Krugman on European Financial Suicide

[rich]

you might be interested in this, Matthew

http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/102134/spanish-holocaust-francisco-franco?page=0,0

*The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century
Spain*
By Paul Preston
(W.W. Norton, 700 pp., $35)

the review is by Timothy Snyder who has written widely and if I may say
most eruditely on modern europe including Bloodlands which I would also
highly recommend.

Rich

The young Jesuit was an idealist. A slim and bespectacled student of
philosophy, Father Fernando Huidobro Polanco dreamed of the redemption of
Spain from the evils of its secular, redistributive Republic. A supporter
of the military coup by nationalist generals in July 1936, he discounted
stories of mass murder of Spanish civilians by the rebels. But knowing that
war tries the conscience, he nevertheless wanted to offer pastoral care to
the rebel soldiers. When he arrived on the battlefield as a Roman Catholic
chaplain that September, he was confronted by two surprising realities.
First, many of the soldiers fighting under the banner of Spanish
nationalism against the Republic were Muslims, mercenaries from Spanish
Morocco. Second, Christian soldiers were little interested in the
application of ethics to their deeds. Father Fernando quickly realized that
he had been wrong about the honorable behavior of the rebels. The war that
he saw, as he courageously wrote to the rebel commander General Francisco
Franco, was “without prisoners or wounded,” because they were murdered by
nationalist soldiers, along with civilians seen as supporters of the
Republic. In April 1937, as Paul Preston records in this breathtaking
history, Father Fernando was shot in the back by his own men.

This is but one of the two hundred thousand or so murders of the Spanish
Civil War, many of which Preston records at this or greater level of
detail. His book is macro-history by way of micro-history, assembling local
stories into an overwhelming panorama of a tortured Spain. Reading this
study is like running your palms along the walls of the Toledo Cathedral on
a dark night, slowly acquiring painful impressions until a sense of dark
structure emerges. You have the sense, though Preston never quite raises
the issue directly, that something must have been amiss in the Roman
Catholic Church. Somewhere beneath his account of sins by Roman Catholics
against Roman Catholics, underground like the remains of a mosque beneath
an Iberian cathedral, is a further history of colonized Muslims.
What Preston knows about the years of civil war, 1936–1939, is astounding,
bespeaking his own formidable record as a historian of twentieth-century
Spain, but also the work of Spanish historians who are restoring knowledge
of a period that had been protected by a double taboo. After Franco’s
victory and the destruction of the Republic in 1939, his dictatorship
taught its own self-justifying history for two generations; and after his
death in 1975 and the general amnesty of 1977, a consensus prevailed in
newly democratic Spain that it was best to delay a historical reckoning
until democracy seemed solidly rooted. But that moment finally arrived, and
Preston’s work is a powerful intervention in a Spanish discussion. Its
significance transcends the events it brings to light, and suggests some
basic re-evaluations of recent European history (if not the one suggested
by its title).

On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 10:03 AM, Matthew Cissell <macissell at yahoo.es>wrote:

> I follow Krugman's columns and although I'm not an economist, his position
> on austerity seems to be upheld by how things have gone (lacklustre growth
> in UK and other places despite auterity programs).
> The article has me particularly concerned because I live in Spain and the
> term depression is not to be used lightly. Aside from my personal concern
> there is a lot bubbling under the surface here (think ghosts of the civil
> war and all Franco's unresolved legacy) that could erupt in an ugly way
> given the right conditions.
>
> mc otis, who watches them whirl ever closer towards the edge
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>
> To: P-list <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Monday, April 16, 2012 3:20 PM
> Subject: Krugman on European Financial Suicide
>
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/16/opinion/krugman-europes-economic-suicide.html?_r=1&ref=opinion#
>
> Consider the state of affairs in Spain, which is now the epicenter of
> the crisis. Never mind talk of recession; Spain is in full-on
> depression, with the overall unemployment rate at 23.6 percent,
> comparable to America at the depths of the Great Depression, and the
> youth unemployment rate over 50 percent. This can’t go on — and the
> realization that it can’t go on is what is sending Spanish borrowing
> costs ever higher.
>
> In a way, it doesn’t really matter how Spain got to this point — but
> for what it’s worth, the Spanish story bears no resemblance to the
> morality tales so popular among European officials, especially in
> Germany. Spain wasn’t fiscally profligate — on the eve of the crisis
> it had low debt and a budget surplus. Unfortunately, it also had an
> enormous housing bubble, a bubble made possible in large part by huge
> loans from German banks to their Spanish counterparts. When the bubble
> burst, the Spanish economy was left high and dry; Spain’s fiscal
> problems are a consequence of its depression, not its cause.
>
> Nonetheless, the prescription coming from Berlin and Frankfurt is, you
> guessed it, even more fiscal austerity.
>
> This is, not to mince words, just insane. Europe has had several years
> of experience with harsh austerity programs, and the results are
> exactly what students of history told you would happen: such programs
> push depressed economies even deeper into depression.
>
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