Homage to Catalonia is George Orwell’s description of his experiences fighting the Spanish Civil War. Like all Orwell’s nonfiction, Down and Out in Paris and London, and The Road to Wigan Pier, Homage to Catalonia is a deeply personal and unflinchingly honest narrative. Unlike many political writers, Orwell was interested in people more than ideology. He favored truth and decency above party platforms. Orwell’s account is biased, but he admitted his biases and warned the reader not to take his or any other account at face value.
Orwell was a partisan for the Republicans first and a journalist reporting on the war second. For this reason, I believe he misses some salient points about that war. Orwell spent the war entirely on the Aragon front. He fought with the POUM Militia, a faction of dissident Communists. He sympathized with the Anarchists who had gained control of Barcelona. Orwell spent much of the war in the most radically left-wing Spanish province with the most extreme left-wing faction of the Republican forces. That naturally skewed his perceptions.
George Orwell believed that Francisco Franco had almost no public support in Spain. He correctly understood that Franco was not genuinely a Fascist. Franco was a conservative who sought to restore the ancien regime of Spain. Orwell believed only conscripts and foreign mercenaries from Germany and Italy fought in the Nationalist army. Only the very rich and romantics supported Franco. I am not so sure about that.
I concede that few Spaniards may have loved Franco. The Spanish Fascist or Phalangist Party was a minuscule, fringe organization before Franco took it over as a vehicle for his political ambitions. Likely, not many people in Spain were enthusiastically in favor of Fascism. Many Spanish must have regarded the Republic as the legitimate government. Under normal circumstances, perhaps, an attempted coup by a few officers would have gained little public support.
Conditions in Spain during the 1930s were not normal. The Spanish far left was determined to convert Spain into a Soviet Socialist Republic, no matter what the voters in Spain wanted. The Spanish left’s policies frightened many Spaniards. Small farmers and shopkeepers did not want to see the socialists nationalize what little property they owned. Pious Spaniards were horrified by the Socialist and Anarchist attacks on the Catholic Church. Spanish patriots did not want the outlying territories of Spain, such as Catalonia and the Basque territories to become autonomous, perhaps as a prelude to independence. For these reasons, many people in Spain supported Franco out of fear of the Communists.
To test this hypothesis, I decided to google Spanish support for Franco. (In fact, I used Duckduckgo. I do not use Google. Google is evil). I did not discover how much support Franco enjoyed during the Spanish Civil War. I did learn that the Leftist dominatged Spanish Cortes has recently enacted a law banning praise for or support of Francisco Franco.
Spain’s Senate house has approved a landmark bill that will ban expressions of support for the former dictator Francisco Franco, and seek to bring ‘justice’ to the victims of the 1936-1939 Civil War and the ensuing dictatorship.
The new ‘Law on Democratic Memory’, which was already approved by the Spanish Congress in July, will for the first time also make unearthing mass graves a ‘state responsibility’.
Organizations that praise or support the policies and leaders of Spain’s 20th-century dictatorship, including the private Francisco Franco Foundation, will now be banned under the legislation. Fines for non-compliance will range from 200 to 150,000 euros.
The new law does not allow for crimes under the dictatorship to be prosecuted, however.
The bill was approved by 128 lawmakers in the Senate on Wednesday, with 113 votes against and 18 abstentions.
So, the Spanish government is defending democracy by limiting democracy. It is protecting freedom by restricting free expression. It is preventing a possible dictatorship by dictatorial means. How Orwellian.
I am not very familiar with Spanish politics. I do not know how many people in Spain would support a Franco-style dictatorship. I imagine that few Spaniards pine for the bad, old days of authoritarian rule. Even if there does happen to be a substantial number of people in Spain who desire a restoration of Fascist rule, it is not going to happen.
Spain is a different country in the twenty-first century than in the 1930s. At the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, Spain was a badly polarized country with little experience of democratic government. Today, Spain is a mature democracy. The Spanish military is not likely to rise against its own elected government. It seems to be unnecessary to ban any expression of support for a dictator who has been dead for half a century. In any case, banning the praise of France will not change the minds of any die-hard Francoists. It only gives the appearance that they are the victims of government persecution.
I think I know what is going on here. The Left-wing parties behind this legislation are not frightened by a revival of Fascist dictatorship. They are taking the opportunity to ban opposition. At first, they will act against overt expressions of praise for Franco. Before long, right-wing or conservative statements will be considered subtle Francoist dog whistles. Opposition to the Spanish left will be equated with supporting Fascism. Eventually, anything but enthusiastic support for the left will be de-platformed and canceled.
This Spanish law would only be a minor concern to me if the trend toward censorship were confined to Spain. Unfortunately, they are part of a wider trend seen throughout the formerly free world. Nation after nation is increasingly imposing controls on speech, ostensibly to fight disinformation or hate speech. Even in the United States, with our First Amendment, we see the government attempting to control information with the collusion of social media platforms. It seems fewer and fewer people anywhere see any virtue in freedom of speech.
George Orwell did not think Franco would win the Spanish Civil War. His fear was that whatever government, whether of the left or the right, that emerged from that conflict would be a dictatorship. In the short term, Orwell was wrong. Franco did win the war. In the long term, it looks as if he might have been correct. Post-Franco Spain is becoming less free. It also appears that the dystopian world he imagined in Nineteen Eighty-Four is getting closer to reality here and in Eurasia.
David's Commonplace Book 