Thom Hartmann: And greetings my friends, patriots, lovers of democracy, truth and justice, believers in peace, freedom and the American Way. Thom Hartmann here with you.
Well, yesterday I was talking about how in my opinion the Obama administration was basically using the same rationale that Nixon had used going into Vietnam saying we just need a decent interval. This morning Mr. Gates running around the news shows yesterday in his testimony, today in his testimony actually, actually I guess it was yesterday, I’m reading from today’s Financial Times saying, 'well, our withdrawal dates are flexible' and like that. At the same time we’ve got Don Rumsfeld, a man who I think is a war criminal, criticizing the President of the United States, President Obama, in his speech in which he was asking for more troops. A speech which I disagreed with and a policy that I disagree with but nonetheless he’s my president. And here we have this weasel, Don Rumsfeld, criticizing him, saying, 'well, you know, how dare you say the US military never asked for more troops or more aid in Afghanistan during the 7 years that we were having a war there'. Well, in fact then, one of the generals goes before Congress, General McKiernan says, 'yeah we did ask for aide and we didn’t get it'. So number one.
And number two, you’ve got the Vice President, the former vice president of the United States, Dick Cheney, another war criminal, saying, “I think it’s likely to give aid and comfort to the enemy,” Obama’s behavior. That’s the definition of treason. Here we have the Vice President of the United States, this is fascist talk. Now, last week Louise and I were in Spain for the week and we spent a couple of days in the Basque region and we spent two days in Barcelona and a day in Madrid. I keynoted conferences in both Madrid and Barcelona and we did some research in the Basque region about the MONDRAGON cooperatives, which we’ll talk about at some point in the future. And I have to confess I didn’t know a whole lot about Spanish history before I went there.
When I lived in Germany I learned a lot about German history, I learned a lot about World War II, Spain pretty much was absent from World War II. They had had the Spanish Civil War from as I recall ’36 to ’39 and Franco came to power and Franco allied himself with the Germans but you know never really fought on their behalf and never really lost and never really was conquered. And so a couple of the people, two of the people who were with me who went to Madrid with me, one of them was one of the directors of the Terra Foundation, one of the groups that sponsored one of the talks that I keynoted and the other was my translator, Irene was her name.
After my presentation in Madrid we went to the museum to see Guernica, the painting by Pablo Picasso that was done after what I was told, this, keep in mind, I am not an authority on Spain or the Spanish Civil War or anything of this but I was told it was one of the very first aerial bombardments, modern aerial bombardments of a civilian target, purely for the purpose of inducing terror by Franco and his fascists during the Spanish Civil War. And Picasso produced this incredible painting, Guernica, which was the name of the city that was bombed about the civilians who died. And in this painting, the only people living are women who are sobbing, the men are dead, there’s a broken sword, there’s the horse, the symbolism of it is incredible. But I asked a question, I asked Irene, my translator, I said, she said is there anything you’d like to see while you’re in Madrid?
And I said, yes, you had a period of fascism here in Spain and pretty much my extent of the knowledge of it is, you know, having seen Pan’s Labyrinth, the movie about the little girl who lived during the time of Franco and you know some incidental knowledge of Franco but I don’t think most Americans know much about the Spanish Civil War. Or having read you know Hemingway’s I forget the title of it now, but when Hemingway got all inspired and said he’s gonna go over and fight with the republicans, small r republicans, in favor of democracy against the fascists and a lot of people did that. And ultimately they lost.
So, and she told me the story of how her grandfather on one side was fighting for the republicans, the good guys. And on the other side was fighting for the fascists, her grandfather. And they all had to get together for Christmas a couple of years ago, many years ago. And I said, she said is there anything you’d like to see and I said yeah is there an equivalent of Yad Vashem. I’ve been to Yad Vashem in Israel which is the Holocaust museum in Israel and you walk through that museum and there’s kind of a mini version of it in Washington DC which I haven’t been to but I’ve been to the one in Jerusalem at least three times. The first time myself, the second couple times taking friends of mine there. And you cannot walk through that museum without walking out the other end sobbing. I mean it is just, it is one of the most intense emotional experiences that you can have.
And so I said is there an equivalent of Yad Vashem here that talks about the Franco years, because I know in Germany there are, you know, we took our kids to several of the camps. There was Dachau, down near Nuremberg near where we lived and we took our kids to Dachau and I remember when our youngest, she was 5 years old and there were the ovens and there were small ovens where they took the ashes out. And I remember our 5 year old saying is that the ovens for the little kids? And kind of the innocence of the question and, but the horror of the place really getting them and getting us. And she said, 'no, there isn’t'. That Franco actually died in his sleep in 1975 in Spain. That the Spaniards have never dealt with the fact that this man, this dictator, this fascist dictator ruled their nation, tortured people, killed people, vanished people, stole their democracy, overthrew a democracy, and when Franco was fading he appointed King Juan Carlos who is still the king and over the next year in ’76 Juan Carlos oversaw a transition to a constitutional monarchy which is what they have now. But it’s just an issue that’s not discussed in Spain. At least this is what I learned from the Spaniards that I was talking about.
And I want to share with you, after the break, I want to share a poem with you about the Spanish Revolution. But the reason why, and I want to set this in your mind right now. The reason why is, and why this comes back to the speech by Obama day before yesterday and the comments by these proto-fascists and war criminals, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld are so important, or are so relevant, let’s say, to this conversation is that Spain is, there actually is even now a resurgence of the fascist party in Spain. Spain has not dealt with their past.
And the United States has just finished a period of 8 years of dealing with what I would characterize as a fascistic administration. An administration that by the Mussolini definition of fascism, the merging of corporate and state interests, we have more so-called contract, we have more mercenaries in Iraq than we do Americans, American soldiers, there’s fascism there. The privatization of everything. Declaring wars on two nations that represented no threat to us and did nothing to us, ignoring apparently the people who actually did something to us, and so on. And then using fear continuously, whether it was the jacking up the terror alerts during the election of 2004 every time John Kerry got good press and Tom Ridge has admitted this, that he was ordered to jack up the terror alerts for reasons that he couldn’t understand. Using fear to terrorize a population to have power. We have to come to terms with this in the United States and the way that we have to come to terms with it is to prosecute the Bush Administration. I want share this poem with you right after this.
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Thom Hartmann: So one of the things we learned is that in Barcelona and Madrid, all across Spain there is no museum that memorializes the horrors of the Franco fascist years from 1939 to 1975. There’s no, there's no, it’s not a subject for polite discussion. We were talking about it in a taxi in hushed tones. It’s like you don’t want to upset people. And it’s the same kind of conversation, it’s the same kind of situation that is happening right now in the United States about the crimes of the Bush Administration. Cheney and Rumsfeld come out and they make these outrageous statements. Cheney calling the President of the United States, Barack Obama, a, literally a traitor, saying he’s giving aid and comfort to the enemy. That is the definition of treason. And nobody pointing out that he himself is a traitor.
Pablo Neruda was arguably one of the most famous poets of the 20th century. He was Chilean born. He was, he worked on behalf of Chile, he was in Spain during the Spanish Civil War and lived in Spain for some time. Went back, back to Chile when conservative President, Chilean President González Videla outlawed communism in Chile and Neruda was a communist, they issued a warrant for his arrest. Friends hid him in a basement of their house, he later escaped in exile into Argentina where he was a friend of President Allende who, as you know, we took care of as well. He won the Nobel prize in fact for his work. And this is a poem that he wrote about the Spanish Civil War. And I think that this frankly is a poem about the Bush years as well. It’s called “I’m explaining a few things.”
"You are going to ask: and where are the lilacs?
and the poppy-petalled metaphysics?
and the rain repeatedly spattering
its words and drilling them full
of apertures and birds?
I'll tell you all the news.I lived in a suburb,
a suburb of Madrid, with bells,
and clocks, and trees.From there you could look out
over Castille's dry face:
a leather ocean.
My house was called
the house of flowers, because in every cranny
geraniums burst: it was
a good-looking house
with its dogs and children.
Remember, Raul?
Eh, Rafel? Federico, do you remember
from under the ground
my balconies on which
the light of June drowned flowers in your mouth?
Brother, my brother!
Everything
loud with big voices, the salt of merchandises,
pile-ups of palpitating bread,
the stalls of my suburb of Arguelles with its statue
like a drained inkwell in a swirl of hake:
oil flowed into spoons,
a deep baying
of feet and hands swelled in the streets,
metres, litres, the sharp
measure of life,
stacked-up fish,
the texture of roofs with a cold sun in which
the weather vane falters,
the fine, frenzied ivory of potatoes,
wave on wave of tomatoes rolling down the sea.And one morning all that was burning,
one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings --
and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on,
and from then on blood.
Bandits with planes and Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars spattering blessings
came through the sky to kill children
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children's blood.Jackals that the jackals would despise,
stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,
vipers that the vipers would abominate!Face to face with you I have seen the blood
of Spain tower like a tide
to drown you in one wave
of pride and knives!Treacherous
generals:
see my dead house,
look at broken Spain :
from every house burning metal flows
instead of flowers,
from every socket of Spain
Spain emerges
and from every dead child a rifle with eyes,
and from every crime bullets are born
which will one day find
the bull's eye of your hearts.And you'll ask: why doesn't his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land?Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
The blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
In the streets!"
Pablo Neruda’s poem, “I’m explaining a few things.”
And that’s the story of Afghanistan. We’re sending some soldiers to Afghanistan.
That’s the story of Iraq, 5 million people in Iraq displaced; between 2 and 3 million of them outside the country, a roughly equal number inside the country. In Syria now, the next country to the north of Iraq, the places of prostitution and strip clubs are filled with 12 year old girls, Iraqis, working to survive. Jordan is filled with the wealthier refugees from Iraq. The dead are all over the country. Our use of, during the first Bush war and the 2nd Bush war, of depleted Uranium is creating an explosion of some of the most horrifying birth defects ever seen. War crimes. We have committed war crimes in Iraq. We committed, and frankly to begin the bombing of Afghanistan was a war crime. To continue it is a war crime. And we, the United States, must confront the criminals, the Bush Cheney Rumsfeld administration and the individuals in that administration with their crimes of war that led to the deaths of as many as a million people. And frankly, we as a people must do everything we can to stop the insanity, the ongoing insanity of these wars. “Come and see the blood in the streets,” writes Pablo Neruda. “Come and see the blood in the streets.”
Transcribed by Suzanne Roberts, Portland Psychology Clinic.
