Franco statue removed, but Spain fails to talk.

Ben Sills captured the right sentiment in his Guardian piece:It was a suitable end for the dictator: the police came and took him with no warning in the middle of the night, despite the cries of his supporters.

The city of Madrid has removed the last statue to Franco, nearly thirty years after the fascist dictator died. But the opportunity to at last open a broad debate over Spain's recent history disappeared as quietly and quickly as the statue itself. A number of neo-nazis and other pro Franco skinheads and degenerates saluted the great dictator and sang charming songs from the ultra right. The post-fascist Partido Populár (PP) accused the ruling Socialist party of political shenanigans. The local council didn't say much at all.

Even where I live, there are still occasional yet striking reminders of the dictatorship. Two apartment buildings close to my home have a "Ministerio de Vivienda" plaques with the classic falange yoke and arrows logo. These symbols are illegal in Spain, and residents are urged from time to time to report them wherever they see them. But then they're not mentioned for a while and (typical in Spain!) after the campaign is over, it's impossible to find out who to report them to.

There are two things that worry me about the persistence of fascist symbology in normal life in Spain. Firstly it means that there are plenty of people who just don't care about it. It would be easy to say that as an outsider, I have little true understanding of 'the way things were' or of how people want to forget. But the truth is that you don't need to have been there to know that the Act of Forgetting is a sad indictment of the way that even after Franco's death, his henchmen continued to threaten and blackmail the Spanish people. "Forgive us, or we'll go after the reds" and "Better if you just forget about what happened" seem to have been the dominant calls from the right wing, and the PP still use them today.

The fact is that the Spanish dictatorship was not one man, but millions of supporters who took part in the murder of tens of thousands of their fellow citizens. No argument can hide that truth, nor the fact that Franco overthrew the democratically elected government when he launched his army rebellion in 1936. If debate is going to happen, it needs to happen now. Or the Spanish may be doomed to repeat their mistakes.

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March 18, 2005 | Filed Under Catalonia, Politics 

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