Franco - The Pact of Forgetting Fascism's Third Man...

In the 1930s Fascism was a popular form of government.  In 1922 there was Mussolini who started it all, and later in 1933 there was Adolf Hitler and later still in 1936 then there was Francisco Franco in Spain who emulated them both…

In 1945 Hitler died by his own hand in a bunker and Mussolini was summarily shot and strung up in the Piazzale Loreto.  Franco however had the wisdom to stay on the side lines during WWII preferring to apathetically egg on the Axis powers and generally play them and the Allies off against each other. 

Why invade other countries when you have 30 million lives at home to ruin?  After all half a million had died in the Spanish civil war – no one was in a hurry in Spain for yet another war…

The result of this was that the third man of fascism lasted rather a long time - only really resigning in 1972 before dying in 1975.  And strangely he isn’t talked about very much…

Working my way through every Storyville documentary on BBC iplayer for something to do of a lockdown I started to discover that this lack of publicity is not an accident.  After Franco died of natural causes and Spain started to transition to democracy the politicians decided on a complete amnesty for anyone who wasn't very nice under Franco or during the civil war...

Basically the government came up with a “don’t talk about Franco” policy whereby no one could be brought to trial for crimes during the civil war or the White terror or later … From 1975 to 2000 Spain’s official Franco policy was literally a “Pact of Forgetting”.  This has led to young people not really knowing anything about the amnesty and a lot of old people either seething with anger or saying “there’s no good to come from going over all that again”. 

Gradually over time however survivors have banded together and tried to get Franco’s henchmen extradited to foreign jurisdictions to face trial – since they can’t be tried in Spain – and a campaign has grown up to end the amnesty laws.  However, it’s all a bit late as a lot of the important people who managed the transition from Generalissimo to General Elections and EU membership have, of course, naturally popped their clogs in the meantime… which was, of course, the whole point of the legislation.

So how did Franco survive so long?  Well, he certainly started as a fascist but he more flirted with the concepts.  The Opus Dei obsessed regime’s natural enemies were Jews, Freemasons, and Communists but he didn’t kill as many as Hitler.  He didn’t exactly suck up to the Allies but he didn’t go out of his way to annoy anyone.  He was aware that after the Civil War Spain wasn’t in any position for any more…  He made his government technocratic – a little like China?  To what degree his regime was truly fascist is a question that has been long debated.  Perhaps it is hard to see forcing people to go to bullfighting and flamenco rather than live comedy and theatre as extremely fascistic but it sort of is… and if Franco had come to power at a different time and in a different way it could have all ended very differently.  When all's said and done people who rule by decree and without parliaments are a bit right wing.  Strangely Franco or his technocrats seemed to do some good to Spain’s economy though and by 1977 they’d had a general election and....

Very soon everybody seemed to live happily ever after...

...if you disregard a lot of dead bodies hidden by the sides of motorways.