You are being dismissive of the glorious Basque space program!
Dismissive? You can’t imagine how many bad jokes we made as kids about that “space program”, from pequeño saltatapias (it was the time of the Little Grasshopper on TV) up to devolvieron el casco (casco in this case does not mean helmet, but the empty bottle you return for small change) casting him as a pioneer of recycling in Spain. Ah, to be a childish kid again!
Right, Carrero would have been the one running things and making sure JC behaved. The assasination resulted in that no strong hardliner was in place to prevent the transition — and the latter generation bureaucrats craved what the rest of Europe had, while JC saw that his cousins were doing just fine in the more progressive monarchies.
(Gotta say, that was one infrastructure-intensive assasination scheme. 1970s European terrorists went hard.)
Anyway… yeah, it’s not just Franco. Too many people in too many places around the world grew up with Grandpa telling stories of how the streets were safe to walk at night and men were men and were respectful to ladies and you could live modestly on a blue collar job and other such crap, and getting angry they changed the name of the street to now honor some gay commie.
I can imagine because traces of those jokes are still going around the internet (I took the “Space Program” jokes from twitter users from Spain. In Argentina we were blissfully unaware of Carrero Blanco (at least my generation was).
I study - for my own education - history quite a bit. I have to say I know little about Franco. Always heard he was a bastard but haven’t read up on his life yet. I’m almost afraid to as I’m thinking it will be very depressing. I do plan to catch up on Spain’s history and Franco’s rule very soon though and welcome your comments and particulars of how you see his reign, if you care to share beyond what you’ve already written.
Oh, dear, that is quite above my paygrade and the scope of this board! He ruled Spain for about 30 years before I was even born, and for ten further years. The US presidents during his tenure were (let’s see whether I get them all from memory): Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhover, Kennedy, LBJ, Nixon, Ford. Imagine being asked how you see their presidencies, all of them. A bit much for me.
One of his most acclaimed biographers is Paul Preston. Never read him, but his name keeps coming up. That may be a start, and then follow the book list and the end notes?
Do you speak or read Spanish? I find that watching movies often shows the feeling people had in past times. Censorship was a problem, but also interesting to see decades later.
The semi-autobiographic novel by Laury Lee is worth a read. I say “semi” because he disguised some facts.
PBS had a good documentary series on just that. And I recommend Paul Preston’s biography of Franco and his other books on the Civil War.
Bear in mind, there’s a complicated and violent historical background - Franco and his like didn’t arrive out of nowhere.
I think Pan’s Labyrinth could also give you a feel for the era from a fictionalized magic realism perspective.
Coincidentally, from today’s (print) Guardian:
I’ll check those out - thank you.
Granada Television did six hours of documentary about the war in the 1980s, when many of the players (including Franco’s brother-in-law) were still around to be interviewed. I saw it again while back and it was just as good as I remembered.
