Can you imagine that a speech by Pedro Sánchez took up almost half of a newspaper? Well, these things happened in Franco's Spain. On May 15, 1946, the newspaper Pueblo published an intervention by the dictator with this disproportionate length. As on other occasions, he had taken advantage of the opportunity to propagandize himself without worrying about the accuracy of the facts.
At the time, Franco was a pariah in a Europe trying to overcome the trauma of World War II. Although he had been an ally of Hitler, he tried to make it appear to the world that it was the Spanish regime that was right. The time had come to rewrite the past with an eye toward the political expediency of the present, so as to disguise some shameful friendships.
As the soldier that he was, the Hispanic leader knew that no defense was as effective as a good attack. For this reason, in his speech, he harshly criticized those who, abroad, spoke of a Spanish “problem.” In his opinion, no such problem existed. Those who could not say the same, he continued, were the European countries that had been involved in the world war, since their democracies were inefficient in the face of the challenges that awaited them.
Was the Hispanic regime a dictatorship? With the greatest seriousness, Franco assured that it was not. He did not enjoy extraordinary powers nor could he act as a despot: “The Government of the Nation runs within the laws and subject to the norms of a pre-established right.” Judicial independence? Everything imaginable. If Franco is to be believed, the judges of any country throughout world history have never enjoyed so much. Spain was, in his opinion, an indisputable democracy, because the will of the people had been clearly expressed in the Civil War, through the sacrifice of the “national” combatants. On the other hand, depositing a piece of paper in an urn from time to time meant nothing. The system was tainted by fraud.
Franco spoke to the Cortes' attorneys without worrying in the least about coherence. He created a parallel world in which words lacked any comprehensible reference in reality. It did not matter that, in the past, he had dedicated himself to condemning and combating what he understood as revolutionary danger. Now, to legitimize himself, he shamelessly appealed to a strange logic with words that had, out of context, even a leftist flavor: “Revolutions and wars are the midwife of History and the origin of most States.”
Europe, therefore, had no right to raise the illegitimacy of the July 18 regime due to its birth through violence. The origin of the other political systems, in one form or another, had also been that. Both in ancient times and in the recent past, since it had been foreign bayonets that had liberated European countries.
It is strange to see how the Spanish dictator uses the verb “liberate” to refer to the nations that had finally gotten rid of Hitler's yoke. The one who had been his former ally had become an annoying character, with whom no one had better associate him. Hence, Franco had no qualms about distancing himself from the defeated fascisms.
Now that the Führer and the Duce had covered themselves with opprobrium, no equivalence could be allowed: “Others try to present us to the world as Nazi-fascists and anti-democrats. If one day we could not have cared about the confusion over the prestige that the nations of this type of regime enjoyed before the world, today, when the vanquished labels of cruelty and ignominy have been thrown at them, it is fair to highlight the very different characteristics of our State.”
Let's look at how the dictator expressed himself: ignominy was not something intrinsic to fascism, but something that was projected onto him from the outside. In any case, the important thing for Franco is that he personified a Catholic regime in which racism, imperialism, and violence against individual conscience had no place. For him, the Spanish simply had the government most suited to their collective personality. They could not be commanded like other peoples, more accustomed to obedience. If they were not tied short, anarchy and selfishness would be unleashed unchecked.
Can you condemn the Holocaust without condemning Hitler? Although it is obvious not, Franco did not stop trying. In the same sentence he distinguishes between condemning “the crimes of the Jewish and prisoner camps in Europe that are being externalized today,” and the possibility, in his unacceptable opinion, of questioning the Third Reich. The Spaniards are not willing to “launch the dead.” And yet he refers to Nazi barbarism as an eclipse of the spirit. But even at that moment he does not stop carrying the waters to his mill. Spain had already known these kinds of monstrous events, "although on a smaller scale, in the Czechs and in the prisons of red Spain."
Clearly, with these comments Franco does not intend to address facts from a historical perspective, but rather to launch into a shameless image operation. As the horror of the Final Solution shakes the world, he does not want anyone to infer, from his cordial ties with Nazi Germany, now transfigured into “relations of normality,” some form of approval of his criminal acts.
What's more, it does not even recognize its former alliance with the totalitarian powers, as if it were a lie fabricated by its enemies. "England and France judged Spain's policy by its appearances and started from a completely false thesis: that Spain had remained committed and allied with the Axis for reasons of our Crusade."
Is it necessary to specify that what the dictator denied was exactly what happened? His speech impresses with the incessant accumulation of blatant lies, delivered with the same imperturbable spirit.
