Merci, Sts. Jacques et Brunon, pour le 6 octobre de 2004

Merci pour mon arrivée à St. Jacques de Compostelle !/HGL

J'avais presque oublié une promesse

Le blog sur mon pèlerinage commence avec le post sur le jour que je quitte Svallerup (champs de fraises et village) dans le Danemark :

15-VII-2004, Svallerup, Kalundborg, AArhus
https://premierequintedupel.blogspot.com/2011/02/15-vii-2004.html

Promesse à qui ?

Au couple qui m'avait invité pour l'anniversaire à un exellentissime repas :

No, Franco Didn't Persecute Jews

On one occasion he came closeish, but he didn't:

General Franco gave list of Spanish Jews to Nazis
Giles Tremlett in Madrid | Mon 21 Jun 2010 00.06 CEST
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jun/20/franco-gave-list-spanish-jews-nazis

Franco made a list of 6000 Jews living in Spain:

That list was handed over to the Nazi architect of the so-called "final solution", the German SS chief Heinrich Himmler, as the two countries negotiated Spain's possible incorporation into the group of Axis powers that included Italy, according to the El País newspaper today.

And we don't know exactly what honesty El País has in regards to Franco, they certainly have a bias against him.

We also know the list included the Jewis poet Samuel Ros Pardo, who was Falangista. Nazis wanted Franco to stop him writing, he continued writing until 6.II.1945 when he died. No, not from a Nazi camp. Not from a Spanish execution partol. From peritonitis, a diagnosis which had a nice amount of the miracles in Lourdes. If he had been Catholic and gone to Lourdes, he could have been healed.

So, as long as Franco didn't join the Axis in the war, that list remained inoperative. Franco and Hitler met in Hendaye. Afterwards, as the article repeats, Hitler said he'd rather spend "an hour" ... just one? "with his dentist" than speaking to Franco. Here is how this Guardian article reported the remark:

Franco, however, had his own demands: Gibraltar and parts of French north Africa. Hitler is reported to have furiously declared that he "would rather have three or four teeth pulled out" than spend more time with the ungrateful Spaniard. Franco agreed to join the war at a future date but Spain eventually stayed out of the conflict.

As you may guess, I loved the memory of Franco when I was in Hendaye on the 15 of August 2004, on my pilgrimage to Santiago. I mean, the other guy, not the Caudillo, really should have remained a painter.

So, a Jew who fled through S. France (not quite unoccupied, but less occupied than the N.) through Spain and Portugal, was he saved by Pétain, by Franco or by Salazar? If you ask me, by the three of them.

The list does not seem to have included Jews fleeing from Vichy France – where similar lists were being drawn up – or the rest of Europe, who were mostly sent on to Portugal. ... The Israeli former prime minister Golda Meier (sic)* once told the conservative Spanish news magazine Epoca that her country remained grateful for "the humanitarian attitude take by Spain during the Hitler era, when it gave aid and protection to many victims of Nazism."

There are a lot of Republican Spaniards, fleeing from Franco, who came to live and whose descendants remain in France, not least Paris. I wish them the best, but I also wish they could build their identity around sth other, by now, than "Franco was such a mean guy, we absolutely had to flee, and we are going to fight Franco and his memory from France, where he couldn't retaliate prior to 1976 and can't retaliate now, and also anyone who honours him." Will the Spanish War ever end? Cara al Sol spoke of peace, but it doesn't quite seem to be attained. Somewhere in France, I saw a village or hamlet with houses of one Muñoz and one Franco next to each other (the other names were Spanish too). I thought "the Spanish war is over, a relative of the Caudillo living next to a relative of the prison chief in Red Madrid** Then it struck me, the Caudillo actually had a first cousin who fought on the Republican side.*** So, my dream of reconciliation after the war was dashed.°/HGL

PS. Franco had no policy of persecuting Gypsies, but Guardia Civil maintained an old policy. It's pretty close to what Algerians of 20th Town District of Paris can suffer, if young and out of work. In French it's called "délit de facies" ... nobody's perfect. Not even the Caudillo./HGL

PPS, suppose some months in 1939, he consciously allowed things to get really ugly ... “Me ha ocurrido que, al hablar de estos campos de concentración en clase, algún alumno de allí me comentaba extrañado que nunca había escuchado hablar de ellos”, recuerda el profesor de la UJA Santiago Jaén Milla.°° In other words, even in Spain, people didn't hear about it, if true. Perhaps the Caudillo needed the missa pro defunctis more than I thought back in 2009. Still, this doesn't mean his régime was all bad afterwards, I've already said, it had the fault of kind of treating the Spanish War as still ongoing ... like some others from the other side, more recently./HGL

* Golda Meir, previous to hebraising the name, Meyerson. **Manuel Muñoz Martínez wasn't actually the immediate director of Cárcel Modelo, but more like "Director of General Security" as his title has been translated. *** Unless my memory of a "Raúl Franco" was actually a garbled memory of Ramón Franco. °If I was wrong, I had no computer access and couldn't check. Anyway, the "cousin Raúl" and the brother Ramón have in common being aviators. °° “Luz” para dos desconocidos campos de concentración

Thanks You, Sts. James and Bruno

I came to Santiago on St. Bruno's day 2004.

For the French, here is the beginning of the story: 15-VII-2004, Svallerup, Kalundborg, AArhus

Understanding the Crusades / Phillip Campbell

New blog on the kid: Otranto · Understanding the Crusades / Phillip Campbell · Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere: Sharing on Islamic Dilemma

Understanding the Crusades. Part 1, the context of the Crusades
CFN | 20 Aug. 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lu6Rc-eTMLA

Caution, at 8:22 he has just misrepresented the Baltic Crusades geographically:

where the Teutonic Knights made 8:11 war against the the pagans of the Baltic 8:14 region, especially around Lithuania, 8:16 attempting to Christianize this region 8:18 and created ultimately a u a Teutonic 8:21 order state up there.

If by "around" he means on both sides of, OK, but Lithuania actually defeated the Teutonic knights, for instance 1410 at Grunwald or Tannenberg (Lithuanian Žalgiris). However, on the one side of Lithuania, you have Prussia, a Teutonic order region, and on the other you have Livonia, Curonia and Estonia (modern Latvia and Estonia, with modern Estonia taking the North part of Livonia too), which were also territories of the Teutonic or up there Sword-Bearer order. I studied this at university in 2003./HGL

PS, he may have thought of Lithuania Minor, outside the Archduchy of Lithuania and a part of Prussia. The Teutonic order took that part from Lithuania properly speaking in 1275—76./HGL

PPS, see also:

Egypt’s government threatens world’s oldest monastery
Denison Forum | 20 Aug. 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJwTPhjS7Ng

If Some Idiot Pretends it was Irresponsible of Me to Go the Camino de Santiago in 2004

New blog on the kid: If Some Idiot Pretends it was Irresponsible of Me to Go the Camino de Santiago in 2004 · Where are the Homeless in Poland? · I'm Not Likely to Admit I Need a Certain Type of Help · Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere: I Do Not Intend to do AA or Similar ...

• I was in a better physical shape
• I was at ease getting along with normal people, which the last few years of the street have started pushing me out of (after Covid)
• the two most dangerous things are Zubiri, which, being before Pamplona, was not on my road: I went on foot from St. Jean de Luz to Irún, and the Hospitalera in Irún gave me bus money for Pamplona, the other thing being bull runs, which I also missed
• apart from Zubiri and bulls, and apart from lonely people getting lured to dangerous people, deaths are very underrepresented on the Camino, as I just looked up:
  
  Injuries, Fatalities Since May
  TorontoGMan | May 26, 2024 | smedical/injuries
  https://www.caminodesantiago.me/community/threads/injuries-fatalities-since-may.87131/

It was probably the best thing I could do the first year as a homeless man.

It has probably saved my life to have reached Santiago, both mentally and socially.

And if some Protestant crook pretends that "we don't need to go to Santiago to earn our salvation," that was simply not the issue. I was trying to make up for one particular sin, and asking a favour. Not trying to fix my salvation in any broader sense than that./HGL

PS, checking on last deaths, article in June, one was at Zuriáin (also before Pamplona), one was Erro (also before Pamplona), one was Roncesvalles (very obviously known by everyone to be before Pamplona). Here is the article:

Muere otro peregrino en el tramo navarro del Camino de Santiago
07 de junio de 2024 - 18:33 (Actualizado: 07 de junio de 2024 - 18:36)
https://www.telemadrid.es/noticias/sociedad/Muere-otro-peregrino-en-el-tramo-navarro-del-Camino-de-Santiago-0-2676932320--20240607063316.html

PPS, considering the number of readers that regularly come from Hong Kong or Singapore, I note "there is no hitch-hiking culture in China" ... the hitch-hiking parts of my trip was not in China, it was in Europe, and Western Europe certainly has a hitch-hiking culture, even if Germany seems to have lost it .../HGL

PPPS, for those who know French but not what I am talking about, here is the story in five blogs (I originally hoped to have 17 posts per blog all visible at start page), their index posts: La première cinquième, seconde ou deuxième cinquième, troisième cinquième, quatrième cinquième, et la cinquième cinquième du pèlerinage.