Review: The Assassination of García Lorca

El asesinato de García Lorca by Ian Gibson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Sometimes the simple act of remembering is political. History is, unfortunately, replete with crimes that one government or another would prefer to remain hidden. And, certainly, forgetting is probably easier for everyone involved—less traumatic, more convenient—even, perhaps, for the victims. Thus, whenever some busybody like Ian Gibson begins stirring up old trouble, the accusation of “opening up old wounds” is inevitably trotted out (ironically, by the ones who did the wounding in the first place).

And yet, even if it is not entirely logical—even if what is done is done, and nothing can change that—some sense of moral duty, of obligation to victims who are beyond all human help, seems to compel us nevertheless to reach back into the past and seek justice. This book is imbued with that sense—perhaps a quixotic sense—of ethical duty, as Gibson attempts to nudge the moral balance of the universe back in the right direction.

He first establishes that Lorca was anything but the apolitical flower child that he is sometimes portrayed as. It is true that Lorca was perhaps somewhat naïve and, in general, was averse to party politics (he repeatedly refused to join the communist party). But he was politically active and unambiguously allied with the left, as was evident by several public declarations. Indeed, the idea that Lorca was, in his final days, converting to the fascist cause—an openly homosexual poet who dramatized the evils of conservative Catholicism!—was never anything but laughable.

Gibson then does his best to establish the events that lead to Lorca’s death in Granada, using interviews with witnesses (admittedly many years after the fact) to pin down as many details as he can. In the process, he gives the reader a sense of the climate of terror and repression that engulfed Granada in the opening days of the military uprising—jails packed to bursting, mass graves filled by firing squads, a knock on the door at mightnight to go “take a walk.” In the process, he also lays to rest another myth of Lorca’s murder, that he was somehow killed by uncontrollable elements of the falangist party—a random act of violence, in other words. On the contrary, Lorca’s death was the product of an intentional campaign of “purification,” approved of and organized by the authorities.

This book might not have had such an impact on me had I not visited Granada as I was on the final pages. Though I had read many of Lorca’s works before the visit, he was still just a historical personage for me—one of Spain’s many dead poets. But visiting his former houses (there are several, as his family was very wealthy) transformed him into somebody startlingly real and close. I saw the piano that he liked to noodle on, the writing desk on which he wrote his most famous plays, and even hand-drawn theater backdrops to be used in a puppet show for his baby sister.

This trip culminated in a visit to the Barranco de Víznar, the place of his execution. We arrived on a foggy Sunday morning and followed the path into the woods. Soon, we came upon several white tents, which covered the excavations sites of mass graves. The trees around the site were covered with laminated posters bearing the names and faces of those executed there—professors, politicians, farmers, pharmacists, music teachers… In the center was a simple memorial covered in flowers, with the inscription “They were all Lorca.”

So far, the remains of dozens of individuals have been recovered there by a team of investigators, though none have yet been identified by DNA tests. That this excavation had to wait nearly 100 years to take place is a measure of the silence—imposed, in an attempt to forget—that followed the Spanish Civil War. But relatives of the victims have kept their memories alive, and now they are perhaps receiving some modicum of justice. Even today, memorializing these victims takes courage. Just last week, a hiker was assaulted at that very place by a man screaming “There aren’t many buried here!” The hiker was hospitalized. But the work continues.

View all my reviews

Quotes & Commentary #82: Tolstoy

In historical events great men—so called—are but the labels that serve to give a name to an event, and like labels, they have the least possible connection with the event itself.
Leo Tolstoy

Anyone who has made it to the end of War and Peace will remember the strange sensation of finishing one of literature’s most epic stories and immediately being thrown into—of all things—an essay on the philosophy of history. With your heart throbbing with emotion for the characters who made it to the end of the novel, you are hardly in a fit frame of mind for considering the deep mechanisms of historical progress.

Tolstoy himself may not even have been in a fit frame of mind, as his essay—while well-written and interesting—is not exactly persuasive. Indeed, the famous philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote one of his most famous philosophical essays, “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” analyzing why a man as brilliant as Tolstoy could put forward a work of analysis that does not really hold together. In Berlin’s opinion, Tolstoy is a classic “fox” trying to be a “hedgehog”—meaning, that although Tolstoy’s brilliance was expansive and intuitive, born of his great gift for empathy, he longed to be a systematic thinker who could subject his life to logical conclusions.

Tolstoy’s particular gifts aside, let us turn to the main argument of his essay—namely, that the “Great Man” theory of history is a mistake. Tolstoy argues that, although we conventionally ascribe major historical events to the decisions of certain powerful individuals, it is more accurate to think of history as the product of a countless number of choices and actions by everyone involved. To use Tolstoy’s own example of Napoleon, he argues that, although Napoleon is treated as a kind of mortal god who changed European history—a military genius who defeated so many foes—in reality he was usually unaware of what was happening during his major conflicts, and entirely powerless to influence the outcomes of his battles.

Now, I think nearly everyone would say that Tolstoy pushes his point too far. I doubt many historians would be willing to argue that Napoleon was not a particularly important man, who certainly did exert an influence on the outcome of his battles. Nevertheless, the opposite opinion —say, that Napoleon was wholly in control of his destiny—can also easily be taken too far. Indeed, as far as I can tell, amid historians nowadays there is quite a bit of hostility to the “Great Man” view of history.

I hate to be the sort of person to argue for a middle ground. “It is a little of both” is the oldest intellectual cop out in history. Nevertheless, it does seem logically inescapable that “men” (or, to be a little more inclusive, “people”) are both products of their times and makers of events. The more interesting question is to what extent any given individual is crucial to the shape of history.

The most convincing proponent of the “Great Man” view of history I know is Robert Caro (whose tomes make even War and Peace seem lightweight). In his biography of Bob Moses, for example, Caro makes a convincing case that Moses was a uniquely gifted administrator—an expert in the accumulation and deployment of political power. The very shape of New York City—its many highways, bridges, and tunnels, its parks and housing developments—is, for better or worse, a testament to Moses’s influence.

But a skeptic might say that, as special as Moses might have been, cities all over the United States implemented similar programs—bulldozing neighborhoods for highways, demolishing buildings to create high-rise public housing. If Moses was really so special, then why did he merely accomplish what was basically accomplished all around the country by far less famous individuals?

This rebuttal works in the abstract but not the concrete (pun intended). In Caro’s telling, you can see exactly how Moses subverted rules, bypassed regulations, and bent politicians and contractors to his will, in a way that was completely unprecedented. After witnessing his machinations, it is very difficult not to be convinced that, at the very least, Moses’s specific personality and prejudices carried historic weight.

This is not to take the opposite view, that so-called “Great Men” are the only ones who count in history. It is just to make the claim that, while every individual can exert some influence on the shape of history, some individuals wield considerably more influence than others. And while this may feel like a cop-out, arguably both Tolstoy’s view or the opposite extreme are anti-humanistic—the former, because individual qualities are held to play no role in history, and the latter, because the majority of humankind are reduced to automatons carrying out the will of a few geniuses on top.

I will cease to belabor this point—which I suspect will seem rather obvious to most—as it is just another form of the “chicken and egg” problem. I will only add that, as an amateur student of history, I think it is greatly rewarding to consider the individual experiences of both the major players (the so-called “Great Men”) and the supposedly “ordinary” people on the bottom. It all has much to teach us.

Quotes & Commentary #81: Pirsig

We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and the results aren’t just bad, they’re ghastly.
Robert Pirsig

Among the many woes of American higher education nowadays, one is the precipitous decline of the humanities. Students these days, apparently, are opting for science, business, or engineering degrees, rather than the liberal arts. And as administrators slash budgets in history and literature departments in response to this declining enrollment, some writers and educators have stepped forward to defend this ancient, noble pursuit.

David Brooks attempted a sort of defense recently, in his column “How to Save a Sad, Lonely, Angry and Mean Society.” His argument was essentially that exposure to great works of art develops empathy, as great art trains us to see the world through different perspectives. It is Brooks’s belief and hope that such exposure translates to moral behavior. After all, if we can appreciate the needs, thoughts, and beliefs of others, we will certainly be more kind to them.

I would very much like to agree with this argument. But I have a hard time swallowing it. For example, one of the artists that Brooks mentions is Pablo Picasso, whose great painting Guernica arguably improves its viewers by making the horrors of war viscerally palpable. Picasso himself was, however, a notorious abuser of women, despite being as steeped in art as a person can possibly be. Indeed, history is so replete with cultured criminals—many prominent Nazis were highly educated connoisseurs, to pick just one notorious example—that the notion of betterment through studying the humanities can seem rather silly.

And yet, it is difficult for me to entirely let go of this idea. As a counterpoint, I might mention the American Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara. After watching Errol Morris’s wonderful documentary about McNamara, one is left with the impression of a man dominated by instrumental thinking. That is, McNamara is always concerned with the how of any question—and he is content to let his superiors worry about what he is doing, why he is doing it, and whether he should be doing it in the first place. Put another way, I think McNamara illustrates the limitations of a purely technical mind—even a brilliant one—as he attempts to make a stupid, immoral war machine as efficient as possible.

Perhaps it is fairer to say, then, that the humanities, while not sufficient for moral behavior, are a necessary condition of it. Or perhaps one must make the even weaker argument that, in general, exposure to philosophy, literature, history, and the arts tends to make us more moral. Or perhaps we might even have to take one further step back, and resign ourselves to saying that these subjects give us an opportunity to at least consider how we could become more moral. If that isn’t convincing, then we ought to just admit that the humanities are valuable simply because they make life more pleasant and interesting—which should be enough, anyway.

What does seem quite clear to me is that all the humanities and arts in the world will not be enough to extricate us from the moral morass that the United States—and, to a worrying extent, much of the rest of the world—seems to have fallen into. Individual enlightenment, even if it is achievable, does not stand much of a chance against collective stupidity. As dirty and disheartening as it is, we must participate in politics as partisans if we want to create a better world.

In any case, I think the decline in student enrollment in the humanities should not be ascribed simply to the deterioration of our culture or the coarse values of the new generation. A huge part of the explanation is simply cost. It is one thing to, say, hold history or philosophy in high esteem, but quite another thing to decide to go into thousands of dollars of debt to acquire such knowledge, with no assurance of a decent job on the other end. Expensive universities only make financial sense if they lead to a good career. (Having studied anthropology, I am in no position to be moralizing on this topic.)

In many ways, the university system here in Spain seems more logical to me. Rather than living on a luxurious campus and indulging in the life of the mind, most university students here commute from home, pay a modest fee, and learn exactly what they need to work in a specific job. In other words, it is job training, pure and simple (at least for most people).

And yet, I am old-fashioned enough to think that there is something good and valuable in the old liberal arts model of education, even if it is difficult to justify on economic grounds. Like Pirsig, I shudder to think of a world where people are only familiar with their own specialty, be it science or art. Education should not be reduced to technical training, or we will be left with a society of people unable to think about problems beyond the narrow domain of their fields. But how can the humanities be kept alive amid the ballooning cost of universities and the dwindling job opportunities of the market? This is a question beyond my ken.

Review: Battle Cry of Freedom

Battle Cry of Freedom by James M. McPherson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It is amazing how ignorant one can be without knowing it. As a product of the American school system, and a veteran of all 11 and a half hours of Ken Burns’s iconic documentary, I thought that I was in for few surprises when I began this book. But because of deficiencies in either my education or my memory—probably a bit of both—I was constantly surprised throughout this telling of the war, and became absolutely riveted.

Though I am certainly not in a position to judge, I would venture to say that this book simply must be the best one-volume account of the war. It is a remarkable performance on every level. Despite the relatively limited amount of space that McPherson can devote to any one subject, the reader never feels that he is offering a superficial or a cursory account. On the contrary, as in the best overviews of historical events, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, as each element in the story sheds light on every other.

McPherson shows himself to be a skilled and flexible author. Whether he is analyzing the Confederate economy, or examining the Northern political situation, or explaining the advances in naval technology, or narrating battles and troop movements, McPherson’s prose is steady, clear, and engaging. His grasp of the subject is so strong, and his vision so clear, that the chaos of politics and war plays out on the page with the orderliness of a Victorian novel. The simple act of taking such a huge mass of information and rendering it into something comprehensible—while remaining nuanced and enlightening—is, in my opinion, a great literary accomplishment.

As might be expected, the comforting notion that the war was somehow about states’ rights—and not slavery—does not hold up to even a moment of scrutiny. It is true that the Confederate states, in general, did place a high value on the autonomy of individual states. Yet these states’ support of the Fugitive Slave Act before the war—a huge extension of federal power, allowing the national government to overrule individual state laws to return escaped slaves—shows that slavery trumped this concern. In any case, whenever the states’ rights argument is made, it immediately leads to the question: their right to do what, exactly? (Answer: maintain slavery.)

As a final irony, after vociferously denouncing the use of black troops by the Union Army, and refusing to treat captured blacks as soldiers (either summarily executing them or selling them into slavery), in its final months, the Confederacy considered the use of slave soldiers. This idea was so totally contradictory to their stated values that it produced anger, shame, and confusion among the Confederates. Some preferred simply to give up to the North than to resort to this horrible betrayal of their values. Others admitted that, if blacks could make good soldiers, their entire way of life was based on a lie. Politicians wrangled with the implications of slave soldiers: If they were to fight, shouldn’t they be promised their freedom as a reward? In any case, this handwringing came to nothing, as the Confederacy collapsed before they could put this desperate—and hopelessly contradictory—idea into practice.

On a purely military level—admittedly, perhaps the most superficial way a war can be judged—the American Civil War is as thrilling and fascinating as any war in history. There were brilliant generals on the Union and Confederate sides whose campaigns are still studied today by would-be commanders. In McPherson’s telling, the main lesson of the war is the wisdom of an aggressive strategy. The first two years of the war, from 1861-63, are marked by defeat after Union defeat under generals (particularly McClellan) who shied away from confrontation, while Southern generals took the initiative. However, when Grant and Sherman—as aggressive as they come—finally took control on the Union side, the carnage of battle went from horrible to simply nauseating, and I began to have some sympathy for McClellan’s reluctance to subject his troops to such slaughter.

In many ways, the American Civil War seems to prefigure the terrible conflicts of the following century. By the end of the war, the basic tactics of the infantry resembled those of the First World War—massed troop attacks against entrenched positions, with predictably horrible casualty rates. The invention of iron-clad ships reminds one of the first tanks, while the Union use of a subterranean mine to break the enemy line in the siege of Petersburg prefigured what became a common strategy in the Great War. On the other hand, the horrible conditions of prisoners of war—particularly in the Confederate camp, Andersonville—are an unsettling forerunner of the German camps in World War II. The photographs of emaciated Union soldiers will look very familiar nowadays. And this is not to mention the millions of enslaved blacks forced to aide in the war effort of their enslavers, another omen of things to come.

And yet, there is a certain horror peculiar to civil wars. I am now, for example, making my way through interviews of civilians and soldiers who lived through the Second World War, and a common thread is how easy it was to hate and fight someone alien—someone who lives far away, speaks a different language, and maybe even looks different. But in a Civil War, neighbors fight neighbors, friends fight friends, and family fight family—not metaphorically, mind you, but literally. It is difficult to understand how a country could devolve to such a point that a boy from Maine is willing to stick a bayonet in the guts of a teenager from North Carolina.

What is even more remarkable, perhaps, is that the country was able to come together after such a vicious conflict. Though the hysterical and uncompromising tone of many of the politicians prior to the war now sound distressingly familiar, I suppose I should derive some hope from the fact that the country survived intact—indeed, became stronger than ever before—after this murderous episode.

Historians are averse to counterfactuals, and perhaps rightfully so. After all, how could you possibly know what might have happened in some imagined parallel timeline? However, I do think it worthwhile to consider these questions, even if precise answers elude us. What would have happened, then, if the South had successfully seceded? In a rapidly industrializing world, in which all of the major powers had abolished slavery or serfdom, how long would the “peculiar institution” have lasted in an independent Confederacy? As valuable as was their cotton, it is difficult for me to resist the idea that they would quickly have ended up an agricultural backwater, increasingly shunned by the rest of the world.

I am getting off track. This is a review of the book, not the war itself. But it is a mark of McPherson’s accomplishment that I cannot stop thinking about this defining conflict. Lately, I have even found myself watching long video tours of the great Civil War battlefields (either a great testament to the book’s value or to my own need to get a life). Of course, in any single-volume work of this kind, there will inevitably be omissions and shortcomings. I would have liked more on the experience of being a common soldier, for example. Yet such criticisms are easy to make, and seem very petty when compared to everything that McPherson has accomplished here. It is a great achievement.

View all my reviews

Quotes and Commentary #80: Schopenhauer

Whoever takes up and seriously pursues a matter that does not lead to material advantage, ought not to count on the sympathy of his contemporaries.
Arthur Schopenhauer

Despite the greed, grubbiness, and graft associated with capitalism, looked at in a certain light it can appear positively utopian. Certainly many economists and centrist politicians have thought so. In a free market there is no such thing as inherent value. No authority, not even divinely ordained, can determine that something is worth paying for. The only true test of worth is whether people want it, and how much they are willing to spend to get it. That’s it. You can even argue that truly pure capitalism—with perfectly free consumers in a perfectly open market—is a kind of existentialist paradise, where every person determines their values through their own decisions (specifically, by deciding what to buy).

Of course, as any behavioral psychologist, marxist, anthropologist, or clear-eyed person will tell you, this paradise of free choice is very far from the reality we live in. Nevertheless, I think that many of us internalize the idea that value is determined via the market—not only personally (as the existentialists might have it), but objectively. If a song is #1 in the charts, for example, then it must be good by definition. Anything people choose to spend money on simply must be better than what they choose to ignore. By extension, any activity that does not make a profit is, objectively, a waste of time. Money is the ultimate arbiter.

Now, I am not against making money. But I am opposed to the idea that an activity must bring a profit in order to be worth seriously pursuing. A good hobby should, above all, bring pleasure to oneself. Money is a bonus.

In many ways the internet has ushered in a golden age of hobbies, by allowing networks to form among practitioners across vast distances and making available resources that previous generations could scarcely dream of. Birdwatching, for example, used to be done in solitude or, at most, in a local group, with only a guidebook as a resource. Now apps can identify birds by photo or call, or notify users of a certain species in an area, pooling the collected knowledge of the entire community.

But the internet has also made it possible to monetize these hobbies—or try to. Whether taking photos, making paintings, or recording music, now we can all be miniature professionals by selling our work or services on the web. (Birders have mostly kept out of the market, though.) And when these ventures perform poorly—as most inevitably will—a tinge of disappointment and failure hangs over what, in another time, might have been a perfectly carefree pursuit. In other words, we now have the ability to turn virtually any skill we have into another job—which is not exactly a recipe for joy.

Of course, Schopenhauer was not talking about hobbies. With a good deal of self-pity, he was referring to his own largely unrewarded and unrecognized labor to create a new system of philosophy. That bitter man was certainly not the only genius whose work was ignored by his contemporaries. There are too many to name. In retrospect, it is a wonder that people can be so blind. And yet, the idea that posterity is the ultimate judge—which Schopenhauer would likely agree with, I think—is just another version of the idea that markets are the ultimate judge of value. In this case, you can just say that the market is a little bit slow.

But, as I mentioned in my review of Van Gogh’s letters, this introduces a kind of paradox. For if the market is the arbiter of value, and that market can be tardy in coming to a verdict, then we must labor under the uncertainty of our own worthiness. We can spend our lives painting and leave behind a treasure for the ages, or we can spend our lives painting and leave behind junk nobody wants. Since we might die before our work is “discovered,” we might never know. Herman Melville, for example, could probably never have dreamed that Moby Dick—which sold poorly and got mediocre reviews—would become the Great American Novel.

Are there any lessons to be drawn from this? Maybe the very idea that markets—including posthumous markets—determine value ought to be scrapped. After all, there is very little stability or unanimity in mass opinion. For all we know, in 100 years Van Gogh might not even be popular or beloved anymore. Schopenhauer’s reputation has certainly had its highs and lows.

Lotz in Translation

Saving the world—one long, pretentious blog post at a time.

Month: February 2024