The pain in Spain: fighting against progress

So far I've been focusing here on the Spanish left. But the real problem is the Spanish right. According to all opinion polls, the left draws the sympathies of a sizeable majority, and the Partido socialista obrero español (PSOE) has been the governing party for 20 of the past 25 years, achieving much in economic development, the growth of per capita income, and human rights legislation. But it has had to fight every step of the way, and its hold on power is precarious. The problem, of course, is the peculiar character of the Spanish right.

Spanish conservatives are not merely pro-business "liberals," as that word is used in Spain. "Liberal" here means defender of the free-market before other more social interests, and thus implies merciless capitalist exploitation -- which in the 19th century was equated with "Progress" (see last week's blog). The core of the Spanish right is far more conservative than that: not 19th century, which was far too dangerously enlightened (Darwin et al.), but reaching back to 1492. That was the year that Spanish intolerance reached unprecedented levels, with the expulsion of Muslims and Jews from the newly united kingdom. It was also the year that Queen Isabel sent Columbus on his adventure to find the Indies, the year that Antonio de Nebrija presented the Catholic Monarchs with the first grammar of the Castilian (now called "Spanish") language (“Language has always been the companion of empire,” he explained in his introduction), and the year the price of gold reached its all-time historical high. A very good time for empire and a moment the Spanish right would like to freeze.

Spain did not invent intolerance (remember Samson's attempted genocide of the Philistines), but its monarch and clergy did invent institutions and even a special vocabulary for it. Our words "race" (in the sense of a subspecies of humans) and "caste" both have Spanish origins. The main institution was the Inquisition, an instrument for squashing innovation so effective that Spain -- once the greatest power in Europe -- stagnated as Holland, France and especially England advanced technically and comercially and soon had taken all Spain's possessions in the Old World (the Low Countries, Naples, etc.) and most of its wealth from the New. Popular resistence to such repression never ceased, causing the Inquisition to be abolished repeatedly, but repeatedly it returned along with the reactionaries who resumed power after every crisis. Abolished in 1808, it was reintroduced in 1814 after the defeat of Napoleon, then abolished again in 1820, restored again in 1823, and not abolished definitively until 1834. The progressive 19th century of the rest of Europe never had a chance in Spain. And though it did not carry that name, something very like the Inquisition was reinstituted by Francisco Franco (1939-75), as the Catholic Church became in effect (again) an arm of the state.

And for many Spaniards today, that is still their ideal of eternal Spain: all Catholic, all heterosexual, all speaking Castilian (and not Basque or Catalán or Gallego or Valenciano or anything else), all obedient to one temporal authority acting in the name of the supreme authority of God (the Roman Catholic God, that is -- not others are allowed). The party most rightists vote for, the misnamed Popular Party (PP), claims to be defending democracy, but its values do not derive from the people but from their constituents' vision of eternal Spain. As a recent example, the PP has blocked renewing the membership of the highest court and as many other measures as it could because it doesn't regard the party that won the elections as legitimate. In short, the PP does not regard the popular will as expressed by voting to be a source of legitimacy. The proof of its illegitimacy is that the PSOE-led government has approved same-sex marriages, recognizes the aspirations of non-Castilian-speaking regions, promotes integration of immigrants and, most damning of all, has sought to laicize education, at least partly.

The Spanish right is a minority but an extremely determined and potentially violent one. Its components include outright fascists waving Falangist banners and assaulting immigrants, an indignant clergy that denounces a course on citizenship as an attack on the Church's exclusive authority over moral values, the Church's outrageously reactionary radio network COPE (which, among other absurdities, has repeatedly called for the king's abdication on the grounds that he is too friendly to the Socialists), and an extremely vociferous organization of "victims of terrorism." The AVT represents only relatives of victims of ETA but not of 11 March 2004 (which happened on the PP government's watch) and has persuaded itself that the Socialists, just because they are Socialists, must be allies of the terrorists. And of course PP supporters also include the usual shady business interests anxious to avoid restrictions on their expoliation of the landscape, perforation of illegal wells in a thirsty country, and other abuses.

Together, they can stage very noisy, colorful demonstrations where they insult the government enthusiastically. More seriously, they have enough deputies in Congress to block any initiative requiring more than a simple majority (such as renewing the membership of the high court). And this is why the Socialist government proceeds cautiously, too cautiously for many of its potential supporters on the left. The state still subsidizes the Catholic Church out of taxes, and in addition still pays salaries for religious instruction in the public schools (students can opt out of that class, but it must be offered) while permitting Church authorities to select and fire the instructors on grounds of creed or anything else.

The Socialists are in a bind. If they try to move too fast, they will be blocked on everything. If they don't move fast enough, voters who oppose the right will stay home or will vote for one of the smaller leftist parties.

Well, I never got to it, but what I had intended to write about today was a symptom of this unending stalemate, the publication of the latest report (2006 data) of Programme for International Student Assessment, PISA. This is an international, triennial measure of 15-year old students' academic abilities in the 30 member nations of the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) plus 5 non-member states. In a terrible embarrassment, Spain came out near the bottom of all the European nations in the three categories: number 32 in mathematics (of western European countries, only Portugal scored lower), 35 in reading (above Greece but below everybody else in W. Europe), and a little better in science where it was no. 31 (ahead of Lithuania, Norway and Italy). Worse, Spain's rankings in math and reading had dropped since the last report (2003 measurements). There are many reasons, of course -- there always are, and may excuses, for a failure. But a big part is due to the failure to institute any comprehensive reform of an antiquated and underfunded school system partly dominated by the clergy, and this is due to the right-left stalemate in Congress.

However, the PISA report wasn't all bad news. Some of Spain's regions, tested separately, did better than the European average, La Rioja best of all. The worst was my home region, Andalucía. Truly woeful results, explained by the Socialist regional president, Manuel Chaves, as a result of Andalucía's historical backwardness -- that is, it had been the least-developed region since Franco times. But we recall that some countries that were at least as backward back then have made far greater strides; Cuba comes to mind. And Chaves' argument doesn't explain why the results were worse in 2006 than in 2003!

But at least Spain can congratulate itself that its students score far better in math than those from countries with more wretched school systems, such as Kirgizstan (no. 57) and the United States of America (no. 35). Canada, in contrast, did very well: no. 7 in math, 4 in reading and 3 in science. Maybe those Canadian kids are brighter. Or maybe there's something wrong with public education in countries like Kirgizstan, the United States and Spain.

Which way is Left? (3) - Thinking otherwise

In previous notes, I've discussed the ideas of Ulrich Beck (Roots & Wings, 9/30) and, last Friday, Vidal-Beneyto (The Spanish Exception). In our recent visit to Paris I picked up the latest book of another sociologist, Alain Touraine, whose work has interested me since his publications 40+ years ago on workers' consciousness in São Paulo.

In the course of his long career, Touraine (Hermanville-sur-Mer, France, 1925) has not only explored consciousness and social change among the oppressed, but has also worked to facilitate both. With workers in Latin America and Poland, or more recently with Muslim women in France, his research design has been a guided dialogue (guided by sociologists) among activists, with the objective of helping those activists understand their situation better so as to act to change it. Since 1992, he has been summing up these experiences for the rest of us in a series of books, of which this is the latest:

Touraine, Alain. Penser autrement. Paris: Fayard, 2007.*

He begins with a critique of what he calls the "dominant interpretive discourse" (discours interprétatif dominant) or DID of the past 60 years. The 19th century had effectively killed God (i.e., an eternal and unchanging moral arbiter beyond our reach), and then the horrors of the 20th century (world wars, genocide, etc.) destroyed our faith in God's replacement, Progress (better and juster society through the advance of science and technology). Then, before the world's thinkers could recover from the shock of World War II, they were split by an Iron Curtain that almost completely blocked new social thought on either side. The sudden and unexpected collapse of that curtain left intellectuals on both sides without any clear idea of where to go next and deepened their pessimism that human beings could even affect the course of our history. From such pessimism arose what Touraine calls the "dominant interpretive discourse", that our lives are shaped by forces beyond our control, and any contrary idea is an illusion or "false consciousness." According to the DID, our individual lives are ruled by material and sexual instincts that we barely understand and can't change, our social lives by the market, especially the mechanisms of global capitalism. This is a view of a society without "actors" (acteurs), that is, human beings capable of acting upon and changing their situation. Such a desperate view of our possibilities encourages people to behave completely narcissistically, with no sense of any larger social purpose or moral control. For those with power, it's all about money and how to get more of it, with no reason to regard the poor. For those without, it's also sometimes about money and survival, but also about something more precarious, personal identity, the precariousness of trying to be recognized as a human being with rights. Among the social consequences of such desperation among the poor are delinquency and "identity politics," including the many forms of fascism or extreme, exclusionary nationalism we see all over the globe, even in places thought to be as staid and stolid as Belgium and Switzerland (not to mention ex-Yugoslavia, Pakistan, Sudan, Guatemala, etc.) Among the social consequences of the irresponsible behavior of the powerful, eager to exploit and profit from the turbulence of the less powerful, are wars and global warming.

The second half of Touraine's new book is his proposal to "think differently" -- penser autrement. It is a continuation of an argument he has been developing in a series of books since 1992: that we don't need faith in either God or Progress, but in ourselves. And the self that you or I or Touraine needs to look to is what he calls "el double", the better self or ideal self that I or you imagine and constantly compare with our practical, here-and now selves: a self with rights, affirming its "right to have rights." Most importantly, this must be a self that recognizes equal "rights to have rights" in all the other selves we encounter.

Touraine insists that this is not just wishful thinking, but a description of something that is already happening all around us. In myriad groups, organized around concerns ranging from global warming to neighborhood deterioration or, what he takes to be the most significant change-agent today, women's rights, people are coming together, discovering their differences and how to accept and even profit from them in terms of personal growth. In the end, Touraine's proposed solution, or path to a solution, to the world's problems is parallel to and quite compatible with Ulrich Beck's: we liberate ourselves and one another through social movements, by which he means self-conscious organizations (conscious of our aims and of the conditions in which we struggle) to confront whatever form of oppression we experience.

Like Vidal-Beneyto, Touraine thinks that the "Left" is exhausted and has nothing more to offer us, but that is because both thinkers think of the Left the way the Left thought of itself in recent decades -- the decades of the "dominant interpretive discourse" where individuals counted for nothing, and only a mass organization led by an enlightened elite had a chance of effecting change. And since the forces of global capitalism were so strong and pervasive, the only change worth struggling for was a total, violent rupture with the present order, that is, revolution.

But the Left (at least in my mind) is and always has been something much more valuable and more permanent, since long before the French Communist Party (Touraine's bête noire) and similar outfits tried to congeal it. That something was never better expressed than in 1789, exactly 200 years before the collapse of Soviet communism: liberté, égalité, fraternité. And those are the values that Touraine is working to recover.

My earliest contact with this thinker, research still worth reading:

Touraine, Alain. "Industrialisation et conscience ouvrière à São Paulo." Sociologie du Travail Octobre-décembre.4 (1961).

* The English translation, Thinking Differently, came out two years after I wrote this review.

Which way is Left? (2) - The Spanish exception

José Vidal-Beneyto is a Spanish sociologist (b. 1929 in Valencia) long resident in France, author of a dozen or more books on mass communications and politics, and a frequent columnist in Spain's most prestigious daily El País (of which he is a co-founder). Recently (10 and 17 November) he contributed two articles lamenting the "Izquierda en desbandada" -- "The Left in a rout," routed from the battlefield by the merciless Right of global capital, consumerism and the defeatism of "There Is No Alternative." Nowhere (in his view, which is mainly of Western Europe) does the Left have a credible, coherent program able to mobilize citizenry against the terrible destruction wrought by global capitalism against the environment, human health, and personal freedoms. Britain's New Labor is reduced to vague electoral liberalism, Germany's SPD is hopelessly divided and adrift, and France's Parti socialiste is in low-intensity civil war after the debâcle of the last elections.

Because he is writing in El País one would assume he is also thinking of Spain, though the authors he cites are mostly French. However the contrast between France and Spain is more dramatic than he is willing to acknowledge. In Spain, the Left has hardly been routed by the enemy but is the national government, and its program of action is still credible enough to rally large numbers, maybe even a majority, of voters.

As in France, the Spanish Left is comprised of multiple groupings with their own histories, traditions and programs, making Left politics a matter of continuous negotiation and frequent compromise to secure a majority in Parliament or to win an election. In Spain, certainly, and in France too, I suppose, far more people identify themselves as "left" than "right," but they don't always vote the same way or even vote at all. Nevertheless the Partido Socialista Obrero Español has been able to win elections more often than any other party in post-Franco democracy: Felipe González in four successive elections (1982, 1986, 1989 and 1993) and, after a 2-term hiatus under the Right, the current government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, elected 14 March 2004. This gives the PSOE enormous authority in those negotiations with other left-leaning formations.

Opinion polls give the PSOE a continuing though narrowing lead over its main rival, the Partido Popular, for the coming (2008) elections: 39.7% to 37.4%. Whether this is enough will depend mainly on the PSOE's ability to win the votes of left-leaners who don't agree with everything they've done or even much like them. Those who think the PSOE is moving too slowly and timidly on social issues may want to vote for Izquierda Unida, whose deputies (members of parliament) would at least give conditioned support to a new Socialist government. However in IU the once-powerful Communist Party is fighting for control against non-communist radicals; the factionalism has become so ugly that IU's usual voters may just stay home. Left nationalists in Catalonia usually vote for Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (Republican Left of Catalonia -- "republican" here means anti-monarchical), which is currently allied with the Socialists in both the Catalonian and national governments; but party scandals and erratic pronouncements by ERC's leaders may reduce their voter turnout, too, meaning a drop in the total left vote.

The PSOE still has two great strengths, one proactive and the other reactive. The first is the series of social measures enacted under the present government, including the legalization of homosexual marriages, the provision of sizable subsidies to assist seriously ill or disabled persons or their supporters, gender equality in elective office, pay, paternity-maternity leave etc., and other generally popular measures. The reactive strength is the strength of repulsion of the hard-right hierarchy of the Catholic Church and the ridiculous spectacle of exaggerations, outright lies, and antidemocratic political maneuvers, some of them extremely clumsy, of the so-called Popular Party. The PP's unreconstructed reactionariness may just be enough to drive those other leftists to the polls, to hold their noses and vote PSOE to keep the likes of Ángel Acebes, Eduardo Zaplana and the unspeakable Mayor Oreja out of their lives. More on that formation, the PP, in future notes. It deserves the same kind of dissection that Karl Mannheim brought to German conservatism in his 1925 study.

Spain & América, today

When people here in Carboneras, the little Andalusian town where we live, say "América" or "americano", most often they're not referring to the United States but to any of the 20+ Spanish-speaking countries of "América" -- i.e., the entire Western Hemisphere -- where many of them have relatives who emigrated in the hard, Franco years or even later, in the better years since Franco's death in 1976. Many Republicans (i.e., defenders of the Second Republic against Franco in the Spanish Civil War) found refuge in Mexico or Argentina, and smaller numbers to other Spanish-speaking lands (including Puerto Rico -- e.g., Pablo Casals). Later, in the 1950s, many went to Venezuela, Argentina, Uruguay or to Portuguese-speaking Brazil, countries which then offered not only greater freedom but also far greater economic opportunities than Spain.

In more recent years, the relationship has reversed. Spain's economic growth has been phenomenal, while economic conditions in Spanish-speaking countries of America got worse and worse, and political repression drove tens of thousands into exile, many of them to Spain in the years of the Socialist government of Felipe González (1982-1996), which welcomed them. There have been periods of tension, and even today there are occasional outrageous acts of discrimination or even physical attacks on "Sudacas" (a pejorative term for South Americans), but generally Spain is still an attractive place for Latin American emigrants. Here in this little town where I live, most people (until they got to know me) have assumed I was from Argentina (it's my accent, I guess), which doesn't arouse any hostility but rather memories of distant cousins in that country.

Spain's relationships with its ex-colonies have been complicated by contradictory memories. Populist leaders in the Americas often invoke the massacres and humiliations of indigenous American peoples in the Conquest, and anti-Spanish prejudice is still cultivated in Mexico (where they call Spaniards "Gachupines"), but Mexico was also one of the countries that sent most volunteers to defend the Spanish Republic during the Civil War -- so they can't feel all that alienated from the "Madre Patria." Some countries, including Cuba, Venezuela and Argentina, all with large 20th century Spanish immigration, feel especially close to Spain. Anyway, since 1982 Spain has paid large "reparations" (though nobody calls them that) in the form of grants and loans for infrastructure and other projects, including the Junta de Andalucía's generous funding of various cultural initiatives.

So it was a big surprise, and at first seemed even a joke, when Hugo Chávez, considering himself offended by the king of Spain (who finally told him to shut up during his irrepressible interruption of Spain's president at the summit meeting in Santiago) brought up the 500-year old history of the conquest as another reason to re-evaluate the presence of Spanish companies in Spain. Spanish capitalists are not do-gooders, of course -- they're capitalists. But the Spain of half a millennium ago is not the Spain of today, and is really an essential (and currently the most prosperous) part of the larger Hispanic world, a market and (loose) political force of 550 million people.

Population of Latin America

Which way is 'Left'? Spain, France, the U.S.

Now isn't this a curious image? A weary, desperately hopeful Bush, nearly friendless in the world and with no support from either the American people or even his party, seems to be leaning on Sarkozy, who is much shorter but at the moment much sturdier. Sarkozy has announced that France will always be "a friend of the United States" and, while making no commitment to Bush's lost war in Iraq, promises to maintain troops in Afghanistan "as long as necessary."

Contrast this with a March 2003 photo of a healthier, much more confident Bush with Spain's then-president José María Aznar, who had just committed Spanish lives to Bush's Iraq adventure in exchange for a little petting. Aznar reveled in that caress in his "best friend" role in Bush's western; Sarkozy knows that this show is not John Ford but Molière, where he plays the clever scamp who happily relieves the pretentious nincompoop of a good part of his fortune.

On Wednesday we flew back from Paris to Madrid, and then on Thursday took the train to Almería, an occasion to catch up on the papers and reflect on the contrasting "Rights" and "Lefts" of Spain and France.

In Spain, the Right can't agree on what direction to take, the major party riven by in-fighting while its supposed leaders take disastrously extreme positions that even many of its usual voters find ridiculous (claiming against all evidence that Atocha train station bombings were really a Socialist plot to take power, for example). In France, it's the Left that doesn't know where it's going, or to say the same thing another way, is trying to go in all directions at once. In both cases, disorganization is both cause and consequence of being out of power.

Aznar's phony nationalism (claiming to promote the ancient values of Spain while surrendering its sovereignty to the U.S. neo-cons) turned into an electoral disaster for his Popular Party in 2003, as many Spanish conservatives now realize, but the PP leadership has been reluctant openly to disavow Aznar's odd mix of neo-liberal economics and medieval social policies. The PP factions are at war with one another (notably in Madrid, with PP Madrid Community president Esperanza Aguirre v. PP Madrid mayor Ruiz-Gallardón, and in Valencia, with former Generalitat president and now PP spokesman Eduardo Zaplana in open conflict with current Generalitat president, also PP, Camps), and has alienated its some-time allies in the other nationalist parties. In contrast, the Socialists (PSOE) now in government have been able to establish the direction of the Left, holding together (mostly) its own internal factions and keeping the support of the other parties that define themselves as Left.

Sarkozy, who is as far right as Aznar economically but not as medieval -- he doesn't openly voice nostalgia for the Reconquista (i.e., expulsion of Muslims) or the Inquisition -- is seeking to impose his vision on France's fractious Right while exploiting the notorious divisions on the Left, seducing some of the Socialist Party's best-known figures to join his government. His successes reveal the utter confusion of the Left, that famous socialists such as Kouchner et al. could think that Sarkozy's echo of Louis-Phillipe's 1840 cry "Enrichissez-vous" could be a left slogan today. Sarkozy's gestures (mostly mediatic) so far have been possible because he faces no concerted, united opposition. The big strikes scheduled for next week will be a major test.

I haven't yet got to what I wanted to talk about here, the parallel and divergent histories of the two countries' Socialist and Communist Parties, which explain a lot of what is going on now and, I think, will help us predict where and in what form the new European Left will take. But this note is already too long and it's late. Those thoughts for a future note.

Les petites nouvelles.

Il fait froid à Paris. But otherwise, there are some great treats here. One is the free Internet, at Wi-Fi spots throughout the city and paid for by City Hall (that is, the taxpayers). Right now we're in the Mairie (town hall) of the 3rd Arrondissment, along with a couple of dozen other people all with laptops (Apple iBooks like mine seem to be the most popular). That's because the city government (one overall mayor, plus local mayors for each of the arrondissments) is all or mostly Socialist (Parti socialiste), in contrast to the national government under Sarkozy (UMP), pushing hard to the right. We are lucky to be here between strikes. The big one of the subway and other transit workers two weeks ago has been lifted, in preparation for a more massive one that threatens to paralyze the country beginning November 13.

My French is no where near as fluent as my Spanish or English but so far I've been able to make myself understood, and to understand most of the replies, in the brasseries, la pharmacie and, most complicated, with the hôte du logement, and I've been reading the papers. So far I haven't found any -- not Le Monde, certainly not Libération -- as good for world news as Spain's El País. Libération is very interesting on the labor conflicts and the effects of Sarkozy's new measures on local households, and carries interesting literary reviews, but has almost nothing on events outside France that don't directly affect France. Le Monde has a little more, including the other day an essay on the coming Mideast conference by, of all people, Henry Kissinger, noted Christmas bomber. More when I learn something interesting enough to share with you. À bientôt.

Spain: Movies and memories

Last night we saw one of the newest Spanish films, Las 13 rosas, a true story made into a perhaps overly sentimental film, but nevertheless effective because we recognize its truth, of both the immense human capacity for cruelty and the strength of those who resist it. In Madrid after the defeat of the Republic in 1939, thirteen very young women -- girls, really -- arrested by Franco's police for various reasons (some had been in the Socialist Youth, one had helped a Communist trade-unionist escape, and so on) were sentenced to death, along with scores of men, accused of complicity in violent acts in which they had had no part, not even remotely. As a work of art, it is far less extravagantly imagined than El laberinto del fauno, a fairy tale of Franco repression and anti-fascist partisan victory, but this film has the enormous advantage of realism: this really did happen, pretty much the way it's told. For a historic photo and a good summary of the true history of the 13 "red roses" (in Spanish), see La corta vida de trece rosas en El País, 11/12/2005.

Otherwise, the news from Spain this week is: nada. Which also happens to be the title of a very good feminist novel of those hard, early years of the Franco dictatorship: Laforet, Carmen. Nada. 1944. (Clásicos Españoles. Madrid: El País, 2004.) No news, just olds. For example, this week an unemployed Spanish youth on a Barcelona subway car screamed at, punched, pinched the breast and then kicked in the face a slender Ecuadorian girl he'd never seen before (this was all recorded on security cameras), was quickly found and arrested, and then freed by a judge; he's on the street, but the girl is now afraid to leave her house. More North Africans and sub-Saharan Africans risked their lives and many lost them in attempts to reach Spain; and Mariano Rajoy, the terminally mediocre leader of the opposition Popular Party, made another grotesquely idiotic statement, this one so clueless that the Spanish press compared him to George W. Bush (he said we shouldn't really worry about climate change, because there were bigger problems such as CO2 emissions; he said this on the same day and in the same forum where Al Gore was about to show his movie). But racism in Spain, immigrant desperation and Rajoy's idiocy are not news.

Next week I'll be in France, so I can't promise any new report on Spain. I've already touched on some of the big issues. (Click on keyword "Spain" below to see the lot.) These include two essays on immigration 2006/10/07 and 2006/9/27, plus the notes of the past three Fridays on Spain's entanglement with Bush's Iraq war and its internal "nationalisms" (2007/10/5, the overbuilding crisis and Rajoy's "Día de la Hispanidad" idiocies (2007/10/12), and "Historical Memory" of the civil war and the Franco dictatorship (2007/10/19). And my compañero Baltasar and I have written many other notes on Spain on our Spanish-language blog, which you may want to visit. Hasta pronto.

Becoming brutal

And do you think this isn't happening to our boys (and even our girls -- remember Abu Ghraib) in uniform in Iraq? Not to mention the un-uniformed Blackwater guys and their kin. Israel shaken by troops' tales of brutality against Palestinians

Farewell to Franco?

"Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense." -- attributed to Mark Twain

The Socialist government's 2005 proposal of a "Law of Historical Memory" has been a sharp poke in the myths of both sides in Spain's great Civil War of 1936-39. This is because the war and its aftermath are remembered in diametrically opposite ways by Right and Left, and because each has huge emotional and even economic investments in its version.

It's easy to see why the emotions are so involved; it's impossible to remain indifferent after looking at the photographs of combat, destruction and suffering, or the posters of the Republic (which had the best artists) or of its enemies the Nationals, or listening to radio recordings (hysterical sermons, tense bulletins, impassioned speeches) or the marches or folk songs given new, revolutionary or nationalist lyrics ("Ay, Manuela", "Los cuatro muleros/generales", etc.).

For the Falangists of the 30s and 40s and their contemporary defenders, the war against the Republic was a Crusade that saved Christian Spain from Godless Communism, and those who opposed it deserved whatever punishment they suffered. All their guys were heroes, all their fallen "martyrs."

For defenders and sympathizers of the Republic, the heroes and heroines were all on their side, defending democratic legality with the support of other heroes from all over the world in the International Brigades. Together they expanded, liberalized and de-ideologized education, extended medical service to those who had never had it, opened the vote and elective office to women, empowered trade unions and civic associations in an intense and active democracy, and made possible a great cultural flowering in drama, poetry and all the other arts. In this view, the Franco dictatorship was inhumane and antihuman, and any resistance, whether by words or bombs, was more than justified.

The two great myths were constructed to solace the survivors and descendants on both sides, ways to "make sense" of real events that were complicated and contradictory. The truth, as usual, makes less "sense": heroes viewed from another angle -- or at another moment in their history -- become monsters, and glittering ideals turn into caricatures of themselves. The Falangist Nationalists killed many more Spaniards than their foes, and did so with the aid of German Nazi and Italian Fascist troops and arms and Muslim Moorish infantry, making their "nationalism" suspect. Also, their denial of basic civil freedoms and even of food to the needy makes their version of Christianity hard to defend. But the Left also committed outrages, including the massacring of prisoners during the Falangist siege of Madrid (far fewer than the other side, but still indefensible), and arrests and killings by one leftist faction against another -- not everyone defending the Republic was a Republican, that is, a true believer in the institutions of a democratic republic.

Until Franco's death in 1976, Republican exiles in Mexico, Russia and other countries and other sympathizers constructed their memorials mainly out of words, building a library of novels, stories, plays and tracts. Those supporters of the Republic who had remained in Spain and survived hunger, imprisonment of close relatives and other humiliations, including many widows, were so traumatized that they tended to keep their memories to themselves, too ashamed or frightened to tell their grandchildren what they had seen and suffered.

The Falangist myth was much more solidly constructed. Its "historical memory" was implanted in Spain by school texts, obligatory hymn-singing in class, the renaming of streets for Falangist generals, heroic statues of Franco, and, especially, the enormous monument outside Madrid known as the "Valle de los Caídos" ("Valley of the Fallen"), constructed by Franco's prisoners of war, and dedicated to "...perpetuating the memory of the fallen of our glorious Crusade," according to the 1940 decree of its founding. And there lie the tombs of Generalísimo Francisco Franco and the founder of the Falange (Franco's fascist party), José Antonio Primo de Rivera (1903-1936), attracting commemorative ceremonies of present-day falangistas, complete with the stiff-armed salute.

Then, after the sweeping Socialist Party electoral victory in in 1982, some town governments began to commemorate Republican and other leftist heroes by putting their names on a few streets and parks. And some of the grandchildren began digging for information in archives of the dictatorship, struggling for access with curators who opened them only reluctantly and partially, and only to those who could demonstrate a personal connection to the papers sought. And with the aid of elderly peasants who now felt empowered to speak, they also began digging into the ground, uncovering unmarked mass graves of school teachers, trade-union members, town officials of the Republican period, poets and others -- even priests, killed by the Falangists for feeding or hiding suspected Republicans.

Even today the Right, including the Catholic hierarchy, wants only its own martyrs remembered, conveniently forgetting those priests slaughtered by Franco's people. And sectors of the Left will not be satisfied by anything less than thorough condemnation of the Falangist mutiny and dictatorship it established, the annulment of all summary trials that condemned opponents of Franco to prison or death, and compensation for the dictatorship's victims and their descendants -- pensions and indemnities that will run into millions of euros.

So it was an important and rather surprising achievement this week when the Socialists and other left parties gained the support of even the opposition Popular Party (which includes Franco's political heirs and other rightists) for parliament to approve legislation to open all the archives to any researcher (as in other European countries), increase indemnizations to Republican veterans and their heirs, permit the children and grandchildren of exiles to opt for Spanish nationality (which should benefit many in Latin America), and -- of greatest symbolic importance -- to redefine the Valle de los Caídos as "a memorial to all the fallen in the Civil War and to those who suffered repression" in the following years. The place will need some serious design reforms. A hammer-and-sickle beside the huge cross may be too much to ask, and a Socialist Party fist with a rose could hardly compete with either of those images. Or better yet: Just pull down the cross -- which in Spain has become a partisan banner -- and set up a representation of Spain's now-democratic constitution.

Photo, top: A crane removes the statue of Francisco Franco from the main entry to the General Military Academy of Zaragoza- EFE, from El País, 24/08/2006.

Photo, side: El Valle de los Caídos, from Falange web forum

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