A few kilometers from Budapest is an absolutely spectacular museum of Stalinism. You can visit inside, with signage, gadgets and all kinds of nostalgic junk, and you can also go out to a large patio to admire in fascination the gigantism of the preserved sculptures, the enormous sculptural friezes, including two enormous boots of Lenin without the rest of the body. It is a marvel of a museum, with everything quite well explained in its plaques, its details, its chronologies and its story, to put it like today. Things are not going like that here yet, and I don’t know if we are in the legislative conditions for them to do so.
As much as good will and even congenital historical optimism has made many think that the two laws of historical memory (Zapatero’s and Sánchez’s) have satisfactorily resolved the present management of Franco’s monumental past, Daniel Rico has just ruled out lands much of the mirage with a forceful plot and style of clearly Ferlosian origin and, for that very reason, damned convincing. I don’t know if we should start over from scratch, I’m sure not, but of course the plot device is implacable and, above all, democratically irreproachable. In fact, if the current legislative articles express any deficiency, it is precisely the democratic insufficiency of laws intended more to bury in oblivion and attics the monumental testimonies inherited from Franco’s regime by demolishing them, saving them, hiding them and archiving them.
The ideological and corrective bias of history has weighed so heavily on these laws that they fail to fulfill the democratic and pedagogical objective that they themselves defend without much success.
The objective of a democratic society cannot be to correct history to pretend that we are good and clean and holy from the cradle, but rather to explain the process that has led from the atrocity of July 1936 to democratic opulence. Among its virtues is not the concealment of the past, the denial of its horror, nor vengeful triumphalism or deferred anti-Francoism, which is the most ridiculous anti-Francoism on earth, where no one stakes anything anymore and where the epic emphasis on its defeat It replaces the pedagogical rationality that explains us as a society heir to a dirty past. The ideological and corrective bias of history has weighed so heavily on these laws that they fail to fulfill the democratic and pedagogical objective that they themselves defend without much success.
These are some of the serious apprehensions that a notebook by Daniel Rico, precisely titled with a joke, has put on the table: Who is afraid of Francisco Franco?, no matter how much your friends accidentally read Who fears Francisco… Rico, his father, recently deceased. The temptation to glean here and there the brilliance of the text is very high, but perhaps it is preferable to do the opposite and concentrate the entire meaning of an excellent diatribe against the intention and manners of the two laws of historical memory with a single phrase: the The objective of public memory policies cannot be concealment and deferred revenge, but rather “making memory without erasing history.” From page 50 of the little book, the chain of arguments ends up becoming suffocating, especially for the left, because this legislation tends to contradict precisely the bases of enlightened thought and the basic function of solvent democracies: pedagogy, explanation, reasoning and contextualization. Demolish all equestrian statues so that we will never know again that they were there for more than half a century in praise of a despotic and criminal victory without rate? Demolish the testimonies of Franco’s power instead of explaining what they did there, who put them there, who built them, what they celebrated? The weakness that this behavior transmits, the lack of confidence in the strength of democracy borders on the infantile, as Rico points out, and seems to accept as a way of managing the past its concealment as a variant of a kind of ethnic cleansing of Franco’s monumental past.
The only sensible policy in monumental terms with the Francoist past can only be “compensatory or additive, not substitute.”
Plural memory does not exist because it is by definition individual and fallible: history is responsible for explaining them and documenting their reliability and the veracity of their memories, almost always false. What it can do, and Rico defends in his notebook, is to take care of a “plural policy of memory” without equating it to the winner and the defeated or claiming any equidistance because it would once again be a falsification of the past. The only sensible policy in monumental terms with the Franco past can only be “compensatory or additive, not substitute.” The “ideological overweight” that Rico identifies in the law of the year 2022 runs the risk of incurring in posthumous revenge and aspiring to the illusory “cancellation of the dead memory of the enemy”, as if history were truly “reversible and its excesses could corrected by resorting to landscaping” (the humor of the book is also of the Ferlosian variety, by the way). Whatever the survival of the neo-Franco nostalgia that encourages the marketing and the speeches of Vox, the democratic demand regarding that past does not flow through denial but through its mature, nuanced, forceful and even entertaining explanation of horror, including the monuments to horror.
‘Who’s afraid of Francisco Franco?’ Daniel Rico. Anagrama, 2024. 160 pages. 11.90 euros
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