Death in Valencia

Thrillers are not usually my cup of coffee - unless they are the camp, hammy Agatha Christie variety where one is nestled in a morally polar fantasy-world  and the bad guys and/or gals invariably get their just desserts. So it was with much trepidation that I turned the front cover of Jason Webster’s A Death in Valencia. I was not to be disappointed. Even cameos are brought to life and one feels their pains, one hurts when they do and one laments their departures.

To be honest, the title is a total misnomer. I suspect the publishers just did not want the nomenclature, “Death in Valencia” for fear the novel would be confused with or just might draw comparisons with Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice”. Though really, there is a genuine commonality - both are literary, each with a mystery at their heart.

So why is the book’s name inaccurate? Well, there are a number of “deaths” depending on one’s moral perspective. I do not think I should beat about the bush. One of the themes of the book is abortion. So, in some sense, if one is anti-abortionist the tally of referenced deaths would be in the hundreds. Pro-abortionists will count at least a handful of deaths, not necessarily linked or committed by the same person(s) - but I am not going to give the game away! There is also allusion to petite mort, little death, or orgasm; the decline and fall of old Valencia; as well as the moral, emotional and spiritual atrophy of the main protagonist. One is left questioning just what is murder.

Another leitmotif is the lore of Valencian paella. I did not know that locals categorise this platter with one of three labels, “Bò, rebò and mèl” [p.108] - ‘good’, ‘very good’ and ‘honey’. There is a higher rank, but I shall leave the reader to discover said label for themself. However, you may ask [p.110]:

‘So what’s below bò, then? What happens if it’s a bad paella?’

Torres scowled.

‘No such thing,’ he said.

The reader will also discover what is so special about socarraet and why aficionados of paella fight over it [pp.107/8].

Death. Life. Great themes, beautifully introduced and handled by the author. Twice during my reading I was in floods of tears and once almost inconsolably so. I was quite literally mourning for a wee while the final demise of one of the characters. The tale fully inveigled me, so that I was unaware of the author’s voice in the well crafted writing of this skilled novelist. I so enjoyed the book that I quite deliberately only read a few chapters at a time in order to prolong the exquisite pleasure of my perusal. I hope you will be as gratified as I with this literary mystery. 

NAZI Treatment of the Disabled

(Image description: 1930's NAZI poster of an invalid and a carer towering over him. The text reads in German, "60,000 [Marks] kostet dieser Erbkranke die Volksgemeinschaft auf Lebenszeit [.] Volksgenosse das ist auch dein Geld"; this translates as, "60,000 [Marks] is the cost to the national community of this genetically defective person over a lifetime [.] Member of the people that is your money".)

Around the time of National Holocaust Memorial Day I posted the following on my facebook page:

"The ConDems began a huge propaganda campaign against mentally and physically disabled Brits. They did not fit into the Neo-Liberal stereotype of the pure hard-working family, that is physically fit with an obedient mind to serve the economy." This is a quotation I have taken about the NAZI era and replaced the words in bold type with those relevant to the situation that is current in the United Kingdom, especially England.

"A DOCTOR yesterday likened the UK Government’s welfare reform crackdown on disabled people to the “barbarism” of the NAZIS." The Scottish Sun  Having some understanding of what occurred under the NAZIs and seeing parallels with today, I posted this quotation with link on my facebook page yesterday, only to receive the following (edited) response:

"Doctors come in all shapes and forms Colin. This one sounds a bit like [a] nutter... Whatever your feelings about the government's welfare reforms, it's hard to compare them with Nazi policies of the 1930's. Nobody is sending anyone to gas chambers - they're simply making sure only the genuinely disabled stay on benefits. It's like they keep telling us, we're all in it together - and that includes the sick, lame and lazy!"

I am quite shocked that in this day and age an intelligent person (from a minority to boot) has so little knowledge about history or what is going on here in Britain, despite my very regular facebook updates.

"Most of us are familiar with the words of Pastor Neimoller, but we are much less familiar with the true origins of the holocaust. The first victims of the Nazi holocaust were the 'anti-socials', mostly disabled people... Marked with a black triangle, labelled as 'useless eaters' and an economic drain, the Nazi's learnt how to exterminate other human beings by experimenting on these vulnerable people with Zyklon B gas, techniques that would later be refined in order to commit the mass murder of millions of people." Benefit Scrounging Scum

"The Nazis began a huge propaganda campaign against mentally and physically disabled Germans. They did not fit into the Nazi stereotype of the pure Aryan, that is physically fit with an obedient mind to serve the Reich. [Recognise this? If not, see above!] In addition, they were viewed as a burden on society, as they were unable to work and drained resources from the state.

As early as July 1933, the Nazis passed a law that allowed forced sterilisation of 350,000 men and women, who were deemed likely to produce 'inferior' children.

Between 1939 and 1941 a programme of euthanasia (so called ‘mercy killing’), ordered by the state, led to the murder, by doctors and medical staff, of at least 70,000 people." The Holocaust Explained

"The Nazi campaign started by targeting not the Jews but disabled people. They where quietly gassed in the first experiments with Zyklon B, these people were comparatively low in numbers, were less likely to be missed, could not speak up for themselves, and had no-one to speak up for them.

Then after a large propaganda campaign that tapped into the populations anger about the country['s] economic state, the murder of millions began, long standing prejudice's like.......

"they think the world owes them something"

"They are a drain on the country's limited resources"

"they do not work so they are worthless"

"It would be kinder not to mention cheaper to kill them, preferably at birth"

......Are stomach turning yet they are statements I hear from people and politicians every day. Maybe not put quite as frankly or bluntly as that but the underlining argument and sentiment is the same." Rabbi Debbie Young-Sommers

Here's a news item from April this year:

"Two medical ethicists connected to Oxford University are arguing in Oxford’s Journal of Medical Ethics that babies have no moral status, and can be killed because they are only “potential persons” rather than “actual persons.” They also argue that if a newborn is disabled, it can be killed.

The journal’s editor, Prof Julian Savulescu, director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, said in their defence, “The goal of the Journal of Medical Ethics is not to present the Truth or promote some one moral view. It is to present well reasoned argument based on widely accepted premises.” When asked about the threats made against the article’s authors, he casually categorised them as “fanatics opposed to the very values of a liberal society.”

The article, “After-birth abortion: Why should the baby live?”, was written by two of Prof Savulescu’s former associates, Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva. They wrote:

“The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a foetus in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual … Both a foetus and a newborn certainly are human beings and potential persons, but neither is a ‘person’ in the sense of ‘subject of a moral right to life’. We take ‘person’ to mean an individual who is capable of attributing to her own existence some (at least) basic value such that being deprived of this existence represents a loss to her … it is not possible to damage a newborn by preventing her from developing the potentiality to become a person in the morally relevant sense …

what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.”

And in the time-honoured philosophy of those who see life as purely a utilitarian matter, they conclude: “To bring up such children might be an unbearable burden on the family and on society as a whole, when the state economically provides for their care.”"British Ethicists & Infanticide

The parallels are there plainly to see, if one is willing to open one's eyes and look and use one's ears to hear. Recently, a politician suggested that folk on benefits should not be permitted to vote. Meanwhile the Govt. has reclassified what is disability and has withdrawn benefits from some of the terminally ill, cancer patients and so on.

So you think these kinds of hate crimes couldn't happen today? Well, this very morrow I read this:

"A while ago, someone threatened Kaliya Franklin [a disabled activist] with the gas chamber. She's Jewish and disabled. They said they would gas her to death, it was what she deserved. Now that's a genuine threat." Sue Marsh

So, before anyone else tells me that what is going on today is nothing like what the NAZIs got up to, please go away and do some research, some reading and some pondering. It could be you next...