History Fighting to Repeat Itself - or Not?
For those of you who have not heard, consider this:
Spain's parliament is debating the Law for the Recovery of the Historical Memory, which is a bill that will - among many, many other things - provide financial compensation to the victims of the dictatorship, recover thousands of bodies that remain in unmarked graves even forty years after Franco's passing and remove statues of and tributes to the dictator.
Picture above: Nationalist dictator Franco, in full get-up.
For the most part this is just fine with me. I believe it is always a good idea to reexamine some of the more painful periods of our lives, of our histories - personal and worldly - to remember the losses, whatever they were, and reinforce the lesson either learned or missed the first time around. (You know, so history doesn't repeat itself).
Spanish Popular Party spokesman Gustavo de Aristegui had this to say about the proposed bill: "Our transition from dictatorship to democracy is an example in Europe and I think that we've got to cherish this and not re-open wounds that have already been able to be cured, wounds that are healed...You know, leave things be, it's not an issue any more, I mean people on the street are not worried about these things any more."
What an opportunity! If Spain's civil war is such an example, shouldn't Spain be setting one?
Germany had an excellent opportunity at one time, but just this month an international conference was held in Iran to debate and question the existence and reality of the Holocaust...What? Germany specifically and Religion generally, in my opinion, have failed if even a few angry men think it is necessary to squat like Primitives in a country who supports nuclear development - another lesson left unlearned - and rail on Israel. You want to change the world? Hey, morons, don't kill people, don't wish the undoing of their cities, their countries. If it is absolutely necessary to intervene, which is ridiculous, you offer to convert them, you share what you've learned, you love them...And leave them the hell alone.
In any case, Spain seems to be struggling with what to do next - or nearly forty years later. Oh, things move so slowly. They are at the proverbial fork in the road: Take down the statues, remove the Franco legacy from mountainsides and state buildings and make things right with families scarred by the war, or leave the settled dust settled because the past isn't important to anyone "on the street," as it was put. Nobody worries about these things anymore.
I do. What do you think? Can't Spain agree on a happy medium - is it worth such division? I propose a happy medium: Pay the 
survivors and victims families, find their bodies. And leave up every statue of Franco there is. Document the war, the real stories on all sides and podcast it non-stop for fifty years across the entire world, so no one will forget what everything from backward politics to mere differences in believe, in tradition, can do to a nation and its people - the people that serve it.
Picture above: Should it stay or should it go? Franco's tomb - you can see it for miles...
Reference:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/5192228.stm
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6625505
posted by J.Helen Shaw at 12:57 PM
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