Quotes from Helen Graham

The absence of a functioning police force or judiciary in Republican territory in the first weeks after the coup, plus the de facto amnesties that saw gaols empty, made it possible for all manner of personal scores to be settled and acts of outright criminality to be pursued in the guise of revolutionary justice.

There were also (though more unusually) refugee children who were kidnapped from France by the Falange's external "repatriation" service and then placed, not with their families, but in Francoist state institutions.65

those who had been obliged to be silent for nearly forty years were once again being told that there could be no public recognition of their past lives or memories.

the past that has not passed away

Baltasar Garzón,

this was a war waged predominantly upon civilians;5 moreover millions of them were killed not by invaders and strangers, but by their own compatriots, including their own neighbours.

the core narrative of how society is organized and how it is reciprocally explained by its inhabitants with reference to a set of collective values deemed appropriate to underpin it.

an image of the city, becoming fixed upon it as a threat and above all as a source of destabilization.

coming to terms with the city" –

the gentry pact came to be constituted as an audience for radical new incarnations of conservative nationalism,

these boys chipping at the rigidities of social deference, in search of a place, a voice. In Spain too the old power seemed to be dying, but slowly and viciously and, as it turned out, not yet. Nor would it depart in the way scripted by Republican reformers, and not before in its passing it claimed from that generation a barbaric tribute, exacted in the coin of "national cleansing

Politics in the 1930s was not a "personal option", not something they could take or leave, be or not be. It was a molten flow engulfing the world to remake it, taking possession of personal lives, whether their owners willed it or not,

the categories of Jewish people excluded often at that time mirrored the profile of non-ethnic social and political cleansing elsewhere.

similarities between Francoism and Stalinism.)

cold war-derived failure internationally to condemn, or even to recognize, the scale of the abuses committed by the Franco regime

Le Vernet, like Gurs and a small number of the other camps across the south-west, was expressly conceived as a punishment or disciplinary camp.

Thus a Western order that retrospectively mythologized its opposition to Nazism as opposition to the camp universe, and which denounced this too as the ultimate offence of Stalinism, patronised a regime in Spain that was, like the Soviet Union's, based on mass murder and its own gulag.

the European concentration camp universe was already in existence.

Francoism constitutes the most significant and enduring "Western" example of how European polities, societies and "nations" of the mid twentieth century came to be reconstructed through violence – through the large-scale execution and mass imprisonment of compatriots.

the machinery of direct repression.

those who had defended the Republic court-martialled and executed en masse for "military rebellion".

in post-war Spain "red" came to mean whoever the rebel victors chose so to label as a means of removing either their lives or their civil rights.

even women who had run the colonias infantiles for refugee children.

the regime then kept alive these binary categories for nearly forty years,