Often in the chronicles of human endeavor, what appears a great beginning, or at least a revival, in a political or ideological movement, in reality represents its final, decadent stage.  Some fireworks burn brightest as they die,  Thus it was that the flourishing anarchist movement during the Spanish civil war of 1936-39, while viewed at the time as a powerful breakthrough for a phenomenon that defined itself in terms baffling to most today, as "libertarian communism," stood at the conclusion of radical labor's intervention in history. 

There are many more such examples, both in totalitarianism and in more benevolent chapters of the modern epic.  From the Parisian insurrection of 1968 to the riots in Athens today, the same judgment appears appropriate:  notwithstanding the frenetic acclamation of superficial commentators, these are better seen as concluding rather than inaugural moments.  In my view, the same could be said of the Islamofascist offensive embodied in the atrocities of September 11, 2001. I believe the horror of that day represented Saudi Wahhabism in extremis, rather than the commencement of a victorious worldwide jihad, just as Hitler's temporary victories in Europe in 1939-41 preceded the eventual collapse, rather than the triumph, of Nazi imperialism.

Of no 20^th century event does the coincidence of spectacle with decline seem more obvious, in retrospect, than the Cuban Revolution of 1959.   The pathetic story of Ernesto "Che" Guevara's fall from revolutionary hero in 1960 to scrounging vagabond liquidated in Bolivia in 1967 was, at the time, perceived by only a few observers in the international radical milieu as a sign that the wave of protest culminating in France six months afterward would close, rather than open, a cycle.

Guevara has returned to prominence as a symbol of the left, displayed on tee shirts and other ephemera, including a brand of cigarettes in Holland.  With that result, the appearance of Steven Soderbergh's bloated two-part film Che, totaling four hours of incident and detail incomprehensible to anybody who is not Cuban or a specialist in the annals of Castroism, comes as no surprise.  But as with the revolution itself, and the subsequent squalid defeat of Guevara's Bolivian campaign, what we see on the screen must stand as a stillborn exercise in nostalgia, rather than evidence of a Castroite resurrection.  

In addition, this cinematic monstrosity signifies the end of Soderbergh's credibility as a film director.   While the Georgia-born cinéaste has been hailed absurdly as a protean figure excelling in all aspects of movie-making, his career has slid since he displayed a clever perceptiveness about sexual deceit in sex, lies, and videotape (1989).  His Erin Brockovich and Traffic, released in 2000, were competent but effective more for their messages - the virtue of protest against corporate corruption in the first case, the power of corruption represented by the drug trade, in the second - than for their cinematic verve.  Traffic, for its part, was marred by unconvincing family entanglements attached to the character of a high government official, played by Michael Douglas.

Soderbergh's obsessions, focused on improbable narrative convolutions that hardly rise to the level of "plot twists," obscure gadgets, and shallow characterizations, have made his later pictures unattractive, when not incomprehensible, to critics and viewers alike.  With the Ocean's 11-12-13 franchise, his flaws were aggravated to a point where the last two films became caricatural.  The blank stupidity of employing the actress Julia Roberts to play a woman pretending to be the actress Julia Roberts, in Ocean's 12, was hard to exceed, although the same film was weighed down (physically no less than psychologically) by the enormously (in every sense) untalented Catherine Zeta-Jones, who had brought nothing but bulk to Traffic. 

In Ocean's 13, Soderbergh outdid his previous artistic failures by humiliating Al Pacino, making him a simulacrum of the suave outlaw roles in some of which he had excelled (see the Godfather trilogy and Carlito's Way, not the ludicrous Scarface).   Ocean's 13 similarly degraded Ellen Barkin, who once joined Pacino in lighting up the classic Sea of Love. And those were but two imbecilities in a movie filled with such tidbits.  Formerly, such film fumbles were usually blamed by the prevalence in Hollywood of a then-common variant of "p.c.": Peruvian cocaine.  In the case of Che, however, the drug at fault is obviously the more familiar political correctness.

Andy Garcia, an underrated and underutilized star who, with obvious justification, trudged through the Ocean's franchise as if his only concern might have been to collect his check, is a Cuban-American and pronounced anti-Castro patriot, so that his inveiglement into the Che disaster was doubtless impossible to imagine.  But a Cuban-born star with a thorough knowledge of the events in Cuba and Bolivia in the 1950s and 1960s could not have saved this latest debacle.  Not even Benicio del Toro, a good choice for a Guevara impersonation, could effect such a rescue.  

Soderbergh's Che appears more a pseudo-documentary than a dramatic film, an effect heightened by the film's dialogue being almost entirely in Spanish.  Yet it is a pseudo-doc with a considerable difference, in that notwithstanding its enervating length, Soderbergh's Che ignores, without exception, the entire backstory of the events it portrays.  The origin of Fulgencio Batista's dictatorship is never explained; nor is the July 26, 1953 failed coup attempt by Castro, centered on an assault at the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba, for which the July 26 Movement (M-26-J) was named.  Among Cubans and foreign experts, the latter gap may be easily explained; how to account for the fact that Batista, universally portrayed by Castrophiles as a monster, was satisfied to see the defiant captive Castro sentenced to no more than 15 years in prison, of which he served only two before he was released in a Batista amnesty?  How, we may ask, does this compare with the dozens of executions carried out after Castro's takeover?  Similarly, the training of Guevara as a medical doctor is unaddressed, although it is doubtful that many spectators of this film will ask how a physician, who has taken the Hippocratic oath to preserve life, could have ordered so many of the mentioned shootings.

The background of Guevara as an anti-American radical in the Guatemalan events of 1954 is also overlooked.  Add to this a silence about the history of the Directorio Revolucionario, the main alternative armed oppositional group to Castro's M-26-J.  Throughout the film, in addition to its near-exclusive Spanish dialogue, groups and names are mentioned without any effort to flesh them out.  A "Faustino" appears and denounces the PSP or Popular Socialist party, as the Cuban Communist party then styled itself, as Stalinists.  His full name, Faustino Pérez, is unmentioned, along with his cooptation into the Cuban Communist leadership.  Nor, of course, is the rich experience of the Cuban Stalinist apparatus as partners of Batista, whom they supported as the Nicaraguan Stalinists once backed Anastasio Somoza, discussed.   A "Rolando" is given orders, and is identified in the credits, printed in a separate pamphlet, as Rolando Cubela; Cubela's later turn against Castro, imprisonment in a plot to kill the dictator, and eventual exile, are deemed unworthy of mention. 

Similarly, Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo, a Spanish-born anti-Stalinist revolutionary who distinguished himself as a fighter in Cuba, is casually smeared, without further elucidation (Gutiérrez Menoyo also turned against Castro.)  As in the Ocean's franchise, Soderbergh remains fascinated with gimmicks rather than personalities.  He spends more time in the first half of the film recording the wrecking of apartment walls to gain a tactical position during the climactic battle of Santa Clara than with the crisis of the Batista regime caused by the same battle.       

In its second-half treatment of Guevara's Bolivian misadventure, context is even more important, and further absent.  Whatever one's view of the Bolivian Communist Party as a Soviet and Cuban tool, Guevara's delusions about life in the highland nation were absurd.  Bolivia's marginalized indigenous majority and history of Trotskyist trade-unionism, rather than pro-Soviet leftism or Castro-style socialist caudillismo, had nothing in common with the population in Cuba or its history.  Guevara emerged on the altiplano more as a subimperialist emissary of neighboring Argentina's Peronism than as an authentic social revolutionary, and left no visible influence in Bolivian political life.  Among the many phantom names that passes through this film like water in a sieve is that of Jorge Ricardo Masetti, an Argentine associate of Guevara who began his political career in a Peronist group with fascist tendencies.  This fact was revealed in a 1997 Guevara biography by Jon Lee Anderson, pretentiously credited as the film's Chief Consultant, but apparently ignored. 

Guevara was obviously a heedless risk-taker, as shown by the cigar- and pipe-smoking habits he maintained even though he was asthmatic.  Nobody has ever, it seems, asked what kind of person, especially one trained as a doctor, would so indulge himself. At the time of his death, few might have imagined the glamorous Guevara going to Bolivia to commit "revolutionary suicide" - a planetary equivalent of the "suicide by cop" in which insane individuals wave guns at the police.  But some in the Castroite milieu of the time, which existed in the U.S. no less than elsewhere, and of which I was then still a member, suspected that Guevara had become an uncomfortable presence for Castro.  

I remember vividly the rainy day in San Francisco, in October 1967, when the death of Guevara produced headlines in the local dailies.  We feared Guevara had been encouraged to leave Cuba and immolate himself in a faroff place, surrounded by people who did not understand or sympathize with him, with the complicity of Bolivian Stalinists.  In addition, much has been revealed since Guevara's death about Tamara Bunke, known as "Tania," the German-Argentine who accompanied him to Bolivia and was also killed there.  Bunke was a KGB/Stasi agent assigned to monitor Guevara's Bolivian operations.  All such perspective is missing from Soderbergh's film. 

The only thing more tedious about this film than its artistic and historic nullity was the juvenile reaction to it visible among the recusant leftists, many of them resembling escapees from an asylum, who crowded into its showing in Manhattan, giggling and cheering at predictable war scenes, like children at a Star Wars performance.  The film should be called Castro's 12, because like an Ocean's franchise product, it is all bogus aesthetics and no content - as well as in recollection of the 12 survivors, including Castro and Guevara, of the doomed Cuban revolutionary mission of 1956, in the yacht Granma.  These personages leap into the camera's eye and depart from it much as do the associates of George Clooney in the Ocean's series - but such may be the fate of any film roles created by Soderbergh.

In real history, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, notwithstanding their political faults, along with Gamal Abdel Nasser and Ahmed Ben Bella in North Africa, erupted into global attention as youthful idols.  The leadership of the leading nations then remained in the superannuated hands of men like Eisenhower, Khrushchev, Macmillan, DeGaulle, and Mao.  In this regard, the Cuban revolutionaries, in particular, and as I have written elsewhere, had more in common with Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Elvis Presley than with Marx, Lenin and Trotsky. 

But Guevara himself, as a doctor who embraced terrorism, may better be compared with Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian physician who became second-in-command to Osama bin Laden, as well as the notorious Stalinist assassin and medical anthropologist, Mark Zborowski; Radovan Karadžić, the government psychiatrist who became infamous as a terror leader in the Balkan wars of the 1990s and now faces trial at The Hague, and even Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi death-camp doctor (see Scientific Training and Radical Islam, published by the Center for Islamic Pluralism).  This is the aspect of the Guevara legacy that most needs examination, and is most lacking from Soderbergh's overblown homage to a revolution that led to tragedy and disillusion, even before the Bolivian fiasco that ended Guevara's life.

“In the Lenin Barracks in Barcelona, the day before I joined the militia, I saw an Italian militiaman standing in front of the officers’ table.”

Such is the famous opening of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, recognized in Catalonia itself, as in most of the rest of the world, as the indispensable account of disillusioned revolutionary hopes and Stalinist betrayal in the Spanish civil war of 1936-39.

I would, with proper humility, begin the following commentary with a paraphrase of Orwell: “In a newsstand at Barajas Airport in Madrid, the day before I headed back to Kosovo and its echoes of the Spanish civil war, I saw a title on a table of books.  It read Las víctimas de Negrín: Reinvindicación del POUM (The Victims of Negrín: Vindication of the POUM).  The author was Antonio Cruz González, a Spanish labor activist and historian.”

So the reader does not become lost,  deep in leftist sectariana, I will note that Juan Negrín was a minor politician from the Canary Islands who became the front-man for Soviet interference and repression of leftist dissidence late in the Spanish war.  He was infamous for his vanity and uncontrolled sexual and eating appetites, and the date of his birth is contested, but he died in his ‘60s in 1956.  His rehabilitation, as a member of the Spanish Socialist party who rose to a high level of power, has been pursued by a group of revisionist historians.  But he remains a figure of criticism and contempt among many Spanish Socialists who opposed totalitarianism, as well as anarchists and partisans of the anti-Stalinist Partit Obrer d’Unificació Marxista (POUM), the Workers Party for Marxist Unification, whose militia Orwell joined and described in his immortal volume.

Debate over the POUM and its fate, as well as that of the other Spanish anti-Stalinists, the Republic itself, and the Soviet agents, including, at least by implication, the American mercenaries for the Moscow secret police who called themselves “the Abraham Lincoln Brigade,” has become a persistent theme in Catalan and general Spanish historiography in the 33 years since the death of dictator Francisco Franco.

With the post-1975 Spanish transition from dictatorship to democracy, the national archives were opened, disclosing a considerable quantity of information about Soviet persecution under the Republic, including secret police notes on the pursuit of Orwell.  The Catalan Communists, for their part, sought to rid themselves of the taint of their involvement in Soviet liquidations of Spanish and foreign Trotskyists and others. The Barcelona Communist leaders, along with survivors of the POUM and the anarchist movement, and some distinguished historians, helped the main Catalan television channel produce a documentary, Operació Nikolai, describing the Russian kidnaping and assassination of POUM leader Andreu Nin (1892-1937).  The film was based on Nin’s official Soviet case file – the sole example of release by the Russians themselves of a dossier on a foreign liquidation – and shown on prime time in Catalonia in 1992.

The Catalan Socialist party, which had been joined by POUM remnants in the aftermath of the second world war, gained power and began a policy of renaming urban sites for anti-Stalinists, including Orwell (who has a small square in Barcelona), Nin, and other individuals.  Barcelona’s main railroad station, Estació Sants, now stands in a location celebrating Joan Peiró (1887-1942), a distinguished luminary of the anarchosyndicalist CNT union federation.  The region of Aragón where Orwell served as a militiaman currently advertises a tourist trail dedicated to him.  

The Soviet archives on the Spanish war were also partly and briefly opened, and in 2001 Ronald Radosh, Mary Habeck, and Grigory Sevostianov published a selection of documents, Spain Betrayed, in the distinguished Yale University Press series of reference handbooks on Soviet history.  That book, which should have completely changed the historiography of the Spanish war, was translated and appeared in Spain itself in 2002.

More was to come.  In 2006, a Spanish historian, José María Zavala published En busca de Andreu Nin, on the murder of the POUM leader.  In 2007, I took to the webpages at Jewcy to challenge unapologetic Stalinist Eric Hobsbawm for his attack on the anarchists and POUM.

In recent times the broader issues of who did what to whom on all sides during the Spanish war has been resurrected, as if the reopening of past controversies and exhumation of the dead was necessary to heal a deep division in Spain’s past.  Most commentary on this topic has been directed against the Spanish right. The left has manipulated the case of the poet Federico García Lorca (1898-1936), who was executed by Francoist forces in circumstances that will probably never be fully elucidated, to demand public recognition of and, presumably, compensation for crimes committed by the counter-revolutionary side.  This month, Spanish magistrate and media freak Baltasar Garzón became an object of scorn even among those who sympathize with him when he learned he could not subject Franco and his close associates to a legal proceeding for their atrocities, given that the dictator has been dead for some decades.

During the 1970s, when revolutionary expectations were briefly rekindled in Spain, it was said that the civil war had ended as a struggle between the murderers of García Lorca and those of Nin.  This opinion echoed the argument of Nin’s co-founder in the POUM, Joaquím Maurín (1893-1973), who said the war was lost when it became a confrontation between Franco and Stalin instead of one between the indigenous right and left.  Another POUM intellectual, Julià Gòmez Gorkín (1901-87) theorized that in the Spanish Republic, Stalin had the first opportunity to test the political strategy of cooptation, repression, and manipulation that would produce the aberrant regimes seen in post-1945 Eastern Europe, and known as “people’s democracies.”  In this form of tyranny, the Russian secret police and the Communist parties controlled the system, but amelioratively-titled front parties gave the regime a public face of alleged pluralism.

The question of whether Republican Spain was really the first example of a so-called “people’s democracy” is a complex one.  First, Stalin’s agents in Spain murdered and kidnapped dissidents (several of the latter were taken to Russia and disappeared, and, unlike Andreu Nin, Soviet documentation on their cases remains closed).   Moscow certainly betrayed the Republic, a development signaled by Soviet press compliments to the German Nazis in 1938.  At that time, the Communist International (Comintern) also shut down the Polish Communist party, since the latter, of all the Communists, would be least likely to accept the soon-to-come Stalin-Hitler pact.

Nevertheless, it is a major error to think that the Spanish Republic became a mere Soviet puppet at the end of the war.  Notwithstanding generations of overheated Trotskyist rhetoric, which has tried to portray the Spanish anarchists and POUM as helpless victims of wholesale slaughter because they would not heed the strategic advice of Trotsky, the anarchists were not killed en masse by the Stalinists, and managed to withdraw hundreds of thousands of their militia members into France at the end of the war.  Although a relatively small number of POUM militants were slain, the most notable being Nin, the POUM leadership was absolved at trial of a charge of acting on behalf of Franco.  The Spanish Republic’s bourgeois judiciary would not support a purge on the Moscow model, and most of the POUM leaders survived the war, as well as later imprisonment in French and German concentration camps.  Finally, the POUM and anarchists were far better than other anti-Stalinists at defending themselves, thanks to their deep roots among the Spanish populace.

In general, the anti-Stalinists have won the battle of historical memory in the Spanish left, not the mush-brained acolytes of Stalin, nor the later equivalents of the American sentimentalists who kept alive the myth of the so-called “Lincoln Brigade” (never larger than a battalion, never efficient in combat, never decisive in winning a battle, and finally consigned to police duties Spanish Republicans would not accept, like executing dissenting leftists).

This reality is demonstrated in many places in Spain.  Traveling from Barcelona to Madrid, on November 22, I read in  the dominant Spanish leftist daily El País about an art show at the Museo Nacional Centro Reina Sofía, dedicated to the German modernist Carl Einstein (1885-1940).  This Jewish exile fought alongside the Spanish anarchists in the civil war, rather like Orwell, but his work is now displayed thanks to the patronage of Spain’s reigning queen.  The same paper, the next day, included a long document titled “Stalin and Spain,” in which the historian Angel Viñas, one of the earliest to adopt this disgraceful path in the 1980s, attempted to close the debate over whether the Spanish Republic became the first “people’s democracy.”  Viñas used a report from the period by a Russian functionary, Sergey Marchenko, as evidence that the Russians pressured Negrin toward greater firmness, and that therefore the Spanish regime could be not considered under total Muscovite control.  This may indeed be true, but remains a detail: above all, Moscow undermined the Republic, attempted to bring it under its dominion, and unleashed a secret police hunt for non-conforming radicals.  These facts can no longer be denied.

All of which is mere background to the theme of my present commentary: the fate not of the POUM itself, but of the only volume dedicated to the POUM in English, written by the eminent Catalan historian Víctor Alba (born name Pere Pagès, 1916-2003) and translated, corrected, amplified, and otherwise edited by me.  The book is titled Spanish Marxism vs. Soviet Communism: A History of the POUM, and was issued by an outfit called Transaction Publishers, located at Rutgers University, in 1988.  Alba recognized my contribution to the work by stipulating that I should be listed as co-author, rather than simply as translator, and assigning all royalties to me.

Twenty years of historical disclosures, debate, and reflection have passed since the issuance of the book I worked on, to my great pleasure and honor, with Alba.  It is cited and acknowledged in various works on the Spanish war, including the Radosh compendium, and resides in numerous libraries.  Some Spanish historians and recusant leftists have written polemics in reply to it.  One Spanish faker, who shall remain unnamed, managed to appropriate and claim as his own some of my research.  I would like to be able to revise the book to reflect the mass of revelations and discoveries since 1988.

It should seem that the updating of Spanish Marxism vs. Soviet Communism should be an easy task.  But the bizarre business enterprise called Transaction Books has made that impossible.  Transaction is headed by a second-rate associate of the New York intellectuals named Irving Louis Horowitz.  Horowitz once had a significant reputation as a historian of Communism in Cuba, but today he is mainly known to authors for the way he runs Transaction.  Claiming that his operation is the publisher of record in the social sciences, Horowitz solicits serious authors for works that have little hope of gaining trade publication.   In my case, he paid no advance, made no attempt to keep in touch with me about sales while I travelled around the world, insulted me (to my face) on various occasions, and now proposes to republish the book I completed with Alba, twenty years out of date, and with no changes to the text.

Why would a publisher conduct his affairs in such a manner?  Frankly, because Horowitz, in my opinion, has contempt for authors.  He knows he will never produce a successful trade book under his own name.  He knows he mainly publishes works that authors have little hope of  introducing to the trade.  He knows he is, finally, nobody, even though I once saw him preening at the Frankfurt Book Fair, where his list had almost no hope of gaining attention.  Did the state of New Jersey, which supports Rutgers, pay for that junket?  Horowitz has only one power and that is the power to say no.  In my case, even after I hired the most respected intellectual-property lawyer in Washington to try to pry the POUM book out of his claws, he put forward such arguments as the following: “Schwartz has nothing to complain about... we are protecting the rights of Víctor Alba [who, let us not forget, is now dead],” and 20 years of new historiography of the Spanish conflict provide no reason to revise such a book.

Horowitz’s attitude really comes down to him saying “this is my business, authors’ efforts become my property, not theirs, and I decide what happens once an author has the misfortune to hand me his or her work.”

What can I do in this situation?  The intellectual property attorney I hired told me that in the absence of a specific agreement providing for transfer of full authors’ rights to me after Alba’s death, I can do nothing. Yet the book in question is unquestionably a collaborative work, as Alba himself declared in the contract and Horowitz himself is compelled to admit.

These issues should have been cleared up by intellectual property law reforms in recent years.  Of course, there will always be vultures like Irving Louis Horowitz who believe that abusing the status of Rutgers to exploit and demean authors, is somehow an acceptable form of publishers’ conduct.

I will not give up.  I worked on the POUM book unpaid, and I do not seek profit from it, but I do want it brought up to date, considering that the changes in debate over the Spanish war, and, not least, over Orwell, have been as momentous in their way as those that transpired in ex-Soviet Russia itself.  Some old anarchist associates of mine have suggested that I simply edit the book and have it published outside the U.S., free of Horowitzian interference, since producing and distributing books is easier now than it was two decades past.  This could, presumably, be construed as piracy, and the irascible and selfish Horowitz might then have to pay lawyers much more money to pursue a case against me than he would have had to lay out for a simple revision of the book.  But why should an author be forced to “pirate” his own work, especially given that the specific volume in question will never turn a profit, and was created exclusively for the benefit of historical truth?

Greetings from Barcelona where there is now a Passeig Andreu Nin (Passeig being Catalan for Paseo).  It is quite an impressive item, especially since it is the location of what I believe to be the most overwhelming, overbearing, over-the-top shopping center in the history of commerce.  It is called Heron City for reasons I cannot fathom.  One could only believe in such a thing if one saw it for itself.  A bowling alley with an internet rank, at which I am now writing, is only one feature.  The rest is simply... staggeringly vulgar and crazy in the way only the Spanish can do such things.

One imagines Luis Buñuel creating such a monstrosity in a movie.  Andreu Nin, the ex-anarchist, martyr to Stalinism, Catalan literary critic, is now a beloved figure, his name decorating something that really looks like it was designed on LSD.

Of course the consolation is always that of normality.  Now that the anti-Stalinists have won the battle of historical memory in Spain it probably makes perfect sense to have a place like this on a street named for Nin.  It shows that Nin is simply part of the mental landscape of the Catalans, as he always was.  Of course there are still no streets in Barcelona named for Dolores Ibarruri, Milton Wolff, or the International Brigades.

It makes me think of a giant golf course in Beverly Hills on Leon Trotsky Boulevard.  One could even invent all sorts of extreme variations on the principle; a TV game show called NKVD For a Day in which down at the heels movie stars dress up as Yezhov... The Karl Marx lapdance bar... Lenin cough drops... Kropotkin cupcakes... Emma Goldman toothpaste...

Who knows what would have happened if the Via Laietana in Barcelona were to have kept its name as the Via Durruti?  There might now be the Via Durruti auto agency selling BMWs.

Of course there are other examples of how these things work.  In Uzbekistan they are so proud of the famous Islamic thinker Ibn Sino (known as Ibn Sina or Avicenna in the West) that one does see the Ibn Sino gas station, Ibn Sino t-shirt shop, etc.  And in Kazakhstan they have the Alfarabi meat market, etc.   Of course Western Europe is awash with images of the gentle physician and executioner Che Guevara, so that in Holland one can buy Che Guevara cigar cutters, ashtrays, t-shirts, backpacks, etc.   

I was in the North African section of Marseilles over the weekend and went into an Islamist bookshop.  Piles of books by Ibn Abd Al Wahhab alongside Che Guevara bookbags!

Barcelona has changed a lot and I must say, mainly not for the better.  Most of the old working class bars have disappeared.  Everything is designed for a Woody Allen film now.  The former Barri Xines or Barrio Chino (also known as El Raval), the shabby neighborhood on the lower side of the Rambles, was completely rehabilitated during the Olympics and is now squeaky clean, but has somewhat been consigned to the Muslim immigrants, including a lot of Pakistanis which is not surprising considering Pakistanis go where there is commerce, not hard labor, and in Catalunya hard labor would be done by Africans.  Very different from Marseille in that in the Raval immigrants and their businesses are present but there are apparently no Islamic bookshops -- maybe because there is so little radical literature in Spanish.

Some of the surviving nice snackbars do a kind of weird double business with their locals coming in and competing for space with tourists asking idiotic questions about tapas... I always tell them to try the blood sausage, which is really a sin, but I know it will make them suffer intestinally... which they deserve.

The Barcelona bookstores have taken a dive in quality.  The old days when they were filled with fabulous academic works on Judaism and Islam have ended.  It´s all bestsellers now -- except that the Catalans remain obsessed with their history before and during the civil war and there are a lot of extremely interesting new books on aspects of the 1930s that never saw light of day in the past.  I suspect this is part of the rather suspect revival of recriminations over the civil war by the Zapatero crowd.  Since Zapatero wants to dig up all the dead from the civil war the Catalans are going to lead the pack by getting a lot of new stuff in print, which in principle is fine. I bought enough books that I have to send them to DC by UPS tomorrow, but they are mostly about Catalan history, not about Islam or Judaism which is what I really wanted.   Maybe the Madrid bookstores will be better -- I´ll go there Wednesday, but I am not optimistic.  A lot of books I used to see all over the place are now probably only available from second hand dealers.   Since I personally donated 100+ Spanish academic books on Sephardic subjects to the University of Sarajevo I might now have to go back and ask them to let me copy some of them.

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has announced plans to organize an "interfaith conference" among Jews, Muslims, and Christians. He invites "representatives of all the monotheistic religions to meet with their brothers in faith" in Saudi Arabia, in order to foster "respect among the religions."

King Abdullah's initiative is excellent and extremely positive. A conference of openKing Abdullah and sincere dialogue between representatives of the three Abrahamic traditions can only be a step forward. My only concern is that the diversity of Islamic opinion be fully represented, but indications from the Saudi kingdom are that King Abdullah recognizes the negative impact of Wahhabism, Deobandism, and other fundamentalist sects on the future of Islam. I hope that Jewish and Christian representatives will participate in such a conference with confidence in their own revelations, and will not give way to "politically correct" accommodations with Wahhabism.

Jewish and Christian representatives should understand that mainstream Islamic tradition respects the People of the Book and expects their teachers and other advocates to present their viewpoint in a learned and insightful manner, and not to engage in nonsensical rhetoric intended to improve relations with the Muslims by offering empty compliments. Jews and Christians who meet with and enter into dialogue with Muslims should do so from a position of self-respect, not of self-abasement. I hope and expect that Muslims at such an event will conduct themselves similarly.