2023>2024: BRIEF YEAR END THOUGHTS
An image that encapsulates 2023, a year of Disproportionate Wars
I saw this painting at Tate Modern here in London as the year was coming to an end. I hadn’t been to the museum since my daughter was a child. She loved going there when she was five or six.
Now she has just finished her first term at university and we found ourselves killing time on the South Bank so decided to go visit for the first time since she was a kid and have a look at Mark Rothko’s Seagram murals. But the paintings were on loan to another museum and instead we found ourselves standing in front of Peter de Francia’s painting.
The Execution of Beloyannis was painted precisely 70 years ago and depicts an incident in the bloody Greek Civil War fought in the years after World War 2. Nikos Beloyannis was a leading figure in the Greek Communist party. During the war he had escaped a Nazi prison camp and been a leading figure in the resistance, the Greek People’s Liberation Army.
Forgotten now, the Greek Civil War was one of the first proxy conflicts between the US and Soviet Union to control the new world order that emerged out of World War 2. Beloyannis’s trial and death sentence became an international cause celebre with leading European intellectuals like Picasso and Sartre writing the Greek government to plead for clemency. The government ignored them and Beloyannis was executed.
I know the painting is inspired or “imitative” of Picasso’s Guernica (you choose which) but it is very powerful in its own right. And it did make me think of the news images that have surrounded us throughout this year.
Lindsey Hilsum, international editor of Britain’s Channel 4 News, spent much of 2023 at the frontline of the wars of disproportion that marked this year. Most recently in Israel and before that Ukraine. I spoke with her yesterday for the FRDH, First Rough Draft of History, podcast. You can listen here. The conversation is wide-ranging, surprising in some of the places it gets to (surprised me, anyway) and I promise you worth your time.
America’s border with Mexico is going to be a major focus of 2024’s Presidential election campaign. At my other Substack, History of a Calamity, I have been republishing essays I wrote in 1998 that came out of a reporting trip I took for the BBC World Service along that border. To end the year I put up the essay about Nogales, Arizona. I had a good time in that border town and my essay makes a change from the serious stuff I’ve had to write about for much of this year.
Finally, thank you for subscribing to and sharing First Rough Draft of History, with a special expression of gratitude to those who have become paid subscribers.
I started FRDH on Substack in response to the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel. I hope in the year to come that the conflict will ebb and I can write about other things. But for now, as I said to Lindsey Hilsum, I see these posts as a guide for those perplexed by this conflict that never seems to end and which drives even rational people to the brink of madness.
In the middle of the night I woke up and had a song going through my head from "Little Me,” a Broadway musical I had seen when I was 11 years old. That’s more than 60 years ago and why it should pop into my head now, in a moment of insomnia, I have no idea but the ironic lyrics by Carolyn Leigh contain appropriate sentiments for a year that was difficult and a year to come full of dangerous possibilities.
Best wishes to all of you for a more peaceful and hopeful year to come.
Here's to us, my darling, my dear,
Here's to us tonight.
Not for what might happen next year,
For it might not be nearly as bright.
But here's to us, for better or worse,
And for thanks to a merciful star,
Skies of blue, and muddling through,
And for me and for you as we are.
And here's to us for nothing at all
If there's nothing at all we can praise,
Just that we're together and here
For the rest of our beautiful days.
Here's to us forever and always.