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| Yes | 19% | 41 votes | Total: 215 votes | |
| No | 81% | 174 votes |
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Add to FavoritesGeneral Franco's plaques and memorials have been removed from prominent locations in post-Franco Spain, by Prime Ministerial order in 2004. General Franco nominated King Juan Carlos as his eventual successor in a newly democratic Spain. This is the one and only good thing he did.
Franco forcibly removed thousands of children from their opposing republican parents, gave them to his fascist sympathisers and had them brainwashed, even changing their names. Small children, now 70 years later, recall vividly their fathers being executed by hasty firing squad, against prison walls. Red/Rojo left wing supporters of Spain's democratically elected Second Republic were crushed by General Francisco Franco's nationalist forces during the barbarous, vicious 1936-1939 civil war. Franco's opponents were punished in the years just after the war had finished. Franco had 37 years until his death in 1975 to complete his pogroms against the defenceless republicans.
Franco imposed a culture of silence and secrecy throughout Spain during the early years of his dictatorship. An estimated 500,000 men women and children died during the civil war. In addition a further 60,000 to 100,000 republicans were killed or died in prison.
Franco's supporters received a promise they would not be prosecuted for crimes committed. In 1977, an amnesty law was passed confirming this promise. An unwritten pacto de olvido (pact of forgetting) was adhered to until the mass graves of Franco's victims began to be unearthed. In 2000, relative's associations organised marking the mass graves. When Prime Minister Zapatero was elected in 2004 he reminded Spain's voters that his father, a Captain in the Republican Army, was executed by Franco's Nationalist Army. Zapatero marked the 70th anniversary of Franco's military coup, facilitated by a British pilot, in 2006 by drafting a controversial historical memory law intended to facilitate the finding and exhumation of mass graves by re-opening previously closed archives.
Zapatero ordered the removal of Francoist plaques and statues from public places and prison sentencs meted out under Franco were deemed unjust. This process was stonewalled by the 1977 amnesty law. Latin American countries specialised in systematically stealing children from their parents, however the 70 year time span has limited redress in Spain. A public debate on Spain's lost children is long overdue.
To those who say it is time Spain turned the page on its past and should not remove Franco from history then they must realise Spain is still at war - a war of words and feelings between left and right.
This writer had a Basque friend who lived under Franco's hatred of the Basque country Pais Vasco.
Learn more about this author, Hibernianscribe.
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No
Franco's name should never be eliminated from Spain's history books, but educators and historians should make sure recorded history conforms to reality, not the sanitized version that former Franco partisans or his modern-day apologists might prefer.
Spaniards who love freedom and are committed to human rights have every right to look back on the Franco Era with greatest sadness. Surely it was not their country's finest hour. But ignoring the Franco Era, a period that spanned four decades, is neither practical nor desirable. The best way for a nation and its people to deal with a troubled past is to face what happened realistically and then learn from it.
Franco himself and his supporters worked carefully over many decades to create a sanitized image of El Caudillo, and their efforts succeeded. But even though Franco is generally no longer mentioned in the same breath with other murderous despots of the 20th Century, the facts cannot be altered. True, Franco was more a monarchist at heart than an actual Fascist, but, as an enemy of democracy, he was a willing and often enthusiastic friend of Hitler and Mussolini. He supported the Axis before and during World War II, although that support stopped short of Spain's entering the war. From the 1930s to his death in 1975, Franco presided over an authoritarian, repressive regime. Some in Spain have long been concerned that there has not been enough attention placed over the past 30 years on the atrocities of the Franco regime.
In October 2008, The Guardian, a British newspaper, reported that a Spanish judge, Baltasar Garzon, formally declared Franco's repression, lasting from 1939 to 1952, a crime against humanity. Among the estimated 114,000 people reportedly murdered by Francoists was poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca. The judge ordered the digging up of mass graves, including one where Lorca is buried.
Spanish citizens who value their country's democratic transformation and want to see Spanish democratic institutions strengthened can't be blamed for wanting to rid the country of all vestiges of Franco worship. It's one thing to disassemble monuments dedicated to Franco's so-called accomplishments, but there is no way his name can or should be excised from the pages of history.
History books should not glorify Franco's regime or ignore the terrible price the nation paid for his repression. Rather, today's historians can best honor victims of Franco's repression and best serve current and future generation of Spanish students by telling the truth about what really happened and analyzing the meaning of these events and their lasting effects.
Learn more about this author, Jake Betz.
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