Spanish Civil War

“Memorízate”, project from FIBGAR, has been selected to participate in the World Forum for Democracy

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Friday, November 3, 2023
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On November 7, FIBGAR will present its Memorízate project within the framework of the World Forum for Democracy.

Key Points: 
  • On November 7, FIBGAR will present its Memorízate project within the framework of the World Forum for Democracy.
  • The initiative has been selected from among 400 proposals and will be presented in Lab 4: Knowledge is power, where projects dedicated to strengthening democracy from the generation of knowledge are framed.
  • In 2016 FIBGAR created Memorízate with the idea of reconstructing the collective memory of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship.
  • Specifically, the project has a triple purpose:
    Collect individual stories and data from victims, witnesses, survivors, etc.

Guide to the Classics: Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots

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Monday, September 4, 2023
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To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul.

Key Points: 
  • To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul.
  • So claimed the great French philosopher, activist and spiritual writer, Simone Weil, in her classic 1943 book, The Need for Roots.

An extraordinary, paradoxical figure

    • Weil is one of the 20th century’s most remarkable and paradoxical figures.
    • (This led her to take leave from teaching, at one point, to labour within the harsh factories of Paris.)
    • Read more:
      Guide to the classics: Immanuel Kant’s Toward Perpetual Peace and its relevance to the war in Ukraine

The needs of the soul

    • In some senses, her thought anticipates so-called “postliberalist” positions in our own time, which reject both individualism and globalist economics.
    • She believes in strong local communities, condemns economic exploitation of the poor, and is deeply suspicious of the motives of the modern, centralised, bureaucratic state.
    • Work is an essential need of the soul for Weil (she speaks at one point of the “spirituality of work”).
    • Read more:
      Friday essay: what do the 5 great religions say about the existence of the soul?

Urban and rural forms of uprootedness

    • Weil then turns to what she considers to be the chief challenge of the times: addressing the uprootedness of peoples in both urban and rural France, as well as the uprootedness of the French nation as such.
    • Her observations and diagnoses here are often as acute as her prescriptions for addressing them.
    • In her analysis, urban workers face the twin perils of either unemployment or exploitation in workplaces that afford little or no opportunity for intrinsic reward from their labours.
    • She writes of the unhealthy rift between rural peasantry and urban workers, the depopulation of the countryside and the “ennui of French Provincial towns”; poverty, poor educational opportunities, and narrow cultural horizons.

The idolatrous nation state

    • Here she sees the malign influence of Roman imperialism behind the growth of the powerful French state, which developed in the 17th century.
    • Not only were provinces conquered and uprooted to create the modern French state, but as an imperial power it, in turn, uprooted and assimilated other territories, thus spreading the contagion.
    • The wartime occupation of France by the more recently developed German state was a manifestation of the same phenomenon.
    • Her virulent opposition is rather to the state as an idol demanding absolute obedience.

Does Spanish nationalism exist?

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Thursday, July 20, 2023
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There is also a Spanish nationalism of Castilian origin.

Key Points: 
  • There is also a Spanish nationalism of Castilian origin.
  • This nationalism has been deeply rooted in Spanish politics from the time of the Restoration in the second half of the 19th century.
  • In fact, allusions to peripheral nationalisms and their claims are constant, while there is hardly any reference to Spanish nationalism.

When did the idea of Spain as a single nation arise?

    • It was in the nineteenth century when a school of thought that promoted the unity and identity of Spain as a single and indivisible nation really emerged.
    • It was put forward by figures such as Spanish politicians Antonio Cánovas del Castillo and Juan Donoso, among others.
    • These began to claim the national identity and territorial unity of Spain more vehemently, doing so in opposition to the peripheral nationalist movements.

Is nationalist sentiment always right wing?

    • But it is important to point out that Spanish nationalism is not an exclusive phenomenon of the political right.
    • There are nationalist lines of thought on the left that also defend the identity and unity of Spain.
    • But the application of article 152 culminated in a policy of transfer of power that practically equated the competences of all communities.

The feeling of identity of recent years

    • It is within this context of “response to the Catalan independence movement” that we must note the significant growth of a feeling of Spanish identity in recent years.
    • They intend to reinforce the principles of centralisation, national identity, and territorial unity – principles so typical of Spain’s sense of identity.

"Ode to January 6th" Painting Unveiled by Elaine Badgley Arnoux

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Wednesday, June 8, 2022
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SAN FRANCISCO, June 8, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- On the eve of the January 6th Congressional hearings, famed San Francisco artist Elaine Badgley Arnoux (www.badgleyarts.com), 96, is unveiling a wall-sized indictment of the 45th President, the GOP and the anti-democratic forces that laid siege to the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021 in a failed coup attempt.

Key Points: 
  • "This is the January 6th Guernica," said Arnoux, referring to Picasso's famous painting following the bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War.
  • Badgley-Arnoux hopes the painting will become a rallying cry for the mid-term elections and beyond.
  • Elaine Badgley Arnoux was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1926 and moved to Southern California when she was 11.
  • In 1952 Badgley Arnoux co-founded the San Luis Obispo Art Association.