18th Of July - The F Word

JM Bordaberry Arocena (RIP)

In Praise Of...

The first name on the list is John Angus. The records say little about him. He was, they suspected, from London. In September 1938, he was reported "fighting in Spain". He was a communist. In longhand, someone has later added "Returned". Further than that, the record is silent. But Angus is caught in the spotlight today because he is on a remarkable list of more than 4,000 British people who volunteered on behalf of the Spanish Republic in the civil war of 1936-39, which has now been made public in the National Archives. To MI5, which compiled the list, John Angus and the others who fought for Spain were suspicious, perhaps with reason in some cases. To many reading the newly released list today, however, Angus and his companions are heroes, bathed in romance. A few – like the poet John Cornford, against whose name a clerk wrote "DEAD" in December 1936, and then underlined it – were famous in their time. Most were not. They were mainly working-class, often communists, Scots and Jewish. More than 500 people from these islands died for Spain in those three years – more than have died in Afghanistan in nearly a decade. The names of the dead have long been collected together on the International Brigade Memorial Trust website. Now, thanks to a liberal gesture by the security service, the dead and their comrades who survived have been reunited in this much longer list, an enduring roll call of a generation and a company who should be remembered in honour.

Gernika, 26 April 1937

Arizona Law: Thu 29 July 2010

The intersection of 43rd Avenue and Thomas Road on the west side of Phoenix is lined with the same monotonous range of petrol stations, fast-food outlets, pharmacies and clothes stores that you'll find in any modern city in America's heartlands. It is distinguished only by the exceptionally mundane.

Look closer, though, and a disturbing pattern emerges. Here is a real estate office that is shuttered and empty, here a panaderia – a bread shop – that has closed, and next door to that, a children's clothes store also shut. Across the road a cellphone outlet is boarded up and a large grocery store has vanished. A Mexican restaurant still has its sign proudly boasting "Tacos Since 1975", but there are no tacos being made here any more. A rival restaurant nearby, Marly's Mexican Food, has a sign saying "Drive Thru Open", yet the building has been stripped bare. A handwritten note in the front entrance says "Se cierra el negocio porque nos mudamos de estado" – the restaurant is closed because we've moved out of the state.

It's as if the whole area is turning into a tourist ghost town, for which the west is renowned. But this is not supposed to be a ghost town. This is bustling Phoenix, capital of Arizona and one of America's fastest growing and most dynamic metropolises.

Why this is going on is the question put to Sergio Diaz, the owner of an English language school next to Marly's restaurant, where a room full of young students are practising English verbs. "We've been in business since 2000," Diaz says. "At the end of this month we are going to close."

"My students are about 90% undocumented," he says, referring to the largely Mexican illegal immigrants who attend his school. "Three months ago we'd have up to 200 students every day; now there are only 15. They are all leaving, or preparing to leave."

Diaz says his clients are fleeing a controversial new immigration law that comes into effect throughout Arizona on 29 July. SB 1070 amounts to the harshest crackdown against undocumented immigrants that has been made in any part of the US for a generation. It has put Arizona in the centre of a nationwide foment about immigration that is pitting individual states against the Obama administration, whites against Hispanics.

At the heart of the debate are the 12 million or so illegal immigrants, most of them Mexican, who already live and work in the US, about 500,000 of them in Arizona. Over the past few decades they have become a fixture of American life, building homes and families and carrying out the low-paid farm work that few US citizens are prepared to do.

They have been largely tolerated, existing just below the surface of American life, sending their children to school, paying taxes and only coming into contact with police if they committed serious crimes. Immigration violations were generally treated as a civilian, rather than a criminal matter.

But in recent months, the mood has hardened, and nowhere more so than in Arizona, whose border with Mexico is the busiest crossing point for undocumented Mexicans. Anger towards them has increased in the wake of highly publicised incidents linked to the burgeoning drug wars on the Mexican side of the border, including the shooting of an Arizonan police officer in April.

Politicians have responded to demands for the border to be strengthened and for more deportations, culminating in SB 1070. The legislation, in effect, turns Arizona's undocumented residents into criminals, handing responsibility for enforcement from immigration officers to the police. Anyone without proper papers who comes into contact with the police – be it for something as minor as a broken brake light – can have their documents checked if police suspect them of being illegal immigrants, and find themselves rapidly deported. Anyone who helps an undocumented person, whether by housing them or offering them work or even feeding them or giving them a lift, can also find themselves in trouble.

Lydia Guzman, a community worker with Somos America, a coalition of Hispanic groups in Phoenix, says the mood among Latino families has changed over the past two months, ahead of the law coming into effect: "Panic has set in."

The mood has changed, too, among white Americans, who have interpreted the increasingly aggressive language used by politicians as a green light to express their own prejudices. Incidents of harassment towards undocumented Latinos from employers, landlords and neighbours have increased. Should the victims protest, they are frequently taunted with the refrain: "So what are you going to do about it, tell the police?"

The hostility has reached such a level that Guzman deploys an extreme metaphor, saying that a "Gestapo community" is in the making.

"Just last week, a family told us that the people next door, who they'd known for 10 years, had reported them to the police because their dog was barking too much. The father was arrested in front of his three young kids."

With two weeks still to go before SB 1070 becomes a reality, thousands of families are already leaving Arizona. Sandra Soto packed her bags last week, quitting the city where she's lived for 20 years and relocating to New Mexico. She, her husband and two of her three children are legal US residents; only the third child is undocumented, but this was enough to make her want to leave.

Besides, she says the atmosphere has become too unpleasant. "It doesn't matter that I'm legal. The first thing I'm asked these days is to show my papers. Just because my skin is a little dark, that I'm Hispanic. That's all they see."

Stephanie, who attends Puente, a Hispanic community group, has an extended family of some 20 or 30 people. Many are legal, some aren't. Recently, one of her nieces was taken in by immigration officials and held in custody for a week. A nephew who has lived in Phoenix since infancy was deported last month to Mexico, a country he barely knows.

"We have followed every single rule in this city to show that we can be good citizens here. I've worked two jobs at a time, cleaning hotels by day and at night – some of the hardest work there is. Yet they say we are trying to rob them."

Opinion polls have shown that more than two-thirds of Arizonans are in favour of the new law. White voters have justified the clampdown on the grounds that illegal immigrants have caused a violent crime wave, when in fact, outside the largely self-contained crime committed by Mexican drug cartels against themselves, the state is enjoying a period of relatively little criminality. It is also said that illegal immigrants are pouring over the border in record numbers, though in reality the rate peaked 10 years ago.

"They are taking our jobs" is another key assumption. But as research by the Morrison Institute for Public Policy at Arizona State University has shown, undocumented immigrants create jobs and support services through the taxes they pay on wages and purchases.

Take schools. Precise numbers won't be known until the start of the new school year, but there is already mounting evidence that large numbers of Hispanic families are removing their children from Phoenix schools in preparation for leaving.

Falling school rolls will mean a collapse in education funding, because money follows the child. In turn, this will hit the quality of education for everybody's children, white Americans included.

Talent is also being squandered. Silvia Rodriguez, 23, has been offered a place at Harvard next year to study arts and education. She has lived in Phoenix since she was two, but because she lacks legal resident status she is not eligible for funding and has to raise the fees privately.

She had been successful at raising the money through foundations and fundraisers, but a few weeks ago support suddenly dried up. "People are afraid because under the law you cannot provide aid to somebody who is undocumented," she says. She now fears that she will be unable to find the $23,000 she still needs, and will have to forego the chance of studying at America's pre-eminent academic institution.

All these examples suggest that by adopting SB 1070, Arizona is economically shooting itself in the foot. But there are others who oppose the new law for reasons more fundamental than self-interest.

Bobbie, a white American from Ohio, believes that it is depriving Americans of the very freedom that made their country great.

For the past 11 years, Bobbie has been married to Roberto [not his real name] from Oaxaca, with whom she has two children, both of whom are also US citizens. Roberto is undocumented. Last year, he was picked up in a raid on his workplace in Phoenix and deported back to Mexico.

Then last July, desperate to be reunited with his family, he began the long and perilous walk across the Mexican border into Arizona. He walked in the searing heat for four days without water. When Bobbie didn't hear from him she presumed him dead.

"I prayed and I prayed. I lit candles over his photograph, and prayed some more," she says. And then he called and said he had made it across. Bobbie brought him back to Phoenix and he has been living back with his family ever since. But it is only a half-existence now.

"He's like a ghost here. He is scared. We don't go to the shops, we don't go on family outings. When the new law comes in I am going to have to hide him in the back seat of my car and smuggle him to work."

Ed Pilkington hears from a woman afraid that her husband may be deported in the crackdown on illegal immigration in Arizona Link to this audio

Bobbie, who has lived in Phoenix for 31 years, is now saving up money to leave Arizona for Las Vegas or Florida. She sees what is happening as a violation of her rights as an American. "They are telling me who I can and cannot marry. My kids are American, yet they look Hispanic, so are they going to be pulled over and questioned too? It feels like I'm no longer in America."

Autumn Rose, Bobbie and Roberto's American-born daughter, aged nine, enters the conversation. "When my dad went away I felt he would never come back, but when he did it was like a miracle," she says. Then she addresses herself to Bobbie and says: "If he goes away again I want to go with him. I don't care if you say no ... I will go with him to protect him."

18th Of July...

If In Arizona...

Don´t forget your "Gringo Mask"!!

Very useful so the Police with Neo-Nazi powers don´t arrest you!

Gernika, 73 Years Today

Eugene TerreBlanche (RIP)

The European Vaccine

The European Union is one reason not to fear the spectre of the 1930s

A WHIFF of cold-war menace hung over the European Union summit on March 1st. A “new iron curtain” threatens to divide rich western Europe from the east, declared Ferenc Gyurcsany, Hungary’s prime minister, as he pleaded for a €180 billion rescue plan for the countries of central and eastern Europe. Mr Gyurcsany had a second plea: for eastern countries to secure early membership of the single currency. Neither idea found favour.

Germany’s Angela Merkel said aid should be given on a “case by case” basis, as eastern countries had “very different” needs. As for speeding up euro membership, she thought not, though newcomers might get faster entry into a scheme to peg currencies to the euro. The Poles, Slovaks and Czechs were also hostile to the Hungarian plan. Their economies are in better shape than debt-laden Hungary or credit-crunched Latvia, and they fear contagion from the belief that eastern Europe is uniformly troubled.

But there is another reason why Mr Gyurcsany’s cold-war rhetoric failed to resonate: another period, the 1930s, haunts Europe even more. This year violent anti-government protests in Greece, Latvia, Bulgaria and Lithuania have spooked leaders across the EU. The European elections are in June. This time, extremists on right and left may do well—including in Hungary, home to some of Europe’s least savoury political groups. Could 1930s economics lead Europe back to 1930s politics?

There are reasons to hope that liberal, multiparty democracy is in pretty good shape across the EU. For a start, everybody knows how the 1930s ended. Europe then was a more dangerous place: its poorest citizens were starving and welfare safety-nets were non-existent or inadequate. At times, Italians in Sardinia ate wild plants to survive. In Denmark unemployment topped 40%, and the government bought surplus cattle from desperate farmers. In 1933 almost-two thirds of Greek public spending went on servicing foreign debts, before the country defaulted. Equally, the first world war had left Europe with much unfinished business. Despite hyperinflation and punitive bills for reparations, Germany remained a big power, yearning to redraw its borders. Austria and Hungary were wounded ex-giants. Italy dreamt of controlling the Adriatic. The Soviet Union’s rise sparked instability as far away as Spain.

Yet for all the differences, intriguing echoes from the 1930s can still be heard. It is not that bits of Europe are flirting with fascism again. It is rather that the same issues irk voters then as now—and politicians are responding to them in similar ways. Today’s German and French governments talk loudly about clamping down on tax havens: this is a highly visible way to seek extra revenue and punish errant plutocrats. Almost 80 years ago, an identical outrage gripped Europe, when French police in 1932 raided the Paris offices of a Swiss bank for customer records, coming away with the names of French members of parliament, newspaper editors and a brace of bishops. (In a nice irony, the raid persuaded livid Swiss authorities to enshrine banking secrecy in law.)

Before the depression, France also had one of Europe’s most open labour markets, home to millions of Poles, Czechs, Belgians, Italians, Spaniards and Swiss, plus impressive numbers of political refugees. But between 1932 and 1935, a string of laws and decrees set quotas on foreign workers and stopped them moving from job to job. Tens of thousands, mostly Poles, were eventually expelled by force. The middle classes also protected themselves: new laws closed the French medical and legal professions to foreign-born graduates, often Jewish refugees.

Today British tabloids rage about jobs for migrants, seizing on Gordon Brown’s infamous phrase about creating “British jobs for British workers”. Spain, which welcomed immigrants in boom times, is offering unemployed foreigners money to go home. Italy’s Northern League wants a freeze on non-EU immigration and last year pushed for the expulsion of EU migrants without adequate means of support, a measure aimed at Roma, or gypsies, from Romania. The expulsion plan was dropped only because it fell foul of an EU directive on freedom of movement.

Holding the line for liberalism

And therein lies the biggest reason to think that the 1930s will not be repeated. EU membership binds national politicians into a set of essentially liberal, free-trading, internationalist standards.

It is true that competition rules and the freedoms of the single market are being sorely tested, as politicians try to steer rescue funds to domestic companies, banks and workers. But among EU leaders there is a consensus on the need to defend “fundamental rights”. The EU can be expected to block blatantly discriminatory laws on housing, employment or schools. No hothead nationalist can close borders to a neighbour’s goods.

Governments can be taken to court or threatened with suspension. But the EU also operates by peer pressure. This can be pompous and ineffective, as in 2000, when European leaders shunned high-level contacts with Austrian politicians because Jörg Haider, a far-right politician, had joined the ruling coalition. That boycott fell apart when Austria’s government was found to be sticking to mainstream policies. Or it can be brutal and effective: in 1998 the EU warned Slovaks not to re-elect Vladimir Meciar, a nasty nationalist, if they wanted to join the club.

Bad things could happen as this crisis deepens. In one nightmare, a fragile EU member could become a failed state. But the EU stands for international solidarity and interdependence. Its maddening complexity amounts to a permanent compromise between competing interests that also makes it a bulwark against extremism. That may not always make Brussels popular with voters. But it does make one thankful that the EU exists.

Is Italy Fascist?

Silvio Berlusconi: "We are the new Falange."

Funny Guy of the Day (V)

"Power must be vested in the armed forces since only they have the organization and the means to fight Marxism."
Gen Augusto Pinochet