En relación a [PEN-L:1454] Aux armes citoyens! (was A slight ad,
el 8 Sep 00, a las 3:16, Yoshie Furuhashi dijo:
Here's a song for lovers of liberty: La Marseillaise. Militant
patriotism at its most full-blooded. Nestor's description of an
Argentine nationalist icon sounds serene, with its sense of duty to
patria fulfilled, in comparison to La Marseillaise.
Allons enfants de la Patrie
Le jour de gloire est arrivé.
Contre nous, de la tyrannie,
L'étandard sanglant est levé,
l'étandard sanglant est levé,
Entendez-vous, dans la compagnes.
Mugir ces farouches soldats
Ils viennent jusque dans nos bras
Egorger vos fils,
vos compagnes.
The complete Argentinian National Song (130 years ago an abridged
version was made so that the Spanish community here would not feel
uncomfortable!), which in fact was a war song of the Latin American
revolutionary armies that was chanted even in the Venezuelan Llanos,
is very similar. On the advances of the Royalist counterrevolutionary
armies in Latin America (the song was written in 1813, during a bad
moment for the revolution) it runs
No los veis sobre Méjico y Quito
Arrojarse con saña tenaz?
Y cuál lloran, bañadas en sangre,
Potosí, Cochabamba y La Paz?
A vosotros se atreve, argentinos,
el orgullo del fiero invasor...
(Can't you see them on Mexico and Quito
throwing themselves in tenacious rage?
And the blood bathed tears that shed
Potosí, Cochabamba, and La Paz?
Against you, Argentinians, is rising
the pride of the savage invader...)
Can't help thinking that these lines were written yesterday, not a
couple of centuries ago. Only that the savage invader does not speak
Spanish any more. This is a piece of "patriotic rant" as most
probably Professor DeLong would say, that it would be very healthy
for our socialist tasks to reinstate.
And on and on. More on the revolutionary credentials of poor Sergeant
Cabral who most probably did not imagine that he would have to wage
battle against a Californian economist.
I was once at the beautiful city of Mendoza, where San Martín
organized the advance of our revolutionary armies into Chile, then in
the hands of a bloody Royalist regime and the only door to Perú,
since the High Perú was strongly defended. There is a great monument
to the army of San Martín there, the Cerro de la Gloria. The monument
rescues the massive popular mobilisation on the liberation war that
our Independence wars actually were, and there is an impressive high
relief of advancing grenadiers (San Martin's élite troops, mostly
constituted by gaucho -and partly by black- soldiers) in their
uniforms of battle.
A couple of Israelis was on visit that same day, and we pooled to
rent a taxi to the monument. Along the road, I told them some facts
on Mendoza and the place they were at. When we came to the monument,
one in the couple asked me "But why are you paying hommage to a
French army?". Then I realized how strong were the links between the
revolutionary generation of the Independence and the great
revolutionaries of 1789. After that I began to study the influence of
the French Revolution and French Illuminists on our early
revolutionary leaders, and it was astonishingly deep and radical,
reasonably enough because deep and radical had been its influence on
the Spanish bureaucracy in general
Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
