Battle for the Valley of the Fallen!

In the place where he is buried, Spanish dictator Francisco Franco has built a symbol of his dictatorship that lasted for four decades. Now, the Spanish government plans to exhume his remains and remove this monument to fascism - but the conservatives are opposed to opening of old wounds.

The hills near Madrid are home to a symbol of a four decades long dictatorship – the famous Valley of the Fallen.  It is a mausoleum that General Francisco Franco ordered to be built to commemorate his victory in the Spanish Civil War. Now there are plans to relocate this complex. The "Valley" has a huge basilica surrounded with hills, and Franco is buried there, behind the altar, beneath the monument that is decorated with fresh flowers.

The new socialist-led government is considering to exhume the remains of the dictator in order to remove that monument. But, even after 36 years since Franco's death, this is still a delicate task.

“The Spanish transition towards democracy was an act of prudence after deep wounds caused by war and dictatorship. We had to deal with the past little by little. We may have touched this issue a bit late, but prudence is the key to the success of our peaceful transition” –says Ramon Jauregui, one of the ministers in charge of this matter.



But Spain's conservative opposition refuses such thing. They claim that it would open old wounds.

“There are people in Spain who are afraid to face the darkness of the past. Horrors and massacres were committed here and we are not unique in that because other countries will also have to deal with such issues. I don’t see a reason for Spain not to do it” - explains historian Angel Vinas.

For him, the relocation of the compound should be part of the process. This monument was one of the most visited in Spain, but there are no signs that explain its history, and it isn’t mentioned that it was built mainly by political prisoners.

Nicolas Sanchez Albornoz is one of them. As a student activist, he was sentenced to six years of work in a camp because of "activities against the state." He escaped in 1948 and never returned.

“I believe that it is really shocking that one European country still has a huge monument as a remembrance of one of the bloodiest dictators. It would be best to remove all symbols. The thing that gives force to this particular symbol is Franco's presence” - said Sanchez who is now in his 80's.

The government now awaits a proposition from expert commission before their final decision. One of the proposals is to relocate the Franco’s remains to a more appropriate place, and to bury him in the city cemetery next to his wife. His daughter has already had a complaint, and the foundation that she runs has promised to carry out legal actions to prevent it.

“Many people will oppose this barbarism. They can not move Franco without the permission of his family. That would be sacrilege. One must be careful with the history of Spain. You can not demonize one part of society, and elevate other” – says Jaim Alonso, in a room full of photos of Franco and his portrait. He believes that the general saved Spain from the clutches of Soviet Russia.

We will continue fighting

Few Spaniards openly shows their admiration for Franco, but many have an aversion towards relocation of his grave.

“It is pointless after so many years. With that, we will only continue with the war” – says Jose Luis, one of the visitors of the Valley of the Fallen. "For the side that was defeated in the war it is quite different. The Fascists killed Father Fausto Canales, and his remains were moved to the Valley in 1959. More than 30,000 people that were killed in the war on both sides have been transferred there by Franco’s order ."

“For me it is very painful that the remains of my father are located in a place that was built in honor of the winner of a coup. This looks like a double crime. Firstly, he was executed, and then his body was transferred without our permission to a place that is totally inappropriate” – says younger Canales.  

read more...

How old are you? – Zsa Zsa Gabor

Zsa Zsa Gabor (1919), American actress of Hungarian origin (also known for being crowned as Miss Hungary in 1936 and for having nine husbands) was convicted in 1989 for slapping the face of a police officer named Paul Kramer when he stopped her for a traffic violation in Beverly Hills.

What did the court ruled for this former beauty and sex symbol?

To spend three days in jail and to enter her real date of birth in her identity documents.

The later was because, in her documents,  Zsa Zsa Gabor listed that she was born a quarter-century later that she really was. 

 

read more...

Marilyn Monroe - Madness and her last days

In the book “Fragments”, which is based on diaries, letters and various writings of Marilyn Monroe, sex symbol of the 20th century, it is revealed that after a series of psychiatric sessions she ended up in mental hospital’s solitary confinement, and that doctor Greenson came there to examine – her breasts.

"Alone!!! I am alone-I am always alone no matter what." – with this begins the earliest of several diaries written by Marilyn Monroe, sexiest and most desirable women of the 20th century, according to "Playboy". Her diaries, sketches, poems, letters, various notes and rare photographs, dating from between 1951 and 1961, are published (in 2010) in a book called "Fragments". They are significant because, for the first time, Marilyn Monroe explains herself – she is presented outside of Hollywood splendor, myths and legends that were woven around her name in recent decades.

That book revealed her fears of sexual abuse, betrayal of her third husband, ghosts of inherited madness, traumas from psychotherapy to which she was forced, and an eerie testimony about the mental hospital in which she was involuntarily taken.

Of countless men who have passed through her life the most famous was John F. Kennedy, the most faithful was Joe DiMaggio… but the most trace in her life left her third husband, playwright Arthur Miller, who managed to make her the happiest and most unhappiest woman in the world.

Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller were probably in their happiest phase during the summer of 1957, which they spent in a rented house on Long Island. They spent their time there swimming and taking long walks on the beach. She looked splendidly on the photographs from that period. That was the time when she happily stepped into her husband’s world - She was joyful and witty at the dinner in the company of writers Carson McCullers and Isak Dinesen, she became friends with Truman Capote,  and met some of her literary heroes such as poet Carl Sandburg and writer Saul Bellow, with whom she had dinner while she waited for the premiere of “Some Like It Hot" in Chicago. The sexiest blonde knocked Bellow of his feet.

Writers and books were not a coincidence in her life. "Esquire" once published a photo of her reading James Joyce’s “Ulysses”. There was also a photo of her reading the poetry of Heinrich Heine. Magazine “Life” once depicted Marilyn reading a book in front of a shelve with books. She had her personal library with 400 volumes that included works of history, philosophy, fiction...

In London, where they traveled in the fall of that same year to film her "The Prince and the Showgirl" movie with Laurence Olivier, Miller caused her greatest disappointment in life. 

Marilyn and her husband moved to a magnificent estate in Surrey, near London. Everything seemed perfect. She was producing a film in which played (and was directed by) one of the most respected actors of her generation and she lived in a large country house with the man she loved the most. As an artist she couldn’t have felt more fulfilled, until a coincidence buried her otherwise very fragile self-confidence and her trust in her husband.  She ran into a Miller’s diary in which he complained that he was disappointed with her and that sometimes he is ashamed having her in his company in front of friends. After reading those entries, Marilyn was destroyed.  One of her biggest fears came true - that she will disappoint the man she loves.

Formally speaking, Marilyn Monroe was not an orphan because her mother Gladys Monroe Baker eventually outlived her famous daughter. But since Gladys was a schizophrenic who spent years going in and out of psychiatric institutions, Marilyn was virtually abandoned and raised in a number of adoptive families, including the family of her mother’s close friend Grace Goddard.

Her first husband, James Dougherty, liked the idea of saving a shy and nice girl, who left high school to marry him. It is not surprising that their marriage fell apart - they divorced in September 1946. “My relationship with him was basically insecure from the first night I spent alone with him,” Marilyn wrote in her diary.

Her second marriage with baseball player Joe DiMaggio, who was one of the most famous names in sport‘s world, also failed. Their marriage lasted only nine months. DiMaggio was almost in his forties and he wanted, with all his heart, for his wife to leave Hollywood and become a housewife. Instead, he became "Mr. Monroe”, and that was too much for his jealousy and frustration. However, when she died, for twenty years DiMaggio sent flowers to her grave three times a week.

She began to visit psychotherapists at the urging of her acting teacher Lee Strasberg, to whom she went in the spring of 1955 because she wanted to become a serious actress. Strasberg was more than a teacher to her; he was almost a father she never met. By the wish of Marilyn Monroe, Strasberg became executor of her will, which was then heavy about 13 million of dollars. After Strasberg’s death, his widow, Anna Mizrahi Strasberg, inherited that right. She even today earns about a million dollars thanks to Marilyn Monroe’s name.

Persuaded by Strasberg, and after breaking up her marriage with DiMaggio, Marilyn visited a psychiatrist five times a week. Dr. Margaret Hohenberg managed to pull out from Marilyn’s subconscious memories of a difficult childhood, including memories of sexual abuse and harassment of her aunt, Ida Martin, with whom she stayed a few times when she was between 11 and 13 years old.

Two years later, in 1957, Marilyn stopped seeing Dr. Hohenberg. Strasberg then recommended her another doctor, Marianne Kris, who later caused one of the greatest traumas in Marilyn’s life.  During sessions with her, Marilyn discovered that she was always “deeply terrified to really be someone's wife” because she knew “from life one cannot love another, ever, really”.

Three years later, after being totally rejected by Miller (he didn’t even came to her funeral), Marilyn Monroe became Yves Montand’s mistress. Her new doctor became Ralph Greenson – it is not known how much he managed to help her, but it is certain that he was obsessed with Marilyn. Greenson’s daily therapeutic sessions lasted about five hours, but nevertheless, in 1960, in a state of complete emotional disintegration, and upon the recommendation of Dr. Kris, Marilyn ended up in a psychiatric hospital in New York.

Practically, as soon as she entered, Marilyn started requesting to leave. But the more she was persistent about it, the employees of the hospital was more confident in her disease, and they eventually put her into a solitary confinement. Marilyn wrote a letter to Greenson in which she described what were they doing to her, but instead of getting her out of that hospital, he came to examine – her breasts. From hell that lasted for three days she was rescued by DiMaggio.

Marilyn became acquainted with Kennedy brothers in 1961, but she met some members of that family at least five years earlier. She wrote in her diary, that she fears that Peter Lawford, Kennedy’s brother-in-law, wants to hurt her - the feeling of violence I’ve had lately about being afraid of Peter he might harm me, poison me, etc.

In August 1962, Marilyn Monroe was found dead. It is assumed that she committed suicide by drinking a large quantity of sleeping pills.

Childhood – Her guardian wanted to rape her when she was just six years old

In her diaries, Marilyn also wrote about her first marriage with an intelligent and attractive James Dougherty. She married Dougherty on June 19, 1942, when she was just 16, and he was five years older. Marilyn described her loneliness and insecurity in that sudden marriage, which was less love and more of a way for Marilyn – then Norma Jeane Baker – to seize the opportunity to escape from the life of an orphan, while her guardians, Grace and Ervin Goddard, were in California. Especially because Ervin tried to rape Marilyn when she was just six years old.

read more...

Better Side of Nicotine!

Each pack of cigarettes has a warning about the brutal truth of harmful effects of tobacco, but it does not inform that smoking bans around the world are creating a new trend – the number of marriages, friendships and close relationships is increasing between the people that are pounded in the rooms for smokers.

Each pack of cigarettes tells us that smoking causes cancer of all possible internal organs, that it has negative consequences for pregnancy...  But, the pack does not say that smoking, in a way, modeled today’s culture of entire civilization and that in recent decades it shaped the lifestyle of modern men and women.

Anti-smoking mania that is currently affecting the western world came to the extent in which the cigarettes are thrown out of the cultural and social life.

Besides prohibiting the advertisement of cigarettes, their display in films and on television also is avoided, and recently, a great "rewriting of history" is in fashion.

In the United States, they erased a cigarette from the hand of the famous Beatle, Paul McCartney, on the cover of re-released album "Abbey Road", and the French have removed cigarettes from the paintings of Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, that adorned their ceremonial post stamps. If smokers, hundreds of years ago, were so "notorious", the question is, how would the present-day popular culture look like, and who would, for example, instead of Humphrey Bogart, stand for a cultural icon of the 20th century. For, although Bogart died back in 1957, every kid now knows that he was a great charmer, who never took a cigar out of his mouth. He based his image on a specific method of smoking, holding a cigar in his mouth between two smokes. Such smoking even entered in the Oxford Dictionary, as a verb “bogarting”.

If the new technologies initiate remastering of the old movies, like the French did with their stamps, it would be likely that "Casablanca", from a cult film, will become a comedy, in which the main actor is doing something strange with his hands. Richard Klein, a professor of French literature and the author of “Cigarettes are Sublime”, a kind of history of smoking, said that “Casablanca" is a type of a film in which cigarettes are providing specific light and character. Klein noted another significant "contribution" of Bogart’s cigarettes; if there was not so much smoking in Casablanca, Franklin Roosevelt would not be so thrilled with the film in 1942, and he would not set up a meeting with Churchill and De Gaulle in Casablanca at the beginning of 1943, where there was made a significant improvement in the U.S. and France relations. America, then, ceased to maintain relations with the Government in Vichy and De Gaulle’s move was acknowledged,  and who knows how the course of World War II would have been if Roosevelt and De Gaulle had not met in Casablanca.  Klein also noted that Hitler was sworn anti-smoker, and that, because of this, smoking at that time was accepted as a kind of patriotic duty.

When it comes to popular culture, one should ask what would happen to the famous scene from the movie "Basic Instinct" in which Sharon Stone crossed legs and, close-up, showed her crotch and became a symbol of sexuality for teenagers. To reiterate, this is performed at a hearing where she was a suspect for murder, during which she lit a cigarette, although they cautioned her that it is prohibited. And, in the fatal moment, she uttered a "cult" line: "What are you going to do, arrest me for smoking?"

Smoking, however, is not only an integral part of the cultural heritage of human civilization. Cigarettes did for a long time kill our internal organs, but with an extremely proactive marketing of tobacco companies, cigarettes became a significant social factor. Hypothetically speaking, if no one smoked, the men around the globe would not have a significant advantage in winning the women. For years the older seducers teach kids that you should always have a lighter with you even if you do not smoke, because you never know when a girl needs a fire. For a long time, the first lit cigarette usually went after the first intercourse, and for boys it was the entrance into the world of men.

Cigarettes, on the other hand, had a significant impact in the "conquest of freedom" of weaker gender in their fight for gender equality, and, eventually, they became a symbol of female emancipation and independence. Puritans in America, in the first period after the Second World War thought that there is a subconscious link between the consumption of cigarettes and sexuality, emphasizing "the rigidity of the situation in which a woman puts something between the lips."

So, during the seventies, picture of a woman with a cigarette represented a symbol of independence and freedom from the conservative morality, and that was embodied in an advertising campaign for cigarettes, "Virginia Slims" with the slogan "You've come a long way, baby." This send a message: a woman that smokes a cigarette is a free woman, she enjoys it independently from the man who wants to approach her with a lighter.

In Europe, tobacco control is gaining momentum in the last decade, while in America this struggle is far more present in people's lives, which is why America has become known as a country where smoking is forbidden even in your own apartments because the neighbors may sue you because you are poisoning them through the ventilation system.

Since 1965, the percentage of smokers in America dropped from 45 to about 20 percent of the total population. Hannah Arendt, German political theorist of Jewish origin, had once written that the smokers in line reminiscent her of an unpleasant scenes from her youth, when Jews were still entering the cattle wagons on their way to the gas chambers. That feeling smokers may experience at any airport in Europe, where visitors are forced to seek special rooms for smoking, and where they are pushed as in a nature reserve.  In these “smoking reserves” , however, it is easy to see that relations among people are somewhat closer, because, as non-smokers mind their own business around the airport, smokers chat in a small space.

 A
In America there is a phenomenon of "smoker's lobby" in large corporations, where the closest relations are made  in the very smoking rooms. This is, maybe, best shown in the most popular sitcom in the last decade, "Friends", when one of the main characters deliberately starts to smoke because she saw that those colleagues of hers who go on smoke-break are getting along better with the head of the company.

Therefore, among smokers who are becoming a new legal category, a new kind of solidarity and opportunity for bonding is created. It is interesting that Ireland was the first country in Europe to introduce a general smoking ban, and that included smoking in pubs, which was seen as a major blow to their local culture. The first effect was a decline in visits to pubs, but in the long term, sociologists have noted another effect - increase in the number of marriages. This was explained with increased interaction between the smokers who were, after the ban, forced to attend small spaces for smokers. In simple words, the average guy in smoking zone has better chances with a girl.

United Kingdom also adopted a total ban on smoking in 2007, which led to the closure of many pubs, particularly low-profit local "holes" for fun for the people in the neighborhood, who felt that it was not right to drink beer without a cigarette.  The respected British weekly newspaper The Economist noted that in the first two years of ban existence, about 27 pubs per week was closed on the island. Some pubs have managed to adopt by attract wine lovers, and almost all pubs have started to serve food (which until recently was unthinkable).

With a change of pub character, "lifestyle" of an average Briton was also changed.  Until the smoking ban, 75 percent of Britons has visited pubs, of which two thirds were considered as regular guests. This is how the journalist of The Economist described a new situation:  “The tables are sticky with half-dried beer. There is a wide range of beers to choose from, but often it tastes as if the pipes have not been cleaned for weeks. Until smoking was banned from pubs in 2007, the front half of pubs stank of cigarettes while the back half was suffused with a smell from the toilets. Sadly, today, the tables are as sticky as ever and, while the cigarette smoke has gone, that has only allowed the toilets' odour to pervade the entire place.”

The only argument which "fighters for the rights of smokers" can not deny are many medical reports that prove that smoking is not only harming health of those who smoke, but people around them to. This is why these bans are slowly conquering the world. Greece is one of the last European countries that was scheduled to introduce a ban in restaurants from September 1 this year, but that was unrealistic in a country that still has 40 percent of smokers. Association of restaurateurs responded with initiative “ashtrays on the tables again”, and the Greeks continued to smoke like chimneys. Most bizarre ban on smoking in Europe is certainly the one in Amsterdam. In front of a certain coffee shop, housed in the middle of Red Light District, opposite to the local church, stands a large sign: "If you smoke marijuana, which is mixed with tobacco, then smoking is permitted only outside. If you smoke marijuana without tobacco, then smoking is allowed inside."

The first ban

The first known smoking ban was introduced in Mexico, in 1575, and involved the use of tobacco in the churches, in all the Spanish colonies in the Caribbean. Then the Turkish Sultan Murad fourth banned smoking in the Ottoman Empire, and Pope Urban Seventh threatened to "excommunicate anyone who is caught taking tobacco in the church, whether he is smoking, chewing or inhaling it through the nose."

The first "secular" building where smoking was prohibited is the old government building in Wellington, New Zealand, where smoking was prohibited in 1876. The reasons for this prohibition, however, were not medical but in fear of fire, since this building is still the second largest wooden building in the world.

read more...