By clothing-bag, 05/03/2023

Hate to Franco - Present and past - Freedom Digital Digital Freedom

http://www.elmanifiesto.com/_franco_para_antifrancistas.aspNot everyone hated Franco, of course, but those who have hated him have done so with unusual intensity, and in that sense he can be considered one of the most hated characters of the 20th century. When he died, on November 20, 1975, the Communist Party of Spain (reconstituted), which would soon create GRAPO, spread to all the cities where it had militants (Madrid, Barcelona, ​​Cádiz, Seville, Vigo, Córdoba, Bilbao and some others), many tens of thousands of pages with the famous poem by Pablo Neruda General Franco in hell. I remember throwing it in the Madrid metro, watering the platforms from the last door of the moving train, kept ajar. One or two comrades would position themselves so that the people inside the car would not notice the maneuver, and those who refilled the platforms would collect the papers. We leaders weren't supposed to do those things, but for some of us it gave us a peculiar satisfaction, also because of its share of risk. Neruda's curses on Franco were so resounding that they caused perplexity, and many people took the sheet with them, probably to show it to others. . No agitative pamphlet of the many that we have thrown out over the years has had as much circulation, although, I suspect, more out of curiosity than the acquiescence of the majority of its readers. It starts this way:

He calls it "the dung of sinister hens from the grave, heavy sputum, a figure of treason that blood does not erase"; she evokes "the holy milk of the mothers of Spain" trampled, with her breasts, by howling legionaries; he alludes to "the dismembered children", to health, the "peace of blacksmiths", the life destroyed by the general; and after a long series of insults and considerations about his hellish destiny, the vate concludes:

Neruda's verses breathe and want to arouse in the reader an absolute hatred, telluric, so to speak, which gives meaning to the sometimes extravagant figures used. Hate also cultivated by many intellectuals for decades, both in literary and political expressions. Very well known and recited has also been the poem by León Felipe on the two Spains, which begins:

The general had left his adversary, says Felipe, "naked and wandering around the world." But defeated Spain took with it the song, "the ancient voice of the earth," thus leaving Franco incapable of "gathering the wheat or feeding the fire." The poet describes a tyrannical power imposed by sheer violence, producer of sadness and misery, in verses of beauty and poetic vigor not very frequent in political poetry. Its historical veracity is already another matter. I will mention, among many other examples, Antonio Machado's sonnet where, without naming him, he asks for himself to be hanged, perhaps for suicide:

In his own death he was accompanied by such insults. I think they are perfectly summarized by the verses that his death inspired the well-known communist or ex-communist psychiatrist Castilla del Pino, according to what he notes in his memoirs:

And ends:

Castilla del Pino made some interesting statements a few years ago: "Thanks to hatred, humanity has progressed"; "I hate Pinochet, and I have hated Franco for forty years." Significantly, he did not mention Stalin, Pol Pot or Fidel Castro among his hated. In short, the most hurtful and hateful imprecations have accompanied the Caudillo's entire career since the civil war. And they continue to accompany him, with surprising vitality, thirty years after his death, in the form of biographies, essays or outrageous allusions; or numerous books on Franco's repression, a cruel repression only comparable to Nazi terror, if we are to believe those writings: the term Holocaust is even applied to it. His military victory is at the origin of all this, and the diatribes against him they convey the impression that this victory constitutes a gigantic, inexpiable crime against the Spanish people, against freedom, peace and progress, against history. Now, who did Franco really beat? To democracy or to a multiform revolution, although mainly communist? We will deal with this later, but evidently it was, in a very important part at least, a victory over the communists, whether they defended democracy or their peculiar revolution, as many argue. For this reason, it is not surprising that among the imprecators against Franco, the Marxist left and the politicians or intellectuals close to them stand out especially. In this regard, Neruda's verses impress those of any other, but understanding them well requires reading them alongside another no less famous poem of his, the Ode to Stalin, where he declares:

Stalin, Neruda preached, embodied the ideals of peace and human progress, the hope of the world's oppressed. And for this reason, when reading the two poems together, the perfect insensitivity of the poet towards the victims, especially children, whose images he uses to raise moral indignation against the figure of the general to a paroxysm, stands out. Well, if they really outraged him as much as he suggests, he would have been much more outraged by the victims of all ages caused by Stalinism, an incomparably higher number than those attributable to Franco. But those of Stalin did not deserve Neruda a simple sympathetic allusion. And not because he was unaware of its existence, because only those who deliberately closed their eyes did. When, three years after the ode, Khrushchof, Stalin's successor, admitted in his famous report some of the despot's crimes, no one was surprised, especially not the communists, who had imitated so much, where they had been able to. , the methods of the "father of the peoples". Khrushchof was simply acknowledging something of the well-known, and the significance of his report lies only in the official nature of the acknowledgment.No. For Neruda, the deaths carried out by the Francoists were unforgivable murders because they affected people with "advanced" ideas, many of them communists, aspiring to a perfect society, without exploitation, without social injustice, without oppression. On the contrary, Stalin killed precisely the type of criminals represented by Franco himself, irretrievable scum of humanity, defenders of the horrors of capitalism both in its form of bourgeois democracies and of authoritarian or fascist regimes, all of them destined for the "dumping ground of the history". Stalin had more communists shot than anyone, among others, many more than the Caudillo; but any proud Stalinist like Neruda knew that they were false communists, agents of imperialism, fascists in disguise. Hence the symbolic value, regardless of its relationship with the facts, of the recurring image of destroyed children. It not only seeks to exalt indignation, but also to identify communists and progressives in general, especially the former, people of pure ideals, fighters for a resplendent future for humanity under regimes like that of the illustrious Stalin: them, like children, the future was reserved. Franco murdered children and trampled women in labor, that is to say, he tried to assassinate the future in a criminally crazed and vain attempt—it hardly needs to be said—to stop the ineluctable march of history. Neruda, the "Stalinist who proudly bears this name", expressed it with poetic skill. History has circulated in other ways and those who claimed possession of the future have failed disastrously, but no one should fall into a hasty and necessarily banal euphoria. We would advance little without an understanding of the mental schemes that lead to Stalinism or Nazism, and other possessors of the future will come out, because the temptation to think and act in this way is in human nature. In any case, we find a first piece of evidence: Stalin and Franco represented opposite mental, moral and political forms: the first the radiant future, the second the disgraceful past. Looking at it as a whole, Stalin had a truly triumphant career. At the time of his death, he ruled an immense empire spanning more than half of Europe and nearly half of Asia, and was the revered moral leader of at least a third of humanity where socialist regimes existed, as well as millions of other people. who fought for that ideal within still bourgeois societies. And of so many others who without a fight supported or respected him, even if inwardly they felt little enthusiasm for living in a Soviet system, and preferred to develop their careers in the atrocious capitalist societies. But not all had been successes and Franco embodied precisely one of Stalin's few serious failures. Failure in a country perhaps unimportant in the demographic or economic order, although much more so in the strategic, cultural and historical order; and, above all in the symbolic. It is not for nothing that the bibliography of the Spanish civil war – a defeat for Stalin, among other things – has been so enormous and continues today in full swing. In turn, a reflection of the passions that accompanied it, stronger than those associated with other events of the 20th century with greater material consequences. Obviously, Stalin did not take the war in Spain lightly, despite the difficult material conditions for his intervention in it. . He sent many of his best weapons, and he personally took care of politically guiding the Spanish left; and enforced his instructions through the Spanish Communist Party,whose leaders put the USSR – homeland of the proletariat – above Spain itself, and were proud to act as agents of the Kremlin. Stalin must not have accepted his failure with good spirits after so much effort, and many of the advisers he sent to Spain served as a scapegoat, shot or disappeared obscurely in the terror of the time. The survivors (Malinofski, Vóronof, etc.), would demonstrate a few years later, fighting against Nazi Germany, that Stalin had not sent second-rate personnel to Spain, but many of his best military and police elements. Needless to say, the majority of those shot were not executed due to low professional quality, but rather due to more or less invented ideological "deviations". They amply made up for that setback, but he remained a black mark on his record, and the final crushing of Germany offered him a second chance to destroy a hated adversary whom his propaganda had managed to identify with Hitler and Mussolini. Spain very few, if any, then doubted the speedy liquidation of Franco and not a few aspired to see him follow the fate of Mussolini, within the country, the prospect considerably cracked the regime, although Spain did not enter the sphere of Soviet influence accepted by Churchill and Roosevelt, continued to be of great interest to Stalin, and he did everything he could to isolate Francoism, declaring it an international plague, as the first step towards its overthrow. The second step consisted of the maquis, the guerrilla organized by the communists in order to resume the civil war, provoke an intervention by the democracies and establish a regime, if not socialist, at least very advanced. And yet, astonishingly, he also failed in this attempt, a second humiliation that he could not find excessively amusing, even counting on his overwhelming successes in other spheres. stay in power, going against the current not only of the communists but also of the Anglo-Saxon and European democratic regimes, which, although reluctant to intervene in Spain, almost never gave him the least amount of cordial sentiments and supported various oppositions to him. And so it would continue until 1975, the year of his death from natural causes after a painful agony much celebrated by many of his enemies, and quite similar to that of another characteristic dictator of the time, Tito, the dissident Yugoslav communist from Moscow. The aforementioned expressions of hate have a peculiar touch coming, usually, from atheist people. The subject goes beyond the limits of this essay, but it is worth noting how Neruda places Franco in a hell of eternal and unspeakable torments in which, as a good Stalinist, he could not believe. According to his doctrine, Franco, whatever he did, like Stalin himself, like Hitler or himself, were destined to become carrion just like everyone else, without any further redress or justice, and therefore without any meaning. Even if it was possible to hope that future generations would share Neruda's hatred, none of that hatred could affect the Caudillo, victor to the end, no matter how much they wished him the impossible hell. On the contrary, Franco was a Catholic believer, apparently quite fervent and convinced of the existence of a heaven and a hell. On some occasion he pointed out that life would be absurd without considering an afterlife. But in general he did not cultivate or encourage expressions of hatred as furious as those aroused by him in his opponents, and his political testament is expressed in measured terms, perhaps because he was already at the gates of death. It would be very far from reality to pretend that all anti-Franco literature comes from Marxism. There is one of the most varied character and of enormous hardness, from the social democrat to some Christian democrat or monarchist. But it should be noted that the most persistent, passionate and hard has been from communism and its surroundings. As the really sustained and serious opposition against the Franco regime was communist. The attention aroused by the character is revealed in the already large collection of biographies and essays of various kinds, including psychoanalytic ones, dedicated to him. Quite a few already appeared in Franco's times, such as the biographies written by J. Arrarás, M. Aznar, C. Martín, B. Crozier, L. Ramírez, G. Hills, by J.W.D. Trythall, H. G. Dahms or R. de la Cierva, generally favorable and some laudatory, except for L. Ramírez. But it can be said that all of them have been little less than eclipsed by the impact of the one published in 1994 by P.Preston. The biography written by this English author marked an era, both for its extreme hostility to the subject and for having been promoted in Spain by powerful right-wing media, especially monarchists, for reasons that are easy to understand. The book did not fail to arouse replies. R. de la Cierva harshly criticized him and published a new and extensive biography in 2000. General R. Casas de la Vega and Colonel C. Blanco Escolá have each written books on Franco's military capacity, with opposing approaches. , and C. de Meer has written a laudatory essay. Along similar lines to that of Preston, there are various studies by J. Tusell, S. Juliá or the book by E. Moradiellos subtitled Chronicle of an almost forgotten caudillo, a strange idea, since everything indicates the opposite: the bibliography on he. More weighted biographical essays followed, such as those by B. Bennasar, S. Payne, A. Bachoud, F. Torres, A. Vaca de Osma or J. P. Fusi, this one prior to Preston's. In recent years, the thick volumes of L. Suárez have been appearing, an expanded and corrected recasting of another previous biography in eight volumes. Due to its abundant first-hand documentation, it currently constitutes the fundamental work in this regard, a must-see for anyone wishing to approach the subject. In general, today the prevailing academic attitude towards the old Caudillo oscillates between the traditional aversion, greatly revived in recent years, and the consideration of the character as a second-rate, cruel, vulgar and mediocre dictator. In my judgment, the latter cannot be sustained. The depth of the hatred that has been paid to him, deserved or not, indicates something very different from mediocrity, as does the fact that over the course of forty years he defeated, militarily and politically, all his enemies, not inconsiderable many of them. them, avoiding really lethal dangers. This does not make its historical trajectory positive, but it excludes for it the description of mediocre. I leave aside the current mania of portraying him as a jerk or something less. Azaña used to complain about his people's lack of interest in using their brains, and perhaps today he would repeat his criticism of those who "reason" like that.