Quotes from Helen Graham

the enduring institutional and social opposition to the civic campaigns to find and identify the extra-judicially murdered in the unmarked graves where they still lie. Most recently this "Franco effect" has been apparent in the unprecedented – and largely successful – bid inside Spain to gag the judge who sought to challenge the impunity of the dictatorship.

harsh neo-liberal "adjustment" (the so-called "ajuste duro") of the 1980s.

unprecedented wave of anticlerical violence,

the wave of priest killing that occurred once the military coup had collapsed public order, was entirely unprecedented.

extra judicial murder (the ley de fugas – prisoners "shot while escaping")

As early as 1977, the now iconic comic strip Paracuellos appeared. It was provocatively named – for Paracuellos, the village outside Madrid where the Republicans shot over two thousand prisoners during the wartime siege of the capital,12 lay at the heart of regime martyrology.

recuperative and commemorative work.

the not uncommon sexual humiliation of priests as a prelude to their murder,

emergent populist conservatism.

allowing the maintenance of dictatorial "impunity".

the attempted military coup of February 1981, the Tejerazo.

memory movement of the 1990s.

These dead were in some regards the antithesis of the Republican disappeared in that their deaths were, from the start, supercharged with state symbolism and the disinterred bodies of many of them (such as those at Paracuellos, but there are many other examples) were made highly visible in the 1940s as part of a ceremonial process of state "sanctification".

Causa General

That state has gone, but its narrative enthralls those deaths still today. It is for this reason that the Francoist dead and the Republican dead are still not, nor ever were in the 1980s and 1990s, similar quantities to be "remembered and named".

an increasing number of court cases in which relatives of deceased perpetrators brought ideologically charged cases for defamation against historians and journalists who had examined instances of Francoist crime,

historical memory law of 2007

the law seeks, as it were, an end in symbolism, but does not offer any means of allowing citizens to address what was actually done to whom, by whom and why.

a tendency uncritically to accept the prevailing "order", and to view the evidence of financial corruption and political clientelism as inalterable,

While these criticisms would be more accurately levelled at Spain's 1977 Amnesty Law, it is nevertheless true that the 2007 law, while it ostensibly addresses what is due to the victims of Francoism, also protects to a very high degree the right of perpetrators to "privacy

The current extra-parliamentary protest movement of the indignados in Spain may potentially make some healthy inroads into this.

With the triumph of the Popular Party on 20 November 2011 in a general election dominated by the debt crisis and nearly five million unemployed, desmemoria is likely now to be in the ascendant.

What is demonstrably the case is that Franco did Hitler the colossal service of altering the European balance of power in favour of the German-Italian Axis, while Spanish Republican resistance, achieved for nearly three years in the teeth of British policy, actively delayed other forms of Nazi aggression in Europe and, in so doing, made Britain itself a priceless gift of time to re-arm.

The Republican authorities could not initially prevent extra-judicial killing in their territory because the military coup itself had completely collapsed the police and army as the instruments of public order while it had also generated a huge surge of fear and anger. But the regime subsequently rebuilt public order – not least to put an end to murder.