💰 Spanish politicians talk more about the Civil War in 2022 than 30 years ago
This has little to do with an authentic quest for truth and much to do with next year's elections in the 21st Century's polarised media environment.
🔊 Audio comment:
Spain has another problem with history. I’m certainly not going to try and win any historical debates today. Every reader in Spain has his own family stories, his own favourite books or references or historian, about what happened 90 years ago in the Second Republic and then the Civil War. Personally, and despite everything that has been written, I think there has still been no definitive history or novel or film about it all, not in the deep and broad and systemic manner of the First or Second World Wars or the Holocaust. When I arrived in Spain 24 years ago, that was all long ago and not spoken much about except in history classes. The young Spaniards that became our friends were the first generation to grow up in democracy as part of a modern Europe, following the death of Franco in 1975. Their parents and grandparents had done that hard work, and people were mostly just enjoying that state of affairs. Aznar had just become Prime Minister, ETA was still killing people, everybody still smoked everywhere and the economy was all still in pesetas. The euro, the real-estate boom, the Madrid train bombings, Twitter and the iPhone were all years in the future. In fact, outside of the history classes, I don’t recall any significant conversations about the Civil War with friends at all. There was an Amnesty Act in 1977 to paper over the legal cracks of past political deeds that might otherwise have been problematic but to be honest I often confuse “amnesty” with “amnesia” when thinking about that. That page had been turned by Spanish society, in its own way. An exciting 21st Century finally beckoned.
In 2022, references to the Civil War are all over Spanish social media and TV news almost every day, but not in a manner that history professors would approve of. The comments are mostly selective, ideological, biased and tribal.
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