Unearthing Franco's Legacy: Mass Graves and the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain

Violence and Silence: The Repressed History of the Franco Regime

Violence and Silence The Repressed History of the Franco Regime Soledad Fox Atrás quedaba una nación en escombros, agotada y aterrorizada, en manos de una minoría cruel y tremendamente eficaz en el uso negativo del poder. Se sucedieron años de exterminio sistemático de toda oposición y de aparente triunfo de los negadores de la libertad política, de la dignidad humana y de la justicia social. —José Rubia Barcia, Prosas de razón y hiel When Manuel Fraga Iribarne was minister of tourism and propaganda in the 1960s, he coined the well-known and cheerful slogan “Spain is different!” to attract foreigners to the sun and beaches of a country still scarred by its Civil War and under the reign of Franco’s authoritarian regime. The benevolent image promoted by the government was immensely successful in masking the sociopolitical reality of Spanish life, but in light of the evidence that has emerged in the last few decades, a much more accurate description of the country would have been “Spain is one big prison” or “Spain is a mass grave.” The following essays offer a detailed portrait of the nature and consequences of Nationalist ideology and violence before, during, and after the war. Though each is very different in its sources and approach, there are many common threads. Themes that stand out are the complex role of the church, the constant 30 menace of imprisonment and death that pervaded and shaped all aspects of Spanish life during the war and the postwar period, and the ideological apparatus that served throughout to justify the use of violence against Republicans. —— In the midst of the Spanish Civil War, Hannah Arendt noted that “even Franco, in a country where there are neither Jews nor a Jewish question, is battling the troops of the Spanish Republic while mouthing anti-Semitic slogans” (“The Jewish Question” 43). The full ramifications of this insight are brought to the fore in Paul Preston’s chapter “The Theorists of Extermination: The Origins of Violence in the Spanish Civil War,” which reveals just how surprisingly fruitful anti-Semitism proved as an ideological theme in a country where there was hardly a Jewish presence. Preston echoes Arendt when he writes: “Spanish ‘antiSemitism without Jews’ was not about real Jews so much as an abstract construction of a perceived international threat.” This essay exposes the cultural and ideological foundations of the campaigns of violence that would terrorize Spain for decades. In order to have a proper understanding of what fuelled the Nationalists’ repressive tactics and what made them widely acceptable in the eyes of so many Spaniards, Preston argues that one must look at the sociopolitical situation in Spain in the years leading up to the military coup of 1936. Particularly from 1917 onwards, the tensions between the “militant industrial and rural proletariat” on the one hand, and industrialists , landowners, and the middle class on the other, spiraled into violent and recurring confrontations. It was in this context that the image of a Jewish-driven revolutionary menace was fomented, using anti-Semitic rhetoric sometimes imported, sometimes indigenous to Spain’s past, and the idea propagated that “an alliance of Jews, Freemasons, and working-class internationals was conspiring to destroy Christian Europe , with Spain as a principal target.” After 1931, the Republic’s measures to separate church and state and diminish the power of the former made it easy to sell the spurious notion that all Republicans were antiCatholic , anti-Spanish, hence foreign and part of the Jewish-BolshevikMasonic conspiracy. Anti-Semitism was thus used to justify a program of violence against the Left. Moreover the religious and racial overtones, Violence and Silence 31 in the context of Spain, lent a particularly Catholic flavor to anti-Semitic prejudice, giving the Church a leading role in political life. Nobody could have guessed how fruitful and enduring this platform would be, as it would justify “any means necessary for what was presented as national survival.” This ideology was spread widely via anti-Republican magazines , newspapers bulletins, and pamphlets. The rhetoric of these publications had a captive audience that included landowners, industrialists, and military officials. The military, an outdated and overpopulated institution , was especially threatened by Republican calls for army reform. One of the leading figures in this propaganda war against the Republic was the Catalan priest Juan Tusquets Terrats (who was descended from a Jewish...