Mirrors

  Stalin is still Uncle Joe, but in a movie soon to be released, called The Cold War, he will take on the role of the villain.

  PHOTOGRAPH: ANOTHER FLAG OF VICTORY

  Reichstag, Berlin, May 1945.

  Two soldiers raise the flag of the Soviet Union over the pinnacle of German power.

  This photograph by Yevgeny Khaldei portrays the triumph of the nation that lost more sons in the war than any other.

  The news agency TASS distributes the picture. But before doing so, it makes a correction. The Russian soldier wearing two wristwatches now has only one. The warriors of the proletariat do not loot dead bodies.

  FATHER AND MOTHER OF PENICILLIN

  He made light of his own fame. Alexander Fleming said penicillin was invented by a microbe that took advantage of the chaos in his laboratory to sneak into a different culture. And he said that the honors for antibiotics should go not to him but to the researchers who turned a scientific curiosity into a useful medicine.

  With the help of the interloping microbe, Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928. No one paid any attention. It was developed years later, a daughter of the Second World War. More people were dying from infections than from bombs, and the Germans were a step ahead ever since Gerhard Domagk invented sulfa drugs. For the Allies, producing penicillin was a matter of urgency. The chemical industry, converted to military production, was obliged to save lives as well as destroy them.

  RESURRECTION OF VIVALDI

  Antonio Vivaldi and Ezra Pound left indelible footprints in their passage through time. The world would be a much less livable place if it weren’t for the music of one and the poetry of the other.

  But Vivaldi lay silent for two centuries.

  Pound brought him back. The strains the world had forgotten opened and closed the poet’s radio show from Italy, which broadcast Fascist propaganda in English.

  The program earned Mussolini few if any sympathizers. But the Venetian musician gained worldwide adoration.

  When Fascism collapsed, officers from the United States put Pound in a barbed-wire cage outdoors so that people would lob coins at him and balls of spit, and later on they sent him to an asylum for the insane.

  PHOTOGRAPH: A MUSHROOM BIG AS THE SKY

  Sky over Hiroshima, August 1945.

  The B-29 is called Enola Gay, after the pilot’s mother.

  Enola Gay has a baby in her belly. The infant, named Little Boy, is ten feet long and weighs more than four tons.

  At a quarter past eight in the morning, it drops. It takes a minute to reach the ground. The explosion is equivalent to forty million sticks of dynamite.

  From where Hiroshima lay, an atomic cloud rises. From the tail of the airplane, military photographer George R. Caron snaps the picture.

  The immense, beautiful white mushroom becomes the logo of fifty-five companies in New York and of the Miss Atomic Bomb pageant in Las Vegas.

  A quarter of a century later, in 1970, several photographs of the victims of radiation are published for the first time. They had been a military secret.

  In 1995, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington announces a large exhibit on the explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  The government quashes it.

  THE OTHER MUSHROOM

  Three days after Hiroshima, another B-29 flies over Japan.

  The gift it bears, larger, rounder, is called Fat Man.

  After testing uranium in Hiroshima, the experts want to try their luck with plutonium. A dense cloud cover blankets Kokura, the chosen city. After circling three times in vain, the airplane changes course. Bad weather and low fuel decide the extermination of Nagasaki.

  As in Hiroshima, the thousands upon thousands of victims are all civilians. As in Hiroshima, many thousands more will die later on. The nuclear age is dawning and giving birth to a new disease, the final cry of civilization: radiation poisoning, which after each explosion continues to kill for centuries upon centuries.

  FATHER OF THE BOMB

  The first bomb was tried out in the desert of New Mexico. The sky caught fire and Robert Oppenheimer, who led the tests, felt proud of a job well done.

  But three months after the explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer said to President Harry Truman:

  “I feel I have blood on my hands.”

  And President Truman told Secretary of State Dean Acheson:

  “I don’t want to see that son of a bitch in this office ever again.”

  PHOTOGRAPH: SADDEST EYES IN THE WORLD

  Princeton, New Jersey, May 1947.

  Photographer Philippe Halsman asks him:

  “Do you think there will be peace?”

  And while the shutter clicks, Albert Einstein says, or rather mutters:

  “No.”

  People believe that Einstein got the Nobel Prize for his theory of relativity, that he was the originator of the saying “Everything is relative,” and that he was the inventor of the atom bomb.

  The truth is they did not give him a Nobel for his theory of relativity and he never uttered those words. Neither did he invent the bomb, although Hiroshima and Nagasaki would not have been possible if he had not discovered what he did.

  He knew all too well that his findings, born of a celebration of life, had been used to annihilate it.

  HOLLYWOOD HEROES THEY WERE NOT

  The Soviet Union contributed the dead.

  On that, all the Second World War statistics agree.

  In this war, the bloodiest in history, the people who had humiliated Napoleon made Hitler taste the dust of defeat. The price was high: the Soviets suffered more than half of all the Allied deaths and more than twice all the Axis deaths.

  Some examples, in round numbers:

  in the siege of Leningrad, half a million died of hunger,

  the battle of Stalingrad left a mountain of eight hundred thousand Soviet dead or wounded,

  seven hundred thousand died defending Moscow, and another six hundred thousand in Kursk,

  in the assault on Berlin, three hundred thousand,

  the crossing of the Dnieper River cost a hundred times as many lives as the invasion of Normandy, yet is a hundred times less famous.

  TSARS

  Ivan the Terrible, the first tsar of all the Russias, began his career in childhood killing the prince who cast a shadow on his road to throne. He ended it forty years later crushing his own son’s skull with his cane.

  Between those two feats, he gained fame for

  his black guard warriors, black horses, long black capes, of whom even the stones were terrified,

  his enormous cannons,

  his invincible fortresses,

  his habit of calling a traitor anyone who did not bow as he passed,

  his tendency to sever the heads of his most talented courtiers,

  his Cathedral of St. Basil, the symbol of Moscow, erected to offer his imperial conquests to God,

  his will to be the bastion of Christianity in the Orient,

  and his long mystical torments, when he repented and wept tears of blood, beat his breast, scraped his fingernails against the walls, and howled, begging to be forgiven for his sins.

  Four centuries later, during the most tragic hours of the Second World War, in the middle of the German invasion, Stalin asked Sergei Eisenstein for a movie about Ivan the Terrible.

  Eisenstein made a work of art.

  Stalin did not like it one bit.

  He had asked for a piece of propaganda and Eisenstein had not understood: Stalin the Terrible, the last tsar of all the Russias, implacable scourge of his enemies, wanted to turn the patriotic resistance to the Nazi avalanche into a personal exploit. The sacrifice of all was not an epic struggle of collective dignity, rather the ingenious inspiration of the chosen one, the masterpiece of the highest priest of a religion called the Party and a god called the State.

  ONE WAR DIES, OTHERS ARE BORN

  On April 28, 1945, while Mussolini swung by his feet in a square in Milan, Hitle
r prowled his Berlin bunker. The city burned and bombs fell nearby, but he hammered his fist on his desk and shouted orders to no one. His finger on the map, he ordered the deployment of troops that no longer existed, and over a telephone that no longer worked he summoned his dead or fleeing generals.

  On April 30, when the Soviet flag rose over the Reichstag, Hitler shot himself, and on the night of May 7 Germany surrendered.

  Very early the following morning, crowds filled the streets of cities across the world. It was the end of a global nightmare that had lasted six years and caused fifty-five million deaths.

  Algeria was also one big party. In the two World Wars, many Algerian soldiers had given their lives for freedom, the freedom of France.

  In the city of Sétif, in mid-celebration, the flag outlawed by the colonial power was raised alongside the flags of the victors. The green and white standard, the national symbol of Algeria, drew cheers from the crowd, and a young Algerian named Saâl Bouzid wrapped himself in it and was peppered with bullets, killed from behind.

  And the rage exploded.

  In Algeria and in Vietnam and everywhere.

  The end of the world war sparked rebellions in the colonies. The subjugated, cannon fodder in Europe’s trenches, rose up against their masters.

  HO

  No one was missing.

  All of Vietnam in a single square.

  A skinny, bony peasant with a goatlike beard spoke to the multitude gathered in Hanoi.

  He had gone by many names. Now they called him Ho Chi Minh.

  He was a man of words as soft and measured as his gait. Unhurried, he had visited many places and survived many misadventures. It was as if he were talking to his neighbors in the village when he said to the immense crowd:

  “Under the banner of liberty, equality, and fraternity, France built more prisons than schools in our country.”

  He had barely eluded the guillotine, and several times had been shackled and thrown in prison. His country remained imprisoned, but not for long, not anymore: that very morning in September 1945, Ho Chi Minh declared independence. Serenely, simply, he said:

  “We are free.”

  And he announced:

  “We will never again be humiliated. Never!”

  The crowd erupted.

  Ho Chi Minh’s powerful fragility embodied the energy of his homeland, armed like him with pain and with patience.

  From his cabin made of wood, Ho led two long wars of liberation.

  Tuberculosis killed him before the final victory.

  He wanted his ashes scattered freely in the wind, but his comrades mummified him and enclosed him in a glass sarcophagus.

  IT WAS NO GIFT

  During thirty years of war, Vietnam gave two imperial powers a terrific thrashing: it defeated France and it defeated the United States.

  Here is the grandeur and horror of national independence:

  Vietnam withstood more bombs than all the bombs dropped in the entire Second World War,

  its jungles and fields were drenched with twenty million gallons of chemical defoliants,

  two million Vietnamese perished,

  and innumerable were the people mutilated, the villages annihilated, the forests razed, the lands left sterile, and the poisonings bequeathed to future generations.

  The invaders acted with the impunity bestowed by history and guaranteed by might.

  A belated revelation: in the year 2006, following nearly forty years of secrecy, a detailed nine-thousand-page report by the Pentagon became public. The report confirmed that all U.S. military units operating in Vietnam had committed war crimes against the civilian population.

  OBJECTIVE NEWS

  In democratic countries, the overriding duty of the mass media is objectivity.

  Objectivity consists of conveying the points of view of both sides of a conflict.

  During the years of the Vietnam War, the mass media in the United States made the public aware of the stance of their government and of that of the enemy.

  George Bayley, who is curious about such things, added up the time allotted to one side or the other on the television networks ABC, CBS, and NBC between 1965 and 1970: the point of view of the invading nation took up 97 percent, while that of the nation invaded got 3 percent.

  Ninety-seven to three.

  For the invaded, the obligation to suffer through the war; for the invaders, the right to tell the story.

  The news makes reality, not the other way around.

  SALT OF THE EARTH

  In 1947, India became an independent country.

  India’s big English-language newspapers, which had called Mahatma Gandhi “a ridiculous little man” when he launched his salt march in 1930, changed their tune.

  The British Empire had erected a barrier of trees and thorn bushes, known as the Great Hedge, two thousand miles long, between the Himalayas and the coast at Orissa, to stand in the way of the salt of the earth. Free competition forbade freedom: India was not free to consume its own salt, even though it was better and cheaper than salt imported from Liverpool.

  Over time, the hedge grew old and died. But the prohibition lived on, and against it marched a tiny, bony, nearsighted man who went about half-naked, leaning on a bamboo cane.

  Mahatma Gandhi began his march to the sea leading a handful of pilgrims. Within a month, after a lot of walking, a multitude marched with him. When they reached the sea, each of them picked up a fistful of salt. By so doing, they broke the law. It was civil disobedience against the empire.

  A few of the disobedient were shot and killed and more than a hundred thousand were imprisoned.

  Imprisoned too was their country.

  Seventeen years later, disobedience freed it.

  EDUCATION IN FRANCO’S DAY

  Flipping through his schoolbooks, Spanish writer Andrés Sopeña Monsalve found this:

  • On Spaniards, Arabs, and Jews:

  Let us loudly proclaim that Spain has never ever been a backwards country. Since the earliest of times Spain produced useful inventions such as the horseshoe, which it taught to the most advanced peoples on earth.

  Though when they first came to Spain the Arabs were simple and ferocious desert warriors, contact with Spaniards awoke in them dreams of art and knowledge.

  On several occasions, the Jews made martyrs of Christian children, torturing them horrendously. For all that the people hated them.

  • On America:

  One day a sailor named Christopher Columbus introduced himself to Doña Isabella the Catholic, saying he wanted to sail the seas and find what lands there were and teach all peoples to be good and to pray. Spain felt very sorry for those poor people in America.

  • On the world:

  English and French are such diluted languages that they are on the verge of completely disappearing.

  The Chinese do not observe a weekly rest and are physiologically and spiritually inferior to other men.

  • On rich and poor:

  Since everything is covered in snow and ice, the little birds cannot find anything and now they are poor. That is why I feed them, and in the same way the rich maintain and feed the poor.

  Socialism organizes the poor so they can destroy the rich.

  • On the mission of Generalissimo Franco:

  Russia dreamed of stabbing its bloody sickle into this beautiful corner of Europe, and all the communist and socialist masses of the earth, together with Masons and Jews, sought to triumph in Spain . . . And then came the man, the savior, the Great One.

  To give responsibility for running the state to the people, who have not studied or learned the complicated art of governing, is foolish and evil.

  • On good health:

  Stimulants, like coffee, tobacco, alcohol, newspapers, politics, movies, and luxuries, relentlessly undermine and wear down our organism.

  JUSTICE IN FRANCO’S DAY

  On the uppermost part of the dais, wrapped in his black toga, sits the presiding judge.


  To his right, the defense lawyer.

  To his left, the prosecutor.

  Steps below and still empty, the bench for the accused.

  A new trial is about to begin.

  Speaking to the bailiff, Judge Alfonso Hernández Pardo orders:

  “Bring in the guilty man.”

  DORIA

  In Cairo in 1951, fifteen hundred women invaded Parliament.

  They stayed for hours and there was no getting them out. They shouted that Parliament was a lie because half the population could neither vote nor be elected.

  Religious leaders, representing heaven, raised their cries heavenwards: “Voting degrades women and goes against nature!”

  Nationalist leaders, representing the fatherland, denounced the proponents of women’s suffrage for treason.

  Winning the right to vote was costly, but in the end it was won, along with other triumphs of the Union of the Daughters of the Nile. Then the government forbade the union from becoming a political party, and sentenced Doria Shafik, the movement’s living symbol, to house arrest.

  That was not out of the ordinary. Nearly all Egyptian women were sentenced to house arrest, and many a woman left the house on three occasions only: to go to Mecca, to attend her wedding, and to attend her funeral.

  FAMILY PORTRAIT IN JORDAN