On 12 October 1936, Miguel de Unamuno, the rector of Salamanca University and a philosopher, gave his last lecture three months after the start of the Spanish Civil War. Salamanca had been captured by the nationalists soon after the military coup against the democratically elected republican government, and Unamuno’s audience included the coup leader, General Francisco Franco’s adviser, General Millán Astray, a soldier notorious for his fascist beliefs.
“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.”
He rebutted ethnic slurs against Basques and Catalans, but he directed most of his fire at Astray, who had just given a pro-fascist speech in which he showed that he “would like to create Spain anew – a negative creation – in his own image and… wishes to see Spain crippled, as he unwittingly made clear.”
At this point, Astray reportedly shouted: “Death to intellectuals! Down with intelligence!”
“This is the temple of intellect,” replied Unamuno. “It is you who are profaning its sacred precincts… You will win, but you will not convince. You will win, because you possess more than enough brute force, but you will not convince, because to convince means to persuade. And in order to persuade you would need what you lack – reason and right in the struggle. I consider it futile to exhort you to think of Spain. I have finished.”
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.
But what makes Unamuno’s speech important is not only his defence of reason in human affairs but his raw personal courage and a clear-sighted absence of defeatism.
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
Newsletter (£)
Gary Lineker is bravely speaking truth to power on Israel
Read MoreDonald 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.
Unamuno took a stand for reason and humanity – and once again they are under threat. The issues at stake are concrete and immediate: hundreds of Venezuelans, for instance, are deported to a prison in El Salvador notorious for torturing inmates. The US President denounces them as hardened criminals, but three-quarters of them have never even faced criminal charges.
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”.
The demonising of intellectuals and the purging of US educational institutions by Trump is something that Unamuno would find familiar. At the prestigious US Naval Academy, for instance, 381 books have reportedly been removed from the shelves on official instructions.
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.
It will be difficult to prevent further wounds being inflicted on American society by Trump’s power-mad blend of cruelty, vengefulness and childish egotism. Given his fantastical picture of the world, optimists imagine that Trumpism will implode through its own amateurism and incompetence, but this will happen only if he faces greater resistance that he has hitherto confronted.
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
In the event, the Democrats’ feebleness has exceeded expectations, though the giant, enthusiastic crowds attending the anti-oligarch rallies of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez show the depth of untapped popular discontent. One does not have to go so far as Spain during its civil war to find examples of brave individuals refusing to buckle when subjected to official harassment and attack.
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.
Robeson magnificently saw off his interrogators in a hearing which, unlike Unamuno’s last lecture, was recorded and is easily available.
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.
Nor is the connection purely ideological, since Roy Cohn, Senator Joe McCarthy’s chief counsel, was an early mentor and fixer for Trump. What Trump learned from him is convincingly portrayed in The Apprentice, an excellent docudrama focusing on their relationship.
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.
It has largely enabled Israel to escape international condemnation since 2 March, when it stopped food and medical supplies from entering Gaza. After Netanyahu ended the ceasefire on 18 March, a further 1,900 Palestinians have been killed, including 44 who died this Thursday.
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
Among the few world leaders to show an active concern for the misery of the people of Gaza was Pope Francis who, on his deathbed last Saturday, phoned the only Catholic church in 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.
Even this gesture was evidently more than the Israeli government could stomach. Shortly after Francis died, the Israeli foreign ministry posted a short message saying “Rest in peace, Pope Francis. May his memory be a blessing.”
But a few hours later, it was deleted – without explanation.
President Donald Trump’s economic war on China appears to be coming apart at the seams, as tariffs are ratcheted up and down in attempts to alternately intimidate China and reassure the financial markets that nothing too radical is intended. The dial-back has become markedly more pronounced over the last few days, and what was billed as a show of US global economic might is turning into a demonstration of its fragility.
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.
Trade wars, embargoes and sanctions generally only achieve their ends when they impose siege-like conditions on poor and isolated countries without allies. This is now happening in Gaza, where Israel has banned the entry of food and medicine since 2 March, leading to a man-made famine.
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 have vivid memories of visiting a Kurdish village called Penjwin in the 1990s, a place where the only way villagers could earn a little money was by defusing a lethal Italian-made jumping mine called the Valmara – a legacy of the Iraq-Iran war – and then selling for a pittance the aluminium foil wrapped around the explosives. The village cemetery was full of newly dug graves and the streets with people missing a leg or a foot.
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.
Against more powerful states, sanctions either do not work at all or their impact is felt very slowly. President Joe Biden’s sanctions on Russia, strongly backed by the Nato powers, has been a debacle because the Russians have access to vast natural resources, notably crude oil. Aside from a naval blockade, borders are always more difficult to police than governments imagine.
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.
A thousand years later, the Chinese exerted tight controls over the export of rhubarb, which they believed to be a uniquely effective cure for constipation, in a vain bid to deter Russian and British imperialists.
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
As the world catches fire, the Liberal Democrats can usually be guaranteed to get their priorities in a muddle when it comes to ways of fixing the dire problems facing Britain. True to this tradition, they now propose a ban on people playing music or videos out loud on their phones on public transport.
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.
This is a change all to the good because the phone conversations of others that I used involuntarily overhear were almost invariably long-winded and boring.
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.
“I’ll do that for my seven-year-old daughter, but not for a 43-year-old woman,” complained the man furiously. “It is not that I even invited her to stay, mum.” His mother was evidently trying to mollify him, but without success since he kept repeating his outrage over the Christmas stocking.
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.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Moral and physical courage essential to stop Trump )
Also on site :
- Trump’s attack on diversity takes center stage as Boston remembers 1965 Freedom Rally led by MLK
- Pacifica graduate Nohl Williams drafted in 3rd round by the Kansas City Chiefs
- Lana Del Rey Sings About Kissing Morgan Wallen, Covers Tammy Wynette and John Denver, and Goes Swinging in Unpredictable Stagecoach Set