They have forgotten nothing and learned nothing.
Talleyrand
Dale Price at Dyspeptic Mutterings reminds us that when it comes to sheer bloody minded wrongheadedness, Spanish Leftists are ever in a class all their own:
Spain’s left passed its whitewashing of Republic atrocities and free speech suppression law yesterday. Spaniards who, like one of my high school’s exchange students, were glad that their grandparents fought for their faith and nation are now in legal danger for expressing that.
Exaggeration? Not in the slightest, as Stanley Payne, America’s foremost historian on Spain, carefully explains.
The proposed law is highly punitive. Symbols, meetings, or statements judged to approve of the Franco regime and the victors in the civil war are deemed infractions against “historical and democratic memory.” Proposed penalties include an elaborate schedule of fines ranging from two hundred to a hundred thousand euros, the closing for a period of six months to two years of any entity found in violation, and the confiscation of the means or goods involved in any such activities. That this law will dramatically restrict freedom of expression and thus violate the Spanish Constitution is apparently irrelevant to the Sánchez government.
The Law of Historical and Democratic Memory is the most dramatic, arbitrary, and punitive proposal concerning discussions of history anywhere in the Western world. Yet the attitude it reflects is fairly common on the left, which increasingly uses governmental or nongovernmental means to restrict and punish speech that defends rightwing views, movements, and figures past or present. Politicized interpretations of history are, of course, not new. But Spain’s proposed law is a stark sign of the way the contemporary left seeks to weaponize history to achieve its goals and silence all dissent.
. . .
The very opposite characterized the Democratic Transition of the late 1970s, which had been grounded in a keen awareness of the failures and crimes of the past and a determination that they not be repeated. As Paloma Aguilar, the leading researcher on the role of collective memory in these years, has written, “Few processes of political change have drawn such inspiration from the memory of the past, and from the lessons associated with it, as the Spanish case.” It would be difficult to find another instance in which awareness was greater. What was agreed upon was not “silence,” but an understanding that historical conflicts should be left to historians, and that politicians should not revive old grievances in their jostling for power.
Far from being “silent,” during the Democratic Transition historians and journalists were active in the extreme in all media, flooding the country with studies and accounts of the civil war and the Franco years that did not disguise the most atrocious aspects. The formerly defeated Republican army veterans were granted full recognition and pensions, with attendant honors. The Spanish state-sponsored official ceremonies of homage to fallen Republicans and former revolutionary leaders who were responsible for many atrocities returned to Spain amid public applause. Later, detailed and objective scholarly studies appeared which, though incomplete, for the first time placed accounts of the repressions by both sides on a more precise footing. All this was the opposite of “forgetting,” and it was much more careful and exact than the current agitation about historical memory, which is allergic to fact or serious research.
Communism is to historical study what strokes are to neurological function. Spain’s opposition party has promised to repeal the law when they return to power.
May it be soon.
Go here to comment. I have long been fascinated by the Spanish Civil War and have probably the largest private library on the subject in Central Illinois. Outside of the Basque Republicans and the Carlist Requetes, I find little to root for. The Nationalists engaged in sickening atrocities as did their foes, but the tipping point for me is the overwhelming hatred, outside of the Basque region, for the Catholic Church by the Republicans, demonstrated by the worst murderous rampage against Catholic clergy in the history of Europe. Wherever the Nationalists triumphed, Catholics were free to worship God again, their clergy and laity safe from the murderous hate of the Left, and all the statutory punishments in the world will not change that fact.
Link to Stanley Payne’s article in First Things:
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2021/05/the-politics-of-memory
I’m not sure how slaughtering political opponents and imposing authoritarianism on a nation constitutes “having fought for faith and country” but the law (at least as summarized here) seems to be similar to laws in Germany precluding fascist revisionism and support for the former Nazi regime. It’s less about thought control than conveyance of false histories.
You know nothing about the Spanish Civil War do you John? The Spanish Left wants to make certain that everyone is as bone ignorant about that conflict as you obviously are.
Truth Mac.
Orwell wasted a year or so fighting for the Spanish red terrorists.
After he went home, he complained the reporting on the Spanish Civil War did not “have the modicum of truth contained in the common lie.”
The Spanish bolshevists [and their international communist fellow mass murderers) slaughtered tens of thousands of Catholic religious and lay people.
Whatever execution they say Franco and his heroic compatriots did was richly deserved.
I don’t think this is peculiar to the Spanish left, just a local manifestation of something you can see here, there, and the next place across the occident. Jonathan Turley has been calling attention to our domestic variant for the last several years and he always gets whiny complaints from his portside commenters.
If Spain, the United States, Canada, Britain, France, and Germany had a healthy political culture, this sort of conduct would suffice to electorally wreck the parties responsible. The electorate does not seem to react at all.
Don:
You are far too kind to John. He’s clearly fine with the rivers of blood spilled by the left and the gulag denial which comes with it.
https://jonathanturley.org/2021/07/22/no-safe-haven-university-of-iowa-again-found-to-be-discriminating-against-religious-groups/#more-176195
Did you catch this? This is our domestic left in operation. There’s a fellow here who is a retired GC who said some time back that the loci of nonsense in his company were the offices devoted to HR and corporate communications and no one was listening to the legal department.
Here you have repeated efforts in court to defend karenwaffe behavior on the part of the student affairs apparat. The same crew at Oberlin College cost the institution a seven-digit sum of money and none of the perpetrators were discharged by the trustees. It’s almost as if they only hire narcissists of the ICNBW variety in student affairs nowadays.