The Pain in Spain: What They’re Saying Across the Pond

In the States a partisan debate raged in the press over whether Rumsfeld should quit, be fired, or hang in there. A friend e-mailed me her letter to the Sun-Times canceling her subscription because that paper took Rumsfeld’s side. The Tribune stood by him too–failing to mention that until he became secretary of defense Rumsfeld sat on the Tribune Company’s board of directors.

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Details never travel well. Spain’s tragic sense of life has been reinforced over the centuries by the defeat of the Spanish Armada and the loss of an empire. The “generation of ’98” holds talismanic status in Spanish history as the anguished cohort that saw Spain lose the last of its colonies to rough-and-ready America and hit rock bottom. Matters didn’t improve much in the 20th century, and as late as 1975 Franco’s courts sentenced five Basques convicted of terrorism to die by the garrote, a form of execution not too different from decapitation. After an international protest, they were shot to death instead.

From Europe it was much easier to think about Abu Ghraib simply as tragedy. The Herald Tribune, which picks and chooses from its owner, the Times, ran an essay by novelist Luc Sante, who wrote that the “jaunty insouciance” of the Abu Ghraib guards reminded him of the “white people…laughing and pointing for the benefit of the camera” in old photos of American lynchings. Those pictures reminded the Spanish author Antonio Munoz Molina, writing in El Pais, of “young, strong, jolly” German soldiers having their way with naked Jews. “There are photos of German soldiers amusing themselves by yanking an old Jew by the nose or the beard, or racing them mounted like horses, or cramming sausages into their mouths, or making them sweep the street with toothbrushes.”

The anniversary of Dien Bien Phu was barely noticed in America. What was that to us (except the gateway into the last war in which we lost our innocence)? We had Brown v. Board of Education to think about instead.

Here’s the voice of a paper strutting its stuff: “Since the drums first beat for war in Iraq the Mirror has led the way in reflecting the public’s unease,” London’s Daily Mirror boasted last Saturday. “We questioned every facet of the desire for war from the outset.”

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