Fergal Keane (2005) All of these people

I know this man. He is one of us. All of these people are people I know. Good and bad, flawed humans. Fergal Keane is much the same age as me. His father was a well-known actor and his mother a school teacher. Ireland was a generation behind us when he was born, in a different times zone, gripped by a dangerous nostalgia of what could have been, a different kind of Ireland, one that was ruled by priests and hypocrisy. Fergal’s father was an alcoholic, the disease of the Irish and handed down from father to son. His mother a miracle worker as his father follows his star from stage to stage from Southern Ireland to London and back again just in time to put the kettle on for the Troubles and the Celtic economic miracle.

Fergal dreamed of Africa and being the kind of hero that changes the world as we all do. He dreamed of writing and with his mum and dad’s connections got started in the reporting business and on the right track for the writing business in general. His Uncle John B Keane was holding forth about writing and writers as they walked. And here is the way it is, ‘If I couldn’t write,’ he said, ‘I’d go stone fucking mad.’

There’s no guarantee of course you won’t go stone fucking mad even if you can write. Fergal’s dad’s pals, politicians, playwrights and poets such as Brendan Behan and Fran O’Brien were professional drinkers and dreamers. His father a greatly loved story teller of some renown, who brought the written word alive, but the drink pulled him under, pulled them under. Fergal is honest enough to declare he too fought on that front, but the war never finished, a waiting game, until the next skirmish.

He makes the leaps from boy to man from Cork to Limerick junior reporter  on the Leader – 17^th September 1979— to reporting on Northern Ireland and the Troubles to world stage and lead report for the BBC telling the word about  South Africa before and after Mandela’s release, the genocide in Rwanda and ethnic cleansing in Serbia and Syria. His dreams had become reality with the added glitter of a loving wife and child to give him ballast.

Look into the Nietzchean pit long enough and the pit will look back at you. Sectarian violence in Ireland, in South Africa, in Serbia and in Rwanda had a common feature. Hatred of others in their midst no different from the Nazi ideology of hatred of the Jews. The dehumanising effect of ideology no different from which we’re spoon fed today when people cheers when ships carrying immigrants sink in the Mediterranean or border guards beat men to death, or guards separate children from their mothers and put them in cages as they do in Trump’s America.

In Rwanda Keane saw men and women running with children in their arms, pleading to be let into the reporter’s cars to escape their attackers, only to be hacked to death in front of them. Keane admits he’s not a brave man. The car did not stop. He did not step out, his white face a passport to be treated differently, he wanted to live. He left the others behind. The reporter’s job is to report, not intervene, as a mantra.

How do you find peace within yourself after what you have seen, lived through? That’s a question that runs through this book. A question we all should ask ourselves. Honesty allows Keane to admit—as  I would too—the Nazi guard, that could have been me. Caught up in forces and ideologies that perpetuate hate and give one a choice of either for them or against them, most folk, myself included, take the easy by-line and easy life.  From the Milgram Shock Experiment to the Stanford Prison Experiments authority figures telling us what to do frees us from the restraint of morality, unleashes the evil within us.

Initially, Keane naively asks why the Tutus never ran from the Hutus when the genocide began. The answer was staring him in the face. Murderers, rapists and child killers weren’t some foreign body but people’s neighbours and friends, people that went to the same places you went to, that knew the back roads and side roads you would take and where there waiting. And when places of sanctuary like a Catholic church was filled with those without hope, they rounded themselves up, encircled on all sides.

One of the stupidest things I’ve read, comes from the mouth of a heroic character in The Librarian of Auschwitz in which he declares the Jews had no army, or the Germans wouldn’t have defeated them. Sectarian and ethnic violence is premised on that argument. Trump supporters carrying make America great again. Franco’s fascist supporters carrying placards calling to make Spain great again.  Le Pen’s right-wing army calling for the deportation of immigrants to make France great again. Or Farage’s cull on the immigrants, with the pictorial smiling face of Boris Johnson with a Union Jack, send them back motif behind him.

Hatred has many flags and many faces, a cancerous growth Keane recognises runs through us. He’s paid the price with his reporting life. And like pastor Martin Niemöller he witnessed the politics of hate from Cork to the whole of our creation which brings nothing but corpses,

  First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—

     Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Storyville, Facing Franco’s Crimes, The Silence of Others, BBC 4, BBC iPlayer, Directors and Producers Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000bynq/storyville-facing-francos-crimes-the-silence-of-others

What is justice?

Here’s a narrative of a statue of Christ in Spain, Italy, Germany, England or sunny California in which the hands get lopped off, a bomb, a bullet or vandalism.   St Teresa of Avila, who founded an order of Carmelites nuns in her native Spain, declared Christ has no hands but ours. That was the message.

Here’s another story. Sculptures by Francesco Cedenilla, human figure set high in the mountains of El Torno in Extremadura to represent the hundreds of thousands ‘disappeared’ under the Franco regime, statues shot up by right-wing supporters of neo-fascism. Cedenilla declared that the bullet holes completed his work.

History is written by the victors.

General Franco army and militias with the support of fellow fascist dictators Hitler and Mussolini seized control of Spain during the Civil War 1936-1939. 500 000 or more Spanish citizens fled across the border, mainly into France. The war didn’t end in Spain nor did it end in 1939, Franco unlike his fellow fascist dictators did not give up power, but held onto it until his death in 1975. Under his regime 187 concentration camps were still open for business and hundreds of thousands tortured and disappeared. Tens of thousands babies stolen from their mothers at birth and given up for adoption without consent.  

The Pact of Forgetting was an attempt to put the past behind them and move on. It was ratified in the Spanish Parliament in 1977 and a general amnesty entailed. We see similar and more recent cases in, for example, South Africa, Northern Ireland and Rwanda.

Robert Harris’s Fatherland plays with this narrative. Hitler, like Franco has won the war and the Nazi leader is going to meet the American President John F Kennedy. This may seem farfetched but Franco, of course, did meet with Nixon, the Pope and most other right-wing world leaders. But in this narrative a lowly officer in the Kripo, the German criminal police, investigates the killing of Nazi officials who took part in the Wannsee Conference in 1942.  That was where the Final Solution was ratified. Hitler did not attend. Six million Jews and millions of other nationalities were killed. The world knows nothing of this and by bumping off those that attended the conference and cleaning up the concentration camps Hitler’s crimes can be righted by the disappearance of the witnesses to history.  

Franco’s victims had no voice and certainly no Nuremberg show trial. Maria Martin was a child during the Civil War. One of seven living in a little village in Castalia La Mancha. Her mother was taken from the fields, her head shaven and murdered by locals that accused her of being a ‘red’, ‘disappeared’, her body found naked. They killed 27 men and three women, including her mother. She recalled how afterwards older children threw stones at her. Later when she started leaving flowers at the side of the road where her mother’s nude body was found, villagers made signals that they’d slit her throat too. Official letters were returned telling her she’d be next if she didn’t stop pestering them with request to return her mum’s body for a proper funeral so she could be laid to rest.  

Or the case of ‘Chato’, whose torturer, ‘Billy the Kid,’ lived a few streets from him. Chato tells us how his friend was shot in the head by the police in 1968. He was taken to prison and some days beatings took place for 13 hours, his legs, his genitals, his feet. ‘Billy the Kid’ retired on a state pension to run marathons in Spain and New York.

Carlos Slepoy (now deceased) over a six year period, documents how victims attempts to bring those that had tortured them, stole their babies or killed their father and mothers were stymied by the Spanish state at the highest levels. How elderly victims had to take out an international lawsuit and take their case to Argentina to be heard. The Silence of Others, with some success, dares to challenge the status quo using the case of the Chilean dictator, General Pinochet, as a precedent.  For justice to prevail crimes against humanity must be heard. Bashar al-Assad, and other world leaders should be worried should such a legal precedent become universal. There’s a certain irony in Argentina were a military junta ruled for so many years is selling itself as the new Nuremberg. Truth is no stranger to justice unless, like St Teresa’s statue of Christ the Redeemer, our mouth stays shut, our voice goes unheard.        

The Man Who Saw Too Much, BBC 1, BBC iPlayer presenter, producer and director Alan Yentob and Jill Nicholls.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000bqt9/the-man-who-saw-too-much

The story of 106-year-old Boris Pahor is a eulogy to the twentieth century. The man who saw too much and experienced too much is a testament to man’s inhumanity to man. He wrote a memoir, Necropolis- City of the Dead about his incarceration in a little-know Nazi concentration camp, Natzweiler-Struthhof in the mountainous regions of Alsace, France.

He was also sent to Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Dora, Harzungen, Ironically, Natzweiler was one of the first concentration camps liberated by the Allies, but it was empty. Prisoners were sent to Dachau, but it was Natwieler he judged to be the most cruel. His account is illustrated by drawings by fellow prisoners.

Pahor’s ability to speak several languages, his native Slovenian, Italian, French and I imagine a bit of German saved him. It allowed him to get a job inside the barracks as a translator for the camp doctor an Austrian, who also trained him to be a diarrhoea nurse. Almost half of the 52 000 prisoners were executed, died of illness or malnutrition or died outside working in the granite quarry in sub-zero temperatures. A mountainous region, each step going up the graded slope to work was recalled as the equivalent of Christ on the road to Calvary.  The camp produced a particular type of red stone favoured by Hitler’s architects who created public buildings in honour of the thousand-year Reich.

Pahor was sent to the camp because he was considered to be an anti-fascist. He was arrested in September 1943.

Fascism comes from the term fasces, a bundle of rods with a projected axe blade, a symbol of the magisterial power in ancient Rome.

The neologism fascism was associated with the rise of Mussolini in Italy, Franco in Spain and Hitler in Germany. A megalomaniac belief in the strong-man theory of history. A contempt for the democratic process and calls for its suspension so the great man can act on behalf of the people.

Pahor, for example, recalls his upbringing in the cosmopolitan Slovenian port city of Trieste with access to the Adriatic being taken over by Italy after the first world war. As a precursor to Kristallnacht, Mussolini’s blackshirts burned down the Slovene cultural centre, closed their schools and banned the speaking of their language in public. School lessons were in Italian. Pahor, the anti-fascist was drafted into Mussolini’s army to fight the anti-fascist Allied forced.

Fascism = Capitalism.

Mussolini, the former Communist and man of the people, had a mandate to rule given by aristocracy, landowners and the moneyed classes. In contemporary terms it was based on deregulation. The bogey men of communism and working men organising themselves into trade unions was outlawed. Deregulation meant no regulation, the whip hand was with the rich and only the poor paid taxes.

King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy’s intervention in the second world war and his late backing of the Allied forces led to the arrest of Mussolini at the end of July, 1943. One fascist force replaced another. The German’s sprung Mussolini from prison and took control of the defence of Italy and split the country among fascist and non-fascist supporters.

An estimated 600 000 joined the anti-fascist resistance movement in Italy, around 70 000 of whom were women. Pahore was caught with a typewriter and accused of producing anti-fascist leaflets. So begins his odyssey in the death camps.

Primo Levi, Italian Jew, in his memoir, If This Is a Man asked a question what is it to be truly human?

Necropolis –City of the Dead is the answer. Them and us.  The ersatz category of subhuman that fight each other over a finger-tip of bread while mining pink-coloured rock that has decorative value. Capitalism in its purest form can be found here. Fascism and the strong man theory of history have made a dramatic comeback. Boris Pahor tells it like it is. He saw too much. We understand too little. This is a Boris you can trust.