The "law of historical memory”

Why European Socialism of any sort needs to be feared: Zapatero is exercising a chilling fascist revision of the past. The Spanish Socialist Worker's Party, Alvino-Mario Fantini reports, is even dispensing pensions to some who make a nice prop for their revision of the Spanish Civil War.

The law, one of Zapatero's many electoral promises, will honor the communists and socialists persecuted by Franco's regime during his 36-year dictatorship.

Specifically, the proposed law stipulates that the Spanish government will provide 60 million Euros--about $76,244,000--in "pensions, compensation and recognition schemes" to honor the estimated 285,000 (according to historian Hugh Thomas) Republican victims of the Civil War and the post-war dictatorship.

It says nothing, however, of the nearly 145,000 members of the Nationalist coalition who were killed in action by Republican forces and executed by their militias. In fact, the law will ban all images, symbols and references to Franco and his regime in all public places (though most statues around the country have already been removed).

Alternately, you can also look at it as a withholding of pensions from those they would like to say (and have said) “never existed”.

no doubt an innocent little oversight on the part of Spain's ruling socialists--the proposed law also manages to completely ignore the more than 4,000 diocesan priests, 2,500 religious and 13 bishops who were brutally murdered--sometimes after being raped or tortured--by Republican militias during the war. (Anti-Catholic bigotry among the Republicans also led to the complete or partial destruction of countless religious icons and more than 7,200 Catholic churches during the war, according to Spanish documents.)

Further, Zapatero is evolving into a fascist, blowing the lid off of the illusion that Socialism and Communism, through their impersonal, inhumane, and coercive outlook are no different than Franco, Mussolini, or Hitler.

Like Americans who joined the Lincoln Brigades, the British writer George Orwell fought against Spain's Nationalists, alongside the POUM (Worker's Party of Marxist Unification), as part of an anti-fascist contingent from Britain's Independent Labour Party.
When Orwell later wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, inspired in part by his experiences, his aim was to provide a warning against totalitarian governments. Of course, the socialist Orwell presumably had Franco's dictatorship in mind.

It is ironic, then, to consider the agenda of Zapatero's socialist government, which involves the kind of censorship, historical revisionism and political repression warned about. In fact, Zapatero's Spain brings to mind a passage in Orwell's classic:

A kilometer away the Ministry of Truth . . . towered vast and white above the grimy landscape. …. [Winston] tried to squeeze out some childhood memory . . . . But it was no use, he could not remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit tableaux occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible.

The similarities are there – Zapatero and the late Franco share a hatred of Catholicism, but more to the point they see people as little more than a lumpenproletariat to be steered if not forced. The very notion of laws imposing themselves on history and it’s memory is a reminder that even when a state carries an image of being pleasant, mid, and meek, that without principals of individual freedom, they are no better that the states of the Europe’s dark past.