On the night of death Francowhen the group surrounding Felipe González He takes out champagne and starts to toast, FG refuses to do so and has a gesture of supreme elegance that reveals a superior human quality in him:
—I’m not drinking champagne tonight. I do not toast the death of a Spaniard, even if he is my first enemy.
Indeed, there was something tribal and anthropophagy about that street orgy on November 20th. Something primitive in which González refuses to participate.
What would you have said Francisco Umbralwho wrote these lines, if he had attended the apotheosis of that “tribal orgy” and cannibalism that are the triumphant splendor of 50 years in freedomaccording to which it would be said that it was Pedro Sanchez Who, with his own hands, ended the general’s life?
Umbral’s testimony reminds us that many of the real anti-Francoists, leftists who fought against the regime when it had consequences (not like these past freedom fighters, who were already born or raised in constitutional Spain), showed a much more temperate and rational attitude towards the dictator than the one encouraged by the subsidized and furious campaign of this macabre anniversary.
If it were really in the interest of the Government to celebrate the beginning of democratic opening, The logical thing would be, in any case, that what was commemorated was not on November 20, but on November 22. Date on which Juan Carlos Ithe main promoter of the regime change, was proclaimed King of Spain.
The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, speaks during the ‘Spain in Freedom’ event, in the Auditorium of the Reina Sofía National Museum of Art, on January 8, 2025.
That instead they are celebrating the biological fact The death of the leader testifies that what moves the left that has joined this vicious imprecation is something other than the exaltation of the triumph of freedom. It is the confession of what he recognized Vazquez Montalban: “Against Franco we were better”
What lies behind this approach was also wonderfully explained by Umbral himself, when he pointed out that the rhetoric of “the victory of democracy” sounded “a little hollow” to Felipe González, because what he had inherited was “the great throw to a dead general, whom we had respectfully left to agonize in bed.”
This “triumphalism with a gloomy echo” reflected a frustration for the columnist: “We had killed a dead man. “We never triumphed over the dictatorship, and that is why the dictatorship continued to triumph over us in some way.”
And, ironically, the celebration of the dictator’s death represents Franco’s last victory over the left, which has never tolerated his nemesis dying in bed.
This is how it is explained, returning to Umbral, that “our manual progression, quite the opposite [que Felipe González]prolong that carnivorous and tribal night, when we all ate Franco’s corpse, for many years.”
The left continues to be tortured by the fact that, as noted Emilio Romero“anti-Francoism was never decisive, and Francoism was one of acclamation and that is why he died when his time came”
Therefore, the 50 years in freedom They constitute a way of getting even for the shame that they have carried since then in the face of the reality that it was the Franco regime itself that made democracy possible.
The way to compensate for this defeat is to now realize your dream of the pending revolution. Remove the dead man from his grave (it was already done with the exhumation of his remains from the Valley of the Fallen in 2019) and defeat him retroactively.
Historical memory is the vehicle of that resentment and the instrument for the consummation of revenge.
The left is demonstrating once again that today’s so-called democratic memory has never sought an objective and complex reconstruction of History in pursuit of equitable reparation. But, as argued Pedro González Cuevas“it has never had any other purpose than to prescribe a “positive and uncritical assessment of the experience of the Second Republic, while at the same time demonizing the Franco regime relentlessly and without nuances.”
The irony is that the reasoning behind this obligatory memory of the Francoist obituary reveals a logic typical of Orwellian Stalinism. And so, ironically, the government campaign that congratulates itself on “freedom” and everything that can be done today that could not be done during the dictatorship, declares certain ideas illegal (prohibiting organizations dedicated to the “exaltation” of the dictatorship) and imposes an official version of the past.
A seamless approach: since Franco was a totalitarian dictator, we initiated totalitarian legislation to prohibit as a “hate crime” even considered trials of the pre-constitutional period.
And it is precisely the prohibition of discussion and the constant noise of demonization that promotes the excitement of the nostalgia. In that sense, No one has done more to rehabilitate Franco’s figure than the Sánchez governmentas demonstrated by the SocioMétrica survey published today by EL ESPAÑOL.
The confirmation that the current left does not understand the transition to democracy as a reconciliation between the winners and the losers, but as a mere investment ex post of the victors for the vanquished, should finish convincing the right that historical memory, from its very approach by Zapaterohas never consisted of anything other than the replacement of a discourse of reconciliation with one of revenge.
The PP must understand that—citing González Cuevas again—the Democratic Memory Law “aims at delegitimizing the trajectory of all the ideological traditions of the Spanish right,” and not only of the Franco regime.
And since he already committed the strategic clumsiness of condemning Francoism at the request of the PSOE, The PP should not again make the mistake of sanctioning a narrative that, by disavowing its origin as a party, ultimately delegitimizes it as well.
The exclusion of Juan Carlos I of the acts of commemoration of the restoration of the Monarchy is conclusive proof that the memorialist discourse, by condemningly reinterpreting the past in the light of today’s progressive democratic fundamentalism, results in the demonization of the very architects of democratic Spain.
Therefore, the fact that the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory has requested to fine the Emeritus King for acknowledging in his memoirs that the Crown owes Franco is nothing more than the logical deployment of democratic memory to its ultimate consequences. Since its spirit consists of damnation of memory of the pre-constitutional antecedents, the remembrance of the beginning of democracy, by virtue of its own revisionist logic, ends up canceling itself.
Hence, the same Association has demanded, invoking the Democratic Memory Law that prohibits Francoism, to remove the name of Juan Carlos I from the streets, buildings and public spaces, arguing that, since he was named successor by Franco, he is “a leader of Francoism.”
The right must therefore recognize that the incomplete memory that informs the fiftieth anniversary involves a devious trick to deprive the opposition and the Transition itself of legitimacy. That’s why, It is imperative to say loud and clear that there is nothing to celebrate today.