Swedes are using Russians’ homophobia to repel them:

 Swedish peace society has come up with a new way of fighting off Russian submarines in the Stockholm archipelago: a subsurface sonar system called ‘The Singing Sailor’, which sends out Morse code and features the message “Welcome to Sweden. Gay since 1944”

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The current wisdom in Russia  (accepted on the level of state law) is that just seeing a gay person might convince one to become gay. So Swedes decided to make good use of this irrational fear.

And here is a question to the brain-dead losers who keep saying that college professors shouldn’t do research.

Please look at this list of books on the Spanish Civil War.

Concentrate. Concentrate some more. Now really concentrate.

And now answer this: is it or is it not beneficial to my students that I’m reading these books?

An additional question for those who are not entirely stupid: what would I be teaching about if I weren’t reading these books? The last time I took a course in graduate school was 10 years ago. Should I just repeat the same outdated material like a stupid drone for the next 40 years? Is that effective teaching, in your opinion?

My plan for the 8-month-long sabbatical is simple:

1. Write 350 words a day (this sounds like very little but I don’t do drafts. These 350 words have to be really good and almost ready to submit). [3 hours writing + 2 hours research]

2. Read 100 pages a day (obviously, this is work-related reading. Everything else I read falls outside these 100 pages.) [3 hours]

In terms of time, this rises to a full work day. The 350 words require research. I can’t just pull them out of thin air. And that research takes time, too. So in case there are still people who think that sabbaticals are like holidays and that professors “do nothing” while on sabbatical, it’s time for them to let go of this insane belief. I will maintain this schedule even on weekends, mind you. 

For those who believe this is too ambitious, I’ve got to say that I have been working this way for a while, and it’s eminently doable. By the end of the sabbatical I will have:

1. Finished the book;

2. Submitted 3 articles for publication (two of them are almost ready, I’m just waiting for a couple more secondary sources to arrive through interlibrary loan);

3. Given a talk at Oxford.

So it seems that American Idol will be cancelled after next season, and I say, good riddance! The only good part about this show were the first two episodes of each season that featured horrible singers convinced they had talent. Their self-delusion was entertaining but got repetitive after a while.

Other than that, I never saw any value to the show.

As I’ve been promising, here is a list of non-fiction sources on the Spanish Civil War.

1. To begin with, this is a really great, very short book for those who just want to get the basics of the Spanish Civil War before they proceed to learn about it more in depth.

Graham, Helen. The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction.

2. This brilliant historian recently published a more in-depth volume on the war. Everybody who is interested in the subject has got to read it.

Graham, Helen. The War and Its Shadow: Spain’s Civil War in Europe’s Long Twentieth Century.

3. Paul Preston is one of the leading historians specializing in the Spanish Civil War. This recent book is so well-researched that it often produces a feeling that the author has written down the story of every single person who was killed in the war.

Preston, Paul. The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain.

4. Of course, there are still Franco apologists, and here is one of the most popular books by them in English.

Treglown, Jeremy. Franco’s Crypt: Spanish Culture and Memory Since 1936.

5. In Spanish, this best-selling book has laid the foundations of fascist apologia in contemporary Spain. The author retells the war in a way that positions Franco as the savior of Spain who did not even start the war. Obviously, the author disregards every pit of scholarly evidence to construct his argument but people are buying the book in enormous numbers, so his strategy is working.

Moa, Pío. Los Mitos de la Guerra civil.

6. Going back to reliable authors, let’s turn to Michael Richards. He is one of my favorite authors, and this is his most recent book.

Richards, Michael. After the Civil War: Making Memory and Re-Making Spain since 1936.

7. This is a hefty but valuable volume on the war.

Beevor, Anthony. The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939.

8. This is a very good collection of articles on the way Spain is processing the memory of the war.

Morcillo, Aurora G. Memory and Cultural History of the Spanish Civil War: Realms of Oblivion.

9. This is another analysis of the many ways in which the war is still present in Spain today.

Gómez López-Quiñones, Antonio. La guerra persistente. Memoria, violencia y utopía: representaciones contemporáneas de la Guerra Civil española.

The bibliography on the Spanish Civil War is growing, and here are some books that I still haven’t read but totally need to. 

1. Based on the blurb, I don’t have high hopes for this recent book but I will have to read it if only to find out what is considered relevant about the war by the English-speaking audience that doesn’t have a scholarly interest in the subject.

Rhodes, Richard. Hell and Good Company: The Spanish Civil War and the World it Made.

2. This sounds like a crucial volume that I will have to read as soon as possible.

Barbieri, Pierpaolo. Hitler’s Shadow Empire: Nazi Economics and the Spanish Civil War.

3. I started reading this book sever months ago but didn’t have the time to finish. From what I have seen of it, it’s very good.

Cazorla-Sánchez, Antonio. Franco: The Biography of the Myth.

Merkel is now reaping the fruits of her own idiocy. She agreed to pay Putin a visit on Victory Day and, as a result, had to listen to humiliating statements about how the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact made total sense. And Merkel could do nothing but bleat meekly that well, yes, the Nazi Germany did start World War II. As if we’d even have the entire problem of Nazi Germany had Stalin not made every effort to bring Hitler to power and then strengthen him enormously.

Today my sabbatical officially begins. And it’s high time it did because I was starting to feel close to a burnout. It’s time for me to take a long rest from teaching because this is not a profession that can be practiced with no breaks. Besides, I was starting to resent everything that interrupted my immersion in my research. 

Ideally, of course, we should not be teaching more than 2 courses per semester because higher teaching loads are a profanation of the very concept of teaching.

The sabbatical will be aimed at advancing my research projects (the book, two articles, and a conference talk) and replenishing my scholarly base in a massive way.

This will be so much fun.

Authors: Ricard Vinyes, Montse Armengou y Ricard Belis

Title: Los niños perdidos del franquismo

Language: Spanish

Year: 2002

My rating: 8 out of 10

In January of 2002, a documentary was aired in Catalonia that was titled The Lost Children of Francoism. Even though the film was shown at 1 am, over 900,000 people watched it. For the viewers, the documentary was extremely shocking. Everybody knows that the Argentinean Junta used to kidnap the children of dissidents and hand them over to their parents’ killers. Nobody knew, however, that this had also happened in Spain during the first years of Franco’s dictatorship.

During the Civil War, the famous Spanish psychiatrist Antonio Vallejo Nágera came up with the theory according to which Marxism was a degenerative psychological ailment. According to Vallejo Nágera, everybody who resisted the advance of Franco’s troops was sick and had to be isolated from society. Franco loved the psychiatrist’s ideas and allowed him to conduct experiments on the POWs, including the Americans who were volunteers of the International Brigades. 

The book titled The Lost Children of Francoism includes and expands the material presented in the documentary and offers the texts of Vallejo Nágera’s studies. The psychiatrist not only strove to prove that Americans were, by their nature, inferior to Spaniards but also advanced the idea that the children of the Spanish Republicans had to be isolated from their parents to prevent them from becoming infected by the disease of Marxism.

I read this book for my Oxford talk, and it’s very heavy reading. The book is a little all over the place in terms of structure and feels hurried at times. But this is a crucial bit of knowledge about Franco’s dictatorship.

The war in Ukraine has disappeared from the news, and this might create a mistaken impression that the war is over. That’s not true, however. Ukrainian soldiers are still dying, and even though the fighting is currently more low-key than before, it’s still going on. Here are some of the most recent developments:

1. The terrorists who occupied Donetsk constantly engage in battles of varying degree of intensity among themselves. Shooting and explosions are an almost daily reality in this formerly beautiful Ukrainian city.

2. The Ukrainian parliament had a minute of silence to honor the fallen (both in this war and in the war against Nazism) yesterday. The priests of the Russian Orthodox Church were the only people there who refused to get up and honor the fallen. So now there is a huge scandal. I believe that it’s a much greater scandal that the priests were at the ceremony at all.

3. Russians were planning to roll out during the Victory Day parade their new tank. The tank was hyped up to the skies as evidence of Russia’s military might and technological sophistication. Of course, during the practice for the parade, the tank’s engine died. So the tank had to be carted away in a very embarrassing manner.

4. Putin was very wounded by the tank’s public failure and the symbolism of the whole thing. So he sent a bunch of police to shut down an exhibition of contemporary art. The police beat and then arrested the artists and destroyed the artwork. I saw photos of the art, and it’s very good.

5. There has been an explosion of imagery glorifying Stalin in Russia.

6. In Ukraine, May 8 was celebrated as the day of reconciliation, and there were touching scenes of the elderly veterans of WWII and the fighters for Ukrainian independence back in the 1940s shaking hands and embracing.

7. “This is our victory, too!” tweeted Ukraine ‘ s president Poroshenko today. Let nobody try to take it away from us.”

8. Several terror acts were prevented in Ukraine this week by the country’s secret service.

9. Everybody is waiting to see how Putin will repay the world for the double humiliation of the tank collapsing and nobody but the planetary losers showing up for his parade today.