← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Franco
Thread ID: 6300 | Posts: 8 | Started: 2003-04-23
2003-04-23 19:59 | User Profile
*Our hero Franco [both] hits it big, heh, heh:
Book about Spanish anti-Commie Francisco Franco [not part-Jew but often claimed to have been].*
[url=http://www.guardian.co.uk/spain/article/0,2763,940967,00.html]http://www.guardian.co.uk/spain/article/0,...,940967,00.html[/url]
Giles Tremlett in Madrid Tuesday April 22, 2003 The Guardian
A controversial, revisionist history of the Spanish civil war which claims it was sparked by a leftwing revolution and that Winston Churchill was crueller than General Francisco Franco has proved a surprise publishing success. The Myths of the Civil War, by the former communist guerrilla turned Franco apologist Pio Moa, has outraged the Spanish left and many mainstream historians with its attacks on the icons of the period.
But it has become the second most popular non-fiction book in Spain as it is snapped up by former Franco supporters and those curious to see a different interpretation of a civil war which most historians agree was started by a rightwing military uprising against a democratic government.
The book's success comes as Spain experiences a belated awakening of popular interest in the fratricidal three-year war that ushered in nearly 40 years of Franco dictatorship, with the emergence of "historical memory" groups dedicated to digging up victims of his firing squads.
But Moa has no time for those investigating Franco's cruelty, claiming they have cooked the figures and that the left - along with Churchill in the second world war - were even more ruthless and bloodthirsty.
"Franco did not think he had rebelled against a democratic republic but against an extreme danger of revolution ... Undoubtedly, he was right," Moa states.
"Franco's victory saved Spain from a traumatic revolution ... his regime saved it from involvement in the world war, modernised society and established the conditions for a stable democracy," he adds.
Moa paints those who joined the International Brigades in the late 1930s to fight Franco as a bunch of lawless, anti-Spanish communists.
He lashes out at historians who have written about Franco and the civil war, including the British author Paul Preston, and claims there is a leftwing academic plot to demonise the dictator.
Moa, who in 1976, the year after Franco died, helped found an armed communist revolutionary group, now blames modern rightwing politicians for not defending the dictator's reputation. "The right will swallow anything just so that it does not seem itself to be Francoist," he complains.
His book had been largely ignored by academics until state television devoted a programme to him, bringing accusations that the rightwing government of Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar's People's party backed his thesis.
"Moa gave up terrorism and claims to have become a liberal but, in reality, has been washed up on the shores of 1950s Francoism," retorted Javier Tussell, one of Spain's foremost historians. "He is by no means a professional historian ... The Myths of the Civil War is systematically against the left and in favour of the extreme right. It drips with extravagance."
Special reports Spain
2003-04-23 20:04 | User Profile
[maybe I should change my avatar? But Franco was not racial, just anti-Commie...]
2003-04-23 20:11 | User Profile
I was laying over in Spain during the 1970's when Franco was in power. It was great. Everybody was happy.
A couple of times I brought my wife and kids along on a madrid layover. I emphasised "See, this is life under a Fascist".
Salazar's Lisboa was also great.
Both dictators had the good sense to stay home and not venture abroad as Bush is doing now.
2003-04-23 21:30 | User Profile
AY --
I am gonna change my avatar photo. I like Goebbels, but the photo doesn't really go with "Franco." Don't know what to get to replace it.
I would change "Franco," but it's a little late to, after all these months....
2003-04-23 22:45 | User Profile
I lived in Spain from April 1969 to April 1971. Franco was running things. I always admired him and thought Spain was a great place to live. Back then the economy was somewhat depressed, but even so, life seemed good for pretty much everyone---I get real boring when I drone on about Spain, so I have to be careful--- I saw Franco once, in Seville, in a motorcade.
Enkidu
2003-04-25 13:12 | User Profile
Originally posted by AntiYuppie@Apr 23 2003, 20:30 ** > Originally posted by Franco@Apr 23 2003, 20:04 ** [maybe I should change my avatar? But Franco was not racial, just anti-Commie...] **
I'm not sure that "Franco" really suits you. Francisco Franco was more Catholic than the Pope, and he actually offered Jewish refugees asylum in Spain during WWII. **
Ditto.
Franco was one of my Catholic lads - he was no Nazi.
Not that we Phalangists won't cut a deal of convenience with the pagans when the circumstances dictate as the Generalissimo did.
Why not just go for it and call yourself Goebbels or Himmler? You can save your investment in the name by co-branding - call yourself "Goebbels-Franco" for a while, using the same picture. You could even play with the text, first highlighting Franco and then later Goebbels, and then making Franco smaller and smaller until it finally disappers. The public will associate the name with the picture, so keep the picture and change the name is stages, and the public perception will change with it.
This is the usual technique in the business world for changing the name of a product. I once saw it done with a trade publication with circulation of about 50,000 - kept the typeset and began by inserting the new name in small type and then gradually increased it as the old name diminished and finally disappered. No loss in sales.
Seriously, that will work.
Walter
2003-04-27 12:25 | User Profile
Franco's victory saved Spain from a traumatic revolution ... his regime saved it from involvement in the world war, modernised society and established the conditions for a stable democracy
Hard to argue with that.
When I was barely a teenager in World History class (ie, The Study Of The Virtuous Good War, basically) I recall raising my hand in class to ask: "Excuse me, where was Spain in the midst of all this?"
It was a genuine question. No teacher or course I'd taken had ever so much as mentioned Spain in any context, after Columbus had sailed away from it.
"Spain?" my history teacher thundered. "They drank wine, and followed the war in the newspapers!"
Right then I knew that's for me. A foreign policy of "me & mine first." No Malmedys to break the news of gently to overnight widows and orphans, no Dresdens to falsify into heroic acts, no mecenary work on behalf of Jewish internationalism. And no apologies for common sense.
2003-04-27 15:24 | User Profile
**"Franco's victory saved Spain from a traumatic revolution ... his regime saved it from involvement in the world war, modernised society and established the conditions for a stable democracy," he adds. **
Amen to that.
The anarchist-communist revolutionaries were murdering thousands, raping nuns, closing churchs, destroying Spain's cultural heritage. Screw them. Up against the nearest wall, I say.
Franco acted like a man, and while he was far from perfect he also without doubt created the foundation for the freedom and prosperity that Spain enjoys today. May his time in Purgatory be short and his bed in Heaven soft.
I worked on a couple projects involving Chile, and my colleagues on the other side of the deal were major Pinochet supporters. Once over dinner and a bit too much wine they got talking about how happy they were that Pinochet dealt, er, decisively with his communist enemies. They looked at me with some apprehension to see how I'd react (no doubt thinking I was a typical Yankee liberal) but they laughed heartily and slapped me on the back when I said "I think putting communists up against the wall can be an act of great Christian charity." It's true, too. Aquinas classified just war as an act of charity.
I liked those guys, I really did. Purest Spanish blood - they saw Spain as the mother country, that's for sure.
Walter