ANTERO DE ALDA Photography Recent Works
|
red roses
«Let a hundred flowers bloom.» MAO TSE-TUNG, 1957.
Carmen, Martina, Blanca, Pilar, Julia, Avelina, Elena, Virtudes, Ana, Joaquina, Dionisia, Victoria and Luisa. August 2, 1939. Las 13 Rosas (2007) by Emilio Martínez Lázaro. They were shot three days later. dir. photography JOSÉ LUÍS ALCAINE
1. The 13 Roses The flowers from Spain were red in 1939, but Franco, who has blessed himself with «the grace of God», could not bear the colours of the Marxist nations.
Once the Civil War came to an end, the Generalissimo rised to power and began a terrible vengeance against those who had «blood stained hands», and the young leftist militants of the revolutionary left are the first to be persecuted. In the women's prison of the Ventas neighbourhood, in Madrid (at the current Marqués de Mondéjar street, which at the time would not house more than 450 inmates and has already housing about 4000), Franco's troops picked up 13 girls, ages between 18 and 24 years old, which belonged to the framework of the Unified Socialist Youths and the Spanish Communist Party. Charged in military court for criminal acts «against the social and juridical order of the new Spain», they were sentenced to death and shot on August 5, 1939, up against the walls of the cemetery of Our Lady of Almudena. Innocent martyrs of a blind war, they were forever known as «The 13 Roses». And after them, in several other Spanish cities and for many years, many women and children were victims of a distorted view from the mirrors of the Royal Palace of El Pardo, proving that dictatorships (as some democracies) have a colour-blind look on the world that is as false as it is tragic.
«All facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice: the first as a tragedy, the second time as farce.» KARL MARX, 1852.
2. Blood gardens In 1958, Mao had just turned 65, but in the calendar of the Maoistic revolution, there was yet to made 'The Great Leap Forward' — the collectivization in the fields and the industrialization in the cities —, in order to turn China into an enviable world power. However, successive seasons of failed strategies and poor harvests would cost tens of millions of deaths, by 1975.
Shortly before, between 1956 and 1957, the revolutionary communist leader seemed to believe in the fundamentals of an open society, but the dramatics of the 'Hundred Flowers' campaign would, soon after, lead to thousands of deaths and as many others deported to the so-called re-education camps. Mao would want to encourage freedom of speech and economy, but only up to the limits in which he was able to understand them. Today, some believe that the ‘flowers’ blow served to identify the regime opponents and to take them out.
In the light of what we know about China's economic development, as well as Japan, Brazil, South Africa... where the explosion of capitalism occurs at the expense of child labour, low wages and the repression of workers (Brazilian journalist Carlos Starling Cassio calls it «the mild farce of the bourgeoisie»), how not to reinterpret? Some democracies (as well as dictatorships) also have their academics ready to plant gardens and to water them with blood.
____ the surviving ‘rose’: Las Trece Rosas (the thirteen roses) were actually fourteen, because in the Ventas imprisonment, an expedient error excluded Antonia Torres. She was executed six months later, in January of 1940. Mari Carmen also belonged to the same group of courageous and revolutionary young women, then 16 years old. She was not executed as her partners and her own father, but was exiled from Madrid and imprisoned for several years, during the Spanish dictatorship. She died a few days ago (on October the 16th of 2010), in Valencia, at the age of 87 years old.
Mao's China: on the geographical map of the Earth, China is a huge territory. In the twentieth century, and particularly in the almost 40 years in Maoist regime, there were many displacements of human mass, that have shaken the whole of Asia and even Europe. The death toll was never determined, but between hunger and war, the rebellions and the deported, it is estimated that over 40 million people died.
the first as a tragedy, the second as a farce: There was a sad event in the history of the twentieth century, which came to reverse the order of Marx's theory (adopted by Engels). In Germany, in 1933, Hitler came to power with promises to restore the German wounded pride, after defeat in World War I (as early as 1923, the young Adolf would have asked for «one more mug» in Bürgerbräukeller — Munich — to save the fatherland and this was a farce). Only later came the invasion of Poland, the deportation of Jews, Auschwitz ... (the tragedy). All in all, history proves what farce and tragedy go hand in hand. |
