Quotes About Spain

and for which the very name of a Spaniard is reckoned to be frightful and terrible, to all people of humanity or of Christian compassion; as if the kingdom of Spain were particularly eminent for the produce of a race of men who were without principles of tenderness, or the common bowels of pity to the miserable, which is reckoned to be a mark of generous temper in the mind. (2)

if you do not kiss my mouth, Inigo Montoya of Spain, I will more than likely die.

Every revolution arises from the failure of a particular state in a particular moment. In Spain the Republican government crumbled in the wake of Franco's military revolt. Power was lying in the street, and the anarchist movement, the most powerful force among the workers and peasants, took it.

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.

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.

in the inland northern half of Spain, there was an ingrained hostility to Republican cultural values.

freedom of movement in 1940s Spain existed only as an exceptional political or social privilege: very few ordinary people escaped surveillance in a society in which travel anywhere required a safe conduct or pass from the authorities.

José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the leader of Spain's fascist party, the Falange,

public declarations were made by local civilian elites in the rebel zone – whether bosses of the fascist Falange or people associated with the mass Catholic party, CEDA, or monarchist landowners or businessmen or clerics. These were made independently of each other and of the military authorities. But they were remarkably similar. Their message was that Spain needed to be purged or purified.

the ultra laissez-faire industrialization pursued by the Franco regime,

100,000 members of the Falange were still permitted to carry guns.

For fear was the great unspoken protagonist of the transition process in Spain. Fear most of all of another civil war:

The transition of the 1970s in Spain was thus a feast of change, but also a civic famine, in that it left unresolved the huge weight of forty years of violent dictatorship, addressing none of the vast accumulated social hurt, the damage done.

requetés (the Carlist militia)

the story of how "Francoism" was built – bottom up as a repressive, carceral society – as well as top down as a political regime.

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.

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.

the attempted military coup of February 1981, the Tejerazo.

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.

those who had defended the Republic were court-martialled and executed en masse for "military rebellion", a punishment that would continue after 1939.

The 1930s in Spain saw the development of a series of culture wars that would play out during the years of the Civil War itself. As in all culture wars, the way people mythologized their fears generated violence.

the tens of thousands of people killed in the Francoist repression – by the end of the 1940s the figure was at least 150,000