Pfft. Total class warfare DID break out. The difference was that the people who started it actually owned the newspapers and TV stations. The kind of economy that Pinochet allowed in does nothing but make a handful of millionaires and a whole countryful of starving people, and the measures required to make it happen are brutal, inhuman and immoral.
Read Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine” sometime and tell me that Pinochet was the LESSER of two evils. Someone should have hanged Milton Friedman decades before he died.
Chouan, on this board there are a lot of intelligent, well-read, and well-educated people who express doubts, condemnations, and questions about those raids. Then there are others of us who think that anyone who forgets the Tokyofirebombingraids that followed the Dresden raid has irretrievably weakened their argument against the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I’m sorry to sound so harsh - I’m just sick of the idea common to a lot of people that an atomic bomb is automatically a more inhumane attack than any else that might occur, and you walked into one of my hot-buttons.
(Picasso couldn’t have carried Goya’s jockstrap, but that’s another thread.)
Even if it’s purely apocryphal, this story sums up Franco’s merits and abominations: one time as Franco was going down a rank of soldiers during a ceremonial inspection, a soldier spit a mouthful of food in his face, protesting that it was terrible. Franco looked into the situation and determined that yes, the food was terrible and ordered it improved and the officers responsible punished. Then he had the soldier shot.
Another telling detail was the trousers he designed for his army: they had a reinforced, slightly padded patch in the seat, which took the shape of several concentic circles centered on the anus. (a few years ago surplus specimens could be bought at Banana Republic) Again, from a practical standpoint, this showed Franco’s honest concern for his soldiers’ comfort. But none whatsoever for the morale of people who had to go around with bullseyes on their assholes.
I think he agrees with you. He was just point out that good people have to use terribly brutal methods to defeat bad people. The difference is often a matter of timing, alternatives ,and what happens afterward.
For example, The U.S. did drop really big bombs against one of the most implacable and cruel monstrosities of a nation ever created by the cold, callous selfishness of man. But we did so not because we wanted to kill them, but because they were trying to kill us, and because the alternatives were likely worse for both of us (civvies and military), and not without kindness to the defeated foe once they were defeated. And I thik that was part of his point.
smiling bandit, you may be right. Like I said, it’s something of a hot button issue, so I’m inclined to look for sarcastic tone first, when I probably should assume serious. Chouan, I’m sorry to have flown off the handle at you without first making sure you intended to be sarcastic.
Disclaimer: Franco haters here as opposed to my late father’s open idolatry of the bloody pygmy.
I have to take issue with the epithet"anti-Semitic"applied to the Franco regime because it is totally untrue. The Franco regime was never anti-Semitic (or anti-Muslim, for that matter). In matters of religion it was strongly anti-atheist (which was joined with anticommunism) but never anti-Jewish. The Spanish government helped many Jews escape from the Nazis (witness Ángel Sanz Briz, a Spanish diplomat during World War II who helped many Hungarian Jews escape from Nazi persecution by issuing them Spanish passports).
I am not sure what the use of garrote has to do with Franco. It was the method used before him and he did not invent it. Contrary to what Wikipedia says, it does not work by asphyxiation but, as the entry in Spanish Wikipedia: Garrote vil. correctly states, by severing the spinal cord and cervical vertebrae. It was developed in the 19th century as a faster, more humane way of execution (sort of like the “Spanish guillotine”) and was used exclusively by civil authorities for common crimes. All of those subject to military law were executed by firing squad. It seems to me that the dislike for the method rests on unfamiliarity and ignorance. In any case, Franco had nothing to do with it. It is amusing to think how a country like the USA could possibly lecture or censure other countries regarding the death penalty, then or now.
The years of political repression just after the war were terrible and unjustified but after that was over the death penalty was very sparsely used in Spain and mostly for crimes like murders which would have got the same penalty in the USA. When it comes to the death penalty America has few competitors so using that reason to justify an invasion would have been… picturesque.
That homosexuals were persecuted is true but, come on, it was pretty much the same if not worse in the rest of the western world and since then Spain has opened up in that aspect much more than America. And yet nobody in Spain that I know of says we would be justified in invading America in order to give American homosexuals their rights.
That honor killings were allowed, well, I’d need some evidence for that. Of course, one might find some example where a sympathetic judge might be lax and find extenuating circumstances when a crime was committed in passion but I doubt one could find evidence that the Spanish system of the time regularly condoned “honor killings”. Seeing how blacks in America at that time could not get any kind of meaningful justice from whites and how the system is, even today, so tilted in favor of the rich and wealthy it would be a poor justification for an invasion.
I would think that it should be for the Spanish people to decide their own government so I find amusing this attitude that the countries and/or governments of the world have a right to exist only at the pleasure of the U.S. who would have some right to invade and set up governments at will. Well, it doesn’t always work so easily does it? How’s it working in… what’s the name of that country again?
150 years earlier Napoleon decided that he was going to liberate and modernize Spain and the Spanish people did not care for the favor and the popular rising and guerrilla war cost Napoleon dearly. No matter that the French called the guerrillas “terrorists” and carried out some barbaric reprisals against the civilian population (as depicted by these famous sketches Goya’s Disasters of War), the Spanish people, who disagreed on many things, were almost unanimous in that they did not want to be governed by a foreign puppet.
Any attempt by America to invade Spain would have met a similar response. Clearly America could have won militarily but they would have been totally unable to control Spain or its people who had not attacked anybody and would have seen any invasion as unjust. I doubt that the results of an American military invasion in the late 1940s would have achieved anything positive. And no other countries would have participated anyway.
After the end of WWII the allies were in no mood for starting new wars and invading Spain as what they had just declared in Nuremberg…
…would have shown that Nuremberg was about revenge and not about what they were preaching.
In March 4, 1946, the US, UK and France published a joint declaration repudiating Franco but saying they would not intervene in Spain. After the war The US and the UK had little interest in Spain. It was actually the Soviet Union who had a strong anti-Spanish stance. On 17 April 1946 the Polish representative at the UN declared that Spain had a formidable army, a powerful war industry and was well advanced in the development of nuclear weapons. An investigative commission was appointed and their conclusion was that Spain was a “potential threat”. This conclusion was just laughable because the Spanish army at the time was ill-dressed, ill-fed and had no equipment to speak of.
In this climate the US and the UK saw in Franco first and foremost an enemy of the Soviets and an ally against communism. Franco also played that card very well.
Still, on December 12, 1946, the UN General Assembly approved a resolution against Spain (supported mainly by the communist countries and Mexico) and almost all ambassadors were withdrawn and Spain was isolated. This gave Franco internal support from many who disliked him but believed foreigners had no right to intervene in Spain. In Madrid there was a massive popular demonstration of support for Franco and of repudiation of the UN. Franco resorted to nationalist rhetoric and came out stronger. The situation also justified extreme police measures. Many Spanish (I was too young to care at the time, but this a matter of record) were opposed to Franco but very few would have wanted a foreign invasion and a government set up by foreigners. It is just human nature.
In 1947 the same climate continued but in 1948 the attitude of the US and the UK began to change as their confrontation with the Soviets was increasing. They saw in Franco an anticommunist and they also saw economic opportunities for sales and investments in Spain.
In the early 1950s the USA set up military bases in Spain and Spain became a key ally against communism. America supported Franco in his repression of leftists just like it supported right-wing dictators in South America and around the world.
—Long day. Just thought I’d put that out there. Though I doubt I have much if anything else to add, thus this post may well be my first sole contribution to this rather misinformed OP.
Redfury - some of your observations hold water, and the Cold War connection is a theme that explains much, but the ‘misinformed’ statement seems out of hand.
The anti-semitism was ingrained in the paramilitary machine throughout Spain after '39. I saw enough gut-churning evidence of this at the time, and any attempt to protest would result in pretty nasty repercussions.
As I’ve said, I never mentioned invasion or military action. Merely asked why we supported the regime. I’m a long way from advocating USA (or UK for that matter) as World Cops. Just affronted that we bankrolled the regime for so long.
As for the Spanish public’s right to self-determination; Hmm. They only had to wait 30-odd years for Franco to die before having the opportunity to elect their party of choice. Careful with that word ‘misinformed’ my friend
Just a somewhat related question for those in the know…did Franco know about Juan Carlos’s democratic tendencies when he chose him to take over the country after his (Franco’s) death?
I’d like to hear some examples of this. My family’s experience (Sephardi Jews from former Spanish-occupied Morocco) is more in line with RedFury’s assessment. They never suffered persecution or discrimination under Franco, and after Moroccan independence in the 1950s many of them settled in Madrid and Malaga - and were apparently among the first Jews to live on the Spanish mainland since the expulsion.
>A work of political propaganda. Picasso was a Communist. Plus, Loyalist fighters were holed up in Guernica at the time, and they had the support of the locals.
>Not that that justifies the Germans firebombing the city, just pointing out that there were military targets in and around the city.
>Lots more civilians died in the bombing of Dresden, too. And Hiroshima. And Nagasaki. But we acknowledge that these were necessary military operations to defeat the Germans and the Japanese, don’t we?
Jesus. Wow. Look, Hitler’s forces firebombed the village for hours, chasing the surviving vilagers into the woods around the town, and as their last step they repeatedly strafed the woods. Casualties were something like 60%. The only thing Guernica had going was its symbolic importance to people who, apparently rightly, disapproved of Franco. It was one of the most depressing spectacles in the history of humankind.
Picasso was an artist first and foremost, and avoided politics until the visceral image of the annihilation of Guernica wouldn’t let him. I don’t think we should ask artists for our political wisdom, but we might very well ask them for our visions. It’s hard to see Dresden or the atom bomb targets as pure visciousness in the same way. In my humble opinion.
You might want to google CEDADE and see what comes up. While they were officially independent of government, it is widely acknowledged that from the 60s they received significant support from the shadier parts of Franco’s machine. I saw a number of disturbing marches through Barcelona in the early 70s, with the Civil Guard cheering them on.
On a more operational level, friends of mine have described unchallenged beatings of Jews by Civil Guards as a regular part of life in the late 60s.
Ironic since one of the exemplars of coexistence and cooperation between Jews Christians and Muslims was Spain in the middle-ages.
That said, anti-semitism isn’t central to my criticism of the Falange, nor do I maintain that it was central to their policies (my OP probably over-egged that); more the general elitist and totalitarian regime and suppression of dissent.
The plural of anecdote is not facts. You agree with the OP’s assertion that Franco was an “anti-semite” and I’ve provided concrete evidence to the contrary. Perhaps you’ll do the same on your side of the discourse?
And note as well, that you’re debating two people that actually lived there during that period. One of them a Gibraltan of the Jewish persuasion (and a very smart one at that, as I’ve met her in meatspace), and the other, a PSOE card-carrying member and rabid anti-Franco* poster, born and bred in Spain during the latter years of his dictatorship.
*To know this you only need look at my posting history here.
Which being the case, I concede that my more limited experience and information is contrary to the wider evidence, and retract the anti-semitic tag. My error. I phail
Notwithstanding that, I still maintain my original premise that more could & should have been done through sanctions and diplomacy than was the case. Not that it’s a new or unrepeated phenomenon - Zimbabwe etc.
I don’t know about the total number of wounded, but the total number of fatalities from Guernica probably don’t number over 2000 at the maximum. Many think the numbers of dead were far fewer than that.
Compare that to the 25,000 (low estimate) who died in Dresden, or the hundreds of thousands who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (either immediately or in the aftermath).
My point is that, in terms of overall destruction and loss of life, the bombing of Guernica pales in comparison to the bombings of these other cities–which were also targeted more for their symbolic significance than for their strategetic importance. In war, this kind of stuff happens, and to great effect, too (witness the Japanese surrender). It just seems hypocritical to use Guernica as an example of Franco’s atrocities when 1.) it was carried out by the German Luftwaffe (albeit in support of the Nationalist campaign on the ground, attempting to stamp out the Loyalists in northern Spain), and 2.) the Allies carried out similar bombings on an even larger scale (and with justification–the comparison isn’t just for sarcasm–thanks, smiling bandit).
As for Picasso, he didn’t just get up and decide to be political one day. He was commissioned by the Republican government in Spain to do a large painting for the World’s Fair. To separate his artistic vision from his political affiliations seems an arbitrary separation, to me. But that’s a debate for another thread.
[QUOTE=Slithy Tove]
(Picasso couldn’t have carried Goya’s jockstrap, but that’s another thread.)
Even if it’s purely apocryphal, this story sums up Franco’s merits and abominations: one time as Franco was going down a rank of soldiers during a ceremonial inspection, a soldier spit a mouthful of food in his face, protesting that it was terrible. Franco looked into the situation and determined that yes, the food was terrible and ordered it improved and the officers responsible punished. Then he had the soldier shot.
[QUOTE]
Sounds like that soldier wasn’t familiar with the proper chain of command for issuing complaints!
Spitting in the face of the Generalisimo certainly wasn’t the right way to go about it.
