by Mark Sheehan

Created on: September 19, 2008

I often wonder about the phrase: forgive and forget'. Who benefits from such a philosophy; the injured party or the injurer? Who is more likely to utter it; the injured party or the injurer? But most of all, why should we forget what we have forgiven?

To my mind, forgetting cheapens forgiveness as the heartfelt compromise is reduced to little more than a token gesture. No. Remembering what we have forgiven and, perhaps more importantly, why we have forgiven it is the surest way of guarding against a similar injury.

When it comes to history, memory is obviously the main constituent part: accounts of events and descriptions of historical figures are remembrances; memoirs are personal recollections; photographs and archive footage are perhaps the most accurate memories' of all as they are actual moments captured on film.

To strike Franco from Spanish history, then, would be to effectively forget the nation's main contribution to world history over the past century. It would be to forget the tens of thousands who fought and died over political ideals in a civil war that ravaged a whole country. It would be to forget the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica, a tragedy immortalised by Pablo Picasso's painting of the same name, and which reportedly provided a dress rehearsal to Nazi Germany of their Blitzkrieg military strategy.

It would also be to forget the political and ideological enemies' of Franco that were imprisoned throughout his reign as dictator, from 1939 to his death in 1975. It would also be to remove the reason for the establishment of the terrorist organisation ETA, which was set up in 1959 to wage a guerrilla war against Franco and whose bombing and killing campaigns up to modern times have claimed the lives of more than 800 people.

Revisionism does have great value. Often it is the myth that becomes history and not the fact. One prime example is that of Custer's Last Stand at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, when Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and his men fought gallantly against superior numbers of savage American natives. Almost immediately, his name was revered in articles, books and in reams of verse. The 19th century poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox wrote of the American hero in her poem Custer': Ah! Deeds like that the Christ in man reveal / Let Fame descend her thrown at Custer's shrine to kneel.

His early image of a fearless leader and servant to the cause in the Indian Wars, however, has since been revised with a more factual description

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