{"id":1014,"date":"2007-12-26T12:26:51","date_gmt":"2007-12-26T16:26:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/2007\/12\/26\/zapatero-legislated-history\/"},"modified":"2008-11-09T15:49:14","modified_gmt":"2008-11-09T20:49:14","slug":"zapatero-legislated-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=1014","title":{"rendered":"Zapatero & legislated history"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s difficult to believe that in this post-Soviet day and age, a liberal democracy in the western world would consider rewriting their history to create an official, government-approved version. But, that’s what is happening in modern Spain. In October, the Spanish parliament passed a “Law of Historical Memory”. No Pasaran’s<\/a> Joe Noory\u00c2\u00a0warned of this impending farce last year;<\/p>\n

\u00c2\u00a0 Zapatero is exercising a chilling fascist revision of the past. The Spanish Socialist Worker’s Party<\/a>, Alvino-Mario Fantini<\/a> reports, is even dispensing pensions to some who make a nice prop for their revision of the Spanish Civil War.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Ian Buruma\u00c2\u00a0compares Zapatero’s attempt to rewrite history to dictatorships like Red China\u00c2\u00a0in the Japan Times<\/a>;<\/p>\n

\n

There are plausible reasons for enacting such a law. Many people killed by the Fascists during the Spanish Civil War lie unremembered in mass graves. There is still a certain degree of nostalgia on the far right for Franco’s dictatorship. People gathered at his tomb earlier this year chanted “We won the Civil War!,” while denouncing socialists and foreigners, especially Muslims. Reason enough, one might think, for Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero to use the law to exorcise the demons of dictatorship for the sake of democracy’s good health.<\/p>\n

But legislation is a blunt instrument for dealing with history. While historical discussion won’t be out of bounds in Spain, even banning ceremonies celebrating bygone days may go a step too far. The desire to control both past and present is, of course, a common feature of dictatorships.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the Australian<\/a>, Buruma continues;<\/p>\n

While the Spanish Civil War was not on par with the Holocaust, even bitter history leaves room for interpretation. Truth can be found only if people are free to pursue it. Many brave people have risked or lost their lives in defence of this freedom. It is right for a democracy to repudiate a dictatorship, and the new Spanish law is cautiously drafted, but it is better to leave people free to express even unsavoury political sympathies, for legal bans don’t foster free thinking, they impede them.\u00c2<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Richard Rahn writes in today’s Washington Times<\/a> that the law might have the effect of deepening polarization among Spaniards, already divided by language and culture. He points out the under Zapatero’s predecessor, Jose Maria Aznar, Spain\u00c2\u00a0became a successful European\u00c2\u00a0nation, both economically and politically,\u00c2\u00a0once again, but that Zapatero threatens that stability with his socialist game-playing right out of Orwell’s “1984”.<\/p>\n

Beth Twiston Davies (Times Online<\/a>)\u00c2\u00a0joins Joe Noory in the opinion that the Law of Historical Memory is an anti-Catholic swipe;<\/p>\n

Three days before the law of historical memory was passed, nearly 500 of those religious victims were honoured by the Catholic Church in a mass beatification ceremony. The 498 individuals now on the path to sainthood were killed, often after being tortured, in 1934, 1936 and 1937.<\/p>\n

The Vatican described them as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153martyrs of the 21st century\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. Spanish Catholics such as Alejandro Rodr\u00c3\u00adguez de la Pe\u00c3\u00b1a, secretary-general of the Asociaci\u00c3\u00b3n Cat\u00c3\u00b3lica de Propagandistas (The Catholic Propagandists’ Association), describe them as innocent victims of the wave of anti-clerical persecution that swept 1930s Spain.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Left wants to portray the martyrs as politicised clerics ,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d says Rodr\u00c3\u00adguez. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153They don’t want to recognise the fact there was a religious persecution. These were simply Christians who died forgiving their assassins, and were killed out of hatred for the Christian faith.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Imagine if the left in the United States succeeds in forbidding the various ceremonies we’ve to which we’ve become accustomed honoring soldiers from both sides in our own Civil War. Suppose for a minute, we succumb to their demonization of those who say that Senator Joe McCarthy turns out to be right about Communists in the State Department and in Congress – and in Hollywood and ban such research and scholarly work.<\/p>\n

Suppose we weren’t allowed to speak out against John Kerry’s “Winter Soldier” testimony of 1971 during his presidential campaign and that the thousands of veterans who gathered outside of the Capitol had been imprisoned for questioning his veracity at those hearings.<\/p>\n

I don’t what the Europeans are thinking when they allow their governments to limit the discussion of unpopular political opinions, but we need to be on guard against imitating them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s difficult to believe that in this post-Soviet day and age, a liberal democracy in the … Zapatero & legislated history<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,5,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1014","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-historical","category-politics","category-society"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1014","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1014"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1014\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}