The Re-Writing of Terror

As the labels of this blog suggest, I have thus far spent considerably more time posting on news from other countries regarding memory, amnesia and politics, while giving domestic news less coverage. There is no secret motive here. On a daily basis, I listen to, watch and read news from the U.S. Of course I am keenly interested in what goes on in this country, but I am even more intrigued by the news coming out of the international press (international news can often be hard to come by or superficially-treated in the mainstream U.S. media). I believe it is essential -- a duty, even -- for every citizen, in any country, to familiarize him or herself with current events, from a variety of perspectives. Part of understanding one's own country comes from observing and reflecting upon how that country is perceived abroad.

As a rule, I do not believe in political apathy. I think it is dangerous, or at least irresponsible, for those living in a democratic society to proclaim "not to care" about politics. Cynicism about today's political landscape is understandable; however, refusing to be informed or to reflect upon current debates because it is easier to do so is simply unacceptable! I can say this now, but I am rather ashamed to admit that when I was 18, I actually recall telling my parents I did not want to vote, because it was my "right" not to do so. My parents tried to drive home the point that voting was a privilege not afforded to everyone, and yet, in my teenage mind, it seemed easier to just "opt out" of politics. The first election I voted in was 1992. Yet it was really after 9-11 that I began to make politics a part of my daily life.

Perhaps because I have made the study of memory a part of my life as well, I am even more drawn to stories such as those that follow this introduction. Each of these reports suggest a bold, blatant - and, what is worse, initially uncontested -- erasure of one of most traumatic events in American history, 9-11. Such stories merit serious attention, and demand an explanation, regardless of one's political ideology.

Let's begin with the more recent story. Yesterday, on the TV program Good Morning America (see video below), former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani claimed, in conversation with George Stephanopoulos, that "we had no domestic attacks under Bush. We've had one under Obama."



According to an article in the Boston Herald, Giuliani later told CNN's Wolf Blitzer that he misspoke. Stephanopoulos, a former political adviser under President Clinton and a veteran television news analyst, was later raked across the coals for failing to press Giuliani further. A report that appeared yesterday in the New York Times, however, focused less on the absurdity of Giuliani's claim, and more on "Stephanopoulos's red face."

I find Giuliani's statement less troubling for what he says, and more for what he doesn't. Just a few posts ago, I spoke about the construction of amnesia in the film The Headless Woman. In the television appearance, Rudy Giuliani actively engages in a revision of 9-11. In fact, it might be better to call this "revision" a non-vision. Spanish historians have argued, in recent analyses of revisionist movements in Spain, for a more suitable term; I agree that "revisionism" is a misnomer, for most revisionists do not seek to "re-vise" or "re-view" the past, but to erase an existing narrative and replace it with an earlier one, or to forge a new tale entirely by appropriating and manipulating existing narratives.

In the video clip, Giuliani -- significantly, for better or worse still the "face" of 9-11 for many Americans (he is still often referred to as "America's mayor") -- omits the naming of 9-11 entirely, opting instead to reference the fatal shooting rampage at Ford Hood (Texas) in November. Here, Giuliani counts on putting fear back in operation: under Obama, we are not safe, under Bush, we were. Giuliani's statement suggests, thanks to what he does not say, that 9-11 did not happen while George W. Bush was president. Giuliani, criticized by many on both the left and right for appropriating 9-11 for personal political gain, has here determined that 9-11 is "that which shall remain nameless." Giuliani's spokeswoman tried to patch over the mess by issuing a statement that the former mayor was "clearly talking post-9/11 with regard to Islamic terrorist attacks on our soil." If that is the case, how do we explain the utter absence of 9-11 from the discussion?

One might say that perhaps we are taking the idea of "amnesia" or forgetting of 9-11 too far with regard to the Good Morning America video. And yet. . .just a few months ago, we witnessed an even more abhorrent statement, also issued in the wake of the Ft. Hood attacks, by former Bush White House spokesperson Dana Perino.

In an appearance on Fox News, Dana Perino stated: "We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush's term."




Although Giuliani and Perino are Republicans, people in all political parties in this country ought to be deeply disturbed by their remarks, which are historically, factually incorrect statements! George Stephanopoulos, and the Fox reporters interviewing Perino, ought to be held accountable as well for allowing their interviews to proceed after their interviewees made such ludicrous statements. Yes, it is critical to make clear that 9-11 did happen under George W. Bush -- Stephanopoulos, the Fox anchors, and whoever else involved had an obligation to assert that information, publicly, at the moment -- not in a statement issued after the fact. By refusing to acknowledge 9-11, and by establishing the idea that domestic attacks "did not happen" under the previous president, Giuliani and Perino effectively wipe clean the slate of the past. They almost seem to be readying the landscape for a re-writing of 9-11, a time in which they might claim, as Mary Matalin does below, that 9-11 was "inherited" from the previous (read: Clinton) administration:



There are many, many other troubling stories about the re-construction of 9-11 in our current political environment. I would like to end with this quote from Marc Howard Ross, in the book Understanding September 11. Ross's chapter, titled "The Political Psychology of Competing Narratives: September 11 and Beyond," reminds us that we must not only look at what a narrative says but what it doesn't say:

Narratives can be analyzed in several ways. Of great significance to an analysis is what a narrative includes and excludes. Often opposing parties' narratives do not directly contradict each other. Rather, opponents draw on distinct metaphors, emphasize different actions, cite clashing motivations, and communicate opposing affect to such an extent that it is sometimes hard for a naive observer to recognize that the narratives protagonists offer are often describing the same conflict. On the surface level, narratives are stories about the unfolding of events. At a deeper level, they reveal something about the motivations and reactions of the parties. . .(304).

Documentary Film: "In Search of Memory"

Next on my list of movies to see, this documentary, "In Search of Memory." I know so little about the science of memory, but really, doesn't Memory Studies encompass the cognitive realms of memory as well? It boggles my mind just to say neuroscience, and yet, I am fascinated by studies that show the brain on fire with thought! I first read about this film in the New York Times, and then, on my favorite documentary film blog Memoriando (usually in Spanish, with the occasional English post). Those two articles follow.



From: New York Press

"Memory is everything. Without it, we are nothing," says Nobel Laureate Neuroscientist and Columbia professor Eric Kandel in Petra Seeger's documentary film In Search of Memory. The film premiered to a full audience on the Upper East Side last night at the 92nd Street Y. Though largely centered on Kandel's own memory of the Holocaust and his personal narrative, the film's larger message tied memory—in both the scientific and sociological sense—to the larger scope of humanity.

In Search of Memory's introductory scenes begin through the rainy windshield of a moving car. Already, notions of nostalgia and selective memory incarnate as the audience squints to distinguish the urbanscape through which Kandel drives. The film, inverse to Kandel's life, begins in New York City and works backwards—like memory—to his hometown Vienna, Austria.

Throughout the film, the audience learns that Kandel's impassioned search for memory finds its roots in his experience growing up in the WWII era in Austria. His interest in neuroscience began with a foray into European history; initially, Kandel wanted to study history to understand motives of humans in times of war. In response to this ambition, his high school European history teacher encouraged him to look into neuroscience instead. If he wanted to understand motives, the teacher advised, he would have to examine humans and their intentions on a very basic cellular level.

And so begins Eric Kandel's legendary career in neurobiology: In his sensitive efforts to discover the science behind motives and map the physical locations of the id, the ego and the superego in the human brain, Kandel finds himself at the intersection of psychology and neuroscience. More specifically, he discovers the physical differences between short-term memory and long-term memory and the process by which short-term memory transforms into long-term memory. These findings ultimately lead to his Nobel Prize.

Instead of focusing strictly on the complexity of Kandel's research, however, Seeger presents short and simple segments of the neuroscientific data with Kandel's memories of Austria, clips from the Holocaust and Kandel's present day activities. Through Kandel's remarkably simple explanations of memory vis-a-vis neuroscience, even those with no scientific background are able to understand the complex structure of the memory as it travels and grows in the brain. Simple physical constituents of memory such as the synapses, the neuron, and the axon are explained as they relate to the memory.

Seeger's style, or almost lack thereof, is without intruding or contriving and, as such, the audience is given a candid look into this scientist's memory and his opus as Kandel remembers it. And because of Kandel's powerful charm and energy, the science-less and more personal aspects of the documentary add an engaging and often comical texture to this very delicate quest for memory and remembrance. The most memorable part—that which changed my brain's synaptic structure—is perhaps the colorful visualization of that very process. I was able to watch with wonder as something as seemingly figurative as short-term memory physically transformed and grew into long-term memory.

From: The New York Times

January 8, 2010
Total Recall: A Journey From Vienna to Brooklyn and the Center of the Brain

By A. O. SCOTT
Published: January 8, 2010

It’s not often that you are invited to spend an hour or two in the presence of a Nobel Prize winner, and “In Search of Memory: The Neuroscientist Eric Kandel,” Petra Seeger’s new documentary, offers an especially gratifying opportunity. The film’s subject won the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his research into the workings of the brain. He is particularly interested in how, at the cellular level, the mind stores and sorts various stimuli and turns them into long- and short-term memory.

For Dr. Kandel, whose laboratory conducts experiments on mice and snails, memory is one of the keys to human identity. Our mental patterns of recollection and learning have been grist for much philosophical and literary speculation, to which Dr. Kandel, a deeply cultured and thoroughly civilized man, pays sincere respect. And though he is preoccupied with physical processes, he is also aware of just how mysterious and complicated their implications and results can be.

Ms. Seeger, a German filmmaker who occasionally appears on screen with Dr. Kandel and his family, gives only a sketch of his ideas and discoveries, but the basic information about axons, synapses and neurons is presented clearly and with enthusiasm. “In Search of Memory” is finally more concerned with the scientist than with his science, and in his particular memories rather than his insights into memory as such. This is hardly a criticism, since Dr. Kandel is an unusually engaging person with a pretty amazing biography.

The camera follows him on visits to Vienna, where he was born, and to Brooklyn, where he lived after fleeing the Nazis in the late 1930s. His accent and temperament are an almost perfect amalgam of the two places: a refined, intellectual disposition forged in Sigmund Freud’s hometown and inflected by the scrapes and strivings of life in the borough of immigrants. He speaks German precisely if at times a bit haltingly and peppers his English with Yiddish words. He laughs easily, and though a prodigious talker — we see him lecturing and also holding forth in the laboratory and at a family Seder — he seems like a good listener as well.

As its main title (shared with Dr. Kandel’s 2006 memoir) suggests, “In Search of Memory” is more concerned with exploration than with comprehensiveness or conclusions. At 95 minutes, it necessarily lacks the sweep and detail of the book, which was more than 500 pages, and occasionally tries to compensate with awkward re-enactments of events from Dr. Kandel’s childhood. But it is an engrossing portrait all the same, a generous introduction to someone worth knowing, who knows an awful lot.

IN SEARCH OF MEMORY

The Neuroscientist Eric Kandel

Opens on Friday in Manhattan.

Written and directed by Petra Seeger; directors of photography, Robert Winkler and Mario Masini; edited by Oliver Neumann; released by Icarus Films. At the IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas, at Third Street, Greenwich Village. In English and German, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. This film is not rated.

On Lucrecia Martel's The Headless Woman (La mujer sin cabeza)

For some time now, I have been wanting to see La mujer sin cabeza (The Headless Woman), directed by Lucrecia Martel. I had seen Martel's previous two films, La niña santa (The Holy Girl) and La ciénaga (The Swamp), and each had left me with a strange sense of unease. La ciénaga, in particular, made me feel disturbed, even sick. But I was willing to give Martel another shot with La mujer sin cabeza after reading favorable reviews in the Spanish press. La mujer sin cabeza was selected for Cannes in 2008, and was co-produced in part by the Almodóvar brothers (not that Martel needed their help, I might add). It is, in my view, the best of the three Martel films I've seen thus far. I found it challenging, enigmatic and, as usual, a masterpiece of sound. In addition, La mujer sin cabeza relates on many levels to my scholarly interests in memory and trauma.

Martel was born in Argentina in 1966 and is part of the so-called "New Argentine Film." In the DVD extras, Martel refutes this categorization, stating that she does not even identify herself as a filmmaker, much less as a filmmaker of a particular generation. However, she does acknowledge the recent developments in Argentine film and attributes the surge in production - at least in part - to a kind of cultural gap created by the military dictatorship (1976-1983).

When it comes to Argentine film, I have to confess that I am most familiar with works about the dictatorship and its aftermath -- La historia oficial, Cautiva, Los rubios, Nietos: identidad y memoria, etc. Martel's La mujer sin cabeza does not deal in any specific way with the dictatorship, and yet there are clear reference points to this dark period of Argentine history throughout the film. I have chosen to write about La mujer here because it is all about memory and amnesia, on both a collective and an individual level.

As with Martel's other films, La mujer takes places near Salta, Argentina, the northwest corner of the country, where the director was born. The landscape is largely rural, and there is a significant emphasis on social class differences. And, as Martel comments in an interview, here, race is also a factor. Once again, we enter the world of the upper middle class and are treated to the sort of banal issues that permeate their everyday imaginations -- getting their cars washed, their hair dyed, their bodies massaged, and their yards landscaped.

The film's protagonist is a bleach-blonde dentist named Verónica, or Vero. Vero is married to Marcos, in what seems to be a relatively loveless, joyless relationship. Vero and Marcos's daughter is in Tucumán, studying law. Though Vero is often in the presence of family and friends, we get the sense she is quite alone, alienated from herself and others.

La mujer sin cabeza tells the story of Vero's mysterious car accident on the way home from a gathering with friends. When her cell phone rings, Vero, alone in her car, goes to answer it and hits, with force, an object in the road. In the opening scene, we see three dark-skinned (most likely, Indian -- Martel notes Bolivia's proximity to Argentina in the DVD extras) boys playing in an empty canal, and when Vero's car stops, two small handprints mark the window of the driver-side door. Looking in her rearview mirror, Vero notes a dead dog in the road, but we know, and know she knows, that she has collided with something far more grave. The handprints travel with Vero for some time, until, in a daze, she gets out of the car and a heavy, pelting rain begins to hit the windshield (rain, and water in general, course throughout the film)

The film's disorienting opening scenes are just a prelude for what is to come. Viewers are sent hurling into the same oneiric, drifting realm as Vero, as we accompany her from the scene of the accident to a hospital for X-rays, a hotel for a tryst with her husband's cousin Juan Manuel, and her own home. I often had the feeling that I myself had just been hit in the head with a blunt object and was trying to recover a coherent view of the world. The extent of Vero's amnesia was never entirely clear to me -- and I think Martel does this on purpose. It is difficult to discern how much Vero comprehends of what is going on around her, though it does seem that she is unable to recognize familiar faces, names and events in the immediate aftermath of the accident.

María Onetto, who plays Vero, gives a stunning performance. She moves through the world in a daze, as if in slow motion, while people buzz about her, entering her space and leaving her to what appears to be an impending breakdown: Vero has lost familiarity with those around her, but also herself. The way she dresses herself (or does not -- she stays in the same outfit as on the day of the accident for what seems at least a day), smooths her hair, sips a cup of coffee or engages in relations with her husband's cousin indicate a profound disconnect with the body and the self; perhaps, however, these are gestures Vero makes toward normalcy, as she represses the accident and attempts to pick up her life where she left off.

The film's title, which, as some have noted, evokes a horror story (i.e. "the headless horseman," etc.), can also be seen as the profound impact that loss of memory has on the self, on one's identity. Memory is the self, and when it is lost, the self becomes other. Martel demonstrates this in a powerful manner, often introducing Vero with the top of her head literally cut off. There are, in fact, many scenes, in which we struggle to see Vero as a "complete" figure on the other end of the lens. Frames often feel crowded, even "amputated," populated with head shots, as when we observe Vero and her niece's friend riding in the car, and her niece on a motorbike alongisde the passenger window.

While we might assume that Vero's amnesia is an effect of the accident and its traumatic outcome -- a coping strategy (a moral escape route?) as well as a physical repercussion -- as La mujer indicates, others in Vero's circle are quite adept at imposing amnesia upon her, in aiding her with the re-writing of her story (perhaps, it would be better to say with the erasure of her story). As the NYT reviewer, Stephen Holden, noted, it is the men in Vero's life who try to protect her from the truth: "the men in her life have apparently protected her by erasing any evidence of her whereabouts the day of the accident; the car has been repaired."

When Vero at last confesses to her husband that she believes she hit and killed a person, her husband drives her to the scene of the crime, insisting that what she hit was only a dog, and that, as he repeatedly puts it, "you were scared." Yet Marcos later takes Vero's car to the shop and has the damage pounded out, and a series of other "repairs" are also made, in an attempt to expunge the record of the past -- Vero's X-rays disappear from the hospital in which she was treated, and the hotel has no record of her stay. In the end of the film, we witness Vero dyeing her unnaturally-blonde hair to a dark brown, effectively adopting a new persona divorced from her previous life. For Holden, this change is indicative of Vero's "tacit complicity to forget what happened."

Holden sees La mujer sin cabeza as "a meditation on Argentina's historical memory," alluding primarily to the recent dictatorship. Martel herself, though focusing her discussion of the film largely on class issues, does not deny or dispute readings linking the work to Argentina's attempts to deal with its violent past. I am inclined to read the film at least partly about this period as well.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to miss the allusions -- missing bodies; crimes swept under the carpet; perpetrators sharing space with victims' families; even Vero's daughter, who studies law in Tucumán (significantly, Vero's car is repaired here, where some of the worst human rights abuses occurred during the dictatorship). Clearly, La mujer offers a critical take on the sort of stories (and histories) that prevail -- the official stories again -- and those that are swept under the rug. Yet La mujer goes beyond the dictatorship, taking on other sorts of amnesias as well -- such as the sort Vero and her family and friends perpetuate in their treatment of the racial other. Vero kills an Indian boy, and the ghosting of his murder can be read as a kind of induced racial and class oblivion, which allows Vero, Juan Manuel and Marcos --"European" Argentines of the bourgeoisie -- to thrive at the expense of others.

I made an immediate connection between this film and Muerte de un ciclista (Death of a Cyclist), which just came out on Criterion last year. However, when asked about this link, Martel states that she was unconcerned about any overlap because La mujer deals with the differences between classes, while Muerte de un ciclista tends to focus more on the infidelities within a marriage and tensions among members of the same social class. Nonetheless, both films take up the encounter between a cyclist and a car, and deal with hit-and-run accidents and marital infidelity. Martel notes that in the 1990s, Argentina saw an influx of SUVs, and an increase in accidents between large vehicles and bicycles. She sees this as an obvious entrance point to tackle glaring disparities between upper middle and lower classes.

Ultimately, the film offers no easy resolution. Like the fountain or well discovered under Vero's home at the end of the film, we get the sense that we have only scratched the surface of a dark history that still lies buried beneath an outwardly-stable foundation. A crime remains unspoken, but there are those who know the truth and continue to say nothing.

I would definitely watch this film again -- I think there is much that is probably easy to miss the first time around. If anyone has seen it and would like to comment, please feel free to do so!

U.S. Trailer (which does not do the film justice, though it does have some quite favorable review quotes):



Spanish trailer (unfortunately, no subtitles provided, sorry!):

New Book on Film and Memory

Cinema, Memory, Modernity
The Representation of Memory from the Art Film to Transnational Cinema

By Russell J.A. Kilbourn

Price: $95.00

* ISBN: 978-0-415-80118-8
* Binding: Hardback
* Published by: Routledge
* Publication Date: 27th May 2010 (Available for Pre-order)
* Pages: 313

About the Book

Since its inception, cinema has evolved into not merely a ‘reflection’ but an indispensable index of human experience – especially our experience of time’s passage, of the present moment, and, most importantly perhaps, of the past, in both collective and individual terms. In this volume, Kilbourn provides a comparative theorization of the representation of memory in both mainstream Hollywood and international art cinema within an increasingly transnational context of production and reception. Focusing on European, North and South American, and Asian films, Kilbourn reads cinema as providing the viewer with not only the content and form of memory, but also with its own directions for use: the required codes and conventions for understanding and implementing this crucial prosthetic technology — an art of memory for the twentieth-century and beyond.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction: Cinema, Memory, Modernity: The Return of Memory as Film 1: No Escape from Time: Memory and Redemption in the International Postwar Art Film 2: The ‘Crisis’ of Memory: ‘Traumatic Identity’ in the Contemporary Memory Film 3: ‘Global Memory’: Cinema as Lingua Franca and the Commodification of the Image 4: The Eye of History: Memory, Surveillance and Ethicality in the Contemporary Art Film 5: ‘Prosthetic Memory’ and Transnational Cinema: Globalized Identity and Narrative Recursivity in City of God Conclusion: Remembering to Forget: The Catachreses of Modernity Notes Bibliography Index
About the Author(s)

Russell J.A. Kilbourn is Assistant Professor of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University.

The Children of Fascist Parents

In Germany, there is an entire sub-genre of "second generation" literature, which includes works not only by and about the children of Holocaust victims, but by and about the children of Nazi perpetrators. In Spain, the context with which I am most familiar, it is difficult, if not impossible, to recall memoirs written by the children of Francoist parents (not that the experiences of the children of Nazis and the children of Francoists are necessarily comparable). In recent years, the focus has really been on the victims of the Franco dictatorship and their descendants -- and with good reason. I am still waiting to read Esther Tusquets's Habíamos ganado la guerra (We Had Won the War), but from what I have heard, this memoir is one of the few to address openly a childhood in the heart of a pro-Franco family of the Catalonian bourgeoisie.

A recent BBC report addressed the children of "Blackshirt women." I wish I could have heard the broadcast, but unfortunately, it is only available in the U.K.

Blackshirt women's children live with shame

By James Maw
Presenter, Mother Was A Blackshirt

Children of Blackshirt women, who joined Oswald Mosley's pro-Nazi British Union of Fascists, often feel that they have had to live with the burden of the guilt and shame caused by their mothers' fascist sympathies.

When I was 11, I was taken by my mother to visit her birthplace in Kennington, London.

As we walked around my mother showed me where the air-raid shelters were during the war, but then she began telling me about the Blackshirt meetings.

At 11 it did not mean much to me but it has played on my mind ever since.

I decided to reopen the case of how the Blackshirts attempted to recruit my mother.

It led me to question how many British women supported Hitler during the war, and what was their fate?

"I could have ended up in prison," my mother said.

And many of these women did.

Now aged 88, my mother told me about the ink factory she worked in as a young girl.

"At first I was packing ink, it was horrible.

"There I met Primrose, nobody liked her, but she invited me home.

"I met her family and I fell for it - they were trying to get me to be a Blackshirt."

Inflammatory speeches

In documentaries about the Blackshirts, the pictures I have seen are only of men, marching in the streets in their paramilitary uniforms.

I knew about the daughters of the aristocracy, like Diana Mitford who married Oswald Mosley, but I had not realised that young girls, like my own mother, could have been sucked in too.

But speaking to the historian Julie Gottlieb (author of Feminine Fascism) I was surprised to learn that the first fascist political organisation in Britain was actually founded by a woman.

"It was called the fascisti, then changed its name to the British Fascists and it was founded... in 1923, by a Miss Rotha Lintorn-Orman," she told me.

Until then the most prominent political movement for women had been the Suffragettes.

One of the most influential Suffragettes was Norah Elam, who was in charge of propaganda and imprisoned for making inflammatory speeches on women's suffrage.

Sent to Holloway prison in 1914, she shared a cell with Emmeline Pankhurst, leader of the British Suffragettes.

But Norah Elam was imprisoned again during World War II, this time with Diana Mosley, wife of the fascist leader.

Like me, Norah's granddaughter and great-granddaughter Angela and Susan McPherson have been on a quest to find out more about their family's history.

They knew little about the colourful past of their granny Norah.

"It was a bit of a shock," they told me. A bit of a shock indeed.

'Battle of the shirts'

But women like my mother were not interested in politics, as Norah Elam was, so was it the comradeship or merely the appeal of the smart uniform that was the attraction?

Julie Gottlieb described the Blackshirt uniform as "a great marketing tool, and an incredible draw particularly for the youth. Some historians call this period the battle of the shirts".

The party grew and even children were recruited to support Hitler's ideology.

Diana Bailey, as a young girl in Bognor Regis, remembers her mother and father in their Blackshirt uniforms.

"We were told to paint slogans on the walls with 'Britain Awake' and 'Perish the Jews'. I was nine years old," she said.

Francis Beckett's mother Anne was also a young working woman, like my mother.

Anne was sent along to Mosley's headquarters by the Pitman's Shorthand temp agency to work as a secretary.

"She wanted to be an actress but she made what she said was a dreadful mistake, she learnt shorthand.

"Pitman's sent her to Black House, HQ for the Blackshirts. She found it exciting.

"She was never a racist but worked amongst racists," Francis Beckett said.

It was at fascist headquarters that Anne joined the Blackshirts and met and later married one of the Blackshirt elite, John Beckett, Francis's father.

John was sent to prison with Oswald Mosley during the war - and his family spent the rest of their lives living hand to mouth.

A former Labour MP, John Beckett should have taken his place in the post-war Attlee government. Instead, he worked as a night watchman for Securicor.

Seeing how easily Francis's mother had become a Blackshirt, I asked my mother if something similar had happened to her, with her factory workmate Primrose and her fascist family.

"They were talking about these meetings - I thought they had got me there for a reason.

"They were talking about Mosley, so after this I left, and later gave in my notice at the ink factory," she said.

So after all these years I can stop imagining my mother sitting in the rows of a mass meeting, 'sieg heiling' their leader and being hauled off to Holloway Prison.

But in talking to these families I can see how life could so easily have been very different for my family.

Diana Bailey continues to live with the consequences of her parents' actions - and says she will never lose her feelings of guilt.

"When Richard Dimbleby went into Belsen I felt the guilt of the whole of the world, I felt utterly responsible for what happened in those camps, because I did write 'Perish the Jews' on walls, it is something I will never get over."

Mother Was a Blackshirt will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Monday 4 January at 1100 GMT.

Or catch-up afterwards on BBC
(UK only).
Story from BBC NEWS

On Turkish-Armenian Relations

From: The New York Times

January 6, 2010
A Family Tree Uprooted by a 60-Year-Old Secret
By DAN BILEFSKY

ISTANBUL — Fethiye Cetin recalled the day her identity shattered.

She was a young law student when her beloved grandmother Seher took her aside and told her a secret she had hidden for 60 years: that she, the grandmother, was born a Christian Armenian and had been saved from a death march by a Turkish officer, who snatched her from her mother’s arms in 1915 and raised her as Turkish and Muslim.

Her grandmother revealed to her that her real name was Heranus and that her biological parents had escaped to New York. Heranus, Ms. Cetin learned, was just one of thousands of Armenian children who were kidnapped and adopted by Turkish families during the genocide of up to 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Turks between 1915 and 1918. These survivors were sometimes called “the leftovers of the sword.”

“I was in a state of shock for a long time — I suddenly saw the world through different eyes,” said Ms. Cetin, now 60. “I had grown up thinking of myself as a Turkish Muslim, not an Armenian. There had been nothing in the history books about the massacre of a people which had been erased from Turkey’s collective memory. Like my grandmother, many had buried their identity — and the horrors they had seen — deep inside of them.”

Now, however, Ms. Cetin, a prominent member of the estimated 50,000-strong Armenian-Turkish community here and one of the country’s leading human rights lawyers, believes a seminal moment has arrived in which Turkey and Armenia can finally confront the ghosts of history and possibly even overcome one of the world’s most enduring and bitter rivalries.

She already has confronted her divided self, which led her from Istanbul to a 10th Street grocery store in New York, where her Armenian relatives had rebuilt their broken lives after fleeing Turkey. (Many of the Armenians who survive in Turkey today do so because their ancestors lived in western provinces when the killings occurred, mostly in the east.)

The latest tentative step toward healing generations of acrimony between the two countries took place in October on a soccer field in the northwestern Turkish city of Bursa, when President Serzh Sarkisian became the first Armenian head of state to travel to Turkey to attend a soccer game between the two countries’ national teams. In this latest round of soccer diplomacy, Mr. Sarkisian was joined at the match by President Abdullah Gul of Turkey, who had travelled to a soccer match in Armenia the year before.

“We do not write history here,” Mr Gul told his Armenian counterpart in Bursa. “We are making history.”

The Bursa encounter came just days after Turkey and Armenia signed a historic series of protocols to establish diplomatic relations and to re-open the Turkish-Armenian border, which has been closed since 1993. The agreement, strongly backed by the United States, the European Union and Russia, has come under vociferous opposition from nationalists in both Turkey and Armenia.

Armenia’s sizeable diaspora — estimated at more than seven million — in the United States, France and elsewhere is alarmed that the new warmth will be misused as an excuse to forgive and forget in Turkey, where even uttering the words “Armenian genocide” can be grounds for prosecution. Also threatening the deal is Armenia’s lingering fight with Azerbaijan, its neighbor and a close ally of Turkey, over a breakaway Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan.

The agreement — which has yet to be ratified in the Turkish or Armenian Parliaments — could have broad consequences, helping to end landlocked Armenia’s economic isolation, while lifting Turkey’s chances for admission into the European Union, where the genocide issue remains a key obstacle.

But Ms. Cetin argued that the most enduring consequence could be helping to overcome mutual recriminations. She said Armenians have been battling the collective amnesia of Turks, who contend that the collapse of the Ottoman Empire during World War I was bloody and that those Armenians who perished were victims of that chaos.

“Most people in Turkish society have no idea what happened in 1915 and the Armenians they meet are introduced as monsters or villains or enemies in their history books,” she said. “Turkey has to confront the past but before this confrontation can happen, people must know who they are confronting. So we need the borders to come down in order to have dialogue.”

Ms. Cetin, who was raised by her maternal grandmother, said the borders in her own Muslim Turkish heart came down irrevocably when that grandmother revealed her Armenian past.

Heranus, she said, was only a child in 1915 when Turkish soldiers arrived in their ethnically Armenian Turkish village of Maden, rounding up the men and sequestering women and girls in a church courtyard with high walls. When they climbed on each others’ shoulders, Heranus told her, they saw men’s throats being cut and bodies being thrown in the Tigris River, which ran red for days.

During the forced march toward exile that followed, Heranus said she saw her own grandmother drown two of her grandchildren before she herself jumped into the water and disappeared.

Heranus’s mother, Isguhi, survived the march, which ended in Aleppo, Syria, and went to join her husband, Hovannes, who had left the village for New York in 1913, opening a grocery store. They started a new family.

“My grandmother was trembling as she told me her story,” Ms. Cetin said. “She would always say, ‘May those days vanish never to return.”’

Ms. Cetin, a rebellious left-wing student activist at the time of her grandmother’s revelation, recalled how confronting Armenian identity, then as now, had been taboo. “The same people who spoke the loudest about injustices and screamed that the world could be a better place would only whisper when it came to the Armenian issue,” she said. “It really hurt me.”

Ms. Cetin, who was imprisoned for three years in the 1980s for opposing the military regime in Turkey at the time, said her newfound Armenian identity inspired her to become a human rights lawyer. When Hrant Dink, editor of the Turkish-Armenian newspaper Agos, was prosecuted in 2006 for insulting Turkishness by referring to the genocide, she became his lawyer. On January 19, 2007, Mr. Dink was assassinated outside his office by a young ultranationalist.

Ms. Cetin published a memoir about her grandmother in 2004. She says she purposely omitted the word “genocide” from her book because using the word erected a roadblock to reconciliation. “I wanted to concentrate on the human dimension. I wanted to question the silence of people like my grandmother who kept their stories hidden for years, while going through the pain.”

When Heranus died in 2000 at age 95, Ms. Cetin honored her last wish, publishing a death notice in Agos, in the hope of tracking down her long-lost Armenian family, including her grandmother’s sister Margaret, whom she had never seen.

At her emotional reunion with her Armenian family in New York, several months later, “Auntie Marge” told Ms. Cetin that when her father had died in 1965, she had found a piece of paper carefully folded in his wallet that he had been keeping for years. It was a letter Heranus had written to him shortly after he had left for America.

“We all keep hoping and praying that you are well,” it said.

Sebnem Arsu contributed reporting.

"Suffering for Return"

Happy New Year 2010! I have been away for a few weeks, but I am now back and ready to update my English blog as much as possible before classes start in 2 weeks. I thought that this editorial, published on New Year's Eve in the New York Times, was an interesting way to end 2009 and begin 2010. I really identify with what the author says regarding the sameness of American towns, particularly after being in the car some 20 hours earlier this week on my way back home from the east coast. Though the editorial is not specifically related to politics, it is with regard to what it says about corporate interests driving out small businesses. What is particularly intriguing is what the author says about the reconstruction of one's sense of time in American landscapes -- building (and re-building) a continual present, rather than allowing for the co-existence of temporal planes.

From: The New York Times

December 31, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor

Times to Remember, Places to Forget
By DANIEL GILBERT

Cambridge, Mass.

TONIGHT, millions of Americans will raise a glass, sing the only three Scottish words they know and remember the past with an ineffable blend of sadness and delight. Nostalgia has all the hallmarks of a universal emotion, and it is only natural to assume that the yearning for “auld lang syne” that was shared by our grandparents will someday be shared by our grandchildren.

But maybe we’ve reached nostalgia’s end. “Nostalgia” — made up of the Greek roots for “suffering” and “return” — is literally a longing for the places of one’s past. And lately, it has become harder and harder to find things to miss about America’s places.

Downtowns were once collections of local businesses that lured us with claims of uniqueness: “Try our homemade pies,” their signs read, or “Best jazz selection in town.” Today, those signs have been replaced by familiar corporate logos that make precisely the opposite claim, promising us the same goods arranged in the same way as they are in every other place. The banks and burritos and baristas on one city block are replicated on the next — and in all the malls, in all the cities, in all the states. Americans can drive from one ocean to the other, stopping every day for the same hamburger and every evening at the same hotel. Traveling in a straight line is no longer much different than traveling in a circle.

When the industrial smoothing of our nation’s once-variegated edges has been fully accomplished, Americans may no longer need to gather at midnight on the last day of the year to yearn for their yesterdays, because wherever they are they will see the landscapes of their youths.

When they remember the Starbucks where they met the one they married or the Gap where they lost the one they didn’t, they will be marinating in memories that happened everywhere but not somewhere, reliving experiences that are located in time but dislocated in space. And when they return to the places where they grew up, or went to school, or fell in love, they may not even notice that the Old Navy has been replaced by an Abercrombie, the Fridays by an Olive Garden and the once-fleeting past by an endless present.

Ours may be the last generation of Americans to suffer for return — to remember events that took place when place still mattered. So tonight let us revel in our nostalgia, and long for the days when longing was easy.

Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, is the host of the forthcoming television series “This Emotional Life.”