"A few sparks" -- My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine

Ambling through the modern centre of Sant Joan Despí [near Barcelona] recently, I came across a kind of historical relic barely seen in this era of celebrity websites, corporate sponsored blogs and fake news.

Lying disregarded on an outdoor cafe table was a copy of a small magazine. I picked it up, looked at it and decided it to take it away and read it.

The name of this Spanish language colour mag was Chispas, or ‘Sparks.’ The cover illustration showed, with for sale and rent signs on top, a block of new apartments, circled by a snare trap with jagged teeth. The accompanying headline in red and white capitals stated: ‘THE COST OF LIVING IS MAKING US POOR.’

This was what encouraged me to take the magazine and explore it further; that and the fact that the layout and graphics inside looked more like it had been printed some time during the 1990s. With a price at just €3, this issue (number 183) filled 66 pages.

Reading through ‘Chispas’ on the way home on a delayed RENFE train, I found that its contents confirmed to me so much that is great about European left wing politics but also a few things that are still wrong with it. The first featured story on the inside cover (with picture) related Spain’s average monthly salary of €1,000 to housing costs in many cities here being between €500 and €700 euros a month.

This article was preceded by a letters page (Trump, the need for a public bank; the wolf-pack rape case and food prices.) The other main items focused on arguments against NATO, the progressive-left political ‘earthquake’ (or landslide) at the Mexican elections and two interviews; one with with a local scientist and one with the head of a LGBT collective: ‘40 Years of Pride.’

As well as the range and breadth in variety of these and the rest of the articles, what also struck me as I read through ‘Chispas’ was the detail and the high standard of research. Yes, some of the writers tended towards polemic points of view at times but overall the language was clear and simple, though surely a bit too academic in places.

A three-page piece picking apart the Partido Popular primary elections beautifully highlighted their current weaknesses, another longer feature looked intelligently at the serious plight of self-employed or independent ‘autonomos’ in Spain and another equally well put-together section criticised the failure of the European Union’s policies on the question of refugee and migrant human rights.

I couldn’t help wondering though, who actually reads this type of humble publication? Apart from people like me who are political animals and the most ardent of trade unionists or party members, who would actually part with the three euros to get your hands on a copy and then do more than look at the bold print or graphics?

The great problem with these kind of wonderful little things is that they are essentially preaching to the converted. Those who are indifferent to the kinds of topics they write about or the politically undecided will never hear their persuasive points. That is probably something of a sad truth.

In my final moment of reading the magazine I looked at the name of the organisation who had printed this highly informative mixture of quality progressive thinking and occasional close-minded dogma: Unificacion Comunista de España, based in Valencia.

[This article was first published in the October edition of Catalonia Today magazine.]

Images from the Stasi secret police files (of then East Germany)

Simon Menner

While conducting research on surveillance, I realized that the public has very limited access to images   showing the act of surveillance from the perspective of the surveillant. What actually is it that the Orwellian “Big Brother” gets to see when he is watching us?

For over two and a half years, I applied this question to materials from the former East Germany’s Ministry for State Security, commonly known as the Stasi, which had become publicly available after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Stasi was one of the most effective surveillance apparatuses ever. The quantity and breadth of the images I was able to unearth was surprising: images documenting Stasi agents being trained in hand signals, or perfecting the art of disguise; Polaroids taken during clandestine searches of people’s homes, to ensure everything could be put back where it belonged; photographs made by Stasi spies photographing other spies.

Many of the images shown here might appear absurd or even funny to us. But it is important not to lose sight of the original intentions behind these pictures—photographic records of the repression exerted by the state to subdue its own citizens. The banality of some of these pictures makes them even more repulsive. Many of the images are open to wide interpretation and could feed or confirm the suspicions of the Stasi agents viewing them. For example, the photograph of a Siemens coffeemaker: Is this West German consumer product evidence of contacts with Western agents? Or merely a present from relatives? The difference can mean years in prison, demonstrating one of the fundamental problems and limitations inherent to any and all forms of surveillance.

Presenting most of these pictures can be a double-edged sword. Many represent an undue intrusion into people’s private lives. Does reproducing them repeat the intrusion and renew injustices committed years ago? I grappled with this difficult issue and concluded that the pictures should be presented because they make an important contribution to discussions about state-sanctioned surveillance systems.

—Simon Menner, November 2014

For fascinating and disturbing photo exhibition click here.






[Source and creator: Open Society Foundations. (Creative Commons license rules.)]

"Albania's pain" - My latest article for Catalonia Today magazine

[A middle class Albanian family Photo: PETER MENZEL, FAMILIES OF THE WORLD.]

When I was a curly-haired (and more ignorant) twelve year old in the Cold War years of the early 1980s, one day our History teacher asked the class a general knowledge question: “Who is the world’s longest-serving current dictator?”

Nobody had the correct answer, though Chairman Mao was one of the few responses from the students. Mr Lamb (yes, that was my teacher's name) gave us some helpful clues. “Come on now! He’s been in power since 1944 and he’s not from Asia.” But still, there was no idea running through the developing minds of those in the group. “It’s the Communist leader, Hoxha. Enver Hoxha in Albania,” he told us and wrote this strange sounding name on the board.

A decade and a half later (after French-educated Hoxha had been dead for almost ten years) I started to develop a morbid fascination with this country - a place the wider world knew little about. I read Paul Theroux’s harrowing account of a few weeks he spent travelling there and from a ferry leaving Greece I saw part of its coast: rough, dry and barren of buildings. I discovered that both Albania’s past, equally as much as its present, beggars belief and this pulled me into its orbit.

By the time Hoxha had been claimed by diabetes at the age of seventy six, his regime had modernised the economy in a classically Communist way: at a huge cost to the lives of its citizens. All across Albania, vicious historical blood feuds between families raged on and on unchecked and Hoxha’s secret police, the “sigourmi,” used networks of ordinary people as informers on their workmates and neighbours. Tens of thousands were jailed or disappeared (often in the kind of nightmarish circumstances that could come straight out of a Kafka story) and it’s estimated that up to twenty percent of the population were killed or died in forced labour.

When Hoxha’s supposed “worker’s paradise” came to an end there was a long, widespread orgy of general destruction of public property including factories. Combined with mass unemployment, severe shortages of food and fuel meant that the winter cold froze many people to death. Thousands of badly-needed professionals and working age men and women are still escaping to try to find work in neighbouring Greece or taking the short ferry to an often equally poverty-stricken existence in Italy. Some are going further away, including to Britain.

But even the years before Hoxha were no less bizarre. Albania’s King Zog, who survived five assassination attempts, married an aristocratic half-American woman (having seen her in a photo.) The Albanian parliament insisted on seeing the bloody nightgown from her wedding night, as proof of her virginity. Their giant-sized only son Prince Leka moved to Spain, where he trained exiles for a planned guerilla war against Hoxha. Leka’s combat practice became too much even for Franco’s government and the prince’s former royal playmate Juan Carlos was requested to ask Leka and his tribe to leave the country in the mid 1970s. He then took up residence in South Africa and hung around with the King of Zululand after marrying an Australian citizen and former teacher named Susan.

Meanwhile Albania was falling apart slowly. To see the country today is to witness corruption on a scale that makes Greece, Italy or Spain look like amateurish. Because of threats to their lives, the Prosecutor General Adriatik Llalla was recently forced to send his pregnant wife and two children to live in another European country. On top of this, environmentalist groups say they fear Albania will become Europe’s dumping site now that the national government has agreed to take other countries recycling waste.

Albania has some of our continent’s most spectacular scenery and quiet beaches. It has been predicted to become the next big thing in tourism for many of the last few years but somehow it is still largely neglected.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, November 2016.]

Modern Spain, according to Muñoz Molina

…"Ideology is often a form of laziness, a reason for learning nothing.

…What I see is a new crop of complacent anecdotes, adventures of old men who prefer to inhabit a realm of vague nostalgia undisturbed by introspection or the awareness of any error, any regret. This blurs the grandeur that the Spanish Communists possessed: that of choosing, when Franco died, the road of concord and reconciliation, shedding their ossified Soviet baggage, to put their intelligence and generosity to work in the construction of a new democracy. Justice can only be done to such lives in one of those biographies — the ones that Spaniards can’t be bothered to write."

A quote (well worth repeating) from Antonio Muñoz Molina in EL PAÍS, Saturday, November 7, 2009.