Francisco Franco’s burial ground has become a gathering place for Spain’s new wave of fascists
On the 46th anniversary of the death of Francisco Franco, I boarded a bus with an assortment of representatives from Spain’s fringe far right. In their pockets, they had Spanish flags emblazoned with the symbol of Francoism, the eagle, now a banned image in Spain’s public places. They intended to pray for “El Caudillo” — “the supreme leader” — in a special Mass to commemorate his death.
The Big Idea: Battling history
Governments rewrite history to further their political goals. School boards insist on rewritten history textbooks to elevate elite groups or privilege favored narratives. But unsavory motives are only one aspect of the rewriting history project. Other impulses are noble, idealistic, and sincere.
All are significant and will impact our politics, international relations, social understandings, economic arrangements. This project will look at specific battles over history — but it’s never really about history.
It’s always a fight over the present.
It was a gray and chilly late November day and we were headed for the Valley of the Fallen, an enormous basilica — technically larger than St. Peter’s in Rome, though part of it was left unconsecrated so as not to compete with the Vatican — hewn out of a rock face 2,000 feet above Madrid. Its 500-foot stone crucifix marks one of the largest mass graves in the world.
The Valley of the Fallen is an unavoidable totem of the fascist dictator who overthrew Spain’s republic during the Spanish civil war and ruled over the country for more than three decades. And it is a gauge by which memorializing and forgetting that brutal period of Spanish history is measured.
And it is where, after decades of deferment, Spain’s national reckoning with its own history is convulsing. “We don’t have things settled. You can feel it in your family, you can feel it in your school, you can feel it everywhere,” said the Mallorcan artist Toni Amengual. He had exhibited a series of photos documenting the Valley of the Fallen in an exhibition called “Flowers for Franco” at Palma’s Museum of Contemporary Art this summer. “If you don’t want to fight, you don’t talk about Spanish history,” he said.
Francisco Franco’s burial ground has become a gathering place for Spain’s new wave of fascists
On the 46th anniversary of the death of Francisco Franco, I boarded a bus with an assortment of representatives from Spain’s fringe far right. In their pockets, they had Spanish flags emblazoned with the symbol of Francoism, the eagle, now a banned image in Spain’s public places. They intended to pray for “El Caudillo” — “the supreme leader” — in a special Mass to commemorate his death.
The Big Idea: Battling history
Governments rewrite history to further their political goals. School boards insist on rewritten history textbooks to elevate elite groups or privilege favored narratives. But unsavory motives are only one aspect of the rewriting history project. Other impulses are noble, idealistic, and sincere.
All are significant and will impact our politics, international relations, social understandings, economic arrangements. This project will look at specific battles over history — but it’s never really about history.
It’s always a fight over the present.
It was a gray and chilly late November day and we were headed for the Valley of the Fallen, an enormous basilica — technically larger than St. Peter’s in Rome, though part of it was left unconsecrated so as not to compete with the Vatican — hewn out of a rock face 2,000 feet above Madrid. Its 500-foot stone crucifix marks one of the largest mass graves in the world.
The Valley of the Fallen is an unavoidable totem of the fascist dictator who overthrew Spain’s republic during the Spanish civil war and ruled over the country for more than three decades. And it is a gauge by which memorializing and forgetting that brutal period of Spanish history is measured.
And it is where, after decades of deferment, Spain’s national reckoning with its own history is convulsing. “We don’t have things settled. You can feel it in your family, you can feel it in your school, you can feel it everywhere,” said the Mallorcan artist Toni Amengual. He had exhibited a series of photos documenting the Valley of the Fallen in an exhibition called “Flowers for Franco” at Palma’s Museum of Contemporary Art this summer. “If you don’t want to fight, you don’t talk about Spanish history,” he said.
