“
Yes, Marcos is gay. Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in the streets of San Cristobal, a Jew in Germany, a Gypsy in Poland, a Mohawk in Quebec, a pacifist in Bosnia, a single woman on the Metro at 10pm, a peasant without land, a gang member in the slums, an unemployed worker, an unhappy student and, of course, a Zapatista in the mountains.
Marcos is all the exploited, marginalised, oppressed minorities resisting and saying `Enough'. He is every minority who is now beginning to speak and every majority that must shut up and listen. He is every untolerated group searching for a way to speak. Everything that makes power and the good consciences of those in power uncomfortable -- this is Marcos.
”
”
Subcomandante Marcos
“
Nick demonstrated twenty-three ways of communicating without words by fanning himself with a napkin. "This one means oops, your fly is open, sir, and if you lower the fan a little and look at someone over the top of it, it means wow, I'd like to marry you. But if you do it the other way around, it means ha ha, we are now at war with Spain.
”
”
Kerstin Gier (Saphirblau (Edelstein-Trilogie, #2))
“
Perhaps there never was a monument more characteristic of an age and people than the Alhambra; a rugged fortress without, a voluptuous palace within; war frowning from its battlements; poetry breathing throughout the fairy architecture of its halls.
”
”
Washington Irving (Tales of the Alhambra)
“
As to whether Marcos is gay: Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in the streets of San Cristobal,… a Jew in Germany, a Gypsy in Poland, a Mohawk in Quebec, a pacifist in Bosnia, a single woman on the Metro at 10pm, a peasant without land, a gang member in the slums, an unemployed worker, an unhappy student and, of course, a Zapatista in the mountains.
”
”
Subcomandante Marcos
“
Why is that I never get cut off from pity, sympathy, participation, in spite of the fact that I am living out of my own dream, my interior vision, my fantasies without any interruptions. I dream, I kiss, I have orgasms, I get exalted, I leave the world, I float, I cook, I sew, have nightmares, write in my head, compose, decompose, improvise, invent, I listen to all, I hear all that is said, I feel Spain, I am aware, I am everywhere , I am open to wounds, open to love, I am rooted to my devotions, I am never separete, I am never cut off, never blind, deaf, absent. I hold on to the dream which makes life possible, to the creation which transfigures, to the God who sustains, to the crimes which gave life, to the illusions which makes the marvelous possible. I hold on to the poetry and the human simplicities.
”
”
Anaïs Nin
“
But neither Europe nor Africa can show any such desolation as America. The proudest, stubbornest, bitterest peasant of deserted Spain, the most primitive and superstitious Arab of the remotest oases, are a little more than kin and never less than kind at their worst; whereas in the United States one is almost always conscious of an instinctive lack of sympathy and understanding with even the most charming and cultured people.
”
”
Aleister Crowley (Magick Without Tears)
“
Must we think of the spirit as something divine that comes from without, that makes us divine? No, it is not that, to me it seems it is not that. The divine is in us, in our own intrinsic humanity, like a diamond in a mine. (La Corriente Infinita)
”
”
Juan Ramón Jiménez (Platero y yo)
“
Direct action meant that the goal of any and all of these activities was to provide ways for people to get in touch with their own powers and capacities, to take back the power of naming themselves and their lives. It was to be distinguished from more conventional political activity even in a democratic system. Instead of attempting to make change by forming interest groups to pressure politicians, anarchists insisted that we learn to think and act for ourselves by joining together in organizations in which our experience, our perception, and our activity can guide and make the change. Knowledge does not precede experience, it flows from it: "We begin by deciding to work, and through working, we learn ... We will learn how to live in libertarian communism by living in it." People learn how to be free only by exercising freedom: "We are not going to find ourselves ... with people ready-made for the future ... Without the continued exercise of their faculties, there will be no free people ... The external revolution and the internal revolution presuppose one another, and they must be simultaneous in order to be successful.
”
”
Martha A. Ackelsberg (Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women)
“
In those times panics were common, and few days passed without some city or other registering in its archives an event of this kind. There were nobles, who made war against each other; there was the king, who made war against the cardinal; there was Spain, which made war against the king. Then, in addition to these concealed or public, secret or open wars, there were robbers, mendicants, Huguenots, wolves, and scoundrels, who made war upon everybody. The citizens always took up arms readily against thieves, wolves or scoundrels, often against nobles or Huguenots, sometimes against the king, but never against cardinal or Spain. It resulted, then, from this habit that on the said first Monday of April, 1625, the citizens, on hearing the clamor, and seeing neither the red-and-yellow standard nor the livery of the Duc de Richelieu, rushed toward the hostel of the Jolly Miller. When arrived there, the cause of the hubbub was apparent to all.
”
”
Alexandre Dumas (The Three Musketeers)
“
Freedom, or individual liberty, was a basic premise of the Spanish anarchist tradition. "Individual sovereignty" is a prime tenet of most anarchist writing; the free development of one' s individual potential is one of the basic "rights" to which all humans are born. Yet Spanish anarchists were firmly rooted in the communalist-anarchist tradition. For them, freedom was fundamentally a social product: the fullest expression of individuality and of creativity can be achieved only in and through community. As Carmen Conde (a teacher who was also active in Mujeres Libres) wrote, describing the relationship of individuality and community: "I and my truth; I and my faith ... And I for you, but without ever ceasing to be me, so that you can always be you. Because I don' t exist without your existence, but my existence is also indispensable to yours.
”
”
Martha A. Ackelsberg (Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women)
“
The whole horror of the much-praised capitalist order lies just in this: Without pity and devoid of all humanity it strides across the corpses of whole peoples to safeguard the brutal right of exploitation, and sacrifices the welfare of millions to the selfish interests of tiny minorities.
”
”
Rudolf Rocker (The Tragedy of Spain)
“
No social movement has ever progressed without emphasizing division, and doing that means stirring up hate.
”
”
Nancy Kress (Beggars in Spain (Sleepless, #1))
“
It’s a new world, right enough, a world for the taking, and we’re the ones who know how to live in it without having to pretend it’s a district of England or France or Spain.
”
”
Tim Powers (On Stranger Tides)
“
...neither of them has yet learned to accept hard necessity without making it worse by regret. That's a vital lesson, Miri. Regret is not productive. Nor is guilt, nor grief.
”
”
Nancy Kress (Beggars in Spain)
“
Both defenders and opponents of the Inquisition have often accepted without question the image of an omniscient, omnipotent tribunal whose fingers reached into every corner of the land. The extravagant rhetoric on both sides has been one of the major obstacles to understanding. For the Inquisition to have been as powerful as suggested, the fifty or so inquisitors in Spain would need to have had an extensive bureaucracy, a reliable system of informers, regular income and the cooperation of the secular and ecclesiastical authorities. Seldom if ever did they have any of these.
”
”
Henry Kamen (The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision)
“
The Beirut beat was a demanding one. Middle Eastern politics were as complex and volatile in 1956 as they are today. But as Philby knew from his years as a correspondent in civil-war Spain, there is no better cover job for a spy than that of journalist, a profession that enables the asking of direct, unsubtle, and impertinent questions about the most sensitive subjects without arousing suspicion.
”
”
Ben Macintyre (A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal)
“
Without papers it was simply impossible to move from a hostile France across a hostile Spain and a not exactly sympathetic Portugal and thence reach an overseas country that was itself fussily bureaucratic.
”
”
Lion Feuchtwanger (The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940)
“
With the gun which was too big for him, the breech-loader which did not even belong to him but to Major de Spain and which he had fired only once, at a stump on the first day to learn the recoil and how to reload it with the paper shells, he stood against a big gum tree beside a little bayou whose black still water crept without motion out of a cane-brake, across a small clearing and into the cane again, where, invisible, a bird, the big woodpecker called Lord-to-God by negroes, clattered at a dead trunk. It was a stand like any other stand, dissimilar only in incidentals to the one where he had stood each morning for two weeks; a territory new to him yet no less familiar than that other one which after two weeks he had come to believe he knew a little--the same solitude, the same loneliness through which frail and timorous man had merely passed without altering it, leaving no mark nor scar, which looked exactly as it must have looked when the first ancestor of Sam fathers' Chickasaw predecessors crept into it and looked about him, club or stone axe or bone arrow drawn and ready, different only because, squatting at the edge of the kitchen, he had smelled the dogs huddled and cringing beneath it and saw the raked ear and side of the bitch that, as Sam had said, had to be brave once in order to keep on calling herself a dog, and saw yesterday in the earth beside the gutted log, the print of the living foot. He heard no dogs at all. He never did certainly hear them. He only heard the drumming of the woodpecker stop short off, and knew that the bear was looking at him. he did not move, holding the useless gun which he knew now he would never fire at it, now or ever, tasting in his saliva that taint of brass which he had smelled in the huddled dogs when he peered under the kitchen.
”
”
William Faulkner (Go Down, Moses)
“
Upon his first encounters with the native people he “discovered” in the West Indies, Columbus was struck by their kindness, generosity, and physical beauty. In a letter to the king and queen of Spain, he explained: “They are very simple and honest and exceedingly liberal with all they have, none of them refusing anything he may possess when he is asked for it. They exhibit great love toward all others in preference to themselves.” In his own journals, he was even more complimentary: “They are the best people in the world and above all the gentlest—without knowledge of what is evil—nor do they murder or steal… they love their neighbors as themselves and they have the sweetest talk in the world… always laughing.” A few pages on, in one of the most chilling pivots in recorded history, Columbus wrote: “They would make fine servants. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.
”
”
Christopher Ryan (Civilized to Death: What Was Lost on the Way to Modernity)
“
When I first went to Rwanda, I was reading a book called Civil War, which had been receiving great critical acclaim. Writing from an immediate post-Cold War perspective, the author, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, a German, observed, “The most obvious sign of the end of the bipolar world order are the thirty or forty civil wars being waged openly around the globe,” and he set out to inquire what they were all about. This seemed promising until I realized that Enzensberger wasn’t interested in the details of those wars. He treated them all as a single phenomenon and, after a few pages, announced: “What gives today’s civil wars a new and terrifying slant is the fact that they are waged without stakes on either side, that they are wars about nothing at all.” In the old days, according to Enzensberger—in Spain in the 1930s or the United States in the 1860s—people used to kill and die for ideas, but now “violence has separated itself from ideology,” and people who wage civil wars just kill and die in an anarchic scramble for power. In these wars, he asserted, there is no notion of the future; nihilism rules; “all political thought, from Aristotle and Machiavelli to Marx and Weber, is turned upside down,” and “all that remains is the Hobbesian ur-myth of the war of everyone against everyone else.” That such a view of distant civil wars offers a convenient reason to ignore them may explain its enormous popularity in our times. It would be nice, we may say, if the natives out there settled down, but if they’re just fighting for the hell of it, it’s not my problem. But it is our problem. By denying the particularity of the peoples who are making history, and the possibility that they might have politics, Enzensberger mistakes his failure to recognize what is at stake in events for the nature of those events. So he sees chaos—what is given off, not what’s giving it off—and his analysis begs the question: when, in fact, there are ideological differences between two warring parties, how are we to judge them? In the case of Rwanda, to embrace the idea that the civil war was a free-for-all—in which everyone is at once equally legitimate and equally illegitimate—is to ally oneself with Hutu Power’s ideology of genocide as self-defense.
”
”
Philip Gourevitch (We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families)
“
Nay, the extent of ground is of so little value, without labour, that I have heard it affirmed, that in Spain itself a man may be permitted to plough, sow, and reap, without being disturbed, upon land he has no other title to, but only his making use of it.
”
”
John Locke (Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration (Rethinking the Western Tradition))
“
For two centuries, the American arrangement has always managed to right itself under pressure without discarding the system and trying another after every crisis, as have Italy and Germany, France and Spain. Under accelerating incompetence in America, this may change.
”
”
Barbara W. Tuchman (The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam)
“
Flambeau, once the most famous criminal in France and later a very private detective in England, had long retired from both professions. Some say a career of crime had left him with too many scruples for a career of detection. Anyhow, after a life of romantic escapes and tricks of evasion, he had ended at what some might consider an appropriate address; a castle in Spain. [...] Flambeau had casually and almost abruptly fallen in love with a Spanish lady, married and brought up a large family on a Spanish estate, without displaying any apparent desire to stray again beyond its borders.
”
”
G.K. Chesterton (The Secret of Father Brown (Father Brown, #4))
“
Indeed, it was illegal to publish papal bulls and decrees in Spain or its possessions without prior royal consent – which is why, decades later, the pope’s decrees against slavery could not be read in Spain’s slave-holding colonies in the New World.38 These same conditions prevailed in Portugal.
”
”
Rodney Stark (Reformation Myths: Five Centuries Of Misconceptions And (Some) Misfortunes)
“
Wilkinson remained a central figure in the Spanish Conspiracy even after he became a lieutenant colonel and later general and commander of the U.S. Army. Even without knowing that he was a paid agent of Spain, John Randolph of Virginia said that Wilkinson was the only man he ever knew “who from the bark to the very core was a villain.
”
”
Gordon S. Wood (Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815)
“
When the Nazis overran France in the spring of 1940, much of its Jewish population tried to escape the country. In order to cross the border south, they needed visas to Spain and Portugal, and tens of thousands of Jews, along with many other refugees, besieged the Portuguese consulate in Bordeaux in a desperate attempt to get the life-saving piece of paper. The Portuguese government forbade its consuls in France to issue visas without prior approval from the Foreign Ministry, but the consul in Bordeaux, Aristides de Sousa Mendes, decided to disregard the order, throwing to the wind a thirty-year diplomatic career. As Nazi tanks were closing in on Bordeaux, Sousa Mendes and his team worked around the clock for ten days and nights, barely stopping to sleep, just issuing visas and stamping pieces of paper. Sousa Mendes issued thousands of visas before collapsing from exhaustion.
The Portuguese government – which had little desire to accept any of these refugees – sent agents to escort the disobedient consul back home, and fired him from the foreign office. Yet officials who cared little for the plight of human beings nevertheless had deep respect for documents, and the visas Sousa Mendes issued against orders were respected by French, Spanish and Portuguese bureaucrats alike, spiriting up to 30,000 people out of the Nazi death trap. Sousa Mendes, armed with little more than a rubber stamp, was responsible for the largest rescue operation by a single individual during the Holocaust.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
“
...and for which the very name of a Spaniard is reckoned to be frightful and terrible, to all people of humanity or of Christian compassion; as if the kingdom of Spain were particularly eminent for the produce of a race of men who were without principles of tenderness, or the common bowels of pity to the miserable, which is reckoned to be a mark of generous temper in the mind. (2)
”
”
Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe)
“
. . .He conjures up the lemon groves
of slumbrous Málaga,
his lament carries
hints of sea salt.
Like Homer he sang
blind. His voice had
something of sea without light. . ."
(. . .Evoca los limonares
de Málaga la dormida,
y hay en su llanto dejos
de sal marina.
Como Homero, cantó
ciego. Su voz tenía
algo de mar sin luz. . ."
-- Federico García Lorca, Selected Poems (Puffin Modern Classics)
”
”
Federico García Lorca
“
In Paris, Simon Thibault had loved his wife, though not always faithfully or with a great deal of attention. They had been married for twenty-five years. There had been two children, a summer month spent every year at the sea with friends, various jobs, various family dogs, large family Christmases that included many elderly relatives. Edith Thibault was an elegant woman in a city of so many thousands of elegant women that often over the course of years he forgot about her. Entire days would pass when she never once crossed his mind. He did not stop to think what she might be doing or wonder if she was happy, at least not Edith by herself, Edith as his wife. Then, in a wave of government promises made and retracted, they were sent to this country, which, between the two of them was always referred to as ce pays maudit, “this godforsaken country.” Both of them faced the appointment with dread and stoic practicality, but within a matter of days after their arrival a most remarkable thing happened: he found her again, like something he never knew was missing, like a song he had memorized in his youth and had then forgotten. Suddenly, clearly, he could see her, the way he had been able to see her at twenty, not her physical self at twenty, because in every sense she was more beautiful to him now, but he felt that old sensation, the leaping of his heart, the reckless flush of desire. He would find her in the house, cutting fresh paper to line the shelves or lying across their bed on her stomach writing letters to their daughters who were attending university in Paris, and he was breathless. Had she always been like this, had he never known? Had he known and then somehow, carelessly, forgotten? In this country with its dirt roads and yellow rice he discovered he loved her, he was her. Perhaps this would not have been true if he had been the ambassador to Spain. Without these particular circumstances, this specific and horrible place, he might never have realized that the only true love of his life was his wife.
”
”
Ann Patchett (Bel Canto)
“
Bills upon Spain?" asked the disturbed host. "Bills upon his Majesty's private treasury," answered d'Artagnan, who, reckoning upon entering into the king's service in consequence of this recommendation, believed he could make this somewhat hazardous reply without telling of a falsehood. "The devil!" cried the host, at his wit's end. "But it's of no importance," continued d'Artagnan, with natural assurance; "it's of no importance. The money is nothing; that letter was everything. I would rather have lost a thousand pistoles than have lost it." He would not have risked more if he had said twenty thousand; but a certain juvenile modesty restrained him. A ray of light all at once broke upon the mind of the host as he was giving himself to the devil upon finding nothing. "That letter is not lost!" cried he. "What!" cried d'Artagnan.
”
”
Alexandre Dumas (The Three Musketeers (Musketeers Trilogy #1))
“
Oh, did I mention that he's Spanish, as in from Spain, and that he occasionally slips into his native tongue? (Add your own sexual innuendo here. It's just too easy for me. Really.) He's from Madrid but has lived here for more than a decade, long enough to master English, but without flattening his Castilian quirks. Who knew a lispy accent could be so manly? So damn sexy? I hear those "ths" clinging to his tongue and go loco.
”
”
Megan McCafferty (Charmed Thirds (Jessica Darling, #3))
“
They just want to pile up and hoard money, and to get it they work almost without eating. Once a coin strays into their clutches, no matter how small, they condemn it to life imprisonment and eternal darkness. In this way, always acquiring and never spending, they’re amassing Spain’s biggest fortune. They are its strongbox, its vault, its guardians and custodians. They gather everything, hide everything, and swallow everything.
”
”
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (The Dialogue of the Dogs (The Art of the Novella))
“
[Galba] was killed beside the Lake of Curtius and was left lying just as he was, until a common soldier, returning from a distribution of grain, threw down his load and cut off the head. Then, since there was no hair by which to grasp it, he put it under his robe, but later thrust his thumb into the mouth and so carried it to Otho. He handed it over to his servants and camp followers, who set it on a lance and paraded it about the camp with jeers, crying out from time to time, "Galba, thou Cupid, exult in thy vigour!"
From these it was bought by a freedman of Patrobius Neronianus for a hundred pieces of gold and thrown aside in the place where his patron had been executed by Galba's order.
...
[Galba's] hands and feet were so distorted by gout that he could not endure a shoe for long, unroll a book, or even hold one. The flesh on his right side too had grown out and hung down to such an extent, that it could with difficulty be held in place by a bandage.
He was more inclined to unnatural desire,a and in gratifying it preferred full-grown, strong men. They say that when Icelus, one of his old-time favourites, brought him news in Spain of Nero's death, he not only received him openly with the fondest kisses, but begged him to prepare himself without delay and took him aside.
”
”
Suetonius (The Twelve Caesars)
“
and then Sweeney was trying, with both hands, to explain the history of the gods in Ireland, wave after wave of them as they came in from Gaul and from Spain and from every damn place, each wave of them transforming the last gods into trolls and fairies and every damn creature until Holy Mother Church herself arrived and every god in Ireland was transformed into a fairy or a saint or a dead king without so much as a by-your-leave…
”
”
Neil Gaiman (American Gods: Tenth Anniversary (American Gods, #1))
“
The practice of “tolerance,” in the sense of allowing people to dissent, did not of course exist in any part of Christian Europe in the 1500s. It came into being only centuries later, when some states conceded legal rights to religious minorities. But frontier societies having contact with other cultures, as in the Mediterranean and in Eastern Europe, were in a special category. Spain, like them, was a plural (and therefore in some sense forbearing) society long before toleration became a philosophical issue. The same was true of Transylvania and Poland. “There is nothing new about diversity of religion in Poland,” a Polish Lutheran stated in 1592. “In addition to the Greek Christians among us, pagans and Jews have been known for a long time, and faiths other than Roman Catholic have existed for centuries.”46 It was therefore commonplace, within that plural context, to have toleration without a theory of toleration, because there were legal guarantees for each faith.47 The protection given to the aljamas by Christian lords was by nature contractual: in return for protection, the Muslims and Jews paid taxes. Because there was no unitary political authority in Spain, the nobles felt free to allow their Muslims to observe their own cultural customs long after the Spanish crown had officially abolished the legal existence of Islam (in 1500 in Castile, in 1526 in the crown of Aragon). The development can be seen as inherent in the nature of pre-modern political systems in Europe. Before the advent of the modern (“nation”) state, small autonomous cultural groups could exist without being subjected to persecution, thanks to the protection of local authorities. The coming of the centralizing state, in post-Reformation Europe, removed that protection and aggravated intolerance.
”
”
Henry Kamen (The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision)
“
From Venice to Rome, Paris to Brussels, London to Edinburgh, the Ambassadors watched, long-eared and bright-eyed.
Charles of Spain, Holy Roman Emperor, fending off Islam at Prague and Lutherism in Germany and forcing recoil from the long, sticky fingers at the Vatican, cast a considering glance at heretic England.
Henry, new King of France, tenderly conscious of the Emperor's power and hostility, felt his way thoughtfully toward a small cabal between himself, the Venetians and the Pope, and wondered how to induce Charles to give up Savoy, how to evict England from Boulogne, and how best to serve his close friend and dear relative Scotland without throwing England into the arms or the lap of the Empire.
He observed Scotland, her baby Queen, her French and widowed Queen Mother, and her Governor Arran.
He observed England, ruled by the royal uncle Somerset for the boy King Edward, aged nine.
He watched with interest as the English dotingly pursued their most cherished policy: the marriage which should painlessly annex Scotland to England and end forever the long, dangerous romance between Scotland and England.
Pensively, France marshalled its fleet and set about cultivating the Netherlands, whose harbours might be kind to storm-driven galleys. The Emperor, fretted by Scottish piracy and less busy than he had been, watched the northern skies narrowly. Europe, poised delicately over a brand-new board, waiting for the opening gambit.
”
”
Dorothy Dunnett (The Game of Kings (The Lymond Chronicles, #1))
“
It’s too bad some of you are old enough to remember the peaceful buccaneer days, because those days are long gone—the summer’s over and empire season is here, and in a few more years it probably won’t be possible anywhere in the Caribbean to just sit in the sun and cook scavenged Spanish livestock over the buccan fires. It’s a new world, right enough, a world for the taking, and we’re the ones who know how to live in it without having to pretend it’s a district of England or France or Spain. All that could hold us back is laziness.
”
”
Tim Powers (On Stranger Tides)
“
Hallie didn't believe she was invulnerable. She was never one of those daredevil types; she knew she could get hurt. What I think she meant was that she was lucky to be on her way to Nicaragua. It was the slowest thing to sink into my head, how happy she was. Happy to be leaving.
We'd had one time of perfect togetherness in our adult lives, the year when we were both in college in Tucson-her first year, my last-and living together for the first time away from Doc Homer. That winter I'd wanted to fail a subject just so I could hang back, stay there with her, the two of us walking around the drafty house in sweatshirts and wool socks and understanding each other precisely. Bringing each other cups of tea without having to ask. So I stayed on in Tucson for medical school, instead of going to Boston as I'd planned, and met Carlo in Parasitology. Hallie, around the same time, befriended some people who ran a safehouse for Central American refugees. After that we'd have strangers in our kitchen every time of night, kids scared senseless, people with all kinds of damage. Our life was never again idyllic.
I should have seen it coming. Once she and I had gone to see a documentary on the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which was these Americans who volunteered without our government's blessing to fight against Franco and Hitler in the Spanish Civil War. At that point in U.S. history fascism was only maybe wrong, whereas communism was definitely. When we came home from the movie Hallie cried. Not because of the people who gave up life and limb only to lose Spain to Franco, and not for the ones who came back and were harassed for the rest of their lives for being Reds. The tragedy for Hallie was that there might never be a cause worth risking everything for in our lifetime. She was nineteen years old then, and as she lay blowing her nose and sobbing on my bed she told me this. That there were no real causes left.
Now she had one-she was off to Nicaragua, a revolution of co-op farms and literacy crusades-and so I guess she was lucky. Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can't even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain. Almost no one really gets the chance to alter the course of human events on purpose, in the exact way they wish for it to be altered.
”
”
Barbara Kingsolver (Animal Dreams)
“
We have nothing to destroy," said Rud. "All these things are done for already. They are falling in all over the world. They are dead. No need for destructive activities. But if we have nothing to destroy we have much to clear away. That's different. What is needed is a brand-new common-sense reorganisation of the world's affairs, and that's what we have to give them. I can't imagine how the government sleeps of nights. I should lie awake at night listening all the time for the trickle of plaster that comes before a smash. Ever since they began blundering in the Near East and Spain, they've never done a single wise thing. This American adventure spells disaster. Plainly. Australia has protested already. India now is plainly in collapse. Everyone who has been there lately with open eyes speaks of the vague miasma of hatred in the streets. We don't get half the news from India. Just because there exists no clear idea whatever of a new India, it doesn't mean that the old isn't disintegrating. Things that are tumbling down, tumble down. They don't
wait to be shown the plans of the new building. The East crumbles. All over the world it becomes unpleasant to be a foreigner, but an Englishman now can't walk in a bazaar without a policeman behind him...
”
”
H.G. Wells (The Holy Terror)
“
Think of Chicago as a piece of music, perhaps,” he continued. “In it you can hear the thousands of years of people living here and fishing and hunting, and then bullets and axes, and the whine of machinery, and the bellowing of cattle, and the shriek of railroads, and the thud of fists and staves and crowbars, and a hundred languages, a thousand dialects. And the murmur of the lake like a basso undertone. Ships and storms, snow and fire. To the north the vast dark forests, and everywhere else around the city rolling fields of farms, and all roads leading to Chicago, which rises from the plains like Oz, glowing with light and fire at night, drawing people to it from around the world. A roaring city, gunfire and applause and thunder. Gleaming but made of bone and stone. Bitter cold and melting hot and clotheslines hung in the alleys and porches like the webbing of countless spiders. A city without illusions but with vaulting imaginations and expectations. A city of burning energies on the shore of a huge northern sea. An American city, with all the violence and humor and grace and greed of this particular powerful adolescent country. Perhaps the American city—no other city in the nation is as big and central and grown up from the very soil. Chicago was never ruled by Spain or England or France or Russia or Texas, it shares no ocean with other countries, it is no mere regional captain, like Cincinnati or Nashville; it is itself, all brawn and greed and song, brilliant and venal, almost a small nation, sprawling and vulgar and foul and beautiful, cold and cruel and wonderful. Its music is the blues, of course. Sad and uplifting at once, elevating and haunting at the same time. You sing so that you do not weep. You have no choice but to sing. So you raise up your voice and sing of love and woe, and soon another voice joins in, and you sing together, for a while, for a time, perhaps a brief time, but perhaps not.…
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Brian Doyle
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He was talking about hire purchase. precredit cards. A different way of getting the poor into debt, but I think he was right. It was nice when ordinary people could take a holiday in Spain, of course, but easy credit is what started the cultural rot. Tourism depends on lots of people everywhere with loads of disposable wealth, which means all kinds of changes through a place a cultivates it. The real, messy, informative past disappears to be overlaid with bad fiction, with simplified folklore, easy answers. Memory needs to remain complex, debatable. Without those qualities it is mere nostalgic sentimentality. Commodified identity. Souls bough and sold.
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Michael Moorcock (The Whispering Swarm (Sanctuary of the White Friars, #1))
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Their kindness, their generosity compared to cruel slave owners, made them blind to the unfairness of a system of slavery that they created, they maintained, and that favored them. It’s like the British bragging about the railways, the colleges, the hospitals they left us—their ‘kindness’! As though that justified robbing us of the right to self-rule for two centuries! As though we should thank them for what they stole! Would Britain or Holland or Spain or Portugal or France be what they are now without what they earned by enslaving others? During the war, the British loved telling us how well they treated us compared to how the Japanese would treat us if they invaded.
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Abraham Verghese (The Covenant of Water)
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The greatest dangers he faced came not from the anticipated calamities of storms or starvation or sickness, which he managed to survive with a combination of skill and luck, but from his own traitorous men, several of whom believed they were more entitled to lead the expedition. When they mutinied and returned to Spain, they spread stories of Magellan’s perfidy and incompetence, partly to explain away their own actions, and partly to make sure Magellan would be imprisoned, tried, and executed if he ever returned. As he circled the world, Magellan became a man without a country, rebuffed by his native Portugal and mistrusted by Spain, the kingdom that had sponsored the voyage.
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Laurence Bergreen (Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe)
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The Court of Vienna is behaving very badly,’ Napoleon wrote to Joseph from Valladolid on January 15, 1809, ‘it may have cause to repent. Don’t be uneasy. I have enough troops, even without touching my army in Spain, to get to Vienna in a month . . . In fact, my mere presence in Paris will reduce Austria to her usual irrelevance.’1 He did not know at that stage that Austria had already received a large British subsidy to persuade her to fight what would become the War of the Fifth Coalition. Archduke Charles had been putting all able-bodied men between eighteen and forty-five into uniform in the new Landwehr militia, some of whose units were indistinguishable from the regular army.
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Andrew Roberts (Napoleon: A Life)
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In those days the soul's amorous fancies were clothed simply and plainly, exactly as they were conceived, without any search for artificial elaborations to enhance them. Nor had fraud, deceit, or malice mingled with truth and sincerity. Justice pursued her own proper purposes, undisturbed and unassailed by favour and interest, which so impair, restrain, and pervert her today. The law did not then depend on the judge's nice interpretations, for there were none to judge or to be judged. Maiden modesty roamed, as I have said, wherever she would, single and solitary, without fear of harm from strangers' licence or lascivious assault, and if she was undone it was of her own will and desire.
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Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (Don Quixote de la Mancha)
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Like Keats he may wander through the old-world forests of Latmos, or stand like Morris on the galley’s deck with the Viking when king and galley have long since passed away. But the drama is the meeting-place of art and life; it deals, as Mazzini said, not merely with man, but with social man, with man in his relation to God and to Humanity. It is the product of a period of great national united energy; it is impossible without a noble public, and belongs to such ages as the age of Elizabeth in London and of Pericles at Athens; it is part of such lofty moral and spiritual ardour as came to Greek after the defeat of the Persian fleet, and to Englishman after the wreck of the Armada of Spain.
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Oscar Wilde (The English Renaissance of Art)
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I’ll tell you. That sort of green sweetmeat is nothing more nor less than the ambrosia that Hebe served at the table of Jupiter.’ ‘Which ambrosia,’ said Franz, ‘no doubt, on coming into the hand of man, lost its celestial name to take a human one. What is the name of this substance – to which, I must admit, I feel no great attraction – in ordinary speech?’ ‘Ah!’ cried Sinbad. ‘It is precisely in this that we reveal our base material origins. Often we pass beside happiness without seeing it, without looking at it, or, even if we have seen and looked at it, without recognizing it. If you are a practical man and gold is your God, then taste this, and the mines of Peru, Gujarat and Golconda will be open to you. If you are a man of imagination, a poet, then taste this too, and the boundaries of the possible will vanish, the fields of infinity will be open and you will walk through them, free in heart, free in mind, in the limitless pasture of reverie. If you are ambitious and seek earthly glory, then you too can taste this and in an hour you will be a king, not the king of some little kingdom buried away in a corner of Europe, like France, Spain or England, but king of the world, king of the universe, king of creation. Your throne will be raised up on the mountain where Satan took Jesus. And, without having to pay him homage, without having to kiss his claw, you will be the sovereign master of all the kingdoms on earth. Aren’t you tempted by my offer? Tell me, is it not an easy thing to do, since there is nothing to do but that? Look.
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Alexandre Dumas (The Count of Monte Cristo)
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somewhere in the middle of the second glass that Mad Sweeney himself began to throw both details and irrelevancies into Ibis’s narrative (“…such a girl she was, with breasts cream-colored and spackled with freckles, with the tips of them the rich reddish pink of the sunrise on a day when it’ll be bucketing down before noon but glorious again by supper…”) and then Sweeney was trying, with both hands, to explain the history of the gods in Ireland, wave after wave of them as they came in from Gaul and from Spain and from every damn place, each wave of them transforming the last gods into trolls and fairies and every damn creature until Holy Mother Church herself arrived and every god in Ireland was transformed into a fairy or a saint or a dead king without so much as a by-your-leave… Mr.
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Neil Gaiman (American Gods)
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There was no response. Soon afterward, a skiff flying the Spanish flag approached the Charleston. Two Spanish officers came aboard and apologized for not having returned the American “salute” because they had no gunpowder left in their arsenal. It turned out that they had not been resupplied for months and did not know the United States and Spain were at war. The next morning an American lieutenant went ashore. At 10:15 he handed the Spanish commandant a message demanding surrender of the island within thirty minutes. The commandant retired to his quarters. Twenty-nine minutes later he emerged with a reply. “Being without defenses of any kind and without any means for meeting the present situation,” he had written, “I am under the sad necessity of being unable to resist such superior forces and regretfully accede to your demands.
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Stephen Kinzer (The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire)
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Hitler and Mussolini were indeed authoritarians, but it doesn’t follow that authoritarianism equals fascism or Nazism. Lenin and Stalin were authoritarian, but neither was a fascist. Many dictators—Franco in Spain, Pinochet in Chile, Perón in Argentina, Amin in Uganda—were authoritarian without being fascists or Nazis. Trump admittedly has a bossy style that he gets from, well, being a boss. He has been a corporate boss all his life, and he also played a boss on TV. Republicans elected Trump because they needed a tough guy to take on Hillary; previously they tried bland, harmless candidates like Romney, and look where that got them. That being said, Trump has done nothing to subvert the democratic process. While progressives continue to allege a plot between Trump and the Russians to rig the election, the only evidence for actual rigging comes from the Democratic National Committee’s attempt to rig the 2016 primary in favor of Hillary over Bernie. This rigging evoked virtually no dissent from Democratic officials or from the media, suggesting the support, or at least acquiescence, of the whole progressive movement and most of the party itself. Trump fired his FBI director, provoking dark ruminations in the Washington Post about Trump’s “respect for the rule of law,” yet Trump’s action was entirely lawful.18 He has criticized judges, sometimes in derisive terms, but contrary to Timothy Snyder there is nothing undemocratic about this. Lincoln blasted Justice Taney over the Dred Scott decision, and FDR was virtually apoplectic when the Supreme Court blocked his New Deal initiatives. Criticizing the media isn’t undemocratic either. The First Amendment isn’t just a press prerogative; the president too has the right to free speech.
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Dinesh D'Souza (The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left)
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All these considerations, conscious and unconscious, strengthened my opinion that war could be avoided only at the cost of the honour of Prussia and of the national confidence in it. Under this conviction I made use of the royal authorisation communicated to me through Abeken, to publish the contents of the telegram; and in the presence of my two guests I reduced the telegram by striking out words, but without adding or altering, to the following form : `After the news of the renunciation of the hereditary Prince of Hohenzollern had been officially communicated to the imperial government of France by the royal government of Spain, the French ambassador at Ems further demanded of his Majesty the King that he would authorise him to telegraph to Paris that his Majesty the King bound himself for all future time never again to give his consent if the Hohenzollerns should renew their candidature.
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Otto von Bismarck (Bismarck: The Man & the Statesman, Vol. 2)
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On the Republican side, the emotional bonds of family launched a major social organization led by nietos, the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory. Late in 2000 Emilio Silva and Santiago Macías began a personal search for the unmarked graves of their Republican ancestors.
[...] Descendants of executed Republicans told a journalist that “without the body, the pain never ceases.” “Never,” she reported, “have they spoken of vengeance, of revenge, or of anything that resembles that. In an exhumation, they never raise their eyes from the ground. They are not thinking of reopening wounds, but of closing, for once, their own.” This journalist, Natalia Junquera, also quoted a distinguished professor of psychiatry who said, “The hatred dies, it is extinguished, but the necessity of putting a name to the dead, of honoring them, no. There always comes a moment in which one has to put an end to this interminable trauma.” [63]
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Paul D. Escott (Uncommonly Savage: Civil War and Remembrance in Spain and the United States)
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But there is one other thing that undoubtedly contributed to the cult of Russia among the English intelligentsia during these years, and that is the softness and security of life in England itself. With all its injustices, England is still the land of habeas corpus, and the overwhelming majority of English people have no experience of violence or illegality. If you have grown up in that sort of atmosphere it is not at all easy to imagine what a despotic régime is like. Nearly all the dominant writers of the ’thirties belonged to the soft-boiled emancipated middle class and were too young to have effective memories of the Great War. To people of that kind such things as purges, secret police, summary executions, imprisonment without trial, etc., etc., are too remote to be terrifying. They can swallow totalitarianism because they have no experience of anything except liberalism. Look, for instance, at this extract from Mr. Auden’s poem Spain
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George Orwell (All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays)
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When Morgenthau surveyed the contemporary United States in The Purpose of American Politics, what he saw wasn’t pretty. Americans were materialistic, hedonistic, and apathetic, their only aim in life apparently to consume more and more in a complacent haze of unconstrained appetite. The economy was wasteful, the government paralyzed. The public sphere had virtually disappeared as individuals struggled to grab what they could for themselves and the hell with anyone else or any larger purpose. Public policy was determined by moneyed pressure groups with no concerns beyond their own parochial interests, and morality consisted of what you could get away with. Americans no longer made any distinction between freedom and license, and the consequences for the country were bound to be dire. “No society,” Morgenthau warned, “can go on like this forever without decay following stagnation; the fate of Spain tells us what is in store for such a nation.
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Barry Gewen (The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World)
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At the Treaty of San Ildefonso, Napoleon had promised Spain not to sell Louisiana to a third party, a commitment he now decided to ignore. On the same day that Whitworth called for his passports in Paris, across the Atlantic President Thomas Jefferson signed the Louisiana Purchase, doubling the size of the United States at the stroke of his pen. The Americans paid France 80 million francs for 875,000 square miles of territory that today comprises all or some of thirteen states from the Gulf of Mexico across the Midwest right up to the Canadian border, at a cost of less than four cents an acre.93 ‘Irresolution and deliberation are no longer in season,’ Napoleon wrote to Talleyrand. ‘I renounce Louisiana. It is not only New Orleans that I cede; it is the whole colony, without reserve; I know the price of what I abandon … I renounce it with the greatest regret: to attempt obstinately to retain it would be folly.’94 After the Saint-Domingue debacle and
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Andrew Roberts (Napoleon: A Life)
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Ah, thus it is that our material origin is revealed," cried Sinbad; "we frequently pass so near to happiness without seeing, without regarding it, or if we do see and regard it, yet without recognizing it. Are you a man for the substantials, and is gold your god? taste this, and the mines of Peru, Guzerat, and Golconda are opened to you. Are you a man of imagination—a poet? taste this, and the boundaries of possibility disappear; the fields of infinite space open to you, you advance free in heart, free in mind, into the boundless realms of unfettered reverie. Are you ambitious, and do you seek after the greatnesses of the earth? taste this, and in an hour you will be a king, not a king of a petty kingdom hidden in some corner of Europe like France, Spain, or England, but king of the world, king of the universe, king of creation; without bowing at the feet of Satan, you will be king and master of all the kingdoms of the earth. Is it not tempting what I offer you, and is it not an easy thing, since it is only to do thus? look!
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Alexandre Dumas (The Count of Monte Cristo)
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Ah!’ cried Sinbad. ‘It is precisely in this that we reveal our base material origins. Often we pass beside happiness without seeing it, without looking at it, or, even if we have seen and looked at it, without recognizing it. If you are a practical man and gold is your God, then taste this, and the mines of Peru, Gujarat and Golconda will be open to you. If you are a man of imagination, a poet, then taste this too, and the boundaries of the possible will vanish, the fields of infinity will be open and you will walk through them, free in heart, free in mind, in the limitless pasture of reverie. If you are ambitious and seek earthly glory, then you too can taste this and in an hour you will be a king, not the king of some little kingdom buried away in a corner of Europe, like France, Spain or England, but king of the world, king of the universe, king of creation. Your throne will be raised up on the mountain where Satan took Jesus. And, without having to pay him homage, without having to kiss his claw, you will be the sovereign master of all the kingdoms on earth. Aren’t you tempted by my offer? Tell me, is it not an easy thing to do, since there is nothing to do but that? Look.
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Alexandre Dumas (The Count of Monte Cristo)
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times had changed. The chief impetus for rethinking the value of colonies was the global Depression. It had triggered a desperate scramble among the world’s powers to prop up their flagging economies with protective tariffs. This was an individual solution with excruciating collective consequences. As those trade barriers rose, global trade collapsed, falling by two-thirds between 1929 and 1932. This was exactly the nightmare Alfred Thayer Mahan had predicted back in the 1890s. As international trade doors slammed shut, large economies were forced to subsist largely on their own domestic produce. Domestic, in this context, included colonies, though, since one of empire’s chief benefits was the unrestricted economic access it brought to faraway lands. It mattered to major imperial powers—the Dutch, the French, the British—that they could still get tropical products such as rubber from their colonies in Asia. And it mattered to the industrial countries without large empires—Germany, Italy, Japan—that they couldn’t. The United States was in a peculiar position. It had colonies, but they weren’t its lifeline. Oil, cotton, iron, coal, and many of the important minerals that other industrial economies found hard to secure—the United States had these in abundance on its enormous mainland. Rubber and tin it could still purchase from Malaya via its ally Britain. It did take a few useful goods from its tropical colonies, such as coconut oil from the Philippines and Guam and “Manila hemp” from the Philippines (used to make rope and sturdy paper, hence “manila envelopes” and “manila folders”). Yet the United States didn’t depend on its colonies in the same way that other empires did. It was, an expert in the 1930s declared, “infinitely more self-contained” than its rivals. Most of what the United States got from its colonies was sugar, grown on plantations in Hawai‘i, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Philippines. Yet even in sugar, the United States wasn’t dependent. Sugarcane grew in the subtropical South, in Louisiana and Florida. It could also be made from beets, and in the interwar years the United States bought more sugar from mainland beet farmers than it did from any of its territories. What the Depression drove home was that, three decades after the war with Spain, the United States still hadn’t done much with its empire. The colonies had their uses: as naval bases and zones of experimentation for men such as Daniel Burnham and Cornelius Rhoads. But colonial products weren’t integral to the U.S. economy. In fact, they were potentially a threat.
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Daniel Immerwahr (How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States)
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If you, illustrious Prince (the words were addressed to the Duke of Wurtemberg) had informed your subjects that you were coming to visit them at an unnamed time, and had requested them to be prepared in white garments to meet you at your coming, what would you do if on arrival you should find that, instead of robing themselves in white, they had spent their time in violent debate about your person—some insisting that you were in France, others that you were in Spain; some declaring that you would come on horseback, others that you would come by chariot; some holding that you would come with great pomp and others that you would come without any train or following? And what especially would you say if they debated not only with words, but with blows of fist and sword strokes, and if some succeeded in killing and destroying others who differed from them? “He will come on horseback.” “No, he will not; it will be by chariot.” “You lie.” ”I do not; you are the liar.” “Take that”—a blow with the fist. “Take that” ”—a sword-thrust through the body. Prince, what would you think of such citizens? Christ asked us to put on the white robes of a pure and holy life; but what occupies our thoughts? We dispute not only of the way to Christ, but of his relation to God the Father, of the Trinity, of predestination, of free will, of the nature of God, of the angels, of the condition of the soul after death”—of a multitude of matters that are not essential to salvation; matters, moreover, which can never be known until our hearts are pure; for they are things which must be spiritually perceived. Sebastian Castellio
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Aldous Huxley (The Perennial Philosophy: An Interpretation of the Great Mystics, East and West)
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At the Treaty of San Ildefonso, Napoleon had promised Spain not to sell Louisiana to a third party, a commitment he now decided to ignore. On the same day that Whitworth called for his passports in Paris, across the Atlantic President Thomas Jefferson signed the Louisiana Purchase, doubling the size of the United States at the stroke of his pen. The Americans paid France 80 million francs for 875,000 square miles of territory that today comprises all or some of thirteen states from the Gulf of Mexico across the Midwest right up to the Canadian border, at a cost of less than four cents an acre.93 ‘Irresolution and deliberation are no longer in season,’ Napoleon wrote to Talleyrand. ‘I renounce Louisiana. It is not only New Orleans that I cede; it is the whole colony, without reserve; I know the price of what I abandon … I renounce it with the greatest regret: to attempt obstinately to retain it would be folly.’94 After the Saint-Domingue debacle and the collapse of Amiens, Napoleon concluded he must realize his largest and (for the immediate future) entirely useless asset, one that might eventually have drawn France into conflict with the United States. Instead, by helping the United States to continental greatness, and enriching the French treasury in the process, Napoleon was able to prophesy: ‘I have just given to England a maritime rival that sooner or later will humble her pride.’95 Within a decade, the United States was at war with Britain rather than with France, and the War of 1812 was to draw off British forces that were still fighting in February 1815, and which might otherwise have been present at Waterloo.
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Andrew Roberts (Napoleon: A Life)
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Similarly, the computers used to run the software on the ground for the mission were borrowed from a previous mission. These machines were so out of date that Bowman had to shop on eBay to find replacement parts to get the machines working. As systems have gone obsolete, JPL no longer uses the software, but Bowman told me that the people on her team continue to use software built by JPL in the 1990s, because they are familiar with it. She said, “Instead of upgrading to the next thing we decided that it was working just fine for us and we would stay on the platform.” They have developed so much over such a long period of time with the old software that they don’t want to switch to a newer system. They must adapt to using these outdated systems for the latest scientific work.
Working within these constraints may seem limiting. However, building tools with specific constraints—from outdated technologies and low bitrate radio antennas—can enlighten us. For example, as scientists started to explore what they could learn from the wait times while communicating with deep space probes, they discovered that the time lag was extraordinarily useful information. Wait times, they realized, constitute an essential component for locating a probe in space, calculating its trajectory, and accurately locating a target like Pluto in space. There is no GPS for spacecraft (they aren’t on the globe, after all), so scientists had to find a way to locate the spacecraft in the vast expanse. Before 1960, the location of planets and objects in deep space was established through astronomical observation, placing an object like Pluto against a background of stars to determine its position.15 In 1961, an experiment at the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in California used radar to more accurately define an “astronomical unit” and help measure distances in space much more accurately.16 NASA used this new data as part of creating the trajectories for missions in the following years. Using the data from radio signals across a wide range of missions over the decades, the Deep Space Network maintained an ongoing database that helped further refine the definition of an astronomical unit—a kind of longitudinal study of space distances that now allows missions like New Horizons to create accurate flight trajectories.
The Deep Space Network continued to find inventive ways of using the time lag of radio waves to locate objects in space, ultimately finding that certain ways of waiting for a downlink signal from the spacecraft were less accurate than others. It turned to using the antennas from multiple locations, such as Goldstone in California and the antennas in Canberra, Australia, or Madrid, Spain, to time how long the signal took to hit these different locations on Earth. The time it takes to receive these signals from the spacecraft works as a way to locate the probes as they are journeying to their destination. Latency—or the different time lag of receiving radio signals on different locations of Earth—is the key way that deep space objects are located as they journey through space. This discovery was made possible during the wait times for communicating with these craft alongside the decades of data gathered from each space mission. Without the constraint of waiting, the notion of using time as a locating feature wouldn’t have been possible.
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Jason Farman (Delayed Response: The Art of Waiting from the Ancient to the Instant World)
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It is certain these people do not commit this as a crime; it is not against their own consciences reproving, or their light reproaching them; they do not know it to be an offence, and then commit it in defiance of divine justice, as we do in almost all the sins we commit. They think it no more a crime to kill a captive taken in war than we do to kill an ox; or to eat human flesh than we do to eat mutton.” When I considered this a little, it followed necessarily that I was certainly in the wrong; that these people were not murderers, in the sense that I had before condemned them in my thoughts, any more than those Christians were murderers who often put to death the prisoners taken in battle; or more frequently, upon many occasions, put whole troops of men to the sword, without giving quarter, though they threw down their arms and submitted. In the next place, it occurred to me that although the usage they gave one another was thus brutish and inhuman, yet it was really nothing to me: these people had done me no injury: that if they attempted, or I saw it necessary, for my immediate preservation, to fall upon them, something might be said for it: but that I was yet out of their power, and they really had no knowledge of me, and consequently no design upon me; and therefore it could not be just for me to fall upon them; that this would justify the conduct of the Spaniards in all their barbarities practised in America, where they destroyed millions of these people; who, however they were idolators and barbarians, and had several bloody and barbarous rites in their customs, such as sacrificing human bodies to their idols, were yet, as to the Spaniards, very innocent people; and that the rooting them out of the country is spoken of with the utmost abhorrence and detestation by even the Spaniards themselves at this time, and by all other Christian nations of Europe, as a mere butchery, a bloody and unnatural piece of cruelty, unjustifiable either to God or man; and for which the very name of a Spaniard is reckoned to be frightful and terrible, to all people of humanity or of Christian compassion; as if the kingdom of Spain were particularly eminent for the produce of a race of men who were without principles of tenderness, or the common bowels of pity to the miserable, which is reckoned to be a mark of generous temper in the mind.
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Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe)
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In the spring of 1940, when the Nazis overran France from the north, much of its Jewish population tried to escape the country towards the south. In order to cross the border, they needed visas to Spain and Portugal, and together with a flood of other refugees, tens of thousands of Jews besieged the Portuguese consulate in Bordeaux in a desperate attempt to get that life-saving piece of paper. The Portuguese government forbade its consuls in France to issue visas without prior approval from the Foreign Ministry, but the consul in Bordeaux, Aristides de Sousa Mendes, decided to disregard the order, throwing to the wind a thirty-year diplomatic career. As Nazi tanks were closing in on Bordeaux, Sousa Mendes and his team worked around the clock for ten days and nights, barely stopping to sleep, just issuing visas and stamping pieces of paper. Sousa Mendes issued thousands of visas before collapsing from exhaustion. 22. Aristides de Sousa Mendes, the angel with the rubber stamp. 22.Courtesy of the Sousa Mendes Foundation. The Portuguese government – which had little desire to accept any of these refugees – sent agents to escort the disobedient consul back home, and fired him from the foreign office. Yet officials who cared little for the plight of human beings nevertheless had a deep reverence for documents, and the visas Sousa Mendes issued against orders were respected by French, Spanish and Portuguese bureaucrats alike, spiriting up to 30,000 people out of the Nazi death trap. Sousa Mendes, armed with little more than a rubber stamp, was responsible for the largest rescue operation by a single individual during the Holocaust.2 The sanctity of written records often had far less positive effects. From 1958 to 1961 communist China undertook the Great Leap Forward, when Mao Zedong wished to rapidly turn China into a superpower. Intending to use surplus grain to finance ambitious industrial projects, Mao ordered the doubling and tripling of agricultural production. From the government offices in Beijing his impossible demands made their way down the bureaucratic ladder, through provincial administrators, all the way down to the village headmen. The local officials, afraid of voicing any criticism and wishing to curry favour with their superiors, concocted imaginary reports of dramatic increases in agricultural output. As the fabricated numbers made their way back up the bureaucratic hierarchy, each official exaggerated them further, adding a zero here or there with a stroke of a pen. 23.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
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Far more damaging to Calvin’s reputation was the case of Michael Servetus. An accomplished physician, skilled cartographer, and eclectic theologian from Spain, Servetus held maverick (and sometimes unbalanced) views on many points of Christian doctrine. In 1531, he published Seven Books on the Errors of the Trinity, enraging both Catholics and Protestants, Calvin among them. At one point, Servetus took up residence in Vienne, a suburb of Lyon about ninety miles from Geneva, where, under an assumed name, he began turning out heterodox books while also practicing medicine. His magnum opus, The Restitution of Christianity—a rebuttal of Calvin’s Institutes—rejected predestination, denied original sin, called infant baptism diabolical, and further deprecated the Trinity. Servetus imprudently sent Calvin a copy. Calvin sent back a copy of his Institutes. Servetus filled its margins with insulting comments, then returned it. A bitter exchange of letters followed, in which Servetus announced that the Archangel Michael was girding himself for Armageddon and that he, Servetus, would serve as his armor-bearer. Calvin sent Servetus’s letters to a contact in Vienne, who passed them on to Catholic inquisitors in Lyon. Servetus was promptly arrested and sent to prison, but after a few days he escaped by jumping over a prison wall. After spending three months wandering around France, he decided to seek refuge in Naples. En route, he inexplicably stopped in Geneva. Arriving on a Saturday, he attended Calvin’s lecture the next day. Though disguised, Servetus was recognized by some refugees from Lyon and immediately arrested. Calvin instructed one of his disciples to file capital charges against him with the magistrates for his various blasphemies. After a lengthy trial and multiple examinations, Servetus was condemned for writing against the Trinity and infant baptism and sentenced to death. He asked to be beheaded rather than burned, but the council refused, and on October 27, 1553, Servetus, with a copy of the Restitution tied to his arm, was sent to the stake. Shrieking in agony, he took half an hour to die. Calvin approved. “God makes clear that the false prophet is to be stoned without mercy,” he explained in Defense of the Orthodox Trinity Against the Errors of Michael Servetus. “We are to crush beneath our heel all affections of nature when his honor is involved. The father should not spare the child, nor the brother his brother, nor the husband his own wife or the friend who is dearer to him than life.
”
”
Michael Massing (Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind)
“
was lost and the other fortress was likewise lost. These two forts were besieged by seventy-five thousand Turkish regulars and more than four hundred thousand Moors and Arabs from all parts of Africa and, accompanying this vast force, was an abundance of munitions and engines of war and so many sappers that, with their bare hands, they could have covered the Goleta and the half-built fortress with just a handful of earth each. The Goleta, until then accounted to be impregnable, was the first to be lost, and it was not taken through any default of valor of its defenders who, in its defense did all they could do or ought to have done, but because experience had shown with what ease entrenchments might be dug in that desert sand. Though water had, at one time, been found sixteen inches below the surface, the Turks did not find any at a depth of two yards. And, therefore, filling many sacks full of sand, they raised their earthworks so high that they did surmount the walls of the fort and, thus, they could fire at the defenders from a superior height, so that it was impossible to mount a defense. “It was the general opinion that our troops should not have shut themselves up inside the Goleta, but should have waited in the open field to meet the adversary at the place of their disembarkation. But those who say this speak from a comfortable remove and with little experience in matters of this kind. For, if in the Goleta and the other fort there were scarce seven thousand soldiers, how could so few in number, be they ever so resolute, have sallied forth into the field and, at the same time, remained inside the fortifications against so great a number of enemies? And how is it possible not to lose a fort when it is not reinforced and resupplied, especially when it is besieged by so many determined enemies fighting on their own soil? But many were of the opinion, and so it seemed to me as well, that Heaven granted Spain a special favor by permitting the destruction of that source of iniquity, that monster of insatiable appetite, that devourer of innumerable sums of money spent there unprofitably without serving any end, other than to preserve the memory of its capture by the invincible Charles V, as if those stones of the Goleta were necessary to sustain his eternal fame, as it is and forever shall be. “The other fort was also lost, but the Turks were constrained to win it inch by inch, for the soldiers who defended it fought so manfully and so resolutely that they killed more than five and twenty thousand of the enemy over the course of two and twenty general assaults. Of the three hundred of our men who were taken prisoner, not one was left without a wound, a clear and manifest sign of their valor and strength,
”
”
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (Don Quixote)
“
Gray froze as Miss Turner emerged from the hold. For weeks, she’d plagued him-by day, he suffered glimpses of her beauty; by night, he was haunted by memories of her touch. And just when he thought he’d finally wrangled his desire into submission, today she’d ruined everything.
She’d gone and changed her dress.
Gone was that serge shroud, that forbidding thundercloud of a garment that had loomed in his peripheral vision for weeks. Today, she wore a cap-sleeved frock of sprigged muslin.
She stepped onto the deck, smiling face tilted to the wind. A flower opening to greet the sun. She bobbed on her toes, as though resisting the urge to make a girlish twirl. The pale, sheer fabric of her dress billowed and swelled in the breeze, pulling the undulating contour of calf, thigh, hip into relief.
Gray thought she just might be the loveliest creature he’d ever seen.
Therefore, he knew he ought to look away.
He did, for a moment. He made an honest attempt to scan the horizon for clouds. He checked the hour on his pocket watch, wound the small knob one, two, three, four times. He wiped a bit of salt spray from its glass face. He thought of England. And France, and Cuba, and Spain. He remembered his brother, his sister, and his singularly ugly Aunt Rosamond, on whom he hadn’t clapped eyes in decades. And all this Herculean effort resulting in nothing but a fine sheen of sweat on his brow and precisely thirty seconds’ delay in the inevitable.
He looked at her again.
Desire swept through his body with starling intensity. And beneath that hot surge of lust, a deeper emotion swelled. It wasn’t something Gray wished to examine. He preferred to let it sink back into the murky depths of his being. An unnamed creature of the deep, let for a more intrepid adventurer to catalog.
Instead, he examined Miss Turner’s new frock. The fabric was of fine quality, the sprig pattern evenly stamped, without variations in shape or hue. The dressmaker had taken great pains to match the pattern at the seams. The sleeves of the frock fit perfectly square with her shoulders, in a moment of calm, the skirt’s single flounce lapped the laces of her boots. Unlike that gray serge abomination, this dress was expensive, and it had been fashioned for her alone.
But it no longer fit. As she turned, Gray noted how the neckline gaped slightly, and the column of her skirt that ought to have skimmed the swell of her hip instead caught on nothing but air.
He frowned. And in that instant, she turned to face him. Their gazes caught and held. Her own smile faded to a quizzical expression. And because Gray didn’t know how to answer the unspoken question in her eyes, and because he hated the fact that he’d banished the giddy delight from her face, he gave her a curt nod and a churlish, “Good morning.”
And then he walked away.
”
”
Tessa Dare (Surrender of a Siren (The Wanton Dairymaid Trilogy, #2))
“
Article VI No State, without the consent of the United States in Congress assembled, shall send any embassy to, or receive any embassy from, or enter into any conference, agreement, alliance or treaty with any King, Prince or State; nor shall any person holding any office of profit or trust under the United States, or any of them, accept any present, emolument, office or title of any kind whatever from any King, Prince or foreign State; nor shall the United States in Congress assembled, or any of them, grant any title of nobility. No two or more States shall enter into any treaty, confederation or alliance whatever between them, without the consent of the United States in Congress assembled, specifying accurately the purposes for which the same is to be entered into, and how long it shall continue. No State shall lay any imposts or duties, which may interfere with any stipulations in treaties, entered into by the United States in Congress assembled, with any King, Prince or State, in pursuance of any treaties already proposed by Congress, to the courts of France and Spain. No vessel of war shall be kept up in time of peace by any State, except such number only, as shall be deemed necessary by the United States in Congress assembled, for the defense of such State, or its trade; nor shall any body of forces be kept up by any State in time of peace, except such number only, as in the judgement of the United States in Congress assembled, shall be deemed requisite to garrison the forts necessary for the defense of such State; but every State shall always keep up a well-regulated and disciplined militia, sufficiently armed and accoutered, and shall provide and constantly have ready for use, in public stores, a due number of filed pieces and tents, and a proper quantity of arms, ammunition and camp equipage. No State shall engage in any war without the consent of the United States in Congress assembled, unless such State be actually invaded by enemies, or shall have received certain advice of a resolution being formed by some nation of Indians to invade such State, and the danger is so imminent as not to admit of a delay till the United States in Congress assembled can be consulted; nor shall any State grant commissions to any ships or vessels of war, nor letters of marque or reprisal, except it be after a declaration of war by the United States in Congress assembled, and then only against the Kingdom or State and the subjects thereof, against which war has been so declared, and under such regulations as shall be established by the United States in Congress assembled, unless such State be infested by pirates, in which case vessels of war may be fitted out for that occasion, and kept so long as the danger shall continue, or until the United States in Congress assembled shall determine otherwise.
”
”
Benjamin Franklin (The Articles of Confederation)
“
My identity as Jewish cannot be reduced to a religious affiliation. Professor Said quoted Gramsci, an author that I’m familiar with, that, and I quote, ‘to know thyself is to understand that we are a product of the historical process to date which has deposited an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory’. Let’s apply this pithy observation to Jewish identity. While it is tempting to equate Judaism with Jewishness, I submit to you that my identity as someone who is Jewish is far more complex than my religious affiliation. The collective inventory of the Jewish people rests on my shoulders. This inventory shapes and defines my understanding of what it means to be Jewish. The narrative of my people is a story of extraordinary achievement as well as unimaginable horror.
For millennia, the Jewish people have left their fate in the hands of others. Our history is filled with extraordinary achievements as well as unimaginable violence. Our centuries-long Diaspora defined our existential identity in ways that cannot be reduced to simple labels. It was the portability of our religion that bound us together as a people, but it was our struggle to fit in; to be accepted that identified us as unique. Despite the fact that we excelled academically, professionally, industrially, we were never looked upon as anything other than Jewish. Professor Said in his book, Orientalism, examined how Europe looked upon the Orient as a dehumanized sea of amorphous otherness. If we accept this point of view, then my question is: How do you explain Western attitudes towards the Jews? We have always been a convenient object of hatred and violent retribution whenever it became convenient.
If Europe reduced the Orient to an essentialist other, to borrow Professor Said’s eloquent language, then how do we explain the dehumanizing treatment of Jews who lived in the heart of Europe? We did not live in a distant, exotic land where the West had discursive power over us. We thought of ourselves as assimilated. We studied Western philosophy, literature, music, and internalized the same culture as our dominant Christian brethren. Despite our contribution to every conceivable field of human endeavor, we were never fully accepted as equals. On the contrary, we were always the first to be blamed for the ills of Western Europe. Two hundred thousand Jews were forcibly removed from Spain in 1492 and thousands more were forcibly converted to Christianity in Portugal four years later.
By the time we get to the Holocaust, our worst fears were realized. Jewish history and consciousness will be dominated by the traumatic memories of this unspeakable event. No people in history have undergone an experience of such violence and depth. Israel’s obsession with physical security; the sharp Jewish reaction to movements of discrimination and prejudice; an intoxicated awareness of life, not as something to be taken for granted but as a treasure to be fostered and nourished with eager vitality, a residual distrust of what lies beyond the Jewish wall, a mystical belief in the undying forces of Jewish history, which ensure survival when all appears lost; all these, together with the intimacy of more personal pains and agonies, are the legacy which the Holocaust transmits to the generation of Jews who have grown up under its shadow.
-Fictional debate between Edward Said and Abba Eban.
”
”
R.F. Georgy (Absolution: A Palestinian Israeli Love Story)
“
Sylvia and Adrienne came under Nazi scrutiny. Sylvia was warned of the imminent confiscation of her books. Adrienne was suspect for having written a condemnation of Nazism and anti-Semitism. She helped Gisèle Freund get to Buenos Aires as the guest of Victoria Ocampo, the feminist Argentine writer who founded the literary journal Sur, and in May 1940 she hid Walter Benjamin and Arthur Koestler in her apartment. Koestler, who had been imprisoned in Spain for airing anti-fascist views, was writing Darkness at Noon.
”
”
Diana Souhami (No Modernism Without Lesbians)
“
What is at stake for people around the world, from Spain and Argentina to Hungary and Poland, when they throw off dictatorship and establish a liberal democracy? To some extent, the answer is a purely negative one based on the mistakes and injustices of the preceding political order: they want to get rid of the hated colonels or party bosses who oppressed them, or to live without fear of arbitrary arrest. Those living in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union think or hope that they are getting capitalist prosperity, since capitalism and democracy are closely intertwined in the minds of many. But as we have seen, it is perfectly possible to have prosperity without freedom, as Spain, or South Korea, or Taiwan did under autocratic rule. And yet in each of these countries prosperity was not enough. Any attempt to portray the basic human impulse driving the liberal revolutions of the late twentieth century, or indeed of any liberal revolution since those of America and France in the eighteenth century, as merely an economic one, would be radically incomplete. The Mechanism created by modern natural science remains a partial and ultimately unsatisfying account of the historical process. Free government exercises a positive pull of its own: When the president of the United States or the president of France praises liberty and democracy, they are praised as good things in, themselves, and this praise seems to have resonance for people around the world.
”
”
Francis Fukuyama (The End of History and the Last Man)
“
The boy estimated that, if he worked for six more months, he could return to Spain and buy sixty sheep, and yet another sixty. In less than a year, he would have doubled his flock, and he would be able to do business with the Arabs, because he was now able to speak their strange language. Since that morning in the marketplace, he had never again made use of Urim and Thummim, because Egypt was now just as distant a dream for him as was Mecca for the merchant. Anyway, the boy had become happy in his work, and thought all the time about the day when he would disembark at Tarifa as a winner. “You must always know what it is that you want,” the old king had said. The boy knew, and was now working toward it. Maybe it was his treasure to have wound up in that strange land, met up with a thief, and doubled the size of his flock without spending a cent. He was proud of himself. He had learned some important things, like how to deal in crystal, and about the language without words . . . and about omens.
”
”
Paulo Coelho (The Alchemist)
“
España dejó tras de sí una religión e innumerables monumentos, una tradición y mucha literatura. Sobre todo, creó provincias y dominios que lograron madurar en los nuevos países independientes de América Latina. Gran Bretaña no lo hizo tan bien en Oriente Medio, África ni el Lejano Oriente. India y Pakistán son dos países en guerra; México y Argentina, no. Las guerras en América Latina son raras. En comparación con el resto del mundo, se nos antoja ahora un oasis de paz.
La presencia de la madre patria continúa siendo una fuerte influencia sobre todo en la vida literaria; y la vida literaria sobresale con fuerza en la cultura hispanoamericana. Resulta permisible preguntarse si ocurrió alguna vez el ocaso de España y el fin de su imperio cuando se visita América Latina.
”
”
Hugh Thomas (World Without End: Spain, Philip II, and the First Global Empire)
“
The author wrote it in France in 1940, just as the Vichy government was handing over Jews to the Gestapo. He finished writing just before he escaped the collaborationist government, only to commit suicide in Spain a month later. With his newly acquired monocular vision, Dan struggled, word by word, through the unsettling conclusion that one cannot look at the treasures of his society without feeling horror. Because when we look at history we only empathize with the victor, an empathy that benefits the current ruler. This ruler comes from a long line of those who’ve stepped over the stricken body of the one who came before, each an heir to a long line of violence and power. So the spoils of resources and culture get carried along in a direct procession, and it becomes difficult to contemplate any document of civilization as anything but a document of barbarism. The inevitability of progress being such a hopeless fantasy. Progress, the author warned, is ephemeral. The notion of progress lies in each successive generation’s “weak Messianic power.” How each one considers itself the conclusion of history: all who
”
”
Stephen Markley (Ohio)
“
Somebody once asked me…what I most loved about living in Spain. I pondered for a bit, considering the culture, the people, the sunshine, the architecture, the music, the cities, the landscape …But I eventually came to the conclusion that the one thing I really could not do without was having my own orange trees. Apart from the beauty of those gorgeous oranges shining from amongst the deep, dark foliage, there’s the delight of idly picking one as you pass a tree, and meditatively peeling and eating it segment by segment. [from Last Days of the Bus Club, book 4 in the Driving Over Lemons Trilogy]
”
”
Chris Stewart
“
The ‘kind’ slave owners in India, or anywhere, were always the ones who had the greatest difficulty seeing the injustice of slavery. Their kindness, their generosity compared to cruel slave owners, made them blind to the unfairness of a system of slavery that they created, they maintained, and that favored them. It’s like the British bragging about the railways, the colleges, the hospitals they left us—their ‘kindness’! As though that justified robbing us of the right to self-rule for two centuries! As though we should thank them for what they stole! Would Britain or Holland or Spain or Portugal or France be what they are now without what they earned by enslaving others? During the war, the British loved telling us how well they treated us compared to how the Japanese would treat us if they invaded. But should any nation rule over another nation? Such things only happen when one group thinks the other is inferior by birth, by skin color, by history. Inferior, and therefore deserving less.
”
”
Abraham Verghese (The Covenant of Water)
“
At school, Pablo found it hard to concentrate. Rather than completing classwork, he filled the margins of his notebook with pencil sketches of animals, birds, and people. His teacher grew exasperated with his lack of attention. She wrote a note to his mother saying: “Pablo should stop drawing in class and pay attention to his lessons.” It was clear that Pablo hated rules, and he took every opportunity to disobey them. When adults told him what to do, he did the opposite. He once got in trouble for coloring the sky a bright red instead of the “normal” blue. Pablo was often banished to the “calaboose,” a bare cell with white walls and a bench, which served as a holding pen for unruly students. “I liked it there, because I took along a sketch pad and drew incessantly,” Pablo later said. “I could have stayed there forever drawing without stopping.” He even began misbehaving on purpose so that he would be sentenced to detention and sent to the calaboose. The one person who understood that Pablo wasn’t acting out for no reason was his father. One day when Pablo’s mother caught him drawing on the wall with a nail, Don José took him to the beach to blow off steam. As Don José stretched out to take a nap, Pablo sat beside him and drew a dolphin in the wet sand. When Don José awoke, he was astonished by the beauty of his son’s drawing. “Could it be Pablo who drew this?” he wondered. That afternoon, Don José took a closer look at the image Pablo had drawn on their living room wall. What at first looked like random scratches soon took shape. Don José recognized a reindeer and a bison running away from a group of men on horseback who were armed with bows and arrows. At that moment, Don José knew what to do to get Pablo to stop misbehaving. He decided to take him into his studio and teach his son how to paint. From that day onward, Pablo and his father were inseparable art partners. In search of new subjects to portray, they began going to the bullfights. Pablo was mesmerized by the sight of the brave picadors as they charged ferocious bulls. He saw El Lagartijo—“The Lizard”—one of the most famous bullfighters in Spain, and he met Cara Ancha,
”
”
David Stabler (Kid Legends: True Tales of Childhood from the Books Kid Artists, Kid Athletes, Kid Presidents, and Kid Authors)
“
Jane Says"
Jane says
I'm done with Sergio
He treat me like a rag-doll
She hides
The television
Says I don't owe him nothing,
But if he come back again
Tell him, wait right here for me
Or
Try again tomorrow
I'm gonna kick tomorrow
I'm gonna kick tomorrow
She get mad
and she start to cry
She take a swing man
She can't hit
She don't mean no harm
She just don't know (Don't know, don't know)
What else to do about it
Jane says
Have you seen my wig around?
I feel naked without it
She knows
They all want her to go
But that's O.K. man
She don't like them anyway
Jane says
I'm going away to Spain
When I get my money saved
I'm gonna start tomorrow
I'm gonna kick tomorrow
I'm gonna kick tomorrow
Jane goes
To the store at 8:00
She walks up on St. Andrew's
She waits
And gets her dinner there
She pulls her dinner
From her pocket
Jane says
I ain't never been in love
I don't know what it is
She only knows if someone wants her
I wonder if they want me
I only know they want me
She gets mad
And she starts to cry
She takes a swing man
She can't hit!
She don't mean no harm
She just don't know (Don't know, don't know)
What else to do about it
Jane says
Jane says
Jane's Addiction, Jane's Addiction (1987)
”
”
Jane's Addiction (Best of Jane's Addiction)
“
He’d raised two daughters, whom he probably loved more than me, while I’d waited for him to return to Spain for over two decades. But he was never planning to come back, I now realized. He’d made a new life without us, discarding us like an old newspaper. What an idiot I’d been—religiously writing all those letters to him, sitting for hours
”
”
Lorena Hughes (The Spanish Daughter)
“
This included taking unprecedented steps to keep large numbers of elderly and frail patients out of intensive care wards to avoid these being overwhelmed. It would mean many patients would die without receiving the life-saving care they needed. Downing Street was anxious that critical care units should not be visibly overrun as they had been in Italy, Spain and China, where patients in the city of Wuhan were photographed dying in corridors. So a veil of secrecy was now placed over Britain’s hospitals. The publication of critical care capacity figures was suspended, which meant nobody outside the corridors of power would be able to tell whether hospitals were being overrun, and a general ban was imposed on information being passed to the media without sign-off from central command.
”
”
Jonathan Calvert (Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle with Coronavirus)
“
Would Britain or Holland or Spain or Portugal or France be what they are now without what they earned by enslaving others? During the war, the British loved telling us how well they treated us compared to how the Japanese would treat us if they invaded.
”
”
Abraham Verghese (The Covenant of Water)
“
It is strange that Switzerland, an independent state in the middle of continental Europe, freely provides Swiss passports to descendants of people from far-off places without background checks or any sort of probationary period. They only need to submit their photos and fingerprints, and a Swiss passport will arrive in the mail a few weeks later, in Barcelona or anywhere, seemingly without much consideration.
Considering the Nazi vibes and the Nazi Gestapo methods used by Israeli, Spanish, British, Hungarian, South American and Italian criminals above it is pretty surreal. Disrespectful.
I wondered what Martina was hiding and why Argentina and her family had sent her away at the age of twenty. Did Switzerland wonder who Martina or her brother really were? In Adam Maraudin’s mafia the exact same time.
Based on this, Switzerland could even grant Swiss passports upon request to the grandchildren of Nazi war criminals. Would it be so surprising, a few decades later, they had resorted to Nazi tactics as they returned to Europe and landed in Spain, their former conquistador's land (by Argentine perspective, to be revenged) in the EU.
”
”
Tomas Adam Nyapi
“
It is strange that Switzerland, an independent state in the middle of continental Europe, freely provides Swiss passports to descendants of people from far-off places without background checks or any sort of probationary period. They only need to submit their photos and fingerprints, and a Swiss passport will arrive in the mail a few weeks later, in Barcelona or anywhere, seemingly without much consideration.
Considering the Nazi vibes and the Nazi Gestapo methods used by Israeli, Spanish, British, Hungarian, South American and Italian criminals above it is pretty surreal. Disrespectful.
I wondered what Martina was hiding and why Argentina and her family had sent her away at the age of twenty. Did Switzerland wonder who Martina or her brother really were? In Adam Maraudin’s mafia the exact same time.
Based on this, Switzerland could even grant Swiss passports upon request to the grandchildren of Nazi war criminals. Would it be so surprising, a few decades later, they had resorted to Nazi tactics as they returned to Europe and landed in Spain, their former conquistador's land (by Argentine perspective, to deliver revenge) in the EU?
”
”
Tomas Adam Nyapi (BARCELONA MARIJUANA MAFIA)
“
It is strange that Switzerland, an independent state in the middle of continental Europe, freely provides Swiss passports to descendants of people from far-off places without background checks or any sort of probationary period. They only need to submit their photos and fingerprints, and a Swiss passport will arrive in the mail a few weeks later, in Barcelona or anywhere, seemingly without much consideration.
Considering the Nazi vibes and the Nazi Gestapo methods used by Israeli, Spanish, British, Hungarian, South American and Italian criminals above it is pretty surreal. Disrespectful.
I wondered what Martina was hiding and why Argentina and her family had sent her away at the age of twenty. Did Switzerland wonder who Martina or her brother really were? Organizing lethal crimes, partaking in Adam Maraudin’s Israeli Nazi cocaine mafia the exact same time whilst becoming "Swiss" and "Europeans."
Based on this, Switzerland could even grant Swiss passports upon request to the grandchildren of Nazi war criminals. Would it be so surprising, a few decades after grandpa's escape from Justice, they had resorted to Nazi tactics as they returned to Europe and landed in Spain, (by Argentine perspective, their former conquistador's land) to deliver revenge in the EU?
”
”
Tomas Adam Nyapi (BARCELONA MARIJUANA MAFIA)
“
It is strange that Switzerland, an independent state in the middle of continental Europe, freely provides Swiss passports to descendants of people from far-off places without background checks or any sort of probationary period. They only need to submit their photos and fingerprints, and a Swiss passport will arrive in the mail a few weeks later, in Barcelona or anywhere, seemingly without much consideration.
Considering the Nazi vibes and the Nazi Gestapo methods used by Israeli, Spanish, British, Hungarian, South American and Italian criminals above it is pretty surreal. Disrespectful.
I wondered what Martina was hiding and why Argentina and her family had sent her away at the age of twenty. Did Switzerland wonder who Martina or her brother really were? Organizing lethal crimes, partaking in Adam Maraudin’s Israeli Nazi cocaine mafia the exact same time whilst becoming "Swiss" and "Europeans".
Switzerland is granting Swiss passports upon request on demand to the grandchildren of Nazi war criminals. Would it be so surprising, a few decades after grandpa's escape from Justice, they had resorted to Nazi tactics as they returned to Europe and landed in Spain, (by Argentine perspective, their former conquistador's land) to deliver revenge in the EU?
”
”
Tomas Adam Nyapi (BARCELONA MARIJUANA MAFIA)
“
It is strange that Switzerland, an independent state in the middle of continental Europe, freely provides Swiss passports to descendants of people from far-off places without background checks or any sort of probationary period. They only need to submit their photos and fingerprints, and a Swiss passport will arrive in the mail a few weeks later, in Barcelona or anywhere, seemingly without much consideration.
Considering the Nazi vibes and the Nazi Gestapo methods used by Israeli, Spanish, British, Hungarian, South American and Italian criminals above it is pretty surreal. Disrespectful towards the victims of Nazi criminals.
I wondered what Martina was hiding and why Argentina and her family had sent her away at the age of twenty. Did Switzerland wonder who Martina or her brother really were? Organizing lethal crimes, partaking in Adam Maraudin’s Israeli Nazi cocaine mafia the exact same time whilst becoming "Swiss" and "Europeans".
Switzerland is granting Swiss passports upon request on demand to the grandchildren of Nazi war criminals. Would it be so surprising, a few decades after grandpa's escape from Justice, they had resorted to Nazi tactics as they returned to Europe and landed in Spain, (by Argentine perspective, their former conquistador's land) to deliver revenge in the EU?
”
”
Tomas Adam Nyapi (BARCELONA MARIJUANA MAFIA)
“
Tomas thinks he is the Prince of Hungary” - Why would Adam say that to Martina? That wasn't the right question I kept asking myself. Did Adam say that to Martina or someone else? Was it meant as a message to me? How in what kind of conversation could it be said like that and why? What was Adam referring to when he said “The Prince of Hungary”? I was arguing with Rachel and Adam over the summer before. I challenged their belief that the UK was victorious in World War II and they were both puzzled, asking why. I tried to convince them by telling them the story of an Austrian Jewish lady who had migrated to the UK before the Anschluss and sensed that Nazi forces were approaching, but the UK denied her documents to stay and she ended up stuck between the Nazis in France and the UK on the Channel islands. The Nazis took all Jews from the islands, including Therese Steiner, and she ultimately ended up in Auschwitz and in the gas chambers. My point was that if the UK didn't defend its own citizens to avoid conflict, then how could they be seen as 'winners'? Who was the Jew here who was stuck between good and evil? I didn't realise that Adam in 2014 was trying to disprove my point, gaining victory without direct confrontation.
Perhaps he was offended that I cared more about a poor, lonely Jewish girl trying to escape death and horrors than he would have cared himself.
”
”
Tomas Adam Nyapi
“
I was standing by the car when two police officers showed up in the alley, very interested in me and the BMW in an alley where car traffic was not allowed at all, sitting there with a Belgian plate tag in the middle of the coffeeshop district, with me, the Hungarian guy, leaning to it smoking a cigarette, obviously waiting for something to happen. They began to examine my IDs and started searching the car. They were looking for drugs, apparently. I had been dealing with them for a few minutes when Adam showed up at the end of the alley. I was the only one looking that way, seeing Adam walking to turn into the alley; the two officers were too busy to notice what I had witnessed. The moment Adam looked up and noticed the officers around me, the moment he was about to turn right towards us into the alley, he made a 180-degree turn, the way a bad kid would do when playing hide and seek. Catching his steps the way Mr. Bean or Benny Hill would do—I could almost hear the music too—was both very funny and very concerning. He was too stupid to be a criminal; he was such a lame criminal that he didn't even think of walking past the alley's entrance like nothing happened instead of turning around and acting so suspiciously and obviously being in the wrong. I began to wonder how the coffeeshop business would work out with this guy if he was suddenly on cocaine all the time before we even opened the club? How would not he get me in trouble when there would be kilograms of marijuana and tons of cash flying around? How could I ever quit this job even if we could manage to run the place and get rich over the next 2-3 years? How would I ever get rid of this embarrassing, childish, dangerously silly criminal guy?
By some miracle, in the car—which was used by these junkies and was usually full of smoking accessories—the cops didn't find a cigarette paper either, although they were very, very thorough. Belgian BMW wagon with a Hungarian guy, in an alley in the area full of marijuana clubs. They were sure they had me now, that they would be rewarded for such a catch. But there was nothing in the car.
I was able to show them Rachel's Belgian registration and everything, explaining that she was my girlfriend who was in Belgium at that time and we were both working for a company selling smoking accessories; I gave them my business card. I apologized for parking there and even driving into that alley with the car.
They fined me regardless. Before we started dealing with the marijuana behalf my name, we were collecting fines attributed to Adam on my name. Talk about being cheap. Apparently, he had started growing a lot of marijuana without my knowledge in a place he did not want me to find out about.
As I was driving back to Urgell, we were both very silent. I was calm but he was anxious and I could almost hear the gears spinning in his mind. Perhaps at the same moment, we both realized that if I got arrested for any reason and ended up in jail, Adam could keep the 33% profit of the coffeeshop which I had signed up for and which belonged to me.
‘Thinking quickly. Acting quicker.’
Never quick enough. The sneaker.
Adam was usually very slow,
whether he was high or low.
”
”
Tomas Adam Nyapi (BARCELONA MARIJUANA MAFIA)
“
Ferran was not as mad the next day; he even cracked a smile and seemed to be normal. Nice to Martina. He had brought a pair of glasses for Adam, made in Israel, and asked me to make sure that I gave them into his hands. He said he would not be able to see without them.
I wish I had known that I was supposed to break those glasses.
Interestingly, Ferran also handed me Adam's brand new Israeli passport, although Adam had not been in Israel for over 10 years. The signature in Adam Maraudin's Israeli passport was the same signature as the letter “L” in Tom Titelany's French passport, which I had photocopy of. How did they do that without Adam entering Israel or sitting in a jail in Israel? It must be: “Magic.”
Martina was reading a book, George Orwell's 1984, in the store. One of my favorite books of all time. One of my favorite authors of all time. The strange thing was only that Martina should have read it before in high school. In Hungary, it was part of the curriculum, being a crucial piece. To recognize the Evil and terror in all its forms and shapes.
She was so cute, reading in wintertime Barcelona, in Urgell, that I couldn’t just watch her; I had to interrupt her and kiss her from time to time, as I checked up on her while working in the office and the storage during the day when I stopped by. Poor baby, she was bored. Somehow like Sabrina had been, arriving in the same rhythm at the end of summer, with not much to do in wintertime Barcelona.
But. Drugs. And. For. Some. Reason. In. Secret. Behind. My. Back. With. Strangers.
I didn't consider how it would sound when I told Martina Sabrina's story - how she had fallen so low, becoming unemployed, sleeping with strangers, and indulging in drugs and alcohol. It didn't come across as a success story at all. I thought.
“The Dream of Venus” by Salvador Dali.
Also, Martina had come from the Southern hemisphere at the end of winter there, and had arrived in the Northern hemisphere when winter started here. She was in the middle of her personal year-long winter, reading so cutely with her cute glasses in the dark Urgell store upstairs with Pinto cat. Martina was wearing glasses for reading only; they had a cute frame. She seemed like she was just waiting for something to happen, almost as if she was waiting for Santa Claus to arrive.
And I should have been listening to my instincts, because that was precisely what was happening, what she was doing - waiting for Santa to appear.
”
”
Tomas Adam Nyapi (BARCELONA MARIJUANA MAFIA)
“
- Can you keep secrets?
- Yesss.
- We are going to make one of the biggest coffeeshops in Barcelona with my boss, Adam.
- Realllllly?
- This Adam guy is kind of my friend and kind of my boss, but I don't trust him; he is a bad guy. “Bad to the bone.” His father is an even darker figure. I am pretty sure that both have killed before, hired to kill people.
- I am from Buenos Airessss.
- I understand honey but you don’t know this kind of people, these f…g desert roses.
- There are Jewish people in Argentina too.
- I am sure, baby, but these are not regular Jewish people, not regular Israeli people. These people are dark. Hocus-pocus. Criminal minds. Do you understand?
- I guessss.
- There are a lot of criminals in this town. They will try to take our club away, just like the Camorra is taking away other people's clubs. Just like that. Do you understand?
- Yessss.
- I know them; they are one of my clients. If there is anyone in the world who could make a deal with them, it would be me and Adam. He cannot cross me and I cannot cross him either. I would never do that. I am not sure about him though what is on his mind, I can tell there is something he is orchestrating I just don’t know what exactly, but he is as fishy as Sabrina. The problem is that only my ex-girlfriend knows about my signature on the non-profit organization, which is the base of the coffeeshop, the marijuana grow and the smoker club. Do you understand?
- Yesssss.
- We are talking about millions of Euros monthly cashflow. Do you understand?
- Yesssss.
- By telling you everything now, you are becoming my trusted; your life is in danger too if they manage to find a gap between us. Do you understand?
- Yesssss.
- I'm not sure what they're up to. They owe me already more money than anyone in this town would murder for. Do you understand?
- Yesssss.
- Now you know about it, too. Sabrina didn't care; she didn't think I would make it happen. She doesn’t know about the place. Only you know about it and us. But she will figure it out somehow; she will try to take your position, slipping between the criminals. Do you know how to play chess?
- Not really.
- OK then. Imagine this as a throne, these chairs you are sitting on top of. OK. No one can remove you from this throne being my girlfriend, no one can stand between us. No one can take the club away from us. They have no chance. Understand?
- Yesss.
- As long as you stick with me, she cannot do anything; no one can mess with us. Do you understand?
- Yesss.
- Everyone in the world would try to take your place, being my girlfriend, and they will try to push you out from this position, which only me I can give you, with Love. They will tell you lies about me and about themselves who’s club is it. Do you understand?
- Yes. But why?
- Because Rachel and Tom, the other two founding members of the club, Golan, I signed up with, are Adam's puppets. I don't trust any one of them. If they kill me, they never have to pay me what they owe me already, plus they can keep the 33% of the club which belongs to me. 100% Adam would keep. Do you understand now?
- Yessss.
- We will pull all the trash out and remodel the place without any permit, under the rug, in secret.
- I sssseeee. (Eye. See.)
”
”
Tomas Adam Nyapi (BARCELONA MARIJUANA MAFIA)
“
I took a black and white photograph, which I also posted on Instagram. Her New Balance shoes and her feet crossed, hanging as she sat atop the pile of aluminum chairs, against the backdrop of the many legs of the chairs shining in the street lights in contrast to her dark shoes and leggings, were so captivating. There was a lightness in the way she sat there with her crossed legs dangling, as if she was perched on a cloud and it was the most natural thing as she was my angel. I was still unsure if she really existed or if I had only made her up with Pinto cat one night. It was all like a lucid dream. I was so glad for us and for us becoming rich soon too. I was so glad I could provide her with a future in Europe. I was so glad we would be rich and happy and we would be able to make all our dreams come true and travel the world freely together. I can show her Italy and Hungary and Europe. We can pick where do we want to live or make family.
I knew all my life, all my work had led to this girl, this moment, and this future. Ours.
She started to rap in Spanish in the Rioplatense dialect as I started to record her. „Loco, loco…” - she was so cute, it sounded like she had learned it on the streets of Buenos Aires, skipping school. She was amazing - so young, so true, so natural and pure and cute. I couldn't get enough of her. I wanted to make kids with her. With only her. Nobody else.
By the wall of the church and the bar tables, there were a bunch of metal mobile railings with the Ajuntamiento de Barcelona logo in the middle of each of them. I told Martina to squat down to the level of the Ajuntamiento sign, and before I could finish my sentence, she was already doing it. She posed with the mobile railings, making a funny, cool and happy face while squeezing the Ajuntamiento logo between two of her fingers and pointing at it with her other hand, as if we were mocking the authorities of the Ajuntamiento. She was reading my mind. Like she knew magic.
She was such a good girl. She was so pretty, smart and sexy.
She was smiling, biting her lower lip, excited, turned on, and in love, I thought, looking like a bunny, or like Whitney Houston on the Brazilian live concert video, so I began to call her “Bunny”. I showed her how Whitney was smiling the same way. I was so blind to see the connection. (“The Cocaine Queen”)
I was so much in love with her, so under her spell, I just really wanted her to be the One, I guess.
I explained to her that the Camorra was one of my costumers and they had a club close by too and they were taking away other people's coffeeshops, menacing their lives and their families'.
I explained to her that we were going to do all demolition and remodeling without any permit, without telling a word to anyone. I told her that we would lie to the residents of the building above us about what we were going to do there for months and months. I told her that she must keep it as our secret. She was nodding happily and she seemed happy that I trusted her. I explained everything to her, I told her about Rachel and Tom and I signing the founding document at Amina's office at the beginning of the same year, 2013. She seemed to understand the weight of all I told her and the reasons why I told her about it all, so she would know, so she wouldn't make a mistake saying the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time. I asked her to pay attention to her surroundings in Barcelona from then on, as there were a lot of criminals, and she was a very pretty girl - not only my girlfriend. She seemed to take it as a privilege to be my girlfriend, and she seemed eternally happy, as was I. I told her that she was the only person I fully trusted.
I wanted to send the video of Martina rapping on WhatsApp to Adam, but Martina told me I shouldn't because it was late and, at the end, Adam was my boss. “Yeah but he is not really my boss, in Spain, I am the boss.
”
”
Tomas Adam Nyapi
“
The marks and wounds from the attack on the 8th of January were changing colors over time. There was still a large graze on my lower back or hip, caused either by flying backwards and falling on the asphalt or possibly a kick or another. I wasn't sure. Over the course of a few weeks, I saw the bruise change colors from purple to black to blue to green, yellow. I sent a picture of it to Martina, along with a depiction of how skinny and sad I had become. I had lost my appetite and had no desire to eat. Since months. I was filled with thoughts of wanting to end all this, unable to imagine living without her, without us, our joy. I struggled to eat, live, and breathe without our love. To this day. My depression (was and is) severe, and I looked like a survivor from a death camp. Just like today.
A Prisoner of War. Marked for Death. And I knew Martina was not looking any better, „Missing.” „In Action.”
Her words were echoing in my head, in the apartment full of death and violence, (Satan) with invisible marks in plain sight, (Evil Eye) everywhere.
One such mark of terror (Hell) and the one-sided wars, all the violence and foolish hatred, (Psychopathy) was the missing glass from the bedroom door, broken by Martina, (Golem) which was why I could clearly hear the couple having sex in our bedroom even with the doors closed. Even near the washing machine, at the other end of the apartment.
In the kitchen, I noticed a small bouquet of flowers I had bought for Martina on the first days. I had purchased it from a very old lady in the underground near the Universitat metro station. As I looked at it, still stuck to the wall, I realized it had been there for a year.
I sent her a picture of it and, to my surprise, she replied. She told me she loved me and wanted us to be happy. She said we should get a cat and that she wanted to see me and have me bring her the tiny bouquet of flowers. Not her blender from the kitchen, not her shoes, not her bathrobe, not the large images on the wall. Just the tiny flower. It seemed fishy that once again, I wouldn't come back home alive if I went to see her and give her those tiny flowers.
And I was Vincent van Gogh now.
”
”
Tomas Adam Nyapi (BARCELONA MARIJUANA MAFIA)
“
The Treasury of Spain informed me that the companies (the criminals) had 365 days to pay me my missing salary of 60,000 Euros, according to an official court decision made in Madrid. However, I was well aware that this would only escalate the danger for both Martina and me. I knew they would not fulfill their payment obligations. They would seek cheaper methods to evade payment and would also attempt to eliminate me without facing any consequences.
I was unsure whom to turn to for help. Should I ask the King of Spain, or the leaders of Israel, Brussels, Hungary, Interpol, or the Policia Nacional? How could I protect Martina from these criminals? How could I dismantle Adam's mafia?
These thoughts were weighing heavily on my mind as my anticipated final departure from Spain drew near.
I received a letter, from Zaragoza. The letter informed me that I owed Zaragoza approximately 1800 euros for fines accrued by Adam. It also mentioned that it had been around 1.5 years since the incident on the highway, where I received fines while I was driving the gypsy caravan. Late fees were added without question. Make it 2000. Additionally, it warned that if I failed to make payment within 15 days of receiving the letter in my mailbox, the authorities would visit me with a court order to seize belongings of mine worth at least 1800 euros.
Someone disclosed my „new” address to the Zaragoza Authorities. It is possible that the Correo/Post Office/Postal Service were unable to deliver their correspondence to my previous address on Carrer Cantabria due to my absence after the same expo where the fines were incurred on the highway and the unwanted flooding of the apartment. But now. Delivered.
It is possible that the biased Catalan Court, which was known by my side at this point for its corruption and/or incompetence, shared my Barcelona address with the Correo/Postal Service to ensure that the fines reached me. The corrupt and/or incompetent Ciutat de la Justicia, the so called „City of Justice”, the Catalan judicial system did not solely reserve the sharing of my home address for the mafia/s.
Everything was not a direct result of the criminals’ conspiracy. But.
”
”
Tomas Adam Nyapi (BARCELONA MARIJUANA MAFIA)
“
„Dear Fernandamama,
I need to borrow some quick cash from you, about 900 Euros to be honest. This f...g Adam guy’s fines arrived on my name.
He is paying your children and drugging them, this f...g godless Israeli criminal, with his f...g junkie friends and family, influencing your children is not good for our health, Fernandamama.
You know. The coffeeshop. On my name.
This f...g Adam guy is the reason why Martina is gone and the f...g coffeeshop, huh? I should have killed him when I had the chances, what do you say, Fernanda? Your silence tells me odes, Fernandamama since weeks if not months. Meaning, you know better if I should have taken care of Adam on time and closed the club last summer when you came to visit „us.” I need to pay for these Zaragoza fines Adam collected for my name Fernanda. I need my money to give it away to the landlord so that Martina has a home. You know, without my coffeeshop on my name. I hope you understand.
I pay you back just like the 6-800 you landed us earlier. If Martina allows me to contact you, if I wasn’t a ghost in Barcelona made believe. You know.
Thanks.
Cheers, Tomas
”
”
Tomas Adam Nyapi (BARCELONA MARIJUANA MAFIA)
“
Portugal and Spain were not eligible for association in the 1960s. Their regimes were incompatible with the EC, for which only democratic countries were suitable partners; and Portugal had already in 1960 become a founder member of the Efta, which Britain had promoted in reaction to the establishment of the EEC and which, being confined to a purely trading relationship, was not so concerned about the political complexion of its members. So when democracy replaced dictatorship in the 1970s, both Iberian countries negotiated entry into the EEC without any prior form of association. This was one reason why the negotiations were protracted, with entry achieved only in 1986.
”
”
Simon Usherwood (The European Union: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
“
Now she was trying to act that she was mad at her because I got hurt but I could see that she didn’t even put effort in acting or asking around or about what happened or where does it hurt. Which again just kept giving her away more and more minute after minute, I could see Adam laughing behind Martina’s stupidity with Sabrina and I really wanted to finally wake her up to reality from their nightmarish spell.
Now she wanted another shot of cognac. She held the empty glass, asking for more without saying a word. Again, very telling. She knew now if she spoke a word she would give herself away even more. Why was she so mad at Sabrina in fact? I grabbed the bottle from the freezer, poured her another shot, and she gulped it down. I left the frosty bottle of cognac on the table and she was playing with the frost with one hand while she held her other hand up in the air. She was fixated with her eyes, her head leaned over the table; she was just staring at the frost on the bottle that she was scratching off with her nails, gazing at it with Evil Eyes.
It was as if she were truly possessed. And. She was.
”
”
Tomas Adam Nyapi (BARCELONA MARIJUANA MAFIA)
“
Sabrina surely had one dead ex-boyfriend on her record.
But did Martina have a deceased ex-boyfriend in her past too?
Biggie’s words swirled in my head, mixing with the reality I faced:
’Sabrina reminding me of Lil Cease with her crocodile teeth,
the warpath we rode apart and together, our laughter,
our tears—my tears, their laughter—the player haters,
the cocaine-snorting bitches, the cats with no dough,
try to play me at my show, pull up and crack doors,
short-change bitches with 5 to 20 euro notes
not enough to powder their beak and nose. They still tickle me,
Sabrina and them midgets cripple me, make me as hard as Martina's nipples be,
I'm sour like a pickle be. You disobey the rules.
Now the year’s new and I want my spot back; fake two,
all the planes I flew, all the bitches I went through, mothersnuggers mad, cause I’m blue,
bitches envy us, too many bitches in my club
guard your dogs before I stick you for your re-up,
maniacs put my name in raps,
living by hugs from fake friends,
your whole life you live sneaky,
you burn when you creep me,
you slipping try to break me,
living by my love, hating me,
they like to hustle backward,
Acid rain, Cadillac Fleetwood
look what you made me do,
you made me and my girl Marine blue
make you, open the safe too’
Della Reese had been on my mind since a while as if she wanted to tell me something a wisdom she wanted to share with me.
The lyrics and the words the bad people played mindgames with me kept mixing up in my head.
’Maniacs put my name in raps;
the club is dead without me
they can hustle only backwards
with all the beef against me.
Blunt wraps and Dutchies,
all the smoking accessories;
they can't touch me. One third is on me.
Martina's butt a public touchy-touchy.
My enemies holding their cats shaky.
Sabrina is dead or alive, her ghost is under me.
”
”
Tomas Adam Nyapi (BARCELONA MARIJUANA MAFIA)
“
Her mother bought her a burgundy pair of VANS summer shoes in Italy, and they took a picture of her laughing happily while holding them in her hand in an exaggerated scene, as if they had been teasing him to take a picture of her for her boyfriend in a park somewhere in Italy.
Shortly after, she started wearing them in Barcelona and cut off the tiny VANS logo with a scissor. When I asked her why, she tried to avoid answering at first until she said something like she didn't like it, or that they looked better without the tiny black VANS logos. It was suspicious that someone must have told her the urban legend in Barcelona soon after her Italian vacation, that VANS stands for „Vans Are Nazi Shoes.” It became more and more obvious in Barcelona that my life was in danger, as an awful vibe surrounded us due to the construction.
It was mostly caused by rich tourists who I had never seen do much work in life, too high to take on a task as simple as changing a password on a bank account on an iPhone app – a crime organisation, quite international already and increasingly so, with a growing number of participants and secrets becoming more and more dangerous, I thought, and I wasn’t wrong, I just couldn’t see the whole picture yet as I was blindfolded. As if her nickname, Stupid Bunny which she had printed out at Ample Store with Adam, was a cute, nice thing, a reassurance after the day before she had been crying for some unknown reason and printing out the phrase, “You never loved me, you just broke my heart.” That couldn't have been further from the truth. She would fidget around and draw at home, and I didn't realise she was bored of being with me when she had so many other options in her mind because of what others had fed her, as if I was a monogamist who wouldn’t forgive her for cheating or making a mistake. Even if I had seen her, when she showed up at home she seemed in love with herself, watching herself in the mirror in her new tight, short shorts. It was weird. I had noticed something strange in Martina for a while now and I couldn’t put my finger on it. I thought it was only the drugs she was secretly doing behind my back, but I was far away from having all the answers.
”
”
Tomas Adam Nyapi (BARCELONA MARIJUANA MAFIA)
“
It seemed as if doggystyle was her favorite position because she couldn't see who was behind her. She kept playing Snoop Dogg's song, “What's My Name?”. It seemed as if she was referring to my signature being forged and still being on the club and she knew perfectly. As if she was referring to all the dogs eager to breed in the video running after something after someone had let them out. As Snoop Dogg is magically transforming into a Doberman dog in the music video, just like the kind of dogs the Nazis had.
I just realize Martina’s dog, Chicha was all black and her cat Anouki was all black too, just like the night Sky, just like the dark, empty, cold Space. The total darkness the canvas, on which our planet is just a pinhead. This rock. This sizzling rock. Spinning. Turning. Leaning. Following the Sun. Lost in the infinite nothingness. Ain’t like a balloon which has nothing inside. All the nothing is outside, all the cold and dark and wide and empty and vile. All the dark forces all the nights, all the known universe and beyond, is located here, inside. Iron comes from Outer Space, it is not a local material on this planet. Each one of us has iron inside a “kickstart-molecule” located in our hearts. Without iron, there would be no life. Are we locals on this planet? To what degree? Since when?
I noticed three members of the Camorra in our street and the street parallel to it, casually passing by. I even nodded to one or two of them, since we already knew each other from the club where I hadn't been since Adam and I had our disagreement. Later that night, while I was waiting for Martina in vain, I noticed two to three of the Camorra's soldiers living a few houses down our street. From the rooftop, and our bedroom that was higher than theirs, I could see into their living room.
I couldn't help but wonder whether this was a mere coincidence, or if Adam and Martina had found our new home together, hanging out in Nico’s store, and so we moved on the Mountain of Jews, on purpose, perhaps, knowing that the Camorra’s men were living almost right in front of us. No accidents.
When I told Martina about the Camorra’s guys living across the street, Martina couldn’t have cared less.
It was almost as if she never considered her life being in danger in Barcelona, Europe, but only mine. I had felt before like Adam had used my skin to make money, while I was the one walking around the streets, spotting tourists usually having fun, not thinking about how I was working hard to make their “unreachable” happiness come true. This time, however, I felt both stuck in our home, feeling helpless to make Martina happy and the outside world offered her much better chances to have fun and find a rich guy or any other smoker club manager with her beauty.
”
”
Tomas Adam Nyapi (BARCELONA MARIJUANA MAFIA)
“
It was uncertain how seriously the police would take the situation, or if I could expect much defence from the law in Spain, where my lawyer had already betrayed me for some reason due to the same coffeeshop, rather working with the mafia.
Amina and Nico might have been involved with the Camorra next door, however, their affiliation was uncertain even after multiple attempts to connect their names further. I had notes back home on the table connecting the criminals and their hubs. I was writing to uncover what I knew happened. To discover what I knew.
Perhaps it was a mistake to withhold any information from those two officers regarding the coffeeshop. It's possible that I should have informed them that Ruan was working for individuals who intended to use my identity to operate one of the largest, if not the largest, coffeeshops in town. The club was located in the Port of Ciutat Vella, where the Camorra had seemingly established a monopoly since 2014. I was still unsure if Adam, Sabrina, Nico, Amina, and the others had already made a deal with them or not. Yet.
She had keys to my home and I had been unable to sleep for weeks already. She had my IDs. I was unsure and concerned as to why she would take them, what was her purpose? If I died somehow and I had no documents, it would be a longer process to identify me. That means more time to sell marijuana behalf my name and get rich.
How can one identify a body without any IDs or with missing fingerprints? By examining dental records.
Who was the individual inside the circle? The circle within the circle? The Eye within the Eye? The focal point of the wheelcart? With all the spikes pointing towards it. Who was the fictitious Robin Hood, the Boss of their nasty and drug-addicted mafia?
”
”
Tomas Adam Nyapi (BARCELONA MARIJUANA MAFIA)
“
Most of the time Mexicans use the word “gringo” without much malice. (Gabacho is the insulting word in Mexico for gringo; in Spain, it is a way of rubbishing a French person.)
”
”
Paul Theroux
“
Who were these people who were Nico's friends at that club? It seemed like an Italian-Spanish coffeeshop. I'm not sure, it was quite far from downtown in a pretty hidden location. I don't remember the name of the club or the street, but if I drive from Urgell I can find it. I took a few pictures outside the reception area while we were waiting outside with Adam to be allowed to enter after being registered as club members. They took our entry into the almost empty private club very seriously, unlike my girlfriend selling weed in their dispensary at age 20, when I just gave her a job elsewhere.
The pictures I took were of two skateboards hanging on the wall next to each other. They were spray-painted with smiling devilish faces, the comedy and tragedy masks.
(„Sock and buskin: The sock and buskin are two ancient symbols of comedy and tragedy. In ancient Greek theatre, actors in tragic roles wore a boot called a buskin (Latin cothurnus). The actors with comedic roles wore only a thin-soled shoe called a sock (Latin soccus).” – Source: Wikipedia)
There was another skateboard hanging on the wall, showing the devil smiling with his eyes and teeth and horns only visible in the darkness of the artwork. I doubt they were Italians – they were rather Spaniards – but I never really met anyone else from there besides Nico and Carulo. But I trusted Carulo; he was different. Carulo was a known person in Catalonia.
He was known to be the person who was sitting in the Catalan Parliament and rolled a joint and lit it up, smoking during a session as a protest against the law prohibiting marijuana growing and smoking in Spain. Nico told me when he introduced me to Carulo in the summer of 2013, almost a year earlier: “This is the guy you can thank for being able to smoke freely in Catalonia without the police bothering you. Tomas, meet Carulo.”
He never really ordered from me if I had met him before. He had no traffic; his growshop was always closed. He was only smoking inside with his younger brother, who was always walking his bull terrier.
Their white Bull Terrier was female, half the size of Chico, but she was kind of crazy; you could see in her eyes that she was not normal; she had mental issues. At least, looking into Carulo's eyes and his brother's eyes, I recognized the similar illness in their dog's eyes.
In 2014, it had been over four years since I had been working with dogs in my secondary job interpreting Italian and travelling every fifth weekend.
Additionally, Huns came to Europe with their animals, including their dogs. There are at least nine unique Hungarian dog breeds.
”
”
Tomas Adam Nyapi (BARCELONA MARIJUANA MAFIA)
“
For the first time she understood her mother's fear of poverty. Money bought freedom; without it one could never be free. In Spain she could live luxuriously and wear beautiful clothes, but she belonged to Maria. If she returned to Cleveland she faced a different kind of imprisonment - marriage to some third-rate man who would also demand the use of her body. Whichever way you looked at it, without money, you were someone's captive.
”
”
Jacqueline Susann (Valley of the Dolls)
“
From the Bridge” by Captain Hank Bracker
The Hurricane of 1502
In the time before hurricanes were understood or modern methods of detection and tracking were available, people were frequently caught off guard by these monstrous storms. One of these times was on June 29, 1502. What had started as another normal day in the Caribbean turned into the devastation of a fleet of 30 ships, preparing to sail back to Spain laden with gold and other treasures from the New World. Without the benefit of a National Weather Service, mariners had to rely on their own knowledge and understanding of atmospheric conditions and the sea. Sensing that one of these storms was approaching, Columbus sought shelter for his ships near the Capitol city of Santo Domingo along the southern coast of Hispaniola, now known as the Dominican Republic. The following is taken from page 61 of the author’s award winning book, The Exciting Story of Cuba.
“Columbus was aware of dangerous weather indicators that were frequently a threat in the Caribbean during the summer months. Although the barometer had not yet been invented, there were definitely other telltale signs of an approaching hurricane.
Had the governor listened to Columbus’ advice and given him some leeway, he could have saved the convoy that was being readied for a return trans-Atlantic crossing. Instead, the new inexperienced governor ordered the fleet of over 30 caravels, laden, heavy with gold, to set sail for Spain without delay. As a result, it is estimated that 20 of these ships were sunk by this violent storm, nine ran aground and only the Aguja, which coincidently carried Columbus’ gold, survived and made it back to Spain safely. The ferocity of the storm claimed the lives of five hundred souls, including that of the former governor Francisco de Bobadilla.
Many of the caravels that sank during this hurricane were ships that were part of the same convoy that Ovando had traveled with from Spain to the West Indies. However he felt about this tragedy, which could have been prevented, he continued as the third Governor of the Indies until 1509, and became known for his brutal treatment of the Taíno Indians.
Columbus’ ships fared somewhat better in that terrible storm, and survived with only minor damage. Heaving in their anchors, Columbus’ small fleet of ships left Hispaniola to explore the western side of the Caribbean.”
Hurricanes and Typhoons, remain the most powerful and dangerous storms on our planet. Hurricane Matthew that is now raking the eastern coastline of Florida is no exception. Perhaps the climate change that we are experiencing has intensified these storms and perhaps we should be doing more to stabilize our atmosphere but Earth is our home and the only place where proven life exists. Perhaps the conclusion to this is that we should take the warning signs more seriously and be proactive in protecting our environment! This is not a political issue and will affect us, our children and grandchildren for centuries!
”
”
Hank Bracker (The Exciting Story of Cuba: Understanding Cuba's Present by Knowing Its Past)
“
Without the changes in political institutions and political power similar to those that emerged in England after 1688, there was little chance for absolutist countries to benefit from the innovations and new technologies of the Industrial Revolution. In Spain, for example, the lack of secure property rights and the widespread economic decline meant that people simply did not have the incentive to make the necessary investments and sacrifices. In Russia and Austria-Hungary, it wasn’t simply the neglect and mismanagement of the elites and the insidious economic slide under extractive institutions that prevented industrialization; instead, the rulers actively blocked any attempt to introduce these technologies and basic investments in infrastructure such as railroads that could have acted as their conduits. At
”
”
Daron Acemoğlu (Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty)
“
A Most Dangerous Hurricane
Columbus was aware of dangerous weather indicators that were frequently a threat in the Caribbean during the summer months. Although the barometer had not yet been invented, there were definitely other telltale signs of an approaching hurricane.
Had the governor who detested Columbus, listened to his advice and given him some leeway, he could have saved the convoy that was being readied for a return trans-Atlantic crossing. Instead, the new inexperienced governor ordered a fleet of over 30 caravels, laden, heavy with gold, to set sail for Spain without delay. As a result, it is estimated that 20 of these ships were sunk by this violent storm, nine ran aground and only the Aguja, which coincidently carried Columbus’ gold, survived and made it back to Spain safely. The ferocity of the storm claimed the lives of five hundred souls, including that of the former governor Francisco de Bobadilla.
Many of the caravels that sank during this horrific hurricane were ships that were part of the same convoy that Governor Ovando, had traveled with from Spain to the West Indies. However he felt about this tragedy, which could have been prevented, he continued as the third Governor of the Indies until 1509, and became known for his brutal treatment of the Taíno Indians.
Having taken adequate precautions, Columbus’ ships fared somewhat better in that terrible storm, and survived with only minor damage. Heaving in their anchors, Columbus’ small fleet of ships left Hispaniola to explore the western side of the Caribbean.
”
”
Hank Bracker
“
When we were first together, when you first brought me here to this beautiful place, you used to say you were glad you found a napoletana, remember? You said the northerners were sane and orderly and hardworking and maybe more honest, but that without the south, Italy would have too many brains and not enough heart. It would be like Europe having only Germany and Austria - no Spain, no France, no Italy. It would be a world of scientists without singers. I thought it was romantic. What happened to the man who said those things?
”
”
Roland Merullo (The Delight of Being Ordinary: A Road Trip with the Pope and the Dalai Lama)
“
What’s the news?” she said, foregoing a greeting for the obvious. That’s Georgia—take the bull by the horns. It was one of the things I loved most about her, one of the things that had saved us when our own love story took a few tragic turns.
The phrase awakened a memory and instead of answering I said, “Do you know that Tag actually grabbed a bull by the horns once? I saw him do it.”
Georgia was silent for a heartbeat before she pressed me again.
“Moses? What are you talking about, baby? What’s going on with Tag?”
“We were in Spain. In San Sebastian. It’s Basque country, you know. Did you know there are blond Spaniards? I didn’t. I kept seeing blond women and they all reminded me of you. I was in a horrible mood so Tag got this bright idea that we should go to Pamplona for the Running of the Bulls. He said a shot of adrenaline was just what I needed to cheer me up. Pamplona isn’t that far from San Sebastian. Just an hour south by bus. I knew Tag had a death wish. At least he did at Montlake. And I knew he was a little crazy. But he actually waited for the bull to run past him. And then he chased the bull. When the bull turned on him, he grabbed it by its horns and did one of those twist and roll things that cowboys do at rodeos.”
“Steer wrestling?” Georgia still sounded confused, but she was listening.
“Yeah. Steer wrestling. Tag tried to wrestle a bull. The bull won, but Tag got away without a scratch. I still don’t know how. I was screaming so loud I was hoarse for a week. Which was fine. Because I didn’t talk to Tag for two. That son-of-a-bitch. I thought he was going to die.” I stopped talking, emotion choking off my ability to speak. But Georgia heard what I couldn’t say.
”
”
Amy Harmon (The Song of David (The Law of Moses, #2))
“
My lord.” St. Just stopped just inside the door and bowed to the older man. “I didn’t mean to impose, but came to fetch the mare and thought I’d—” “Here they come!” St. Just looked up to see a half-dozen very young ladies trotting up the hallway in a giggling, laughing cloud of skirts and smiles. “Another guest, girls! This is Lord Rosecroft. Make your curtsies and then line up.” The ladies assembled with an alacrity that would have done St. Just’s recruits in Spain proud. “All right, Rosecroft, best be about it. They get bold if you make ’em wait.” St. Just looked askance at his host, who was grinning like a fiend. “It’s the kissing bough,” Vim Charpentier said as he emerged from the hallway, a tumbler in his hand. “You have to kiss them each and every one, or they’ll pout. And, Rosecroft, they’ve been collecting kisses all afternoon between trips to the punch bowl, so you’d be well advised to acquit yourself to the best of your ability. They will compare notes all year. So far, I believe I’m your competition.” He took a sip of his drink, eyeing his cousins balefully. “I’ve charged headlong into French infantry,” St. Just said, smiling at the ladies, “praying I might survive to enjoy just such a gauntlet as this.” He went down the line, leaving a wake of blushes, kissing each cheek until he got to a little girl so small he had to hunker down to kiss her. “What’s your name, sweetheart?” “Cynthia Weeze Simmons.” “The prettiest has been saved for last.” He kissed a delicate cheek and rose. “Any more? I was cavalry, you know, legendary for our charm and stamina.” This was said to tease the young ladies, but they all looked at their grandfather without breaking ranks. “Once with you lot is enough,” the old man barked. “Shoo.” They departed amid more giggles. Sindal looked disgruntled. “You made that look easy.” “I have daughters, and I’m half Irish. It was easy, also fun.
”
”
Grace Burrowes (Lady Sophie's Christmas Wish (The Duke's Daughters, #1; Windham, #4))
“
A good example of a really large-scale anarchist revolution—in fact the best example to my knowledge—is the Spanish revolution in 1936, in which over most of Republican Spain there was a quite inspiring anarchist revolution that involved both industry and agriculture over substantial areas, developed in a way which to the outside looks spontaneous. Though in fact if you look at the roots of it, you discover that it was based on some three generations of experiment and thought and work which extended anarchist ideas to very large parts of the population in this largely pre-industrial—though not totally pre-industrial—society. And that again was, by both human measures and indeed anyone's economic measures, quite successful. That is, production continued effectively; workers in farms and factories proved quite capable of managing their affairs without coercion from above, contrary to what lots of socialists, communists, liberals and others wanted to believe, and in fact you can't tell what would have happened. That anarchist revolution was simply destroyed by force, but during the period in which it was alive I think it was a highly successful and, as I say, in many ways a very inspiring testimony to the ability of poor working people to organize and manage their own affairs, extremely successfully, without coercion and control. How relevant the Spanish experience is to an advanced industrial society. one might question in detail.
”
”
Noam Chomsky (Chomsky On Anarchism)
“
On August 12, 1933, President Machado fled Cuba with ABC terrorists shooting at his laden airplane as it prepared to take off from the long hot runway. He left Cuba without any continuity of leadership and a smooth transfer of authority to the next administration became impossible in Havana.
American envoy, Sumner Welles stepped into the vacuum and encouraged Carlos Manuel de Céspedes y Quesada to accept the office of Provisional President of Cuba. Céspedes was a Cuban writer and politician, born in New York City, son of Carlos Manual de Céspedes del Castillo who was a hero of the Cuban War of Independence. Wearing a spotlessly clean, crisp white suit, Céspedes was installed as the Provisional President of Cuba, on what was his 62nd birthday.
This expedient political move failed to prevent the violence that broke out in the streets. Mobs looted and behaved with viciousness that lasted for six long hours and created a mayhem not witnessed since Cuba’s Independence from Spain. Students from the university ransacked the previously pro-Machado newspaper “Heraldo de Cuba.” The Presidential Palace was stormed and severely damaged, with the culprits leaving a “For Rent” sign hanging on the front gate. The temperament of the mob that rallied against the Machado supporters, including the hated Porristas who had been left behind, was ferocious. They wounded over 200 hapless souls and cost 21 people their lives. Five members of the Porristas as well as Colonel Antonio Jimenez, the head of Machado’s secret police, were summarily shot to death and trampled upon. The rioters then tied the mutilated body of Jimenez to the top of a car and paraded his bullet-riddled carcass through the streets of Havana, showing it off as a trophy. When the howling throng of incensed people finally dumped him in front of the hospital, it was determined that he had been shot 40 times.
Students hammered away at an imposing bronze statue of Machado, until piece by piece it was totally destroyed. Shops owned by the dictator’s friends were looted and smashed, as were the homes of Cabinet members living in the affluent suburbs.
”
”
Hank Bracker
“
I would argue that without social media and the internet, the Catalan independence movement could not possibly have progressed so far in such a short space of time, and even with the same chain of political events, levels of pro-independence activism and voter support would have been much lower at this stage.
”
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Kathryn Crameri ('Goodbye, Spain?': The Question of Independence for Catalonia (The Canada Blanch / Sussex Academic Stud))
“
a nun in the tenth century was so impressed with Cordoba, a city in then–Muslim-ruled Spain, that she called it “the ornament of the world.”54 The freedom Islam offered to the peoples of the Orient, and the way it stimulated the individual, was critical to this grandeur.
”
”
Mustafa Akyol (Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty)
“
By ARTHUR C. BROOKS ABD AL-RAHMAN III was an emir and caliph of Córdoba in 10th-century Spain. He was an absolute ruler who lived in complete luxury. Here’s how he assessed his life: “I have now reigned above 50 years in victory or peace; beloved by my subjects, dreaded by my enemies, and respected by my allies. Riches and honors, power and pleasure, have waited on my call, nor does any earthly blessing appear to have been wanting to my felicity.” Fame, riches and pleasure beyond imagination. Sound great? He went on to write: “I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot: They amount to 14.” Abd al-Rahman’s problem wasn’t happiness, as he believed — it was unhappiness. If that sounds like a distinction without a difference, you probably have the same problem as the great
”
”
Anonymous
“
The exodus takes different forms in different countries. In Spain, many gifted young émigrés come from ordinary families without the connections to enter the Spanish elite. France exports ambitious people who can’t join the French elite because they didn’t go to a grande école. This amounts to a geographical reshuffling of elites. Amsterdam may be the future for cities like Paris and Madrid: a backwater inhabited by an increasingly impotent national elite, a delightful place for paceless mornings of coffee and newspapers.
”
”
Anonymous
“
Anja Floetenmeyer, a spokeswoman for Taxi Deutschland, told the FT the trade group intends to pursue fines against the company for continuing to operate. “We didn’t expect anything else,” she said. “Uber has never observed German law. This is Wild West capitalism without consumer rights.” Local authorities in cities across Europe have tried to restrict the company’s services. Uber also faces opposition in the UK, Italy, France and Spain.
”
”
Anonymous
“
Two writings of al-Hassār have survived. The first, entitled Kitāb al-bayān wa t-tadhkār [Book of proof and recall] is a handbook of calculation treating numeration, arithmetical operations on whole numbers and on fractions, extraction of the exact or approximate square root of a whole of fractionary number and summation of progressions of whole numbers (natural, even or odd), and of their squares and cubes. Despite its classical content in relation to the Arab mathematical tradition, this book occupies a certain important place in the history of mathematics in North Africa for three reasons: in the first place, and notwithstanding the development of research, this manual remains the most ancient work of calculation representing simultaneously the tradition of the Maghrib and that of Muslim Spain. In the second place, this book is the first wherein one has found a symbolic writing of fractions, which utilises the horizontal bar and the dust ciphers i.e. the ancestors of the digits that we use today (and which are, for certain among them, almost identical to ours) [Woepcke 1858-59: 264-75; Zoubeidi 1996]. It seems as a matter of fact that the utilisation of the fraction bar was very quickly generalised in the mathematical teaching in the Maghrib, which could explain that Fibonacci (d. after 1240) had used in his Liber Abbaci, without making any particular remark about it [Djebbar 1980 : 97-99; Vogel 1970-80]. Thirdly, this handbook is the only Maghribian work of calculation known to have circulated in the scientific foyers of south Europe, as Moses Ibn Tibbon realised, in 1271, a Hebrew translation.
[Mathematics in the Medieval Maghrib: General Survey on Mathematical Activities in North Africa]
”
”
Ahmed Djebbar
“
In Libya in 2011, fourteen NATO members and four partner countries prevented Muammar Qaddafi from carrying out a promise to slaughter tens of thousands of his own people—and then they removed him from power. France, Britain, Italy, Canada, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, and others struck 90 percent of all NATO targets. Spain, the Netherlands, Turkey, Greece, and Romania enforced an arms embargo at sea. Sweden, not a NATO member, contributed naval and air force personnel and equipment. The United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Jordan, and Morocco also contributed.18 There was not a single U.S. casualty.19 The point is not that Washington should persuade others to do all the heavy lifting. NATO jets were able to hit their targets only because U.S. cruise missiles had already wiped out Libya’s air defenses. When Europeans ran short on precision-guided missiles, Washington sent them more.20 Without the United States, there would have been no mission. Critics carp that while NATO rid the world of a dangerous monster, it hasn’t created a stable Libya. That charge misses the point. From a Moneyball perspective, the goal was not to bomb Libya into democracy, start a war, or launch another improvisational bout of nation-building. It was to give Libyans a chance to escape the fate Qaddafi intended for them, and to enable them to begin the long-term process of building their own future.
”
”
Ian Bremmer (Superpower: Three Choices for America's Role in the World)
“
without being tiresome. They lacked that all-important dimension of physics: torque. Too much time ahead, too little behind, like a man trying to carry a horizontal ladder with a grip at one end.
”
”
Nancy Kress (Beggars in Spain (Sleepless, #1))
“
Franco won the civil war with the aid of the Axis. He remained throughout the Second World War entirely politically committed to the triumph of the Nazi New Order in Europe, and he contributed a great deal materially to that end and all the time without the “alibi” of occupation. Yet through a series of favourable historical circumstances he also survived its collapse. This set of circumstances made for a political “career” unique in Europe. Franco was never defeated in any war. Under the changed Western priorities of the cold war world, Franco’s Spain took its place (in the days before inter-continental missiles) as a “sentinel of the West” with an international veil drawn over the regime’s murderous “past
”
”
Helen Graham (The War and Its Shadow: Spain's Civil War in Europe's Long Twentieth Century (The Canada Blanch / Sussex Academic Studies on Contemporary Spain))
“
the Franco regime’s highly tendentious view of the civil war as a war of liberation against those without ethics or value – a mythology on which Franco never ceased to stake his legitimacy.
”
”
Helen Graham (The War and Its Shadow: Spain's Civil War in Europe's Long Twentieth Century (The Canada Blanch / Sussex Academic Studies on Contemporary Spain))
“
Thomas Jefferson expressed similar concerns about miscegenation (without regard to his personal practices). He advocated removal of blacks from the United States, due in part to concerns over maintaining blood purity. He stated that Negro “amalgamation with the other color produces a degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of excellence in the human character can innocently consent.”45 Resettlement of blacks would mean that they would “be removed beyond the reach of mixture” so that they could not stain “the blood of [their] master.”46
”
”
Jeffrey Gorsky (Exiles in Sepharad: The Jewish Millennium in Spain)
“
Until a firm basis for order was laid down, we can now see, it was almost as necessary to curb man's creativity as his destructiveness: that is perhaps why the whole weight of culture, down to modern times, has centered on its ties with the past, so that even fresh departures would be disguised as a replenishing of old sources. With good reason, archaic societies distrusted innovators and inventors as heartily as Phillip II of Spain, who classed them, not without reason, as heretics. Even today that danger is still with us; for ungoverned creativity in science and invention has reenforced unconscious demonic drives that have placed our whole civilization in a state of perilous unbalance: all the more because we have cast away at this critical moment, as an affront to our rationality, man's earliest forms of moral discipline and self-control.
”
”
Lewis Mumford (Technics and Human Development (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 1))
“
Pontius Pilate in Jesus’s death, instead placing blame on the Jews. The fairness of Pilate and his Roman administration that is displayed in the Christian Bible is not supported by the nonbiblical historical accounts. As Elaine Pagels has noted in The Origin of Satan: “Even Josephus, despite his Roman sympathies, says that the governor displayed contempt for his Jewish subjects, illegally appropriated funds from the Temple treasury, and brutally suppressed unruly crowds. The Jewish Greek historian Philo describes Pilate as a man of ‘ruthless, stubborn and cruel disposition,’ famous for, among other things, ordering ‘frequent executions without trial.
”
”
Jeffrey Gorsky (Exiles in Sepharad: The Jewish Millennium in Spain)
“
... It strikes me that if I'm in such a febrile and imaginative mood I ought to take advantage of it with some serious writing exercises or at least a few ideas for stories, if only to demonstrate that I'm not treating this here commonplace book solely as a journal to record my most recent attacks of jitters! Maybe I should roll my sleeves up and attempt as least an opening practice paragraph or two of this confounded novel I'm pretending to be writing. Let's see how it looks.
Marblehead: An American Undertow
By Robert D. Black
Iron green, the grand machinery of the Atlantic grates foam gears against New England with the rhythmic thunder of industrial percussion. A fine dust of other lands and foreign histories is carried in suspension on its lurching, slopping mechanism: shards of bright green glass from Ireland scoured blunt and opaque by brine, or sodden splinters of armada out of Spain. The debris of an older world, a driftwood of ideas and people often changed beyond all recognition by their passage, clatters on the tideline pebbles to deposit unintelligible grudges, madnesses and visions in a rank high-water mark, a silt of fetid dreams that further decompose amid the stranded kelp or bladder-wrack and pose risk of infection. Puritans escaping England's murderous civil war cast broad-brimmed shadows onto rocks where centuries of moss obscured the primitive horned figures etched by vanished tribes, and after them came the displaced political idealists of many nations, the religious outcasts, cults and criminals, to cling with grim determination to a damp and verdant landscape until crushed by drink or the insufferable weight of their accumulated expectations. Royalist cavaliers that fled from Cromwell's savage interregnum and then, where their puritanical opponents settled the green territories to the east, elected instead to establish themselves deep in a more temperate South, bestowing their equestrian concerns, their courtly mannerisms and their hairstyles upon an adopted homeland. Heretics and conjurors who sought new climes past the long shadow of the stake; transported killers and procurers with their slates wiped clean in pastures where nobody knew them; sour-faced visionaries clutching Bunyan's chapbook to their bosoms as a newer and more speculative bible, come to these shores searching for a literal New Jerusalem and finding only different wilderness in which to lose themselves and different game or adversaries for the killing. All of these and more, bearing concealed agendas and a hundred diverse afterlives, crashed as a human surf of Plymouth Rock to fling their mortal spray across the unsuspecting country, individuals incendiary in the having lost their ancestral homelands they were without further longings to relinquish. Their remains, ancient and sinister, impregnate and inform the factory-whistle furrows of oblivious America.
”
”
Alan Moore (Providence Compendium by Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows Hardcover)
“
... It strikes me that if I'm in such a febrile and imaginative mood I ought to take advantage of it with some serious writing exercises or at least a few ideas for stories, if only to demonstrate that I'm not treating this here commonplace book solely as a journal to record my most recent attacks of jitters! Maybe I should roll my sleeves up and attempt as least an opening practice paragraph or two of this confounded novel I'm pretending to be writing. Let's see how it looks.
Marblehead: An American Undertow
By Robert D. Black
Iron green, the grand machinery of the Atlantic grates foam gears against New England with the rhythmic thunder of industrial percussion. A fine dust of other lands and foreign histories is carried in suspension on its lurching, slopping mechanism: shards of bright green glass from Ireland scoured blunt and opaque by brine, or sodden splinters of armada out of Spain. The debris of an older world, a driftwood of ideas and people often changed beyond all recognition by their passage, clatters on the tideline pebbles to deposit unintelligible grudges, madnesses and visions in a rank high-water mark, a silt of fetid dreams that further decompose amid the stranded kelp or bladder-wrack and pose risk of infection. Puritans escaping England's murderous civil war cast broad-brimmed shadows onto rocks where centuries of moss obscured the primitive horned figures etched by vanished tribes, and after them came the displaced political idealists of many nations, the religious outcasts, cults and criminals, to cling with grim determination to a damp and verdant landscape until crushed by drink or the insufferable weight of their accumulated expectations. Royalist cavaliers that fled from Cromwell's savage interregnum and then, where their puritanical opponents settled the green territories to the east, elected instead to establish themselves deep in a more temperate South, bestowing their equestrian concerns, their courtly mannerisms and their hairstyles upon an adopted homeland. Heretics and conjurors who sought new climes past the long shadow of the stake; transported killers and procurers with their slates wiped clean in pastures where nobody knew them; sour-faced visionaries clutching Bunyan's chapbook to their bosoms as a newer and more speculative bible, come to these shores searching for a literal New Jerusalem and finding only different wilderness in which to lose themselves and different game or adversaries for the killing. All of these and more, bearing concealed agendas and a hundred diverse afterlives, crashed as a human surf on Plymouth Rock to fling their mortal spray across the unsuspecting country, individuals incendiary in that having lost their ancestral homelands they were without further longings to relinquish. Their remains, ancient and sinister, impregnate and inform the factory-whistle furrows of oblivious America.
”
”
Alan Moore (Providence Compendium by Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows Hardcover)
“
The POUM leaders were handed over to NKVD operatives and taken to a secret prison in Madrid, a church in the Calle Atocha. Nin was separated from his comrades and driven to Alcalá de Henares, where he was interrogated from 18 to 21 June. Despite the tortures he was subjected to by Orlov and his men, Nin refused to confess to the falsified accusations of passing artillery targets to the enemy. He was then moved to a summer house outside the city which belonged to Constancia de la Mora, the wife of Hidalgo de Cisneros and tortured to death. A grotesque example of Stalinist play-acting then took place. A group of German volunteers from the International Brigades in uniforms without insignia, pretending to be members of the Gestapo, charged into the house to make it look as if they had come to Nin’s rescue. ‘Evidence’ of their presence was then planted, including German documents, Falangist badges and nationalist banknotes. Nin, after being killed by Orlov’s men, was buried in the vicinity. When graffiti appeared on walls demanding ‘Where is Nin?’ communists would scribble underneath ‘In Salamanca or in Berlin’. The official Party line, published in Mundo Obrero, claimed that Nin had been liberated by Falangists and was in Burgos.
”
”
Antony Beevor (The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939)
“
Clubs know they cannot operate without opponents, and so unlike in most businesses, the collapse of a rival is not cause for celebration.
”
”
Simon Kuper (Soccernomics: Why England Loses; Why Germany, Spain, and France Win; and Why One Day Japan, Iraq, and the United States Will Become Kings of the World's ... the Kings of the World's Most Popular Sport)
“
An hidalgo, Lieutenant, is a man who can trace his blood back to the old Christians of Spain. Pure blood, you understand, without a taint of Moor or Jew in it. I am hidalgo.’ He said it with a simple
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Bernard Cornwell (Sharpe's Rifles (Sharpe, #6))
“
The outside world called this the “Spanish civil war,” but no worker in Spain ever thought of it as anything but an invasion by foreign Fascists who were pledged to put down and enslave the workers of all Europe and keep them as slaves for the rest of time. Spanish landlords and great capitalists and high prelates of a degenerate Church had hired this crime and paid for it by pledging the national wealth of Spain, the iron ore and copper and all the products of the soil. Foreign troops were doing the fighting, and the weapons were without exception of foreign manufacture
”
”
Upton Sinclair (Presidential Agent (Lanny Budd #5))
“
There is nothing that I should more fear, nor any kind of death that might threaten me, which would not be more supportable for me than to live without you and be separated by a great distance.
I would rather die or be eaten by fish in the sea or devored on land by cannibals than to consume myself in perpetual mourning and unceasing sorrow awaiting not my husband but his letters.
”
”
Hugh Thomas (Rivers of Gold: The Rise of the Spanish Empire from Columbus to Magellan)
“
Sugarcane in Sombrero
by Maisie Aletha Smikle
Sugarcane is no cane
Sugarcane does not claim
To be from a tropical plain
Sugarcane is a giant Dane
Who was born in Maine
And then migrated to Spain
On a very humid day in Maine
When there was no rain
Come Come Come Sugarcane
Sugarcane won't budge
Sugarcane will not fudge
Sugarcane looked perplex
As if the Dane was sore vex
Ven Ven Sugarcane Ven ven
The Dane wagged its tail
Alert and happy as a whale
The Dane from Maine
Learnt Spanish
From a parrot in Spain
And now barks in fluent Spanish
Its Maine accent had vanished
And the Dane comprehends only Spanish
Sombrero Sombrero
Sugarcane dashed to get its hat
Out goes the Dane from Maine
Decked in its sombrero in Spain
Where ever Sugarcane went
People gathered to watch
The Dane from Maine
That barks like a Dane from Spain
Fluent as a parrot from Spain
Without an accent from Maine
”
”
Maisie Aletha Smikle
“
As long as the human race fails to look within and see the darkness there, they'll continue to be drawn to the darkness without, i.e. the psychopath which whom they are so easily enamored.
”
”
Kara D. Spain
“
Despite having the largest budget in the league, Guardiola had failed to mount a serious challenge of any sort. And the media seized on his continued failure to reach a Champions League final without Messi, his on-field nuclear weapon. All of it was proof that his tippy-tappy tiki-taka might have worked in Spain or Germany, but Guardiola couldn’t expect to try that stuff in Manchester and succeed. The phrase “Welcome to the Premier League, Pep” was uttered and printed sarcastically more times that season than anyone could count. The tabloids even had a new name for this delicate Catalan genius. Fraudiola.
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”
Joshua Robinson (The Club: How the English Premier League Became the Wildest, Richest, Most Disruptive Force in Sports)
“
The things that are essential are acquired with little bother; it is the luxuries that call for toil and effort.” The author is Seneca, born in Spain 2,000 years ago. China’s Lao-Tzu, born nearly six centuries earlier than Seneca, had this to say: “To know you have enough is to be rich.” This next quotation is my favorite. It is by actor Jim Carrey, who is both rich and famous: “I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it's not the answer.” However, if being rich and famous will not make you happy, what will?
”
”
J.J. Luna (SUCCESS WITHOUT COLLEGE: The Pandemic Has Changed Everything)
“
I have often tried in dreams to be the kind of imposing individual the Romantics imagined themselves to be, and whenever I have, I’ve always ended up laughing out loud at myself for even giving house-room to such an idea. After all, the homme fatal exists in the dreams of all ordinary men, and romanticism is merely the turning inside out of our normal daily selves. In the most secret part of their being, all men dream of ruling over a great empire, with all men their subjects, all women theirs for the asking, adored by all the people and (if they are inferior men) of all ages … Few are as accustomed to dreaming as I am and so are not lucid enough to laugh at the aesthetic possibility of nurturing such dreams. The most serious criticism of romanticism has not yet been made, namely, that it represents the inner truth of human nature, an externalization of what lies deepest in the human soul, but made concrete, visible, even possible, if being possible depends on something other than Fate, and its excesses, its absurdities, its various ploys for moving and seducing people, all stem from that.
Even I who laugh at the seductive traps laid by the imagination often find myself imagining how wonderful it would be to be famous, how gratifying to be loved, how thrilling to be a success! And yet I can never manage to see myself in those exulted roles without hearing a guffaw from the other “I” I always keep as close to me as a street in the Baixa. Do I imagine myself famous? Only as a famous bookkeeper. Do I fancy myself raised up onto the thrones of celebrity? This fantasy only ever comes upon me in the office in Rua dos Douradores, and my colleagues inevitably ruin the effect. Do I hear the applause of the most variegated multitudes? That applause comes from the cheap fourth-floor room where I live and clashes horribly with the shabby furnishings, with the surrounding vulgarity, humiliating both me and the dream. I never even had any castles in Spain, like those Spaniards we Portuguese have always feared. My castles were built out of an incomplete deck of grubby playing cards; and they didn’t collapse of their own accord, but had to be demolished with a sweeping gesture of the hand, the impatient gesture of an elderly maid wanting to restore the tablecloth and reset the table, because teatime was calling like some fateful curse. Even that vision is of little worth, because I don’t have a house in the provinces or old aunts at whose table, at the end of a family gathering, I sit sipping a cup of tea that tastes to me of repose. My dream failed even in its metaphors and figurations. My empire didn’t even go as far as a pack of old playing cards. My victory didn’t even include a teapot or an ancient cat. I will die as I lived, among the bric-a-brac of my room, sold off by weight among the postscripts of things lost.
May I at least take with me into the immense possibilities to be found in the abyss of everything the glory of my disillusion as if it were that of a great dream, the splendor of my unbelief like a flag of defeat — a flag held aloft by feeble hands, but dragged through the mud and blood of the weak and held on high as we sink into the shifting sands, whether in protest or defiance or despair no one knows … No one knows because no one knows anything, and the sands swallow up those with flags and those without … And the sands cover everything, my life, my prose, my eternity.
I carry with me the knowledge of my defeat as if it were a flag of victory
”
”
Fernando Pessoa
“
I have often tried in dreams to be the kind of imposing individual the Romantics imagined themselves to be, and whenever I have, I’ve always ended up laughing out loud at myself for even giving house-room to such an idea. After all, the homme fatal exists in the dreams of all ordinary men, and romanticism is merely the turning inside out of our normal daily selves. In the most secret part of their being, all men dream of ruling over a great empire, with all men their subjects, all women theirs for the asking, adored by all the people and (if they are inferior men) of all ages … Few are as accustomed to dreaming as I am and so are not lucid enough to laugh at the aesthetic possibility of nurturing such dreams. The most serious criticism of romanticism has not yet been made, namely, that it represents the inner truth of human nature, an externalization of what lies deepest in the human soul, but made concrete, visible, even possible, if being possible depends on something other than Fate, and its excesses, its absurdities, its various ploys for moving and seducing people, all stem from that.
Even I who laugh at the seductive traps laid by the imagination often find myself imagining how wonderful it would be to be famous, how gratifying to be loved, how thrilling to be a success! And yet I can never manage to see myself in those exulted roles without hearing a guffaw from the other “I” I always keep as close to me as a street in the Baixa. Do I imagine myself famous? Only as a famous bookkeeper. Do I fancy myself raised up onto the thrones of celebrity? This fantasy only ever comes upon me in the office in Rua dos Douradores, and my colleagues inevitably ruin the effect. Do I hear the applause of the most variegated multitudes? That applause comes from the cheap fourth-floor room where I live and clashes horribly with the shabby furnishings, with the surrounding vulgarity, humiliating both me and the dream. I never even had any castles in Spain, like those Spaniards we Portuguese have always feared. My castles were built out of an incomplete deck of grubby playing cards; and they didn’t collapse of their own accord, but had to be demolished with a sweeping gesture of the hand, the impatient gesture of an elderly maid wanting to restore the tablecloth and reset the table, because teatime was calling like some fateful curse. Even that vision is of little worth, because I don’t have a house in the provinces or old aunts at whose table, at the end of a family gathering, I sit sipping a cup of tea that tastes to me of repose. My dream failed even in its metaphors and figurations. My empire didn’t even go as far as a pack of old playing cards. My victory didn’t even include a teapot or an ancient cat. I will die as I lived, among the bric-a-brac of my room, sold off by weight among the postscripts of things lost.
May I at least take with me into the immense possibilities to be found in the abyss of everything the glory of my disillusion as if it were that of a great dream, the splendor of my unbelief like a flag of defeat — a flag held aloft by feeble hands, but dragged through the mud and blood of the weak and held on high as we sink into the shifting sands, whether in protest or defiance or despair no one knows … No one knows because no one knows anything, and the sands swallow up those with flags and those without … And the sands cover everything, my life, my prose, my eternity.
I carry with me the knowledge of my defeat as if it were a flag of victory
”
”
Fernando Pessoa
“
Dylan, Duende, Death and Lorca
Does Bob Dylan have Duende?
DUENDE dancers perform moving, unique, unrepeatable performances
Does Bob Dylan have duende? Do you have duende? What is duende?
Duende is a Spanish word with two meanings.
A duende is a goblin or a pixie that probably lives at the bottom of the garden and gives three wishes to old ladies who deserve a break.
The duende was best defined by Spain’s great poet Federico García Lorca during a lecture he gave in New York in 1929 on Andalusian music known as cante jondo, or deep voice. ‘The duende,’ he said, ‘is a momentary burst of inspiration, the blush of all that is truly alive, all that the performer is creating at a certain moment.’
The difference between a good and a bad singer is that the good singer has the duende and the bad singer doesn’t. ‘There are no maps nor disciplines to help us find the duende. We only know that he burns the blood like a poultice of broken glass, that he exhausts, that he rejects all the sweet geometry we have learned.’
Some critics say Bob Dylan does not have a great voice. But more than any other performer since the birth of recorded music, Dylan has revealed the indefinable, spine-tingling something captured in Lorca’s interpretation of duende. ‘It is an inexplicable power of attraction, the ability to send waves of emotion through those watching and listening to them.’
‘The duende,’ he continues, ‘resembles what Goethe called the demoniacal. It manifests itself principally among musicians and poets of the spoken word, for it needs the trembling of the moment and then a long silence.’
painting off hell by Hieronymus Bosch
Hell & Hieronymus Bosch
Four elements can be found in Lorca’s vision of duende: irrationality, earthiness, a heightened awareness of death and a dash of the diabolical. I agree with Lorca that duende manifests principally among singers, but would say that same magic may touch us when confronted by great paintings: Picasso’s Guernica, Edvard Munch’s The Scream, the paintings of heaven and hell by Hieronymus Bosch.
The duende is found in the bitter roots of human existence, what Lorca referred to as ‘the pain which has no explanation.’ Artists often feel sad without knowing why. They sense the cruel inevitability of fate. They smell the coppery scent of death. All artists live in a permanent state of angst knowing that what they have created could have been better.
Death with Duende
It is not surprising that Spain found a need for the word duende. It is the only country where death in the bullring is a national spectacle, the only nation where death is announced by the explosion of trumpets and drums. The bullring, divided in sol y sombre – the light and shade, is the perfect metaphor for life and death, a passing from the light into darkness. Every matador who ever lived had duende and no death is more profound than death in the bullring.
”
”
Clifford Thurlow (Sex Surrealism Dali & Me)
“
So, armed with my NIE, I merrily filled in lots of forms to order telephones, water, electricity and so on – if not exactly without incident, then at least without NRIs (NIF-related Incidents).
”
”
Richard Guise (Two Wheels Over Catalonia: Cycling the Back-Roads of North-Eastern Spain)
“
One thing was very grievous unto us at this place. There was an old woman, whom we judged to be no less than a hundred years old, which came to see us, because she never saw English; yet could not behold us without breaking forth into great passion, weeping and crying excessively. We demanding the reason of it, they told us she had three sons, who, when Master Hunt was in these parts, went aboard his ship to trade with him, and he carried them captives into Spain, (for Tisquantum at that time was carried away also,) by which means she was deprived of the comfort of her children in her old age. We told them we were sorry that any Englishman should give them that offence, that Hunt was a bad man, and that all the English that heard of it condemned him for the same; but for us, we would not offer them any such injury, though it would gain us all the skins in the country. So we gave her some small trifles, which somewhat appeased her.
”
”
Edward Winslow (Good Newes from New England)
“
Today I've been reflecting on the benefits bestowed by the social anonymity of a traveller 'in the wilds'. To the peasants and tribesmen here one is merely a human being—outwardly strange but fundamentally one of them—and their spontaneous acceptance and hospitality is extended with an air of full and unselfconscious equality. In contrast, how deep is the gulf between groups of human beings in our society—go into a pub in Connemara or a café in rural Italy or even a posada in the remotest part of relatively unspoiled Spain and you find it impossible to establish the same easy rapport. You are at once noted as a non-peasant and are therefore someone to be envied, or admired, or despised, or kept aloof from, as individual temperaments dictate. Probably you will be treated most kindly by the peasants there, but at the deepest level you are automatically isolated because you have (they imagine) more money or more education or 'better' manners than they have. So I appreciate the chance to share the people's lives here for a time without regarding myself, or being regarded by them, as an intruder. Yet I also appreciate coming back to converse among friends who are on my own wave-length.
”
”
Dervla Murphy (Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle)
“
It is a pleasure to meet you, Miss Sheffield,” he said politely. “I do hope you will favor me with one of your dances this evening.”
“I— Of course.” She cleared her throat. “I would be honored.”
“Kate,” Mary said, nudging her softly, “show him your dance card.”
“Oh! Yes, of course.” Kate fumbled for her dance card, which was tied prettily to her wrist with a green ribbon. That she had to fumble for anything actually tied to her body was a bit alarming, but Kate decided to blame her lack of composure on the sudden and unexpected appearance of a heretofore unknown Bridgerton brother.
That, and the unfortunate fact that even under the best of circumstances she was never the most graceful girl in the room.
Colin filled his name in for one of the dances later that evening, then asked if she might like to walk with him to the lemonade table.
“Go, go,” Mary said, before Kate could reply. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be just fine without you.”
“I can bring you back a glass,” Kate offered, trying to figure out if it was possible to glare at her stepmother without Mr. Bridgerton noticing.
“Not necessary. I really should get back to my position with all the other chaperones and mamas.” Mary whipped her head around frantically until she spied a familiar face. “Oh, look, there is Mrs. Featherington. I must be off. Portia! Portia!”
Kate watched her stepmother’s rapidly retreating form for a moment before turning back to Mr. Bridgerton.
“I think,” she said dryly, “that she doesn’t want any lemonade.”
A sparkle of humor glinted in his emerald green eyes. “Either that or she’s planning to run all the way to Spain to pick the lemons herself.”
-Colin, Kate, & Mary
”
”
Julia Quinn (The Viscount Who Loved Me (Bridgertons, #2))
“
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”
”
Kuqya
“
Of Rome's wealth in the Middle Ages de Rosa says: "The cardinals had huge palaces with countless servants. One papal aide reported that he never went to see a cardinal without finding him counting his gold coins. The Curia was made up of men who had bought office and were desperate to recoup their enormous outlay. . . . For every benefice of see, abbey and parish, for every indulgence there was a set fee. The pallium, the two-inch-wide woollen band with crosses embroidered on it . . . paid for by every bishop. . . brought in. . . hundreds of millions of gold florins to the papal coffers. . . . [T]he Councilof Basle in 1432 was to call it 'the most usurious contrivance ever invented. . . . '" De Rosa continues: Dispensations were another source of papal revenue. Extremely severe, even impossible, laws were passed so that the Curia could grow rich by selling dispensations . . . [such as] from fasting during Lent. . . . Marriage in particular was a rich source of income. Consanguinity was alleged to hold between couples who had never dreamed they were related. Dispensations from consanguinity in order to marry amounted to a million gold florins a year.26 An Eyewitness Account from Spain D. Antonio
”
”
Dave Hunt (A Woman Rides the Beast)
“
Perhaps there is to be found in Pastrana the key to something which happens in Spain more frequently than is necessary. Past splendor overwhelms and in the end exhausts the people's will; and without force of will, as can be seen in so many cases, by being exclusively occupied with the contemplation of the glories of the past, they leave current problems unsolved. When the belly is empty and the mind filled with golden memories, the golden memories continually retreat and at last, though no one goes so far as to admit it, there is even doubt whether they ever existed and there is nothing left of them but a benevolent and useless cultural residue.
”
”
Camilo José Cela
“
AD 476, the year when Romulus Augustulus, the last Roman emperor of the West, was deposed. But in fact the removal of Romulus was only the final, inevitable step in a process that had begun long before. By 476, the emperor was a puppet without any effective power; the empire had already broken up and was losing one piece after another; barbarians were dominant in Gaul, in Spain, in Africa, and even in Italy; and Rome had been sacked more than once, by the Goths in 410 and again by the Vandals in 455. In short, the dissolution of the empire was already so far advanced that the deposition of the last Western emperor was not very important news. A famous essay by Arnaldo Momigliano titled "An Empire's Silent Fall" demonstrates that the so-called great event of 476, the dethronement of Romulus Augustulus, was noted by few at the time. But if things had reached this point, if the western half of the Roman Empire had been reduced to an empty shell that a barbarian chieftain could sweep aside without eliciting a protest, it was because of a series of traumas that had begun exactly a century before. In 376, an unforeseen flood of refugees at the frontiers of the empire, and the inability of the Roman authorities to manage this emergency properly, gave rise to a dramatic conflict that was to culminate in Rome's most disastrous military defeat since Hannibal's Carthaginians destroyed the Roman army at Cannae in 216 BC.
”
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Alessandro Barbero (The Day of the Barbarians: The Battle That Led to the Fall of the Roman Empire)
“
When it (Self-management in revolutionary Spain) was not sabotaged by its enemies or hindered by the war, agricultural self-management was an unquestionable success. The land was united into one holding and cultivated over great expanses according to a general plan and the directives of agronomists. Small landowners integrated their plots with those of the community. Socialization demonstrated its superiority both over large absentee landholdings, which left a part of the land unplanted, and over smallholdings, cultivated with the use of rudimentary techniques, inadequate seeding, and without fertilizer. Production increased by 30—50 percent. The amount of cultivated land increased, working methods were improved, and human, animal, and mechanical energy used more rationally. Farming was diversified, irrigation developed, the countryside partially reforested, nurseries opened, pigsties constructed, rural technical schools created, Pilot farms set up, livestock selected and increased, and auxiliary industries set in motion, etc.
”
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Daniel Guérin (For a Libertarian Communism)
“
In the official story of the sixteenth-century conquest of Mexico, the one that all Mexicans learn at
school, Mohtecutzoma, the tlahtoani, the spokesman and leader of the Aztecs,
was a traitor who
surrendered to the conquistadores from Spain without a fight and was killed by them. But the oral
tradition of Mexico gives a different account, one in which the world of dreams is extremely
important.
According to this tradition, Mohtecutzoma was a master of the art of dreams and prophecies, as all
governors and warriors were expected to be, and in a lucid and prophetic dream he saw the future of
Mexico. He knew it would be conquered and a great mingling of races would take place — and there
was nothing he could do about it. It was the dream of Centeotl, the creative principle of the universe.
That was why he decided to give his land to its new owners without a fight, to avoid pain and
bloodshed.
”
”
Sergio Magana "Ocelocoyotl (The Toltec Secret)
“
Although a handful of progressive individuals favoured independence from Spain, Cuba's economic elite was conservative, fearful of the economic and social consequences of a break with the colonial motherland. Without Spanish support, the planters would not be able to sustain the slave system on which their economic power was based, nor would they be strong enough to crush slave revolts
”
”
Richard Gott (Cuba: A New History)
“
His “real” identity became an obsession of journalists after the uprising, and when one journalist took him at face value that he had been a gay waiter in San Francisco, he wrote, “Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian on the streets of San Cristóbal, a Jew in Germany... a pacifist in Bosnia, a single woman on the metro at 10:00 p.m., a celebrant on the zócalo, a campesino without land, an unemployed worker... and of course a Zapatista in the mountains of southeastern Mexico.” This gave rise to the carnivalesque slogan “Todos somos Marcos” (“We are all Marcos”), just as Super Barrio claims to be no one and everyone.
”
”
Rebecca Solnit (A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster)
“
This mischief was peculiarly felt in the provinces of Spain and Gaul, where the principles of order and obedience had been extinguished by war and rebellion. Before Constantine resigned the purple, and in the fourth month of the siege of Arles, intelligence was received in the Imperial camp, that Jovinus has assumed the diadem at Mentz, in the Upper Germany, at the instigation of Goar, king of the Alani, and of Guntiarius, king of the Burgundians; and that the candidate, on whom they had bestowed the empire, advanced with a formidable host of Barbarians, from the banks of the Rhine to those of the Rhone. Every circumstance is dark and extraordinary in the short history of the reign of Jovinus. It was natural to expect, that a brave and skilful general, at the head of a victorious army, would have asserted, in a field of battle, the justice of the cause of Honorius. The hasty retreat of Constantius might be justified by weighty reasons; but he resigned, without a struggle, the possession of Gaul; and Dardanus, the Pr?torian pr?fect, is recorded as the only magistrate who refused to yield obedience to the usurper.
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Edward Gibbon (History of the Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire 3)
“
Bacardi Limited was started in Santiago de Cuba by Facundo Bacardí Massó, a wine merchant. Having immigrated to Cuba from Spain in 1830, he refined the method of making a quality rum, which until then was considered an inferior drink compared to grain whiskey. Filtering the rum through charcoal gave it a smoother taste and made it the drink of choice in the island nation. One hundred years later, the company headquarters moved into an art deco building in Havana. Other than drinking it straight, the favorite way of drinking rum was with Coca-Cola, which is now called a “Cuba Libre.” At the time I was there, the midshipmen bought cases of rum for very little money and brought them back to the ship without anyone objecting. The Navy also routinely flew to Cuba, and brought airplane loads of Bacardi Rum back to Pensacola, on what were called “Rum Runs.” This was not considered smuggling, but rather was thought of as “routine multi-engine training flights for U.S. Navy SNB-5 pilots.
”
”
Hank Bracker
“
English medieval history is impossible to understand without France, which exerted a huge cultural influence over its northern neighbor well into the modern era, and so the story of the Seven Kingdoms is not just that of England but rather Britain, France, and Spain in one. In Martin’s words, “Westeros is much much MUCH bigger than Britain. More the size (though not the shape, obviously) of South America.”9 Although the Seven Kingdoms all speak the same language, they are varied in their ancestry and racial appearance, while the geography varies hugely; so, while the five most northerly kingdoms correspond to Britain, the Reach strongly resembles France and Dorne is Moorish Spain. Paris is the model for King’s Landing, and in the books appears far less tropical than in the television series, which is filmed in Malta and Croatia.10
”
”
Ed West (Iron, Fire and Ice: The real history behind Game of Thrones)
“
The common linguistic and intellectual ground on which Muslim, Christian, and Jewish philosophy flourished then characterized the entire medieval Islamicate world. But within the semiclosed precincts of “this peninsula” (a term of endearment as much as a geographical designation, used by both Jews and Muslims), the commonality is particularly striking, and perhaps easier to follow. Without imposing on al-Andalus a single predominant school of thought (be it Pseudo-Empedoclean or Aristotelian), and without appealing to a spurious Spanish “genius,” one can identify recurring themes in Andalusian speculative thought. The true meaning of tawḥīd and the correct interpretation of the divine attributes run like a thread through Andalusian thought, from Ibn Masarra and Ibn Gabirol to the Almohads and Maimonides. The respective merits of rational thought and revelation, philosophy and scriptures, preoccupied thinkers from Ibn Masarra and Baḥyā Ibn Paqūda to Averroes and Judah Halevi. Key concepts such as tadbīr (as divine providence or as human governance) or iʿtibār (contemplation and drawing a lesson) surface time and again, receiving different interpretations and being put to different uses by Ibn Masarra and Baḥyā, by Averroes and Maimonides. All of these thinkers had to negotiate their way in the political and social framework of al-Andalus, balancing mundane commitments to the court and to their respective communities with a yearning for perfection, for the sublime and the transcendent. We can sometimes trace the movement of these themes from one thinker to another; more often, the transmission lines remain buried, leaving us to choose between assuming an enigmatic osmotic process and admitting the existence of yet unknown contacts.
”
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Sarah Stroumsa (Andalus and Sefarad: On Philosophy and Its History in Islamic Spain)
“
Most émigrés, lacking the resources to establish themselves in England, traveled to other British outposts in North America known only by maps and rumors. The most popular destination for loyalists in the deep South was East Florida, which grew from a population of 4,000 to 17,000 in a single year.105 Within a few months of their arrival, however, the émigrés learned that Great Britain had ceded East Florida to Spain in the peace settlement. Not wishing to become Spanish subjects, the vast majority decided to move on. About one-third returned to the United States, some creeping back to their former homes, most settling on the frontier or some other location where their prior loyalties would not be known. Many others, including Thomas Brown and Robert Cunningham, sailed for the Bahamas, with a plantation economy based upon slavery. Those who carried their slaves to Jamaica, ironically, wound up protesting the trade policies of the British Parliament, just as their rebel opponents had done. Southern loyalists without slaves and nowhere better to go headed north to Canada, but many did not take well to the cold, and they too petitioned the British government, claiming it was “altogether impossible . . . to clear the ground, and raise the necessaries of life, in a Climate to southern Constitutions inhospitable and Severe.”106 They would prefer, they said, to trade in their homesteads in Canada for a small piece of the Bahamas.
”
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Ray Raphael (A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence)
“
Even nonradicalized authoritarian regimes glorified the military. For all his desire to stay out of the war, Franco seized the opportunity offered by the defeat of France in 1940 to occupy Tangiers, as we saw earlier. Military parades were a major form of public ritual for Franquist Spain. Defeated France, under the Vichy regime of World War I hero Marshal Pétain, put much energy into military pomp and patriotic display. It never stopped asking the Nazi occupation authorities to allow the tiny Vichy Armistice Army to play a greater role in the defense of French soil from an Allied invasion. Even the quietist Portuguese dictator Salazar could not neglect the African empire that provided major emotional and economic support for his authoritarian state.
But there is a difference between authoritarian dictatorships’ glorification of the military and the emotional commitment of fascist regimes to war. Authoritarians used military pomp, but little actual fighting, to help prop up regimes dedicated to preserving the status quo. Fascist regimes could not survive without the active acquisition of new territory for their “race”—Lebensraum, spazio vitale—and they deliberately chose aggressive war to achieve it, clearly intending to wind the spring of their people to still higher tension.
Fascist radicalization was not simply war government, moreover. Making war radicalizes all regimes, fascist or not, of course. All states demand more of their citizens in wartime, and citizens become more willing, if they believe the war is a legitimate one, to make exceptional sacrifices for the community, and even to set aside some of their liberties. Increased state authority seems legitimate when the enemy is at the gate. During World War II, citizens of the democracies accepted not only material sacrifices, like rationing and the draft, but also major limitations on freedom, such as censorship. In the United States during the cold war an insistent current of opinion wanted to limit liberties again, in the interest of defeating the communist enemy.
War government under fascism is not the same as the democracies’ willing and temporary suspension of liberties, however. In fascist regimes at war, a fanatical minority within the party or movement may find itself freed to express a furor far beyond any rational calculation of interest. In this way, we return to Hannah Arendt’s idea that fascist regimes build on the fragmentation of their societies and the atomization of their populations. Arendt has been sharply criticized for making atomization one of the prerequisites for Nazi success. But her Origins of Totalitarianism, though cast in historical terms, is more a philosophical meditation on fascism’s ultimate radicalization than a history of origins. Even if the fragmentation and atomization of society work poorly as explanations for fascism’s taking root and arriving in power, the fragmentation and atomization of government were characteristic of the last phase of fascism, the radicalization process. In the newly conquered territories, ordinary civil servants, agents of the normative state, were replaced by party radicals, agents of the prerogative state. The orderly procedures of bureaucracy gave way to the wild unstructured improvisations of inexperienced party militants thrust into ill-defined positions of authority over conquered peoples.
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Robert O. Paxton (The Anatomy of Fascism)
“
Because you loved my father, this is harder for you to grasp,” Joppan says. “You see yourselves as being kind and generous to him. The ‘kind’ slave owners in India, or anywhere, were always the ones who had the greatest difficulty seeing the injustice of slavery. Their kindness, their generosity compared to cruel slave owners, made them blind to the unfairness of a system of slavery that they created, they maintained, and that favored them. It’s like the British bragging about the railways, the colleges, the hospitals they left us—their ‘kindness’! As though that justified robbing us of the right to self-rule for two centuries! As though we should thank them for what they stole! Would Britain or Holland or Spain or Portugal or France be what they are now without what they earned by enslaving others? During the war, the British loved telling us how well they treated us compared to how the Japanese would treat us if they invaded. But should any nation rule over another nation? Such things only happen when one group thinks the other is inferior by birth, by skin color, by history. Inferior, and therefore deserving less.
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Abraham Verghese (The Covenant of Water)
“
Even the monarchist newspaper, ABC, wrote on 17 February that the poll had taken place ‘without strikes, without threats and without any scandals. Everybody voted as they wanted to, in absolute liberty.
”
”
Antony Beevor (The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939)
“
How do I speak to a person at Iberia?
How do I speak to someone in Iberia?
For more information or new bookings, +34 914 831025 o (914) 831 -1025 y +1-840(221) 1212 please contact:
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To speak to someone at Iberia, call their customer service at +34 914 831025 or (914) 831-1025 if you're in Spain. For assistance from the U.S., dial +1-840-221-1212. These numbers connect you with live agents who can help with bookings, changes, and other travel inquiries.
”
”
How do I speak to a person at Iberia?
“
Very possibly the intention, at the beginning, was only to detain Smillie for a few days. But the trouble is that, in Spain, once you are in jail you generally stay there, with or without trial.
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George Orwell (Homage to Catalonia (1938) : illustrated)
“
Jurors five and six, women in their thirties without wedding bands, look like they’re ready to hand over possession of their ovaries, gift-wrapped and tied up with neat pink bows.
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Jo Spain (The Perfect Lie)
“
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