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The death dance

In Spain, we didn't have the guillotine and it seems that now we have little time to read our own history

ANTONIO ORTÍN

Friday, 27 July 2018, 12:25

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Spain, from outside, must seem paradoxical and at the same time grotesque. A country that is sometimes one of progress, with the lucidity of Lorca, Cervantes and Quevedo. One able to produce the genius of Galdós, Severo Ochoa or Barbacid with the soundtrack of De Falla, Morente, Serrat or Sabina. And, however, tangled up every step of the way with its Civil War dead. From Franco to Queipo de Llano via the Paracuellos Massacres, family lunches with stories of atrocities carried out by one band or the other to see who was worse; the one who raped the militia woman or the nun; the reds who dragged the priest around naked or the fascists who paraded the bodies of two UGT trade unionists around the village. And on we go; starting the education reform with Religious Education for the umpteenth time, as if in the Pisa report the Finns were better than us at reading the Gospel rather than algebra or biology.

That's why I believe we must appear a little weird in the eyes of those who look at us from other countries. Unlike the French, we haven't been unable to close the chapters of our past. We didn't have the guillotine and it seems that now we have little time to read our own history.

And perhaps that's why we can't understand that that was an atrocious dispute in which, really, the only victor was the pain of a people split in two. Or in three or four, because here brothers betrayed cousins and vice versa; socialists against anarquists, and Francoists who wanted to get rid of the Falangists. And so the Historical Memory law has just revived this continual loop of vindictiveness, leaving behind the fair demands of the families of victims in mass graves to be able to identify and bury the remains of their loved ones, to become an instrument that has brought civil war back to coexistence.

Of course the shameless exhibition of the dictatorship in the Valle de los Caídos is an outrage. Neither do I understand why Franco's general Queipo de Llano has a crypt in the Macarena Basilica in Seville.

But, in a look back at the brief history of Spain in the 21st century, if the Civil War deaths are the issue that is causing most commotion, that doesn't say much for us. Among other reasons because perhaps without realising we are destroying the heritage of the Transition. That reconciliation was not, despite the arguments of populists, a denial. In short, it only meant a consensus to allow us to continue to move forward together. Without forgetting, but also without going back every minute over what caused us so much pain because on all sides there were people who hated others to death.

I was really hoping that Sánchez's new government would choose priorities that would affect us more closely: repeal the labour reforms, end Rajoy's "death by austerity" affecting dependency aid and social spending or find out who benefited from Montoro's tax evasion amnesty.

That's why I find all this dancing with death so disconcerting.

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