Just a quick skim through La Vanguardia for pertinent quotations:

Monday, March 31: "The witchhunt for the guilty has begun. The military campaign in Iraq has tripped over unexpected difficulties, greater than those foreseen, and this causes tension and impatience in the United States"--Eusebio Val, Washington. "(The British "Desert Rats") eventually defeated the Germans and Italians at El Alamein, two and a half years later, pushing back the Afrika Korps in a humiliating retreat through the deserts of Libya and Tunisia. Shortly afterwards they returned to Europe and participated in the advance through the south of Italy toward Rome, the liberation of Ghent, the landing at Normandy, and the entrance into Berlin."--Rafael Ramos, London; hey, Rafa, that there Berlin thing was the Russians. And Don Mattingly was a pitcher, and you scored an interview with Brian Epstein."The (American religious) fundamentalists insist on the infallible primacy of God and the corruption of modern life. (They would be as willing to bomb New York and San Francisco as Baghdad.)--Norman Birnbaum, "adviser to the Progressive Caucus of the House of Representatives". "Seeing Bush pray before starting this war is pornographic, obscene, scandalous, and indecent."--Jack Lang, French idiotarian.

Country music lyrics of the day by a guy named Tom Russell over KHYI:

"There are two damn things that'll break your heart
Modern love and modern art."

I am faced with an ethical dilemma. My favorite brand of rolling papers is OCB. OCB papers make a big deal about being of fabrication française. Should I boycott OCB or not? Answer: Yes, but I'm going to use up this packet of papers first. Looks like I have to go back to Smoking, which I'm pretty sure are made here in Spain. Smoking papers are crap. The glue never sticks. Any suggestions? Rizla papers exist around here but they're kind of hard to find.

Here's a piece from The Wall Street Journal's editorial page by Ana Palacio, Spain's foreign minister. It's an eminently respectable article that doesn't say anything particularly new but pretty well sums up the official position of the Spanish government, which, y'all should remember, has stuck its neck out big-time for the United States, democracy, and just plain decency and against Saddam and the international rogue states and terrorists.

I don't feel like translating or commenting on anything from the Vanguardia over the last couple of days. You're reading it all in America: the Yanks' and Brits' military plans have failed, the Allies are massacring the Iraqi civilians, Israel is the main beneficiary of the war, there's a moral equivalence between Bush and Saddam, the arms manufacturers are the ones behind the war, and for the real truth you need to read Robert Fisk and the Vangua's Fiskimitator, Tomás Alcoverro, as they tell you how the streets of Baghdad are strewn with the dying bodies of Iraqi babies.

I remind all Americans that Catalonia, despite its charms, is the most anti-American place in Europe. It's not merely that the press and popular conversation is anti-American; it's that there are about three pro-American voices who are not getting heard these days. Everybody's anti. Nobody's pro. Even in France there are a good few pro-American voices, not to mention in Germany. Remember this when planning foreign travel. They're nice people, the Catalans, and I love them dearly, but they hate the United States. Not much question of that. So it's your decision whether you want to give them any of your money or not.

Here's a fascinating webpage which lists the number of deaths in the wars, genocides, democides, and general massacres during the 20th century. Comparing these numbers, which are compiled from various sources (each source named for each deaths figure; I would seriously discount Rummel's figures, which seem to be compiled according to the Marc Herold method; Rummel's book, Democide, is well worth a read, but his numbers to my mind appear wildly exaggerated), to those of the recent Afghan War or to the current Saddam War, should prove very enlightening. Unless your name is Zap or Gas.

UPDATE: This guy, whose name is Matthew White, has a hell of a website called the Historical Atlas of the 20th Century which I just spent a couple of hours clicking through. Give it a look; it gets four and a half coveted Iberian Notes stars.

There is a pro-war Internet video presentation on the war on Saddam in Spanish which you guys ought to look at. (via Samizdata). It's signed by "Eslabon Perdido", "The Missing Link". This name is registered to Miguel Angel Rodriguez, the former spokesman of the governing Partido Popular. The PP itself has denied any official party connection with this video presentation. It doesn't matter whether they had anything to do with it, in my opinion; making a pro-war video is exercising one's freedom of expression in a much more socially responsible way than, say, throwing rocks at candidates for office, looting department stores, trashing fast-food restaurants, or dumping tons of animal excrement in the streets. Anyway, though, the SocioCommunists, Zap and Gas (Zapatero, the Socialist boss, and Gaspar Llamazares, the Communist leader), are demanding some kind of parliamentary investigation, I suppose on the grounds that the video makes them look like morons at best (the truth about Zap) and mendacious at worst (the truth about Gas). By the way, speaking of Parliamentary investigations, the PP's website is still down; the Communists are e-mail-bombing it.

John Derbyshire from National Review has posted an "illegal" copy of Malcolm Muggeridge's famous essay on George Orwell, "A Knight of the Woeful Countenance", which I had read about but had never read. You really ought to read this.

For all you new country music fans, check out TwangCast, a damn good Internet country station. They have links to a lot of other interesting sites with cool music, like Freight Train Boogie, The Gumbo Pages, and Alternative Country.Com. Check it all out and pick your favorites. For American and especially Louisiana music, check out WWOZ out of New Orleans, possibly the best individual radio station in the world. Blues, jazz, country, Cajun--they've got it, and I've never heard a lot of the stuff they play anywhere else. KBON out of Eunice, Louisiana, is stupendous, mixing Cajun stuff with classic country and at least one country-pop atrocity per hour. KHYI out of Dallas plays rednecks-and-longnecks Texas country. I like Bluegrass Country.Org a lot, too, though they repeat prerecorded shows all week; it's your only source for all bluegrass, all the time.

Angie from Dark Blogules / The Machinery of Night, the unmasker of Márius Serra the plagiarist, took Murph up on his request for other people to classify anti-war letters to newspaper editors in their country. She's in Berkeley, so she's got an awful lot of material to work with. You ought to read Murph's original typology of Spanish anti-war letters on EuroPundits, and then read Angie's response. Then you ought to read everything else on EuroPundits--Nelson Ascher is turning out some great stuff from Paris--and everything else on Angie's damn good blog.

Jesus Gil at Ibidem keeps us up to date from Madrid--check it out. Natalie Solent has the dope--thanks for the link--both at her own site and at Biased BBC. Bite the Wax Tadpole has some cogent analysis, including an excellent explanation of why we might lose the propaganda war even after a clean, quick victory over Saddam. Xavier at Buscaraons has some fine quadrilingual posts--and Xavier is often critical of the United States, but always in a constructive and positive way. He is pro-democracy and basically likes America, despite all its faults, from his Catalano-Quebecois perspective. You're a lot more likely to convince people of your ideas doing things Xavier's way than, say, uh, mine.

Cinderella Bloggerfeller, the most erudite blogger of them all, has two illuminating translations from French intellectuals, with his commentary, of course. One of them is by Pascal Bruckner, who I do know something about, and the other is by some guy from Le Monde I've never heard of but who is no dummy. He also translates a piece (of shit) by Barcelona's own Eulàlia Solé that I couldn't make any sense out of and so didn't translate for y'all. It's good for a guffaw or two and at least three snickers. The Dissident Frogman has a long, brilliant, and very cranky post on the "human shields" who left Iraq after seeing the real nature of the Saddam regime. Frank McGahon fills us in from Ireland--check it out.

Merde in France has a lot of good merde up there to read, along with several enlightening photographs. Eamonn at Rainy Day has several good posts up, including a defense of the BBC. Check out his "Diarist of the Day" feature. Jessica from Chloe and Pete rambles on in a compulsively fascinating manner, switching between war commentaries and, thank God, OTHER TOPICS BESIDES THE WAR. The Jedman fills us in on his love life and his trip to spring training in Arizona, and brings back his famous stupidhero character, the Overland Park Streetfighter.

Oh, one thing for you folks in town or visiting: the best undiscovered restaurant I know, and I will hunt you down and kill you if you tip off a tourist guidebook, is the Bodega Manolo around the corner from my place. Two people can have two courses, dessert, and wine for less than forty-fifty bucks, and that's not ordering the cheapest stuff on the menu. It's open for an inexpensive fixed-price lunch every day and that's decent enough. The dinner menu is small, admittedly, but what they do they know how to do very well. The quality is excellent; you get what you pay for here. A lot of their dishes are in a wine sauce because they're a real bodega as well as a restaurant; they sell wine from the barrel. You bring your own recipient and they charge by the liter.

Dinner is only on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, and you'll need a reservation. The place is popular with the staff of El País, who can frequently be seen hanging around there. Since they don't know or care who I am, I leave them alone. Goddamn SocioCommunists.Their phone number is 93 284 43 77 and the address is Torrente Flores, 101. What I like is their salad of homemade pasta, shrimp, and avocado in a red wine sauce, their sole--not filet, you get the whole fish--a la meuniere, with white wine and butter, and the salt cod baked with a mild allioli sauce--homemade garlic mayonnaise, doesn't taste at all like the stuff out of a jar. Remei likes the entrecot. They serve sea urchins, for some ungodly reason. Icky poo. Eating sea urchins is common around the Northwest Mediterranean, from Cartagena around to Palermo. So is eating anything snail-like.

No, I don't get a kickback, nor am I being paid for this here advertisement. The folks who run the place are ace, though, and deserve to get a little more business. Maybe they'd open up a couple of more nights a week or something.

Well, they did the pot-and-pan banging again tonight, so this evening's serenade was "The Fightin' Side of Me" and "Okie from Muskogee", then "The Envoy" by Warren Zevon, then "This Land is Your Land" off the Folkways tribute album, and finally "Surfin' USA". Tomorrow we're going to kick off with "And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda" by the Pogues (in tribute to the Aussies and the Irish), then hear Gordon Lightfoot doing "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald", and finish off by "Desolation Row" by Bob Dylan. After we hear those three long, depressing songs, there will be a pause of about one minute and then we will crank into Fear doing "I Don't Care About You". Should the cops show up, I have NWA's "Fuck tha Police" on hand, since if they come here because I'm soundblasting the block while there is rioting happening in other places, they've got their priorities all wrong.

Here's an article by Stanley G. Payne in Spanish about what the declassified Soviet archives let us know about the Spanish Civil War. He says that one thing that surprised him is that these internal Soviet documents is that they used the same "running-dog-hangman-butcher-paid-agent-Trotskyist" rhetoric as they used to the public. He also says, "The dictator who took best advantage of the war was not Stalin but Hitler, since the objective of the Nazi leader was not so much to contribute to a rapid Franco victory, but to prolong the conflict as long as possible in order to distract attention from German rearmament and German expansion in Central Europe, dissuade the democratic countries, create internal divisions in France, and involve Mussolini in German plans. In each of these aspects Hitler was entirely successful."

Here's Payne's introduction to a University of Wisconsin (where he is Hilldale-Jaume Vicens Vives Professor) exhibition called Life under Italian Fascism. You really ought to take a look at the whole exhibition. This is a chapter from one of Payne's books on the formation of Portugal. Uh, duh, my bad, here's the whole damn book, titled "A History of Spain and Portugal". It runs through the end of the 1600s.

Televisión Española is reporting, first, that Izquierda Unida, the Spanish Communist party, has incited people to hack the Partido Popular's website, and second, on its own website, has posted photographs of Bush, Blair, and company, and of the Spanish PP leaders, under the heading "Asesinos" (Murderers). The PP has announced that it will sue them for libel. Go, PP! I am intentionally not linking to the Communist webpage. Esquerra Republicana, the Catalan neo-fascists (its origin is Fascist, as Stanley G. Payne, my favorite historian, documents; today, it is about as "leftist" as my left nut, but it is rabidly Catalanist. That there is the "national" part of National Socialism. As for the "socialist" part, Esquerra seems to prefer some sort of corporatist paternalistic state in which property would remain private but the government would control the economy. That's what I gather, anyway. They're a lot clearer on their nationalism than they are on their economics. I am not just using the F-word to refer to something I don't like, and I think the F-word perfectly defines Heribert Barrera, Esquerra's elder statesman, who made the news most recently about a year ago with some horribly and blatantly racist statements compared with which Trent Lott's are vanilla pudding) have pasted up similar posters all over Gràcia. I hope the PP sues them too.

I haven't been downtown today but Murph has; I just talked to him on the phone. He says that both Corte Ingléses and the McDonald's are a wreck and Plaza Cataluña looks like there was a riot there, which is precisely what there was. I suggested that the government should perhaps turn the cops loose and have them beat the crap out of and then arrest the rioting punks. Murph said that we'd better watch out or this could be another '09 or '23 or '30 or '34 or '36. I said nope, in those days the rioters were real anarchists and SocioCommunists and Trotskyists who did Paris Commune shit like building barricades in the streets and torching the churches and murdering their enemies. These are just a bunch of middle-class kids smashing things up for fun. The most important thing is they don't have any guns. The militias in the old days, both right and left (though there's never been a real right-wing militia in Barcelona except for the Estat Català-Esquerra Republicana fascists, the Falange was very strong in some parts of Spain) had guns and used them, sometimes indiscriminately. These punks don't have any guns, nor do they have the balls necessary to do anything really revolutionary.

Here in Barcelona, a mob of "antiwar" rioters stormed the El Corte Inglés (a well-known chain of department stores) on the Plaza Cataluña yesterday. They smashed windows and destroyed sections of the interior of the store, and looted what they could before leaving. Basically they stole hams and liquor, from what I could tell. Several other stores in the area were also attacked. The McDonald's on Puerta del Angel was completely trashed. (Avui has a nice color photo of a couple of squatters smashing the windows with the sign, which they'd torn down; just scroll down a bit), and the employees of the Corte Inglés at Puerta del Angel and Santa Anna drove away the rioters with a firehose. This was all caught on camera; I am not exaggerating.

No arrests were made.

Catalan Partido Popular leader, Alberto Fernández Díaz, was to have given a speech in the city of Reus, near Tarragona. He was booed off the stage by a mob of some 500 "antiwar protestors" who then assaulted him physically as he attempted to leave the building under police protection. They kicked and punched him and threw things, mostly eggs and tomatoes, but also rocks and bottles, and one of the latter hit Fernández Díaz in the forehead and cut him; he bled rather copiously. I am not exaggerating; this was all caught on camera.

No arrests were made.

Over 120 offices of the Partido Popular, José María Aznar's governing conservative party, have been attacked over the past few days in Spain. In Catalonia the PP offices in Barcelona, Lérida, Reus, Terrassa, Tárrega, and Cornellà were attacked yesterday, with varying degrees of violence; the worst was Reus, where the police had to charge the mob twice to disperse it. 47 of the anti-PP attacks since March 18 have occurred in Catalonia. In addition to throwing rocks and bricks, protesters also threw human and animal excrement, animal viscera, and animal blood.

No arrests were made.

In Barcelona, a mob of rioters stoned the central government's delegation, equal to a prefecture in France, down on Marqués de Argentera by the harbor. The only decent thing that happened in Barcelona yesterday was that a group of honest pacifists put their bodies where their mouths were and stood in front of the delegation building as "human shields" to force the rioters to stop the assault. Congratulations to those brave people; they may be against the war but they are also supporters of democracy and the rule of law.

No arrests were made.

Here in Gràcia, the boho neighborhood of Barcelona, I haven't seen anything broken, but the protestors, probably mostly squatters, have covered up most of the walls with graffiti ranging from plain stupidity to incitements to violence. Bank and savings bank branches have been particular targets; every single one of their façades is covered with paint, accusing the financial institutions of being capitalist murderers who are profiting from the war.

No arrests were made.

La Caixa, the biggest savings bank in Europe and one of the three basic foundations of Catalan civil society--the other two are the Generalitat and FC Barcelona--was the especially particular target. This is stupid because La Caixa is a nonprofit institution which spends a lot of money on the public good; they've established schools--some for handicapped people--and libraries, they've paid for literally thousands of scholarships (including sending 50 graduate students every year to the US and 25 each to Britain and France), they subsidize a very large cultural program including theater, music, and art exhibitions, they give large contributions to various Barcelona institutions from the opera house to the Picasso Museum, they support various sports clubs, they subsidize scientific research at the universities and hospitals, and their pet project is establishing "neighborhood houses" (casals) where retired people can meet up and play dominoes and hold dances and the like. In the old days, before the National Health, they funded clinics. La Caixa was founded in about 1900 with the stated goal of providing banking services to the ordinary working Joe, giving him a place where he could earn interest on his small savings without fearing that the bank would go bust, providing small loans for his store or workshop, and even serving as his broker if he wanted to put his money in stocks or bonds. What it especially did was provide someone honest and disinterested that ordinary people could talk to about money matters; half the little old ladies in town still do exactly what the Caixa guy at their neighborhood branch advises them to do with their pensions. (You need a degree in Econ or business to be a teller there; you also have to win out over others in a test like the civil service exam.) It is genuinely a fine institution with a sterling reputation that is dedicated to benefitting the public. And these morons call them murderers.

Tomás Alcoverro is La Vanguardia's guy in Baghdad and he is doing his best to imitate Robert Fisk, whose articles the Vangua publishes daily. Alcoverro says that Baghdad smells like burned and putrefying human flesh. Interestingly, he said the exact thing about the so-called Jenin massacre a few months ago. Mr. Alcoverro is full of shit.

Reports Catalunya TV about last night's pot-and-pan-banging protest: "Some of the participants in the protest, which occurred without incidents, joined together in places around the city with pots, pans, and other metal recipients in order to express their repudiation of the warlike policies of the United States and the governments that support it." Now they're being honest. They're not antiwar in the least, since they practice violence themselves. They're anti-American and anti-Aznar. That is the motivation that moves them.

By the way, Catalunya TV has not posted the video of the looting of El Corte Inglés or the attack on Fernández Díaz, though they have about twenty-five sports videos up. Wonder why? It's pretty exciting, action-packed video, great stuff. Wouldn't be, uh, censorship, would it?

Sorry I haven't been blogging much. There's only one topic, the war, and Command Post has got that pretty well covered.

I'm too disgusted to write much. Barcelona is a sea of anti-Americanism. These people are so childlike and so easily led politically by people with SocioCommunist agendas. They're organizing a bunch of anti-American crap like demonstrations and shit. Supposedly everybody in town is supposed to bang pots and pans at ten PM tonight. I'm going to listen, and if I hear any noise coming from my building, when it all finishes and everyone is eating or watching TV, I'm going to turn up my boom box in the living room all the way with my Merle Haggard CD on it, and I'm going to turn up KHYI as loud as I can on these tinny little computer speakers. I bet I can crank enough noise that everybody on the block can hear it. If anybody gives me any shit, I'm demonstrating in favor of the war. Fuck the neighbors. If they participate in this they can kiss my ass. By the way, of course, while all this is going on, I'll be down at the bar myself.

Friend of Iberian Notes Alan Murphy has posted an excellent piece on EuroPundits titled "A Typology of Spanish Anti-War Letters". Check it out. It's excellent. You'll have to scroll all the way down to the bottom. There are all kinds of other terrific posts up there, so go read all of them.

Well, I called up La Vanguardia and got hold of the ombudsman and finked out Márius Serra. They are opening an internal investigation. I feel like a rat but he had it coming. He stole a nasty America-bashing piece of trash off the Internet and signed and published it as his own work, and I assume he got paid for it. That's wrong, especially since the text he stole is so sick. Thanks to Angie for tracking down the source of Serra's plagiarized article.

On my accent in Spanish: I sound weird. First, I have rather a high, nasal voice, which actually makes me pretty easy to understand because it's easier to hear high tones than low ones. That's just my own way of talking, though. Second, I have a fairly strong Kansas-Texas accent, noticeable if you're from one of the Coasts. Third, people from Texas and Kansas and that general area often cannot distinguish, before a nasal, between the "short I" sound or mid-high front unrounded vowel(pin, bin, etc.) and the "short E" sound or mid-low front unrounded vowel (pen, Ben, etc.) I pronounce them all the same, with the short I. This makes my English just a little weird, and it carries over into my Spanish since I didn't really learn good Spanish until I was about 22 or 23. It's impossible to get rid of an accent when you learn a language that late in life unless you have an unusually fine ear and an unusually good ability to mimic. I have neither. The only convincing accent I can do is of someone who's a bigger redneck than I am. This all means, combined with my fluency and fast talking, that it takes these folks a couple of minutes of listening to my voice to catch on. Damn. Wish I was better at this. Oh, well, can't change it, so no point in worrying about it.

Sorry, guys, not tonight, and after I'd taken three pages of notes--I'd gone on last time without any except for the quotations I didn't use anyway. They ran out of time since they had to get the necessary clownishness all in and so there's no debate tonight; it's been rescheduled for either tomorrow or Wednesday.

This guy named José, who is apparently a Spanish leftist according to his blog, Tierra y libertad, is kind enough to comment on both this blog and my television performance the other night. He links to some video that I hadn't seen before. I watched it; hadn't seen it before since I don't know how to work our VCR except to play videos from Blockbuster. God, my accent is horrible, but I really did do OK. He is polite and open-minded and admits that, though he is anti-war, that I put up a pretty decent case ("coherent from the American perspective"). His blog is good; it's extremely well-written, this guy's Spanish is a good model for you non-Spanish-speakers who are interested in learning to write Spanish effectively. I disagree with most of what he says, of course, but he is reasonable and he argues according to the rules. Check it out for a different perspective on Spain than you get from me.