Trapped in the Past

Scotland and Catalunya are two European nations with a strong sense of identity. Both have very long historic legacy. Their respective populations are very similar. And they share one more trait, their respective societies are not settling down for with the info we just enunciated, they want more, they want for their nations to achieve statehood, just like the English and the Spanish states. Then again, that's when they become really different from each other: while London seems to see as democratic "fair play" the possibility that the Scots make an statement regarding their independence in a referendum set for 2010, when it comes to Spain it takes just a consult that involves no more than 7,000 people for all the red lights to go off, something that includes judiciary vetoes and the Phalanx's street violence.

Yes, Madrid has real reasons to worry about. "El País" reminded its readers just yesterday that the polls in the Generalitat showed an increase of six points for those who support independence since 2005. And "La Vanguadia" stated that the street polls show that the support for independence could easily reach 40% if was actually an option on election day. More so, the pro-independence Catalans gathered yesterday in Arenys de Munt constantly shouted in support of Euskal Herria, where the polls throughout the last few years locate the support for independence above 30%, despite the frustrating fact that such option is not something that will be allowed any time soon.

To the self-determination exercise in Arenys the Spanish state answers by dispatching the Phalanx, a political party that has not been outlawed as opposed to those within the abertzale left (Batasuna, ANV, EHAK, D3M), and with a judicial ban directly inherited from the "Spain one, great and free". We have the very same recipes used almost a century ago on plain sight. A period in which the Spanish state has not only been unable to eliminate the pro-independence camp but has also been unable to offer any democratic alternatives.

Madrid is running out of time. The referendum in Arenys de Munt is undeniable proof that the pro-independence Catalans are more that ready to make Catalunya happen, and perhaps quite soon Euskal Herria too.

.... ... .

Txalaparta and Basquetronic

This article was published at The Guardian:

Crystal Fighters (No 572)

This east London five-piece bring traditional Basque folk music screaming and kicking into the 21st century by fusing it with heavy dance rhythms and synthesisers

Paul Lester

Hometown: East London.

The lineup: Laure (vocals), Sebastian (lead vocals), Mimi (vocals), Graham (programming, txalaparta), Gilbert (synths, txalaparta).

The background: Have you ever wondered what would happen if you went back, say, 100 years and dropped a ton of modern recording equipment plus a copy of Mixmag into an obscure hamlet in the heart of the Basque region of Spain and left the villagers, steeped as you'd expect in folk music, to their own devices? No? Fair enough. To be honest, we hadn't given it much thought ourselves until we heard Crystal Fighters, the third great "Crystal" band of the century so far after Crystal Castles and Crystal Stilts. A five-piece comprising three gentlemen – two English and one American – and two Spanish girls, Crystal Fighters take the notion of melding folk and funk to another level. Hearing them bash their txalapartas (instruments made out of wood or stone) in time to programmed beats as bowel-loosening basslines burble underneath and voices shout in euphoric disharmony over the top, you do indeed feel as though you've wandered into a rave in a forest in early 20th-century rural Galdakao. And, oh look, there's a gimlet-eyed peasant, grinning as he leafs through a copy of that dance bible that we airdropped in earlier, wondering what the Spanish is for "subsonic boom-bap".

What Crystal Fighters do isn't a million miles away from Crystal Castles-meet-CSS. Their single Xtatic Truth has the ecstatic rush and mental electronic FX of the former and the excitable unison vocals of the latter, with the extra dimension you get from five members banging away on those txalapartas. "We make fast dance music with Basque instruments, synthesisers and our voices," they explain, adding that they fuse heavy dance rhythms with traditional folk melodies and chants gleaned from old Basque sheet music. "We're interested in using this music from a small community that's been handed down through generations. There are lots of Basque dances that are 200-300 years old and we use their eerie melodies, and play around with them until we find the bit that resonates most with us, which might be a two-bar or two-note phrase."

It all sounds simple enough, and it is, until you get to the part where they attempt to explain where they get the ideas for their songs from. Apparently, singer Laure was going through her late grandfather's possessions somewhere deep in Basque country when she came across an unfinished opera he'd been writing called Crystal Fighters. "The faded manuscript and the prophetic prose contained within quickly became an obsession," she said. Now her band are trying to bring some of the quality of his wild, dishevelled poetry to bear on London's trendy indie-dance scene. So far, so good: they recorded a live session for Radio 1, their live shows are becoming the stuff of legend and their online hit I Love London was voted one of the top 100 records of 2008 by Mixmag – the only unreleased entry in the list, ahead of the likes of Toddla T and Bloc Party.

The buzz: "Instead of sucking at the teat of dance music's rinsed-out tech boobies, they play a carnivalesque amalgam of all the best bits of ghetto house, punk, Latin electro, South American and Basque folk traditions."

The truth: It's positively Basquetronic.

Most likely to: Advertise txalapartas on Basque TV.

Least likely to: Go on a package tour with Crystal Castles and Crystal Stilts.

What to buy: Xtatic Truth is released by Kitsuné on 6 July, followed by I Love London later this year.

File next to: Buraka Som Sistema, CSS, Django Django.

Links: myspace.com/crystalfighters

Tomorrow's new band: Mickey Gang.

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Franco's Incriminating Letters

When you read this article published at Times Online you have to keep in mind that Spain's government still subscribes to Franco's version of the genocidal attack on Gernika, that the real culprits were "the reds" and that there was no more than a dozen casualties.

Here you have it:

Revealed: Franco's desperate attempt to hide the truth about Guernica

Graham Keeley | Madrid

General Franco launched a propaganda campaign to try to counter a report by The Times that exposed the attack on Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, according to original documents.

George Steer, who was covering the war for the newspaper, revealed how the Nazi Luftwaffe Condor squadron reduced the Basque market town to rubble and unleashed a firestorm that killed 1,600 unarmed civilians.

Mr Steer’s report outraged the world and inspired Picasso’s masterpiece Guernica.

Thousands of original telegrams sent by General Franco to the Duke of Alba, the Nationalist Ambassador in London, are to go on show to the public at a new archive in Spain shortly.

They reveal the four-year campaign, waged by the man who was to rule Spain for 36 years, to counter damaging reports in the British Press and prevent their readers from supporting the Spanish Republican Government.

Three days after the devastating attack on Guernica, on April 26, 1937, Franco sent a telegram from his military headquarters in Burgos, northern Spain.

It read: “Escaping Basques recount frightening tragedies of a town like Guernica, burnt and destroyed intentionally by the Reds when our troops were only 15 kilometres away. Indignation great among Nationalist troops for slanderous Red manoeuvres, after destroying their best cities, try to lay blame Nationalist air force when this only pursues military objectives.”

But Mr Steer had already revealed the truth.

He was covering the Spanish Civil War from the Republican side and was one of the first journalists to reach Guernica, hours after the massacre. He waited before filing his report to find proof that the Nazis were responsible: three small bomb cases stamped with the German Imperial Eagle.

At this point, Nazi Germany had signed the Non-Intervention Pact and their troops were officially playing no role in the war.

Mr Steer’s report read: “Guernica was not a military objective... the object of the bombardment was seemingly the demoralisation of the civil population and the destruction of the cradle of the Basque race.”

The report appeared in The Times, was syndicated to The New York Times and went around the world.

When Picasso, who was in exile in Paris, read it, he was outraged and changed a canvas that he was preparing for an exhibition. The result was Guernica, a stark black-and-white canvas, that has come to symbolise the horror of war.

As Franco’s Nationalists faced international condemnation for the attack on defenceless civilians, which was to herald the era of total war, he sent another telegram to London.

Dated May 3, 1937, it criticised lack of coverage of the “murder of thousands of innocents in Madrid under the Presidency of the Red Government”. The telegram claimed that these “murders” were the “deliberate work of Red dinamiters [sic]”.

The efforts of Franco to counter bad publicity in the international Press extended from 1936 to 1940, even after he had crushed the Republican forces in 1939.

In thousands of telegrams, Franco’s propaganda machine sought to remind the world of the outrages it claims the Republican side committed.

They include the alleged murder of “17,000 priests”, the “theft of gold from the Bank of Spain” to Russia and the “barbarity” of the Republican militias.

In reality, though hundreds of priests were killed in the Civil War, the figure of “17,000” appears wildly exaggerated. The Republican Government did send the Soviet Union gold worth $500 million to pay for arms and support.

The documents were carefully preserved by the Duke of Alba and later stored in the Institute Cervantes in London.

Under an initiative to preserve documents relating to the Civil War and the dictatorship, they were transferred to the Historical Memory Documentation Centre in Salamanca in western Spain.

In 2006, Mr Steer was honoured with a street named after him and a bronze bust in Guernica after a 25-year campaign.

And then there is those within the international community that claim that Spain has never deployed an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Basque people. This article proves them wrong... again. No government can commit as many crimes as Madrid has against the Basques without the silent complicity of the international community. It is because of their own phobias against "the reds" that the Europeans agreed to allow Franco to remain in power and go on with his murderous reign of terror that lasts until today through his heir, Juan Carlos Borbon.

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Gernika's Lessons

Remember a few years back when George W. Bush, Tony Blair and José María Aznar were weaving their web of lies and deception in order to bully the international community into backing up their holly crusade in Irak?

There was a pivotal moment in which then Secretary of State Colin Powel was forced by Bush's hawks to lie before the UN Assembly, we can all remember how he moved around a small vial containing a white powder but few of us recall the blue drape behind him. That blue drape was put there to conceal Picasso's Guernica replica from the world's view for the painting was a stark reminded of what war really means.

Well, it did not matter, soon after Bush's USA went to war and now that very same replica will be touring Tony Blair's England, maybe because Aznar's Spain decided to abduct the original as an excuse for preventing the painting to be shown in Euskal Herria.

This note comes to us via The Independent:

Guernica in Britain: The art of war

No artwork left its mark on the 20th century as emphatically as Guernica. And Picasso's monumental painting remains as controversial as ever. As the UN's famous replica comes to Britain, Gijs van Hensbergen dissects its awe-inspiring power

Wednesday, 28 January 2009

On 3 November 1998, Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of the United Nations, stood up to address the International Council of New York's Museum of Modern Art (Moma): a world élite of tastemakers and guardians of culture. Referring to the Guernica tapestry, a copy of Picasso's original painting, that was hanging in the corridor outside the Security Council chamber room, Annan declared: "The world has changed a great deal since Picasso painted that first political masterpiece, but it has not necessarily grown easier. We are near the end of a tumultuous century that has witnessed both the best and worst of human endeavour. Peace spreads in one region as genocidal fury rages in another. Unprecedented wealth coexists with terrible deprivation, as a quarter of the world's people remain mired in poverty."

It was a grimly realistic analysis of how far the world had progressed since 1937, when Picasso reacted so powerfully to the catastrophe of the bombing of the Basques' spiritual capital, but also of how far we were from achieving that elusive goal of the UN mandate for enduring world peace. Annan's statement to Moma's International Council also recognised Guernica's unique position in the history of art, elevated as it had been to the status of moral exemplar; a universal icon, warning that unless we studied its lessons, history was doomed to repeat itself.

Just over four years later, in the last week of January 2003, in the wake of the twin towers tragedy, a blue shroud was thrown over the Picasso tapestry to hide it from public view.

Considering the central role Guernica had played in the UN's education programme, it was a strange and highly symbolic decision. According to Fred Eckhard, a UN spokesman who had been given the impossible task of playing down the significance of the action, it was merely that blue was a more appropriate colour as a backdrop for television cameras, in contrast to Picasso's visually confusing mixture of blacks and whites and greys. Other observers, however, were quick to draw their own conclusions. It wasn't colour or shape that was the problem; what the picture showed up was the embarrassing contradiction of presuming to take the moral high ground while simultaneously campaigning for war.

On 5 February, the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, shadowed by George Tenet, director of the CIA, had been scheduled to brief the United Nations Security Council in a last-ditch attempt to win UN approval for the war with Iraq that would start, according to military analysts, with a massive aerial bombardment of Baghdad that was to receive the chilling codename "Shock and Awe".

That same week, Hans Blix was expected to report back on either the discovery, or, as seemed more likely, the lack, of any concrete evidence proving that Saddam Hussein had been stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. On an almost daily basis, John Negroponte, US ambassador to the UN, had come out into the corridor to brief the world's press, while hovering in the background over his shoulder, the viewer could easily make out the mutilated bodies and screaming women of Picasso's painting. The presence of Picasso's Guernica was, it seemed, confusing the viewer. Painted as a passionate protest against senseless violence, it was once again succeeding only too well, illustrating perfectly the truism that we never seem to learn from our own mistakes.

Defiantly, in response to the cover-up of the painting, Laurie Brereton, a UN delegate representing Australia, pointed out: "Throughout the debate on Iraq, there has been a remarkable degree of obfuscation, evasion and denial, and never more so than when it comes to the grim realities of military action. We may well live in the age of the so-called 'smart bomb', but the horror on the ground will be just the same as that visited upon the villagers of Gernika [the Basque spelling of the town]... And it won't be possible to pull a curtain over that."

***

It was obvious that from the day of its creation, Guernica has never lost its power to shock. Even when reproduced, in tapestry, or in poster form, it still continues to mirror the horror of war and throw a harsh spotlight on our propensity for cruelty. Subtly, over the years, Guernica has reinvented itself and changed from being a painting born out of war to one that speaks of reconciliation and the hope for an enduring world peace.

In 1937, on Monday 26 April, as Franco's Nationalist forces pushed north to cut off Bilbao and take control of the Basque Country, the decision was taken to crush resistance with an overwhelming show of force. At 4pm, and for the next three hours, 60 Italian and German planes rained incendiary bombs down on Gernika, reducing it to a burning wreck. Nothing like this had been seen in Europe before. And no single act was so prescient of what the world would soon come to understand as the appalling reality of total war, where innocent people are bombed indiscriminately, or strafed by machine-gun fire as they escape from the carnage in towns up into the hills. The newspapers reported graphically on the tragedy, and the shockwaves circled the globe.

In Paris, on 1 May, Pablo Picasso, who was by then the world's most famous living artist, started to give concrete form to his powerful sense of revulsion, jotting down at lightning speed some initial ideas. Over the next fortnight, preparatory sketches, drawings, and paintings poured out with a feverish passion.

By late June 1937, Picasso was ready to put the finishing touches to a painting that had been executed on such a scale that he had been forced to jam it in at an angle in his enormous studio on rue des Grands Augustins. The canvas, which had acquired the title Guernica, was covered with what at first sight seems a chaotic jumble of animals and contorted human bodies drawn out in an austere palette of blacks, whites and scumbled greys.

Photographs taken by Picasso's new lover, Dora Maar, show the artist reaching forward from the top rung of a stepladder, stretching out to make a quick addition at the top of the canvas. Sweating, almost manically absorbed, Picasso paces up and down the painting's length, feeling and reading its almost palpable presence and testing out, again and again, the suffocating pressure of its interior space. Torn paper was pasted on to the canvas to try out possible changes and then quickly removed. Ideas and doodles were torn out of the ether, built up and overlayered, one on top of the other, as they were drawn into the painting's creative vortex and hammered into shape. Desperately short of time, Picasso had covered the almost 30 square metres of canvas in little less than six weeks. By any standards, it was an extraordinary achievement.

Out of the chaos, Picasso had managed to give shape to an arresting and profoundly disturbing image. There was nothing that specifically alluded to Gernika, or the terror that rained down from the skies. Instead, Picasso had resorted to employing images whose simplicity and meaning could travel across every cultural divide. At the base of the painting, decapitated, splintered and crushed, lies the corpse of a dead warrior, strangely reminiscent of a classical bust. Above him the weight of a horse, contorted with pain and clearly in its death throes, threatens to collapse to the ground.

On the right of the picture, three women in various states of distress look in upon the scene. In the background, barely discernible at first, a cockerel is crowing up at the skies from the top of a table. Most poignant of all, at the extreme left edge, the picture is anchored and framed by the tragic image of a mother with the limp body of her dead child held in her arms, who in turn is overshadowed by an impassive bull. Only the ghost of a wind blows across the canvas to lift the beast's tail.

At first sight, there seems to be no clear relationship between cause and effect. There is no easy way in to read the story or discover exactly at what point we have joined the narrative. But among the shattered walls, blind doorways and roofs, we come to a growing realisation that something terrible has happened here.

***

When first shown at the Paris Exposition in 1937, the painting's reception was strangely muted. In fact, considering the coolness with which it was initially received, particularly by the official Basque delegation, it would have been reasonable to assume that Guernica might end up rolled and stored in the back of Picasso's Paris studio, like Les Demoiselles d'Avignon; left to collect dust and haunt those who had seen it with ever fainter echoes of a drama that had long since played itself out. Awkward and difficult to transport, this was perhaps the most likely outcome. After all, in the remaining Republican strongholds of Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia, the most obvious venues for showing the work, it would have served only to demoralise the militiamen who were witnessing daily what was painted out so graphically across Picasso's large backdrop.

During the Second World War, however, and particularly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Guernica's imagery became more recognisable, indeed painfully familiar. City after city in Europe was bombed. Finally the catastrophic lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought the stark realisation that the world would never be the same again. With no hint of irony, the President of the United States, Harry S Truman, announced sombrely: "I fear that machines are ahead of morals by some centuries, and when morals catch up, there'll be no need for any of it.' Guernica had been horribly prescient. What it depicts is modern mass slaughter only faintly disguised behind the ancient rituals of death. Every community in the world that has suffered an appalling atrocity has become synonymous with Guernica the painting and Gernika the town, the brutalised spiritual heartland of the beleaguered Basques.

As the prolonged sound of air-raid sirens boom out across a threatened city somewhere far away, each new conflict, each new bombing, each act of total devastation, begs the question: shall this be the Gernika of our age? Warsaw, Coventry, Dresden, Rotterdam, Hamburg, Stalingrad, Hiroshima, Stalin's Gulag Archipelago, Pol Pot's Cambodia and, closer to us today, Rwanda, southern Sudan and Srebrenica. Iraqi Kurdistan has its Halabja. Recently, during the Balkan crisis in Kosovo, Serbs attempted to liquidate the Kosova Liberation Army. Each and every example has been cited as the Gernika of its day.

On 23 September 1998 in Washington, DC, Senator John McCain took to the Senate floor, declaring: "We have not lacked for rhetoric, but we have proven woefully inadequate at backing up our words with resolute action... Mr President, prominently displayed in the United Nations building in New York is Picasso's famous and haunting Guernica. That painting symbolised for the artist the carnage, the human suffering on an enormous scale, that resulted from the Spanish Civil War as a prelude to the Second World War. Perhaps it is too abstract for those countries in the United Nations that oppose the use of force to stop the atrocities that have come to symbolise the former Yugoslavia, or that believe the war in Kosovo is the internal business of Serbia."

Just as Anne Frank's story has become symbolic of all the Jewish children lost in the extermination camps, and Auschwitz shorthand for the apocalyptic horror of the Holocaust, Guernica has become synonymous with indiscriminate slaughter in whatever corner of the world such tragedy takes place.

On any given day, somewhere in the world, in parliaments, council chambers and in open debate, Guernica is cited to add a sense of moral suasion and urgency to the argument. Picasso's Guernica is the image that draws our constant attention to the proximity of catastrophe. Reproduced by the million, copied by other artists, reinterpreted by even more, Guernica remains, nonetheless, inviolate and unspoilt.

***

The extraordinary thing about Guernica is that it refuses to yield and drown under the weight of its own ubiquity. It is still an image that can awaken the nightmares of our historical past while painting a terrifying scenario of what has yet to come. Despite the marketing and the myriad psychological, sociological, historical and art-historical interpretations – enough to fill a library – it can still be guaranteed to stun the viewer into silence as he witnesses it afresh. Guernica has, and this is even more unusual, the capacity to speak intimately to the individual while also remaining a universal symbol that is understood by all.

From Paris in 1937 to the United Nations today, much of the painting's meaning has lain beyond Picasso's reach and control. Guernica has its own life, forging a relationship with its audience that has often been entirely separate from the life of the genius who brought it into our world. Over the years, that audience and historical circumstances have continued to change. And Guernica, as is inevitable, has become stylistically dated.

But while the fabric of the painting has become increasingly fragile, as a work of art it has nevertheless been ageing well. It has never lost its relevance, nor its magnetic, almost haunting appeal. From its first showing in Paris to its arrival in Spain 44 years later, it has witnessed and helped to define a century. That its lessons have still not been heeded or learnt makes it as relevant and iconic today as it ever was. Guernica, for better or for worse, more than any other image in history has helped to shape the way that we see.

Extracted from 'Guernica: The Biography of a Twentieth-Century Icon', by Gijs van Hensbergen, published by Bloomsbury (£10.99). To order a copy for the special price of £9.89, plus free post & packing, call Independent Books Direct on 0870 079 8897. The Guernica Tapestry will be on display at the Whitechapel Gallery, London E1, from 5 April 2009 to 18 April 2010 (www.whitechapel.org )

'While I work, I leave my body outside the door'

For art historians keen to search out Guernica's ancestors in art, the painting has proved a minefield. Picasso had often stressed the need for the modern artist to be a visual kleptomaniac, and with Guernica he didn't disappoint.

He had raided the store cupboard of art history and drawn from myriad sources: from Roman funerary sculpture to David's Oath of the Horatii; from the 10th-century St Sever Apocalypse in the Beatus de Liébana codex, to Catalan primitive art; from the classical Winged Victory of Samothrace to Bartholdi's Statue of Liberty; from Grunewald's Isenheim Altarpiece to Delacroix's Massacre at Chios; from Gericault's Raft of the Medusa to Rubens's Horror of War in Florence's Pitti Palace; from Guido Reni to Poussin; from Pierre Paul Prud'hon to press photographs in L'Humanité and Ce Soir; from Rogier van der Weyden's Descent from the Cross to Goya's Third of May and his horrific Desastres prints. One recent theory suggests inspiration also came from an anonymous Catalan fresco, The Triumph of Death, in Palermo's Palazzo Abatellis.

All these were absorbed, metamorphosed and transformed. Picasso also used his own earlier motifs; in Guernica we find passages from Songe et Mensonge and Minotauromachy, of course, but the Crucifixion, Three Dancers, Vollard Suite, early bullfight juvenilia and hundreds of other echoes, faintly remembered gestures, similar compositions and the employment of his habitual techniques are there too.

It mattered little that Picasso sourced so readily from elsewhere; what mattered was his capacity to come up with something shocking and new. He had performed a kind of visual alchemy in which the immediate power of the propaganda poster sits side by side with something as ancient and atavistic as the Altamira bull. On 12 July 1937, the Paris Exposition's Spanish Pavilion opened and the public could study Guernica and decide for themselves.

Few artists in history, excepting Goya, whose Second and Third of May were produced in just two months, have been capable of imagining and bringing to resolution such a complex and ultimately convincing work in such a short time. Physically, as well as intellectually, it was a remarkable feat.

Françoise Gilot, continually surprised by Picasso's extraordinary stamina, wondered at the physical cost of such an obsessive drive. "I asked him if it didn't tire him to stand so long in one spot. He shook his head. 'No,' he said. 'That's why painters live so long. While I work I leave my body outside the door, the way Muslims take off their shoes before entering the mosque.'" GvH

The Spanish Civil War: 1936 to 1939

Fighting broke out after a group of Spanish army generals, Franco among them, rebelled against the government of the Second Spanish Republic, which came to power in 1931 following the abdication of King Alfonso XII.

The conflict attracted worldwide attention as a struggle between left and right, with the elected Republicanos, or Popular Front, backed by the Communist Soviet Union, and Franco's Falangistas supported by Fascist Germany and Italy.

The military coup began in mid-July 1936. In early November, the Republican government fled Madrid for Valencia. Germany and Italy recognised the new regime and sent support before the year was out.

In addition to the civilian casualties of the horrific bombing raids that inspired 'Guernica', historians estimate that up to 50,000 people were executed on both sides, including the poet and dramatist Federico García Lorca.

The Falangistas won the war in 1939, and Franco began his bloody 36-year rule. Over the next 12 years, his supporters murdered at least 100,000 Spanish citizens. Republicans were subjected to constant persecution.

Although photographers and reporters had covered earlier wars, the Spanish Civil War attracted an unprecedented level of foreign attention because of developments in media and communications. Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn and George Orwell famously wrote dispatches from Madrid and a variety of front lines, illustrating the human cost of war.

The photographer Robert Capa covered the war with his partner, Gerda Taro. His 'Falling Soldier' picture, alongside 'Guernica', is the most memorable representation of the war. Purported to depict the moment a Republican soldier took a fatal bullet, 'Falling Soldier' is held up as an example of how propagandistic photography can shape the image of a war internationally. Capa went on to found the Magnum photographic agency. He was killed by a landmine while covering the war in Indochina in 1954. Sophie Morris

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Sol

We just published an entry about Eva Forest, now we present you this bio about Solomon Frankel and how he aided the Basque children that found refugee from Franco's genocidal campaign in England and how he fought against Franco's forces in Spain. It was published at The Independent, here you have it:

Sol Frankel

Veteran of the Spanish Civil War and the Battle of Cable Street

Jim Jump

Solomon Frankel, tailor and political activist: born London 31 March 1914; married 1943 Pearl Simonson (died 1999; one son, one daughter); died London 18 May 2007.

Sol Frankel was one of the generation of secular Jews who embraced Communism in the 1930s and 1940s and made the Communist Party an influential force in the political life of London's East End. He took part in the Battle of Cable Street against Sir Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts, fought in the Spanish Civil War against General Franco's Fascist-backed rebellion and returned home injured to pursue his political activism for another three decades.

Frankel was among a small group of Communists who defied the Home Secretary Herbert Morrison in 1941 and published the Stepney Worker after their party's newspaper, the Daily Worker, had been banned because of its criticism of the war effort and aims. Though naturally right-handed, he supplied cartoons for the stencil-duplicated paper drawn with his left hand, his other having been disabled by a bullet wound in Spain. The Stepney Worker continued to appear during the 19 months of the ban, leaving plenty of time for Frankel to fall in love with its editor, Pearl Simonson. They were married in 1943.

The high point of Communist influence in the East End came soon afterwards, with the election in 1945 of the Jewish Phil Piratin as the local MP, one of two Communists in the House of Commons. Frankel and his wife stayed loyal to the Party longer than most, the last straw being the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, when they left and joined the Labour Party. "Socialism is my religion," he would tell his family and friends.

One of nine children of Polish-Jewish immigrant parents, Frankel was born in 1914 in Whitechapel, in the East End, and left school at the age of 14 to work as a tailor in the sweatshops of the local clothing trade. He witnessed the rise of Fascism and anti-Semitism in the 1930s, when Jewish-owned shop-windows were frequently smashed. He was a member of the Labour League of Youth but later left to join the Communist Party over what he saw as the Labour Party's failure to stand up to Fascism at home and in Europe.

Frankel was always proud of his involvement in the Battle of Cable Street when, on 4 October 1936, Blackshirts were prevented from marching through the streets where many of Stepney's 60,000 Jewish residents lived. The Communist Party mobilised its supporters to block Mosley's path. In contrast, the Labour Party urged everyone to stay away from the area - a hands-off approach that was mirrored in its initial support for the government's embargo on arms sales to the Spanish Republic. Frankel was in the thick of the Cable Street fighting, digging up paving stones and building the barricades.

The slogan chosen by the Cable Street demonstrators, "No pasarán" ("They shall not pass"), was the one used by the defenders of Madrid as they faced Franco's attempt to overrun the Spanish capital with help from Hitler and Mussolini. Frankel, like many other Jewish socialists, saw the Spanish Civil War as an opportunity to fight back against Hitler and Fascism. As many as 20 per cent of the 2,300 International Brigaders from the British Isles were Jewish.

Before going to Spain, Frankel was a volunteer at the refugee camp outside Southampton for nearly 4,000 Basque children who had arrived in May 1937 following the bombing of Guernica by Hitler's Condor Legion. He helped put up tents and dig latrines. Being in the camp on the day it was announced that Bilbao had fallen to the Fascists left a big impression on him. The children were distraught and the older ones rioted and broke camp. "We were up all night looking for them, trying to round them up. They called us 'fascistas'. They were trying to get away so that they could go back to Spain to fight against Franco."

The experience helped convince him that he should go to Spain. Aged 23, he arrived at the British battalion's base in Tarazona de la Mancha in December 1937 and, after training, was promoted to sergeant in the machine-gun company. He saw action in the Battle of the Ebro in July 1938 and was wounded in the fierce fighting around Gandesa. "I poked my head above the trench and a bullet grazed my hat," he said.

When I was shot I remember seeing the glint of an enemy rifle. I didn't realise I'd been shot, but I was thrown backwards. I had taken a bullet through the arm. When the stretcher-bearers came, they carried me away under fire. They were incredibly brave.

Nerves and tendons in his right arm had been severed and he remained in hospital in Barcelona for three months. His hand was left permanently partially paralysed.

His injury disqualified him from military service in the Second World War - though he was a volunteer air-raid patrol warden in the Blitz - but not from resuming his work as a tailor. He became a shop steward for the National Union of Tailors and Garment Workers and worked in East End factories until retirement in the early 1970s. He learnt to grip the cloth with his disabled hand clenched while sewing with his left hand.

After the war, with their home bombed out, Frankel moved to the suburbs of Golders Green, then Edgware and, in 1958, Crawley, though he still commuted to his work in the East End. Living in the north-west of London made him a member of the Wembley branch of the Communist Party, the same as Harry Pollitt, the Party's general secretary for 25 years. Pollitt was a frequent visitor to the Frankel family home, both on Party business and for social evenings. In 1973, Frankel and his wife moved to Wales and ran a guest-house near Aberystwyth, before settling in Leeds until Pearl's death in 1999, when he returned to London.

His idealism and political activism found expression during the 1950s and 1960s in the CND and anti-apartheid movements. He didn't return to Spain until democracy was restored after Franco's death in 1975. His final visit was in 2003, on the 65th anniversary of the Battle of the Ebro, when International Brigaders from around the world were reunited in significant numbers for probably the last time.

One small little detail, democracy has not been fully restored in Spain yet, and the Basque Country is still occupied, against the will of its people.

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In Southampton

Nations must never forget their past in order to build their future. This article about the solidarity shown by individuals and organizations based in Scotland, Wales and England for the children of Euskal Herria is something that we can never forget. This article regarding the operation that saved thousands of youngsters from Fascism comes to us courtesy of EITb:

Southampton commemorates anniversary of Gernika children's arrival

Nearly 4,000 refugee children arrived in Southampton in May 1937 aboard the steamship Habana, while the Basque region was being attacked by General Franco and his German allies during the Spanish Civil War.

Basque children who 70 years ago fled Nazi bombs to find sanctuary in Britain are to be reunited in Southampton on Saturday 26 May.

Nearly 4,000 refugee children arrived in Southampton in May 1937 aboard the steamship Habana. It sailed from Bilbao with a Royal Navy escort while the Basque region was being attacked by General Franco and his Nazi German allies during the Spanish Civil War.

The arrival of the Habana on 23 May 1937 remains to this day the largest ever single influx of refugees into Britain. The town of Gernika had been destroyed by Hitler’s Condor Legion only a few weeks earlier. The bombing sparked a public outcry that persuaded a reluctant British government to accept the refugees, who were cared for entirely by volunteers.

This year's commemoration at the Southampton Solent University Conference Centre will be attended by surviving refugee children who settled in Britain along with several of the children who returned home. Some of those travelling from the Basque Country will retrace their voyage of 70 years ago by crossing the Bay of Biscay by ferry.

The commemoration will be attended by representatives of the Spanish government and the Basque regional government, as well as by local MPs and dignitaries and the children and grandchildren of the refugees. A plaque recording the anniversary will be unveiled by the representative of the Spanish government.

The event is being organised by the Basque Children of ’37 Association UK, a charity run by the children and their descendants. The commemoration begins at 11am at the Southampton Solent University Conference Centre (157-187 Above Bar Street, Southampton SO14 7NN).

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Basque Refugee Children in Leeds

On an effort to provide safe haven for the children due to the imminent danger created by the genocidal war unleashed by the Spaniards with the support of Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini, a number of countries decided to aid the Basques. Thanks to the Yorkshire Evening Post we learned about one of the many stories of how some Basque children were spared from the ethnic cleansing campaign led by Francisco Franco:

Children of war at work and play

John Thorpe

It was Eric Drummond of Syke Lane in Scarcroft who urged us not to forget how Leeds helped to house 30 Basque children during the Spanish Civil War.

They were given a home on Hill End Road, Armley, and their home was also their school.

Eric, then a 12-year-old who had a newspaper round that included the street on which they lived, remembers them being slightly mischievous. And Eric's wife's grandmother was caretaker at the house of the Basque children.

The Basque children would "take" Eric's bike for a ride while he delivered newspapers to the houses but it was always returned.

Raymond Hardcastle of Langton Green in West Leeds was an eight-year-old when the Basque children were evacuated to Leeds. He is another who remembers them.

"We used to walk up the long fields from the Green Thorpe Estate passing all the tusky fields," Raymond tells me.

"The path then ran along the railway to a bridge over the tracks which led to the path that ran alongside West Leeds High School playing fields.

"The house where the children stayed was a mansion-type place with a big courtyard. There was a small wall dividing the path and the courtyard where the Basque children played. We'd climb on to the wall and throw a ball down in to the courtyard and the children would throw it back.

"Sometimes we'd throw down sweets but not very often because these were in short supply.

"A lady used to come out of the house and into the yard and 'shoo' all the children inside and tell us to go away but we used to go back just the same. Then one day when we went there were no children playing in the yard and we were told they'd all moved. I've often wondered what happened to the Basque children and if life got better for them.

"And after reading Eric's account of the children I now wonder if the lady who told us to go away was indeed Eric's wife's grandmother?"

Now the snap of the Basque children were taken by Sydney Long's father. Says Sydney from his Harrogate home: "I presume the 'lads' are working on their allotment.

"I believe they were housed in the building with the tall chimney stack at the back. I would be about the same age as the Basque children when my father took these pictures."

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