[The Critic] Choosing Hate

The Spanish government’s move to disinter a fascist icon evinces hate rather than dutiful memory.

On Monday this week, the Spanish authorities were confronted with one of mankind’s eternal dilemmas, resolving to choose revenge over redemption and hate over hope. To mark his 120th anniversary, the left-wing coalition led by PM Pedro Sánchez had legislated earlier last summer to disinter the bodily remains of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the icon behind the far-right Falange party and a mainstay of the country’s turmoil leading up to the 1936–1939 Civil War. The exhumation fits into a larger law that claims to restore “democratic memory”, which built on an earlier and similarly aimed “historical memory” law passed by Sánchez’s socialist predecessor in 2007. Both laws amount to an Orwellian rewriting of History, one that overturns the “pact of forgetting” that underpinned Spain’s democratic transition upon the death of the war’s victor, strongman Francisco Franco, in 1975. In its stead, on the pretext of honoring the memory of Franco’s victims (many of whose families are being paid to recover their bodies from unmarked mass graves), these two laws propound a slanted account of the war and the ensuing 40-year dictatorship as a Manichean contest of good (the republicans) versus evil (Franco’s nationalists).

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