Guernica.
Digging into Picasso’s Guernica you realize how brutal the Spanish Civil war was. A prelude to WWII complete with carpet bombing of civilian cities, mass executions, and concentration camps. Spaniards vs. Spaniards. Much of the logistic support came from the Nazi SS and Luftwaffe and Italian Fascists. On July 17th 1936, Colonel Francisco Franco staged a coup and with the support of the Army, took over the democratic government. Only the government wasn’t interested. Since the army was not available to defend the government, the people did. They fought without supplies, without training, but with passion and belief in democracy (ok, there were a few communists, socialists, and anarchists too).
Franco’s movement set a new standard. With the help of the Nazi’s they created the first concentration camps to which they sent over 400,000 Spanish men, women, and children. In every town there were mass executions of anyone suspected of sympathies with the democratically elected government. Mass graves are located all over Spain. The Catholic Church - fearing that democracy and the free will that it gave the Spanish people in choosing leaders aligned themselves with the Franco’s fascists and thus condoned the wave of death and repression.
I could easily see Dick Cheney and the other nationalists in America leading such a coup with the support of the fundamentalist right just as Franco did in Spain in July of 1936. The only difference is that I do not believe the military would follow as the did in Spain. We must keep our military apolitical and loyal to the democratic instutuons. It is amazing that for a country of our size the military has stayed out of politics and focused on being the most professional fighting force in the world.
The government finally fell after a brutal seige on Madrid in 1938. Over 1,000,000 Spaniards fled spain, mostly to Central America. Franco and his fascists remained in power in Spain with the Generalisimo as dictator until his death in 1975.
It seems af if the Spaniards are only just now coming to grips with their past as they create ‘Historical Memory Commisions’ that are unearthing the atrocities that Spaniard Fascists committed against Spaniard Republicans. The battle to dig up the remains of the poet Frederico Garcia Lorca from the roadside mass grave next to where he was executed by a shot to the head in August of 1936 seems to be a metaphor for the whole country on how to deal with each other from those events 60 years ago.
A good part of the conflict of the civil war was driven by the Catholic Church. The conservative fascists used the church as a central tenet in its propaganda and as a key tool to get the traditional civilians behind them. The church has always been powerful in Spain from the Crusades to the Inquisition to Franco’s dictatorship. The church used the fascists to keep the population in their traditional roles and subservient to the existing cultural and hierarchical power structures. The last thing either wanted was a “free” population, able to elect their own leaders. The fragile democracy that had been in place for only 10 years in Spain was a huge threat to the old ruling families and church leaders.
This makes it even more amazing how much Spain has evolved since 1975 and Franco’s death. As an American I still think of Spain as a religious country. But in recent polls 60% of the population identify themselves as religious, but only 25% practice weekly. Compare that to the USA where 85% of the population consider themselves religious and 70% practice weekly. The Spanish government has recently passed laws enabling gay marriage and abortion and we are psyched to be going to celebrate at the Gay Pride Parade in Madrid on Saturday! Thankfully, Generalisimo Francisco Franco is still dead.
Seeing Picasso’s Guernica is very moving. It really brings home to me the the death and devastation that war, especially war between neighbors, friends, relatives, countrymen can bring. Democracy is precious, all the more precious when fought for by so many around the world.
