“All of you are hanging on my words,” said Unamuno as he began what turned out to be a denunciation of the barbarity of the new dictatorship. “I am unable to remain silent. I have not learned to do so in 73 years of my life. At times, to be silent is to lie. For silence can be interpreted as acquiescence.”
At this point, Astray reportedly shouted: “Death to intellectuals! Down with intelligence!”
After completing his speech, Unamuno was placed under house arrest by the nationalist junta and died two months later. But his words should be remembered today, as so many of the beasts who prowled the political jungles in the 30s have re-emerged with methods and agendas not so different from those of their fascist forebears.
Reason and humanity
Moral and physical courage, combined with the self-confidence to oppose the powers that be – essential as it is today as it was in the 30s – is never common.
square YASMIN ALIBHAI-BROWN
Gary Lineker is bravely speaking truth to power on IsraelRead More
Donald Trump and the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu – populist nationalist demagogues who are political soulmates – get away with much because they frighten their opponents at home and abroad. Only when people stand up to that fear with courage rather than timidity will their power begin to ebb.
Arbitrary punishment of the innocent is consciously geared by authoritarian leaders to spread a pervasive sense of fear, sending a message to all that “you are at our mercy and we can do what we like with you”.
Readers can no longer obtain a copy of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, her classic memoir published in 1970, describing her struggles with racism. But they can borrow either of the library’s two copies of Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler, which have escaped the cull. Charles A Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s 1994 work The Bell Curve, which claims that black people are less intelligent than white people, is still available in the library, but a critique of the book has been removed.
Nobody expected much in the way of effective opposition from a sclerotic Democratic Party after its defeat, partly self-inflicted, in the presidential election last November.
McCarthyism reborn
square KITTY DONALDSON
Power plays and brush-bys: what really goes on in the shadows of a Pope's funeral
Read MoreThose seeking to revive their morale as they witness Trump’s assault on US democracy may find it a useful antidote to watch the singer Paul Robeson’s appearance in 1956 before a fiercely hostile House Un-American Activities Committee at a moment when McCarthyism was at its peak.
It is too seldom noticed that Trumpism is in many respects McCarthyism reborn – or perhaps it might be truer to say that it never died.
Trumpism differs from McCarthyism in that it attacks any criticism or protests over the destruction of Gaza as evidence of antisemitism. This tactic is effectively silencing many who might otherwise resist “Make America Great Again” Republicanism.
Almost all American and most European politicians have a shameful record on Gaza, but outside the elites, and especially in Israel, courageous critics have taken their place. Notable among these is the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz, which describes in a recent editorial “how – under the auspices of Israel’s nightmare government and the Trump administration – Israel’s starvation of more than two million Palestinians has been fully normalised”.
Misery of Gaza
“All the time he told us, for this period – more than one year and a half, and he called every day, every day – he asked to help people, to protect the children,” said Father Gabriel Romanelli, a priest at the Holy Family Church in Gaza City.
But a few hours later, it was deleted – without explanation.
It is difficult to see how Trump can hope to fight a prolonged trade war with a powerful and determined adversary like China if every time he sounds the retreat – a 90-day pause in the tariffs, some Chinese exports exempted – his troops in the shape of the financial markets give a wild cheer, and every time he sounds the advance he is greeted with a despairing groan.
Economic warfare is sold to the public as more humane than military action, but, in my experience, it is always a thinly-disguised communal punishment of the most vulnerable. Iraq endured 13 years of UN sanctions between 1990 and 2003; it did not remove Saddam Hussein from power, but it did wreck Iraqi society, which has never truly recovered.
I suppose I should long ago have become used to the cynical cruelty of the powers-that-be orchestrating the economic isolation of those who oppose them. Twenty years later, I visited hospitals in Damascus where international charities could not bring in spare parts for X-ray machines because of an all-embracing embargo.
Nobody should know this as well as the Chinese, who have centuries old experience of failing to impose embargoes on others. Way back in the mid-sixth century the Chinese Empire was trying to keep secret the key ingredients of its silk industry – silkworm eggs and the mulberry bushes – by threatening to execute anybody passing on the information. Needless to say, they failed: two well-rewarded monks passed on the necessary knowledge to the Byzantines, who soon had a flourishing silk industry of their own.
What sanctions invariably do is benefit the smugglers and black marketeers. But even they must find it impossible to do essential forward planning as Trump announces a permanent sky-high tariff wall on one day – and knocks a large hole in it on the next.
Beneath the Radar
I take trains regularly, but what strikes me is how quiet they have become compared to a decade ago, when many passengers used to talk at length on their phones. These days, on the contrary, people are for the most part silently reading, texting or emailing on their phones with not a word spoken.
I can recall only one that was truly riveting, which was between an angry middle-aged man and his unseen mother on the St Pancras-Canterbury train a few days before Christmas about a dozen years ago. The man was complaining vigorously that his 43-year-old sister had invited herself to stay and was demanding that she have a stocking, stuffed with small gifts and pinned to the bottom of her bed, to be opened by her on Christmas morning.
Cockburn’s Picks
As I mention in my column, while the McCarthyism of the 1950s is reborn in Maga Republican guise, it is inspiring to listen to those like the great singer, Paul Robeson, who appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1956 and defied them with an eloquence and dignity that sound highly relevant today.
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