[lbo-talk] THE FALL..redux

[Mike Ballard]

Lessons not learnt: secrets, lies and the danger of silence
Andrew McKay
July 24, 2007
 

Pan's Labyrinth
 

WATCHING the film Pan's Labyrinth on DVD at the weekend, I remembered 
Spain more than 40 years ago. I remembered a small village called 
Campello where there was a central square faced by a church. Amelio, a 
local, took me by the arm, and showed me ragged pockmarks in the church 
wall.

"So we remember," he said. And, foolishly in retrospect, I asked what? 
And he said: "The war, when father killed son, and son killed cousin." 
The war he referred to was, of course, the Spanish Civil War, and in 
1961 it was still not over although they had stopped shooting in 1939. 
On the inside of a cave in a nearby mountain someone had recently 
whitewashed "THE WAR'S NOT ENDED".

Sometimes when memories come back to disturb they thrust you into a new 
awareness. The awareness brought by Pan's Labyrinth was that of 
thinking hard about trying to define the moment at which things that 
should be known by everyone are declared by a few to be unknowable.

Pan's Labyrinth is set in 1944 when the Allies were stamping out 
fascism across Europe but when, in Spain, fascism was at its most 
vicious because there the outbreak of WWII was not a beginning but a 
convenient continuation of Francisco Franco's crushing repression of 
republican and other counter-forces.

The Spanish, for all their charm, hospitality and warmth, have a steak 
of cruelty and this perhaps explains why their war was so fearful and 
sometimes condemned to a deep mental dungeon.

In Pan's Labyrinth there is a shocking scene where an officer in 
Franco's army orders two peasants summarily murdered because he chooses 
not to believe they have been out at night shooting rabbits. (He is 
given proof of their story too late but dismisses it with a shrug.)

In a bar by the beach in Campello, not long after I arrived at the 
beginning of summer, two young peasants appeared. Both were already 
drunk, but harmlessly. They had been to the market and bought two live 
rabbits for the pot. Several drinks later they were killing the 
rabbits, very slowly and with pleasure. Years after I left Campello I 
learned its worst secret. That between it and Alicante, up in the 
hills, there was a prison camp established by Franco's Falangists some 
time after the start of the Civil War in 1936. Thousands of men, women 
and children were incarcerated there.

They were still there in 1961, more than 20 years after the war ended.

This was awful. But more terrible was the silence. Nobody talked about 
the camp. It's not as if its existence was unknown. You cannot disguise 
a camp holding thousands of people for two decades in a densely 
populated area.

Or you can if you are able first to tell the population they must not 
talk about it. Then impose this order for so long that it becomes 
accepted. Then because it is accepted for so long it is no longer 
thought about. So as I watched Pan's Labyrinth I thought about Campello 
and Amelio. And I thought about Mohamed Haneef and I thought about what 
we are not allowed to know.

We are, it seems, being forced to become complicit in a selective 
secrecy.

We cannot know if that is harmless or very dangerous because the not 
knowing involves our inability to even think forensically about it — to 
look at it this way and that, argue, demand proof.

In Spain in 1961 Amelio's revelation came only after I had known him 
for nearly six months. The scars on the church wall were a secret in 
plain sight, the graffiti in the cave was there only for those who knew 
to look.

Andrew McKay is a Melbourne writer. His latest book is Shadows of War.


"The peculiar character of the Social Democracy is epitomized in the fact that democratic-republican institutions are demanded as a means, not of doing away with two extremes, capital and wage labour, but of weakening their antagonism and transforming it into a harmony."

Karl Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1346


       
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