A Catalan Christmas in Times of Genocide

Written By The Argonaut

By Soufyaan Timol - cover photo taken by author

One of the first images that strikes me as I lug my sister’s suitcase through the roads of Central Barcelona, mere hours after our plane landed, are the words chalked on a wall near a children’s playground: ‘Gaza no estás sola’. Only few meters away, marked in red across a traffic sign, is the emblematic A of anarchism, surrounded by a circle. A feeling of the transcendent breathes through the streets of Barcelona, of the unspoken, the unspeakable. I notice it again and again; a tradition that should be dead, buried; plastered all around the squares, featured in the display windows of bookshops, graffitied on walls and shop shutters, and all over the buildings it has appropriated. This tradition, anarchism, though repressed and suppressed, shunned from the mainstream, survives 87 years since its flag was raised against the rise of fascism in Spain.  

‘Viva Palestina libre’ (Long live Free Palestine) and ‘Sionistas = Nazis’ (Sionists = Nazis) on the walls of Barcelona. Photo taken by author.

            In the spring of 1939, after 3 years of a civil war that left half a million people dead, the Spanish republic fell to Franco’s fascist forces. 36 years of a sadistic military dictatorship followed. Franco banned democratic elections, crushed unions, voided progressive laws, sent refugees to die in Hitler’s death camps, and established his own concentration camps where hundreds of thousands would be imprisoned. The dictatorship only ended in 1975 with his death, and a new democratic republic was established. Franco’s generals made sure that along his body, they buried the memory of his massacres, sweeping them under the rug of history (1). A minor blip in the country’s evolution, a time you don’t speak about, distorted, erased.

As well as the 36 years of dictatorship, the new state excised from Spain’s history the anti-fascist resistance. In Barcelona, no monument stands, no museum salutes, no day celebrates, perhaps one of the most momentous events in the West’s political history: the Spanish revolution.

When, in Catalonia, after the collapse of the republic and the initial attempt at a fascist coup, workers, organized in massive syndicates, armed themselves and brought down the fascist attacker, and, with the republic frozen, incapacitated, erected their own stateless society. Then Catalonia was run, not by the Spanish state, not by any political party, but by its working people, through a variety of anarchist and socialist syndicates. They collectivized production, introduced free healthcare, legalized abortion, and led a relentless war against social hierarchy. For three years, Catalans undertook the most radical of social experiments. George Orwell, who, like the tens of thousands of international volunteers, travelled to Spain to fight the fascists, wrote, in one of his most beautiful works, Homage to Catalonia (1938):

“It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags and with the red and black flag of the Anarchists… Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shopwalkers looked at you in the face and treated you as an equal… There was much in this that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.”

            Over three years of civil war, Franco’s forces, aided by fascist Germany and Italy, tolerated (and sometimes supported) by the Allies, vanquished the revolution, conquered city by city, until even Barcelona crumbled. What remains today are the mass graves, holding over 100, 000 bodies of Franco’s victims. The subsequent effort to erase from Spain’s memory — not just the anti-fascist resistance, but also the revolutionary moment, whereby for a few years the absolute reality of capitalism stood defeated, dumb, unable to rely but on its most reactionary bloc — was total, hegemonic. But the anarchist tradition lives on.

            Walking around central Barcelona, I feel the libertarian spirit, alive and uncompromising. Street art abounds, with a character more left-wing than punk, more anarchist than anti-system. Posters calling for radical political action decorate every other wall along the streets of the historical old town. Massive squats skirt the edges of Central, where anarchist groups organize free dinners, clothes drives, reading groups, movie screenings, vigils, protests, occupations. Red-black manifestos dot the notice boards of Barcelona’s castle-like university. At the very heart of the city survives a bookshop run by the same syndicate, the CNT, that led the liberation of Catalonia in 1936.

Picture of the Libreria La Rosa de Foc run by the CNT syndacate in Barcelona. Photo taken by author.

            In times where Israel’s ethno-fascist regime visits incessant destruction upon Gaza, at a rate of 300 deaths a day, it is impossible to stroll around Barcelona and, unless one confines herself to the tourist-chosen spots, to miss the support for Palestine. I feel safer, less secluded, knowing I am not alone in standing against genocide, unlike in Rome and Florence, which I also visited over the holidays, or in Mauritius, where friends tell me the subject is alien to most, or in London, where, despite the massive protests, the indifference, the silence, of academics, of universities and student unions, of the so-called ‘progressive’ left, deafens.

            Through one of the numerous plastered posters — of which I manage to swipe a stunning one for my room, at the cost of a few angry looks from passers-by — I learn of a march for Gaza on my first day in Barcelona. The gathering, of a few hundred people, begins in front of a center for Catalan independence. The faces are young. Dozens of candles are passed around, and we light each other’s.

            The chants throughout the march echo the feeling of those one would find in London. ‘Des del riu fins al mar, Palestina lliure’, ‘Israel asesina, Europa patrocina’. One resonates a bit more with me: ‘Gaza no estás sola’. Gaza you are not alone. Even when the world’s major powers support and finance your martyrdom, when the global intelligentsia baptizes you a home for terrorists, when most remain indifferent to your oppression, Gaza you are not alone.

            At the end of the march, some speakers share a few words about Palestine, mostly in Catalan, which eludes me, though two or three deliver their speeches in Spanish, which I can somewhat understand. They state the death toll, standing then at 20,000, of which 8,000 are children. A woman, her back draped with the Palestinian flag, mentions how even the pope condemned Israel for its war crimes after Israeli snipers shot dead two Christian women in a church. His words, too late, too soft, fall short of addressing the gravity of the situation. Even the term ‘ceasefire’ leaves one’s moral sense wanting, when what people are calling for is simply an end to genocide.

Picture of the march the author has taken part into. Photo taken by author.

            A young woman, probably a university student, describes with poignant thoroughness the man-made hell that the IDF has fashioned of Gaza: the bombing in the north, then the bombing in the south, the wholesale destruction of hospitals, refugee centers, schools, churches and mosques, the assassination of journalists, the parading of men naked in the streets, the cold-blooded murder of its own hostages, the eradication of entire families and the starvation of survivors, the denial of water and electricity, the harvesting of organs (2).

She accuses Israel of being of being a fascist (3) settler colonial project, the West’s monster, crafted in its own image, shaped by the legacy of the white man in the Americas, in Namibia and Ethiopia, in India and Australia, who, in his time, would enact ‘punitive expeditions’ against the uncooperative colonial subjects. When, calling upon the military might of his state, the colonizer would respond to an act of rebellion, real or invented; maybe the subject had burnt a settler alive, or tortured and raped women, or beheaded infant children. Simply uttering the name of the crime would make it true (4), a crime so horrific, so barbarian, so savage, committed against civilization, that the boundaries of law could not accommodate the response. Biblical extermination was called for; a violence so complete it would extinguish any hope of liberation. When Netanyahu asks the people of Israel to “remember what Amalek has done to you,” and to fight accordingly, he means that, as the bible verse he quotes says, the war of extermination waged upon Gaza is to spare no man, woman or infant (5).

             There is anger, terrible fury, in her voice as she concludes, but so is there hope. Barcelona’s memory of resistance resonates loud in her anti-fascist rhetoric. She closes, not by calling for a ceasefire, but for an end to colonization and imperialism, for a world free of borders, free of ethnic hatred, free of fascism.

——

           

Over the next few days, while the city lights up with preparations for Christmas, I walk around with a bittersweet taste in my mouth. One cannot escape the reality of the genocide in Palestine. Millions displaced, entire neighborhoods levelled, their very social reality destroyed. But here, I cannot escape the pro-Palestinian movement against this genocide either, uncompromising, libertarian in spirit and in action. I already feel nostalgic; I know that I am barely scratching the surface of what this anarchist tradition holds over these few days. Knowing that it exists, though, that it lives on, is comfort enough. If European fascism, in a metastasized, ethno-religious form, survives into the 21st century, so does the resistance to it, and so do the radical possibilities that this resistance offers.   

 

 

 

Notes

(1)   The ‘Pack of Oblivion’, passed in 1977, imposed that Spain would not recall this history of fascism, and especially not prosecute the war criminals.

(2)   A recent article by the human rights organization Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor calls for an investigation in what looks very likely to be organ theft on the bodies of Palestinians (read here). The article was republished by an arm of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs - OCHA (read here).

(3)   Chris Hedges, who has studied Israel’s policies for over 30 years, covering the rise of the Israeli far-right, writes, in a beautiful piece: “there has always been a strain of Jewish fascism within the Zionist project. Now it has control of the Israeli State.” (read here).

(4)   The degree to which the mainstream media has parroted Israel’s unsubstantiated claims is extreme, especially when all previous ones have been disproved. For a thorough deconstruction of Israel’s lies, see Lindsay Collen’s article for LALIT: Debunking Israel’s Lies and Propaganda (read here).

(5)   The Bible verse Netanyahu references, 1 Samuel 15:3, states, “Now go and smite Amalek, utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.”

 

References

The Argonaut
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