

The people who are responsible for the war in Iraq cannot be allowed to just go home and draw their pensions in peace. Saddam Hussein did much harm to Iraq, but he didn't destroy it. The country is going to disintegrate amid hardships for the population beside which all the carnage of today will seem little. If Americans are ever going to hold their heads up again, there must be some accounting before the nations. DS

Abstract: While American commanders have suggested that civil war is possible in Iraq, many leaders, experts and ordinary people in Baghdad and around the Middle East say it is already underway, and that the real worry ahead is that the conflict will destroy the flimsy Iraqi state and draw in surrounding countries. Whether the U.S. military departs Iraq sooner or later, the United States will be hard-pressed to leave behind a country that does not threaten U.S. interests and regional peace, according to U.S. and Arab analysts and political observers. "We're not talking about just a full-scale civil war. This would be a failed-state situation with fighting among various groups," growing into regional conflict, Joost Hiltermann, Middle East project director for the International Crisis Group, said by telephone from Amman, Jordan. "The war will be over Iraq, over its dead body," Hiltermann said. "All indications point to a current state of civil war and the disintegration of the Iraqi state," Nawaf Obaid, an adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and an adviser to the Saudi government, said last week at a conference in Washington on U.S.-Arab relations. As Iraq's neighbors grapple with the various ideas put forward for solving the country's problems, they uniformly shudder at one proposal: dividing Iraq into separate regions for Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, and then speeding the withdrawal of U.S. forces. "To envision that you can divide Iraq into three parts is to envision ethnic cleansing on a massive scale, sectarian killing on a massive scale," Prince Turki al-Faisal, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, said Oct. 30 at a conference in Washington. "Since America came into Iraq uninvited, it should not leave Iraq uninvited." "When the ethnic-religious break occurs in one country, it will not fail to occur elsewhere, too," Syrian President Bashar al-Assad told Germany's Der Spiegel newsweekly recently. "It would be as it was at the end of the Soviet Union, only much worse. Large wars, small wars -- no one will be able to get a grip on the consequences." In an analysis published last month by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Obaid said sectarian conflicts could make Iraq a battleground for the region. READ IT ALL

Peace and Hope

We have a weekend place an hour and a half drive outside of Madrid in the Guadarrama mountains. This picture is from there. Seventy years ago this idyllic spot was one of the most fiercely disputed battle fronts in the legendary defense of Madrid, swept by artillery and machine gun fire. Many died here. Spain ended its civil war a wretchedly poor and broken country in the hands of murderous dictator... Time passed and today Spain is one of world's most prosperous countries with no death penalty, free health insurance for the entire population, gay marriage... even the possession of marijuana for personal use is legal... And a socialist government. Whenever you despair of ever seeing progress or peace, visit the Guadarrama mountains. DS