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Saturday, November 04, 2017

Thoughts from Galicia: 4.11.17

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
- Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain. 

If you've arrived here because of an interest in Galicia or Pontevedra, see my web page here.

CATALUÑA
  • Don Quijones talks here of the fuse lit under Cataluña by the PP government of Sr Rajoy. As I and others have noted: The greatest tragedy of all, as British-Spanish journalist John Carlin wrote yesterday in the Barcelona daily 'La Vanguarda', is just how “spectacularly unnecessary” the current conflict is and how easily it could have all been avoided: [Carlin] "First, with a change of the sacred text of the Spanish Constitution and the approval of an agreed referendum, just as any other modern and democratic State (Canada, United Kingdom) would have done in similar circumstances. But it could have been avoided with even less, with merely conciliatory gestures and respectful words, with the granting of extra powers to the autonomous Catalan region, with a minimum of statesmanship, with the desire to think first of the general good. Instead, what we have is a constant escalation of tensions from a government majority ruled by a party (Popular Party) that is implicated in over 60 major political scandals — more than just about any other governing party in Europe. And yet, even as the party continually falls on the wrong side of the law, the EU holds it up as a defender of the rule of law."
  • Talking of Cataluña and Brussels: The EU – which, over the years, has amply demonstrated its attitude towards people who vote the wrong way – remains solidly behind Madrid. But, who knows, they might be doing a bit of arm-twisting in secret. Not every technocrat in Brussels can be as right-wing – or as stupid - as Rajoy and his cabinet. Germany takes the same view, it says, here. But that's hardly surprising, given that the EU and Germany are increasingly the same institution. Though not, of course when it comes to debt-sharing that would mean more northern cash flowing to feckless southern states.
  • A columnist in The Guardian takes a similar line to DQ and Carlin: Rajoy, who has been using coercion rather than argument in Catalonia, might be wise to soften his tone. Rather than threatening elected representatives with long prison terms, or sending in their police, it would be useful if they remembered that they are in the European Union and, in line with the values the EU espouses, it would be good if they entered into a serious dialogue and a detailed debate with those with whom they are in conflict. But this writer goes even futher and asks why Catluña can't be an independent state.
  • DQ is not, of course, the first person to point out that: It’s amazing how fast the wheels of the Spanish justice system go round when the establishment wants them to, and how slowly they revolve when it doesn’t, which is usually when members of the same establishment — senior politicians and civil servants, bankers, business owners, or even royalty — are in the dock, which is happening with disturbing regularity these days.
  • The Bank of Spain has warned of damage to the Catalan - and, thus, the Spanish - economy.

Life in Spain
  • Answering the charges cited above: The Spanish government insisted that the jailings were not politically motivated. The education minister said the matter had been decided by a judge and the government was instead focusing on elections called for December. “There is a separation of powers in Spain and what happened yesterday is in the realm of the justice system and beyond the reach of the government,” he said on Friday. One assumes he's either an idiot, a liar or someone with his tongue lodged firmly in his cheek. As must have been Mr Juncker's spokeswoman when she pronunced: This is a matter entirely for the Spanish judicial authorities, whose independence we respect fully, 
  • If you didn't want to read DQ's article cited above in respect of Cataluña, you might want to go back and see what he says about the stability of the pillars of the Spanish economy

Finally . . . I received a foto on my phone yesterday from an unknown source. It seemed to be of a laundry room in the basement of a hotel. I know nothing about it, other than I got 32 copies of it. I've decided against downlaoding it to my computer and posting it here, in case there's a virus. Anyone got any ideas about its origins???

Today's Cartoon:-

SAILING FROM DEATH

AN ARTICLE

Orwell’s prophecy of our fake-news world : Tess Summers

In January, just after Trump’s spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway defended what most people call lies as “alternative facts”, sales of 1984 in the US increased by 9,500% in four days, catapulting Orwell’s classic to the top of the bestseller lists.

In her self-justifying memoir Hillary Clinton compared Trump’s “attempt to define reality” to the scene in 1984 where “a torturer holds up four fingers and delivers electric shocks until his prisoner sees five fingers as ordered”. But the overused term “Orwellian” has a specific resonance in 2017, and one that Eric Blair himself would have recognised: a world in which there is no verifiable truth, but only varied forms of propaganda; in which lies are repeated so often and so insistently that they become reality; where the audience is so exhausted and baffled by falsehoods that it no longer knows or cares where the truth lies. As in the title of Peter Pomerantsev’s remarkable book about surreal modern Russia, nothing is true and everything is possible.

Before he wrote 1984 and Animal Farm, in 1942 Orwell laid out his nightmare vision of a post-truth world in an essay entitled Looking Back on the Spanish War. Orwell had enlisted on the Republican side in the civil war in 1936, and left a year later with a bullet wound in the throat and the conviction that the essence of truth was under threat.

Having witnessed the way both sides competed to mould perception through propaganda, he wrote: “In Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories.” That experience informed an overwhelming fear: “The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history . . . If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’ — well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five — well, two and two are five.” 

The idea of objective truth is under more sustained attack today than ever before. Trump alternative facts include insisting that Obama helped to create Islamic State and that there are more than 30 million illegal immigrants in the US. Climate change statistics have been purged from US government websites, stuffed down the memory hole.

President Putin, meanwhile, manages a steady flow of disinformation and fake news through the Kremlin’s troll farms, to sow division and confusion and, in the Russian phrase, “powder the brains” not only of his own people but a worldwide audience. Aung San Suu Kyi dismisses the refugee crisis in Rakhine state as fake news, a “huge iceberg of misinformation” designed to help terrorists. The Leader says it never happened.

Orwell believed in an objective truth, a set of facts and realities that can be uncovered despite all the doublespeak and newspeak, no matter how much or how often those in power insist that two plus two make five. As he wrote in his largely forgotten but seminal essay in 1942: “However much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing.”

In 1984, Winston Smith is put to work falsifying back copies of The Times in accordance with Ministry of Truth’s demands for “alternative facts”, but he knows, as we know, that there are only facts and lies, with nothing in between.

Orwell was a better reporter than writer, with an ingrained instinct to experience, witness, verify, and debunk. He had what he himself called the “power of facing unpleasant facts”. He even foresaw the polarised “debate” on the internet, in which “everyone is simply putting a ‘case’ with deliberate suppression of his opponent’s point of view”.

His new statue, outside the BBC where he worked briefly as a producer during the war, is more than just a symbolic gesture. It celebrates Orwell’s belief in the existence of an elusive but empirical truth, and the human spirit that continues to seek it out despite the fake news, distorting language and alternative truths that have become the currency of modern power.

Not all claims to truth are equal; some are more equal than others. Having witnessed the way both sides competed to mould perception through propaganda, he wrote: “In Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories.” That experience informed an overwhelming fear: “The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history . . . If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’ — well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five — well, two and two are five.”

The idea of objective truth is under more sustained attack today than ever before. Trump alternative facts include insisting that Obama helped to create Islamic State and that there are more than 30 million illegal immigrants in the US. Climate change statistics have been purged from US government websites, stuffed down the memory hole.

President Putin, meanwhile, manages a steady flow of disinformation and fake news through the Kremlin’s troll farms, to sow division and confusion and, in the Russian phrase, “powder the brains” not only of his own people but a worldwide audience. Aung San Suu Kyi dismisses the refugee crisis in Rakhine state as fake news, a “huge iceberg of misinformation” designed to help terrorists. The Leader says it never happened.

Orwell believed in an objective truth, a set of facts and realities that can be uncovered despite all the doublespeak and newspeak, no matter how much or how often those in power insist that two plus two make five. As he wrote in his largely forgotten but seminal essay in 1942: “However much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing.”

In 1984, Winston Smith is put to work falsifying back copies of The Times in accordance with Ministry of Truth’s demands for “alternative facts”, but he knows, as we know, that there are only facts and lies, with nothing in between.

Orwell was a better reporter than writer, with an ingrained instinct to experience, witness, verify, and debunk. He had what he himself called the “power of facing unpleasant facts”. He even foresaw the polarised “debate” on the internet, in which “everyone is simply putting a ‘case’ with deliberate suppression of his opponent’s point of view”.

His new statue, outside the BBC where he worked briefly as a producer during the war, is more than just a symbolic gesture. It celebrates Orwell’s belief in the existence of an elusive but empirical truth, and the human spirit that continues to seek it out despite the fake news, distorting language and alternative truths that have become the currency of modern power.


Not all claims to truth are equal; some are more equal than others.

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