Kevin Capé : Franco Apologist

I like this time of the year for it is these days that Franco's apologists come out of the closet.

Check this one out, his article appeared at The Register Guard, I went ahead and highlighted the best parts:

32 years after his death, Franco remains divisive

By Kevin Capé For The Register-Guard

Published: November 19, 2007 05:00AM

BARCELONA — Back in 1970, my purple South Eugene High diploma in hand, I was ready for Adventure with a capital A. For me, this meant spending time abroad, and after various tests, I was admitted to the University of Madrid.

The idea of sol y sombra, (light and shade) of Spain in the twilight years of Generalisimo Francisco Franco fascinated me. But I was a few years late to experience what life really meant under an authoritarian regime, as Franco’s iron hand was beginning to rust.

For young Spaniards my age, though, change was not occurring fast enough, and inspired by the student protest movements around the world in the late 1960s, they spent more time on the streets than in the classroom.

I remember being caught up in one anti-Franco demonstration, and receiving a strong dose of tear gas and a glancing blow from a police truncheon, which probably told me all I needed to know about authoritarian regimes.

These distant memories came alive earlier this month, which marks the 32nd anniversary of Franco’s death, when the unwelcome ghost of the “Caudillo by the Grace of God” suddenly reappeared on the Spanish political stage. The catalyst for this was legislation recently passed by the government of Prime Minister José Luis Zapatero, an Orwellian-sounding Law on Historical Memory, which finally rehabilitates victims of Franco.

While the substance of this law is long overdue, since it will provide financial assistance to surviving victims and help families trace the bones of loved ones, some of its elements are more questionable. One will force local municipalities to remove all symbols of Franco (though most are already gone) and another will forbid “political demonstrations” at his gravesite.

So the controversy rages on, with the left resenting the unnecessary suffering Franco inflicted on his opponents, and the right still firmly believing that Spain was better off under Franco than it would have been under a leftist regime, which would have been chaotic at best, Communist at worst.

Then there is the position of the Roman Catholic church, which retains considerable influence within the Spanish right, and has been sparring with the Zapatero government over issues such as religious education in schools and gay civil marriages. Recently yet another wave of about 500 clergy and laity killed by the left during the civil war were officially declared “martyrs” in Rome. Though the church says the timing was a coincidence, it provided a pointed reminder that the left did not have a monopoly on suffering.

Fortunately, there is very little danger of Spain coming unglued today the way it did in the 1930s, but there are still some eerie parallels with the early 1930s.

One is that King Juan Carlos is increasingly contested by the far left, the far right and people in the Basque country and Catalonia, who see him as an unwelcome symbol of national unity. Though Catalonia remains peaceful, the Basque country is on the edge of more violence, which can only bring police repression.

The selectivity of historical memory is a striking phenomenon. When I first laid eyes on this city (then as now one of the most prosperous areas of the country) parts of it looked more like North Africa than neighboring France. It was Juan Carlos who initially assured prosperity and democracy, and when that became too much for elements of the army, they attempted a coup in 1981. This led the young king to appear on television in military uniform, facing down the rebellious soldiers.

Twentieth-century history provides a unique challenge for most continental European nations. It was only in the 1970s that the French began to engage in serious public debate about the role of the wartime Vichy regime. In Russia, high school history books praise Stalin’s World War II role, but give scant space to the arbitrary deaths of millions. Very many Italians still harbor a tender spot for Mussolini — I cannot count the number of times I have heard people say, “After all, he only killed a few thousand political opponents, nothing like Hitler or Stalin.” True enough, but the vanity of this “Caesar of the Carnival” (as a French diplomat called him) led to Italy’s involvement in a horrendous war that laid waste to wide swaths of the country.

By contrast, Franco’s defenders are quick to remind people that “he kept us out of World War II.” That is small comfort to his one-time opponents, currently being dug out of unmarked mass graves. For those of us who never lived through a civil war, perhaps what is called for is a degree of generosity toward the moral ambiguity of those who did.

If anyone was to write a note like this one about Hitler he would be called an anti-Semite and could be facing legal action, but since Franco's image has been sanitized by the main stream media, individuals like Capé are free to honor their caudillo.

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