Dealing with Memorials to Franco in Spain

I'm not really sure what to make of this. At issue is a law Spain has passed that removes monuments to Francisco Franco.

On the one hand, I think it's undeniable that Francisco Franco was one of the worst criminals of the 20th century, at the same level as Jorge Videla or Augusto Pinochet. I fully agree with Paloma Aguilar, who said "seventy years after the civil war we cannot allow these monuments that perpetuate discrimination against the victims.’ ” Franco's regime was one of the most brutal of the 20th century, setting a paradigm for other dictators, from his bombing of Guernica to his execution of political prisoners to the nation-building monuments under attack. In the human-rights sense, I agree with Aguilar that such monuments are discriminatory against the victims.

However, the historian in me is far more ambivalent. Removing the memorials removes the public reminders that such a monster existed in the first place, and in some ways helps to forget exactly how horrible the Franco regime was. Without the daily reminders of his existence, the daily reminders of the brutality and repression disappear. As Michael Kimmelman says in the article, “Legislating monuments doesn’t rectify injustices of the past. It just fumbles around with the symbols of history."

While this is true, Kimmelman is ignoring a very important component of the "symbols of history" here. The monuments don't and never did mark some universally true aspect of "Spain" in symbolic forms. The existence of such monuments "fumbled around" with the "symbols of history" in the first place. After all, when the monuments were created, they were designed to celebrate Franco and the Nationalists and forget (or damn) the Republicans, appealing to one particular vision of what Spain's politics, culture, and nation should have been while erasing other, competing visions. As cliché and often wrong-headed the idea that "the victors write history" may be, at least in the case of the use of history in public space in Franco's Spain, that was the case, and they used these monuments to "fumble around" with the history of the Civil War and the Franco regime itself.

Yet the first half of Kimmelman's statement that "Legislating monuments doesn’t rectify injustices of the past" is still relevant here. So is Charles Powell's observation that "public declarations [against Franco] are one thing. In many villages where neighbors betrayed one another, and even husbands and wives don’t easily talk about the war, a common policy is still don’t ask, don’t tell.” Whether intentional or not, these suggestions in one way lend weight to those opposed to the law (be it because they support the Franco regime, or because they don't want the reminders of the atrocities to disappear). Getting rid of the monuments, resulting in one more way in which discussion of the Civil War and the Franco regime are silenced, won't make it easier for Spain to reconcile their past; it will just make it easier to forget everything.

One Spaniard in the article complains of being made to feel guilty for having "led our lives", and the article cites Powell again as saying, "National reconciliation really took place during the 1960s and ’70s, when Franco was still in power, through a natural process, not by government edict, but because of a collective feeling that the war had been horrible and that Spain had to move on."

Here, I think an important distinction needs to be made. I agree that the Spaniards reconciled the Civil War in the 1960s and 1970s, but I disagree with Powell's implication that this means they reconciled the Franco regime. I think in a large way Spain still struggles with the issue of the regime itself, and this battle over the monuments is a great example of this ongoing struggle, thirty-plus years after Franco's death.