Quotes About Oppression

Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time.

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.

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

similarities between Francoism and Stalinism.)

the European concentration camp universe was already in existence.

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.

clear parallel between Francoist judicial practice and that of the Nazis – in that both, unlike the Soviet case, overturned previous liberal jurisprudence/practice.

to "have ideas" (tener ideas), thinking for oneself being considered doubly reprehensible in women.

this was a "dirty war" and it "disappeared" some 30,000 people during the war of 1936–39.

the desire first to humiliate and then to eradicate those women who had demonstrated any kind of autonomy, but especially those who had actively participated in the military defence of the Republic (the milicianas).

like Stalin, Franco pursued an intransigent political idea of "purifying" state and domestic order with extreme levels of brutality and coercion.

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.

allowing the maintenance of dictatorial "impunity".

Terror could only happen because the military allowed it.

the fear-driven social purification underpinning Francoism,

the death squads came, by night to "take out" of gaol in the deadly sacas, exactly the same form of extrajudicial execution that ended the lives of her two brothers and of tens of thousands of others across Spain.

The most fatal blow to progress is slavery of the intellect. The most sacred right of humanity is the right to think, and next to the right to think is the right to express that thought without fear.

Tyranny cannot defeat the power of ideas.

The patriarchy may have stolen our freedoms, but we don't have to be complicit in the abandonment of our souls.

If feminism doesn't frighten people with power, it is toothless.

The women's movement doesn't hate men. It hates patriarchy – a system created and supported by all of us, where men and women are legally, financially and socially unequal.