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Anger and rage are impulses that can cause true social and political earthquakes and even lead to violence, unless either repression or negotiation prevent it.
Unhappy 20s. Although the 20s of the last century are known as happy years, the enrichment and prosperity of that time were built on weak foundations and on unrestrained exploitation, as Hernán Díaz recounts in his latest book. The building collapsed in 1929. Another author, Andreu Farràs, has just published a tour of 200 years of outbursts of anger in Barcelona, which were not unrelated to the inequalities created by capitalism.
Industrial violence. The peace of Versailles, first, and the crash of 1929, later, are behind that enormous apparatus of industrial violence that was the Third Reich and that ended with the Holocaust, from which not even the most innocent escaped. In the repression of the war, a unit stood out for its especially cruel profile, Oskar Dirlewanger's 36 Waffen Grenadier SS-Division, a kind of Wagner group of the time, formed like the latter by convicts.
Pure conspiracy. It is true that the Transition was not as exemplary as has been explained because it was not exempt from violence, but it is also true that it could have been much worse. Was Kissinger the architect of the shadow process? Was the US behind the assassination of Carrero Blanco? With the perspective of five decades they seem like conspiracy theories. Many years before, the writer Arturo Barea had imagined a process similar to the Transition.
Egypt and the plagues. Judging by the biblical account, those who did not have much room to react with anger were the victims of the plagues of Egypt. That if they came to exist, because despite the work of archaeologists -attention to this article on the working conditions of the sector- there is no evidence to corroborate them. It does seem that some climatic anomalies could have occurred that would be at the base of these narratives.
Grid cities. Contrary to what it might seem, urban layouts in the form of a regular grid, such as Barcelona's Eixample or Manhattan, are not a modern invention. This twitter thread from Sheehan Quirke's Cultural Tutor account –who is also the author of the magnificent Aeropagus newsletter-, shows cities of all times that have responded to this structure, from the spectacular Timgad to Babylon. (in English)
In the body of a king Sancho I de León, the Crassus, took living like a king literally, because according to the chronicles he weighed about 240 kilos. The same chronicles point out that this overweight caused him health and political problems. The accounts of the time indicate that, after being deposed, he lost more than one hundred kilos in record time, a figure surely exaggerated and that, if true, would be an extraordinary precedent for miracle diets. Read in Xataka.
Flights over Moscow. The allegedly Ukrainian drone strikes in Moscow this week and the haze surrounding the possible drone raid on the Kremlin in early May have reminded the Russian government and the public that the capital is not safe from the consequences of war. which, moreover, develops several hundred kilometers.
Saving the distances, this aerial threat has a precedent. In May 1987, the young German Mathias Rust landed his small plane in the middle of Red Square, an action that, although it was not offensive in nature, did have an enormous psychological impact since it showed, in the last days of the Cold War, that the The USSR could not guarantee the full security of its airspace, in a similar way to what happens now. Then, Gorbachev took advantage of that circumstance to dismiss the senior staff of the Soviet army and thus pave the way towards the opening of the communist regime. This was Rust in 2012.
