José Álvarez Junco: "The victims of Francoism have been procured shameful reparations"

2022-05-02T11:42:49.924Z

In his new book, the historian reconstructs the last century in Spain and shows the different ways in which other countries have digested their traumas

What to Do With a Dirty Past,

José Álvarez Junco (Vielha, Lleida, 1942) explores the recent history of Spain, from the beginning of the 20th century until now, and he does so with an eye on the tears that traumatic events that deeply marked it continue to produce in society.

"Franco shot some 40,000 people during peacetime," says Junco.

“This means 4,000 people for 10 years and it means more than 10 a day.

Franco is a person who signs more than 10 death sentences a day during the first 10 years of his dictatorship.

He put the war aside.

That is part of the trauma, of the dirty past.”

And there is no choice but to try him again.

“I have tried to place the Spanish case in the international context.

That allows you to realize something that nationalisms do not let you see: that we are not so rare.

The close look and the wide angle, the finesse in the analysis, a diaphanous and precise writing, the recourse to the lessons of the recent masters of History, an exquisite but sober erudition, the commitment to the present: all of this is in Álvarez Junco's work and in this new installment the great concerns that have marked his work reemerge.

And his desire to be pedagogical to avoid conceptual confusion that ultimately results in poor and poorly focused debates.

This new book is a good excuse to remember his trajectory.

anarchist outburst

The first issue that Álvarez Junco dealt with seriously was anarchism.

He had studied Law by decision of his father, who was a property registrar and who trusted that his son would follow in his footsteps.

He did not do it.

When he finished his studies, he made “the big decision” of his life, he explains: “Not to do oppositions and go abroad to study English”.

He went in the 1965-1966 academic year and landed in Bristol at the age of 22.

"I had a terrible time, but I read

The Spanish Labyrinth

, by Gerald Brenan, and I discovered that there had been anarchism in Spain.

I decided to dedicate my thesis to studying it.”

Another important year was 1968. He was enthusiastic about the French May and got a scholarship to study in La Jolla, California.

There was Herbert Marcuse, the great referent of the political contestation at that time, and it was a time of riots and social outburst, with the Vietnam War as a backdrop.

“I ended up becoming one of his students and was able to meet the ultra-left circle around him.”

On the way back he finished his thesis.

Exhumation of the grave of Ágreda, with the remains of 'The four of Torrellas' murdered on October 19, 1936. 10 YEARS OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR THE RECOVERY OF HISTORICAL MEMORY sofia moro

“I was attracted to anarchism by its criticism of political parties and that revolutionary dictatorship that had led to Stalinism.

I was never attracted to communist regimes.

When I visited Cuba, the illusions that could remain in me because of the romantic and revolutionary Castroism fell away.

It was a bureaucratized, absurd, inefficient country.

I liked what Bakunin defended about anarchism, that all powers are evil and that what you have to do is release the energies of the human being: political, social, sexual.

I didn't know how to see the negative, terrible aspects of anarchism: its dedication to killing priests, for example.

They made life impossible for the Second Republic and, when the 1936 coup broke out, they left a trail of religious corpses for every town they passed.

I didn't find out about all that, I didn't want to see it, I left it out.

I dealt exclusively with political ideology.”

Álvarez Junco published his thesis in 1976: a work on political philosophy.

“I never studied History”, he explains, but he started at the university to work on the subject of History of Social Movements.

“We were dealing with the proletariat and the class struggle.

With a Marxist base, although in my case not in an orthodox way”.

populist demagoguery

While studying the anarchists, Junco noticed another atypical labor movement.

The one led by Alejandro Lerroux.

"He directed a workers' organization, he presided over a workers' congress in 1900, he was a demagogue who was voted for by the Catalan anarchists because he preached Spanish nationalism in Catalonia."

A collective book came out of the seminar that he directed at the time,

Populism, caudillaje and demagogic discourse

, and decided to do his second big research on Lerroux.

“Neither is it a history book, nor a biography, but an investigation into a populist, anticlerical, demagogic, left-wing, workerist, Spanish nationalist, anti-Catalanist social movement.

It is the movement that ends up leading to the Tragic Week.

And I stop there;

I always stayed there, around 1910. So I didn't get involved in the Lerroux of the Second Republic at all”.

The mythical schemes of the liberal and Catholic national identity are the same: paradise, fall, redemption

"Lerroux's populism has something of current populism," he says.

“The discourse itself, which is very simple and is based on a dichotomy: the people, who are the good, against the anti-people, the bad: the elites, the foreigners, the homosexuals, the immigrants, the priests, the caciques and the oligarchy.

Then there is the leadership: 'I am with the people against the anti-people', but 'I am the people'.

And there is a third thing in common: the use of strategies that go out of the established channels.

Lerroux just as much went out to organize democratic snacks in the mountains near Barcelona that suggested burning churches or occupying the streets”.

The Emperor of the Parallel.

Lerroux and populist demagoguery

was published in 1990. While writing it, Junco began to realize that the key to everything lay in nationalism: what had worked for Lerroux in Catalonia was Spanish nationalism.

“I went to the United States in 1992 after obtaining a professorship at Tufts University, and I was there for seven or eight years and I was able to experience, albeit with a little delay, the great revolution that took place in studies on nationalism hand in hand with of Greenfeld, Hobsbawm, Gellner or Anderson.

Nationalism was a construction that permeated the entire worldview.

And I decided to apply this look to the Spanish case”.

The two Spains

Painful mother.

The idea of Spain in the nineteenth century,

which won the 2002 National Essay Award, was the result of that investigation.

“I seek to understand how the idea of the Spanish nation arises and how everything is reorganized around that Spanish nation as a subject.

That invention that was built during the 18th and 19th centuries is projected into the past, and from that moment a history of Spain begins to exist, but also painting and literature and the sciences are organized around the nation”.

In this book, Álvarez Junco tells how what ended up being actually two national identities, the liberal and the Catholic, were built.

"Both speeches follow the same mythical scheme: paradise, fall, redemption," he says.

“There was a time when we were free and happy, some will tell you,

but the Middle Ages came and an evil foreign dynasty came that imposed absolutism and the Inquisition and ignorance on us and there were centuries of decadence, but one day we resurfaced with the liberal revolution and we were free and happy again.

The others maintain instead that one day we were Catholics and that we managed to be the greatest power in the world around some great kings, as it should be, as it corresponds to Spain for being the people rewarded by God, the chosen one, but we sin because of the influence of foreign powers and decadence came, until one day we resurfaced and thanks to the glorious General Franco who defeated the Judeo-Masonic plot in 1939, Spain recovered the splendor of the Catholic Monarchs”.

but one day we resurfaced with the liberal revolution and we were free and happy again.

These calfskin boots were unearthed in 2010 during a series of archaeological excavations carried out by the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory in search of José Antonio Rivas Carballés, a resident of Fraialde (Pol, Lugo) murdered on September 4, 1936. The children of the time, now elderly in their eighties, did not know the man, but they never forgot those "strong" and "very good" shoes.

The foot bones were still inside.

sophia moro

The next book, which he wrote together with Gregorio de la Fuente, was a history of the history of Spain, and was entitled

The National Account.

“The first reference I found”, explains Junco, “was that of a Greek historian who was on a Roman ship in the second century before Christ and, passing off the coast of the Iberian Peninsula, said: 'That which you see there it is called Hispania because there was a king there called Hispano, who was the son of Hercules.

When Christianity arrives, the protagonist is Tubal.

In the tower of Babel, God punished human pride and divided those who were there into 72 peoples who spoke different languages and did not understand each other.

One of them was that of the Iberians, who led by Tubal arrived in this area and founded Hispania”.

From those remote times and from those myths, Junco and De la Fuente showed how the history of Spain was built up to the works of Tuñón de Lara and Pierre Vilar, already at the end of the Franco regime.

the nationalist religion

“In

Useful Gods

I returned again to the theme of nationalism, but this time to try to explain it in global terms,” says Junco, referring to the essay he published in 2016. “I started with the revolution in the way of understanding the phenomenon of nations and nationalisms and I dealt with several cases, those of England, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Turkey or the United States, but also those of the Iberian Peninsula itself: Portugal, Catalonia, the Basque Country, Galicia…”.

Reparations in the Transition to the victims of Francoism "were made in a shameful way"

Now comes

what to do with a dirty past

“I try to try to distinguish between history, memory, myth: to know what we are talking about.

I begin with the image that the Spaniards constructed of themselves at the beginning of the 20th century and then I continue with the transformations that this country has undergone: how it is modernizing, and how those two Spains that are going to face each other in a civil war arise there, the Spain urban, modern and very secularized and rural Spain, or small provincial towns, very conservative, still in the hands of caciques and priests.

From that war and the Francoist repression comes above all that traumatic past.

It is necessary that the new generations know that the tyrannical regime of the dictatorship did not respect rights or formalities, and executed.

But it turns out that many of the people he condemned had done their corresponding barbarities.

That is why I speak of a dirty past from which no one comes out clean.

Which is not to say that there weren't people who behaved in the best way one can behave in those terrible circumstances."

Pending tasks

Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, Vichy France, Pinochet's Chile, Russia during the 70 years of Bolshevik dictatorship or

apartheid South Africa

: José Álvarez Junco has tried to think about the pending tasks that Spain has with its dirty past by studying how other countries worked to establish justice with their respective victims.

And he also deals in his latest book with the long list of reparations that were launched during the Transition.

“They were done in a shameful way, not in a clear, explicit, solemn way,” he says.

“There has never been a general condemnation of Francoism, although there was one against regimes of political violence in 2002, in a Congress in which the PP had an absolute majority.

The victims and their relatives have been provided with material reparations, but as if under the table, as if society did not want to bring this up to an open debate.

And the time has come for it to be done once and for all."

During the first government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Álvarez Junco was appointed director of the Center for Political and Constitutional Studies, and worked there between 2004 and 2008. He was part of the commission that dealt with the Historical Memory Law, although without a special role, and there he was able to realize the enormous complexity of getting into the swampy terrain of looking back and answering politically for the accounts that remain pending.

The young man who began to study anarchism touched by the critical enthusiasm of the riots of 1968 now looks back and recapitulates: “One day we were more ambitious and more idealistic, but with much less practical sense.

When the Government of Felipe González was constituted after the Transition, in 1982,

my generation understands that not only Francoism has ended, but that the country is in our hands, and that there are things that can be done and others that cannot.

The lack of realism of the young leads them to think that everything is possible, and the sometimes excessive realism leads the old to think that nothing can be changed.

The same would have to combine the two things: the ethics of conviction and the ethics of responsibility”.

readings

What to do with a dirty past

Jose Alvarez Junco.

Gutenberg Galaxy, 2022. On sale May 4.

328 pages.

20 euros.

Painful mother.

The idea of Spain in the nineteenth century

J. Alvarez Junco.

Taurus, 2001. 688 pages.

€25.90.

The National Story

José Álvarez Junco and Gregorio de la Fuente.

Taurus, 2017. 624 pages.

€24.90.

useful gods.

Nations and Nationalisms

J. Alvarez Junco.

Gutenberg Galaxy, 2017. 336 pages.

€18.90.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2022-05-02