Holiday history books

December 7, 2024

Do we really want to get accusatory and revisit the questions of which Panamanians called for the 1989 invasion and who, exactly, burned down El Chorrillo at great loss of human life? The invaders’ own video and photographic records tell us that. Here, US forces bombard the old Panama Defense Forces Comandancia, sending burning chunks flying off into adjacent areas, in particular the wooden tenements of El Chorrillo. Yes, the invading Americans kept Panama’s first responders off the streets, such that by the middle of the next morning the fires that had been started turned into a firestorm. Set aside the later lies, and the speculation about motives. It’s easy enough to see. And who asked for this act of violence? George HW Bush did. Nobody at the Pentagon was taking orders from Panamanians, and moreover the US Southern Command newspaper, The Tropic Times, had been boasting of US provocations like the running of guardia checkpoint that led to the shooting death of a young soldier. Poor guy wasn’t even an American, but a Colombian hoping to get US citizenship and perhaps the ability to sponsor family members’ legal moves to the USA via military service. US Department of Defense video.

Holiday season books about this country

by Eric Jackson

Do you remember, in the Robin Hood stories, the question the guards at the approaches to the outlawed nobleman’s camp would ask of those who drew nigh?

“Are ye Saxon, or are ye knave, “ it went.

These stories, like the King Arthur tales of brave knights of a bygone golden age, arose along with the rising of English nationalism. The progeny of the Plantagenet family, always with an eye to the continent and descended from Frenchified Vikings, were wearing out their welcome and a nation whose language and customs had been transformed by the invaders of 1066 were looking for new stories about supposed olden to explain and justify their existence and to point out qualities that ought to be encouraged as English. Leave it to a much later generation of Englishmen to make off-color jokes about the old time justice system.

We have just been through the November parts of our patriotic holidays, but have two hallowed days with aspects of holiday treatment although designated as somber national days of mourning.to come in this season – the December 20th anniversary of the 1989 US invasion and the January 9th Day of The Martyrs.

But hot sellers for this Christmas season are two history books, journalist Fernando Berguido’s “El Colapso de Panamá,” about Noreiga times, and professor Olmedo Beluche’s “Ensayos Sobre Nación Nacionalismo E Historia.”

WHAT?!?!?!? Events aren’t free-standing anomalies over the erratic course of history? And national creation stories aren’t like they teach them in school, like George Washington didn’t really cut down that cherry tree and then ‘fess up about it?

In these days of rampant nihilism it would be easy to notice where La Prensa and its principals are and have been at over the years. So does that make Berquido’s book invalid for not “solving the question of who asked for the 1989 invasion? Is Beluche’s book invalid because the guy’s a leftist who ties to poke holes in the stories promoted by “The Families?”

Read history and politics with at least enough skepticism to understand that every writer, especialy the ones who deny it, has a point of view. Which does not mean that everything that’s written is a lie.

This holiday season Panama finds itself in something of a crisis, wherein after years of sticky-fingered abuse the Social Security Fund’s pension system approached insolvency, some of the interest groups and political parties responsible are playing games about it and some of the usual suspects are starting to take to the streets about it.

‘Tis the season to take some quiet time to get a better handle on who Panamanians are and where we have been.