Spain, Francoism and the unfinished fight against fascism

The Morning Star prints a speech given by NOELIA SANCHEZ at a Marx Memorial Library event earlier this week to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the Spanish civil war, highlighting how the defeat of Nazi Germany did not mean the defeat of fascism

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A FEW weeks ago I took part in the Cable Street march, and there was one slogan I heard again and again: “They did not pass, and they shall not pass!”

It also appeared on the front page of the Morning Star. And I have to admit that it had an impact on me, because all my life I have always felt the exact opposite: they did pass.

And, of course, it is not difficult to understand why I feel that way. I am Spanish. In Spain, they did pass. And not only that: they stayed in power for 40 years.

That is why I believe that, when we talk about the second world war as the great crusade against fascism, there are many things we need to consider.

Is true that we beat the Nazis, but it is more difficult to believe that we beat fascism. Because if fascism had truly been beaten, we should ask ourselves what happened after.

Europe came out from the war proclaiming victory over fascism, but the dictatorships in Spain and Portugal continued for decades. And apart from Europe, we also find a long history of coups and interventions. There are a lot of examples: Guatemala, Brazil, Chile, Nicaragua, Grenada, Honduras, Operation Condor — don’t forget Cuba and Venezuela. The list goes on.

And not only in America, also in Africa and the Middle East. Of course I could not possibly avoid mentioning the genocide in Palestine.

That is why I believe we have every right to ask uncomfortable questions.

Can the Allied countries present their history as a struggle against fascism when, under certain circumstances, they have tolerated or supported dictatorships? Are we not members of Nato?

We should also ask ourselves why certain European migration policies reproduce deeply authoritarian principles: intervening economically and politically in other countries, benefiting from their resources but then rejecting immigrants that come to our countries searching for a better life.

And there is another topic that, for me, is fundamental: the working class. In the last decades, we have not only lost labour and social rights. We have lost something even deeper: our sense of class-consciousness. The understanding that the problems we face are not simply individual problems. They are collective problems.

But I want to focus now on Spain because, after all, that is what I came here to speak about today.

In Spain, we lost the war twice. We lost the Spanish civil war and, in a way, we also lost the second world war. We lost it because, when the war in Europe ended, no-one came to liberate us.

Thousands of Spanish Republicans had continued fighting fascism outside Spain. They fought in the Resistance, they helped liberate Europe, some of them entered Paris with Leclerc. Other ones were deported and died in Nazi concentration camps.

But when Europe celebrated victory, our dictatorship continued and our history occupies barely any space in the collective memory that was built around the second world war. We never are the protagonists of the great films or the great stories about the liberation of Europe, so as you can see, the International Brigades are not the only ones forgotten by history.

The Allies had other political and strategic priorities. And maybe we should ask why the Spanish Republic made so many people uncomfortable?

Was it because it had tried to expand the rights of the working class and challenge the privileges of the economic elites, the aristocracy and the Church?  

Or it was because Spanish Republic had also one of the most progressive constitutions in the history of Spain and Europe?

Spain lived for 40 years under a terrible repressive dictatorship. And that repression existed from the very beginning until the very end.

But Franco’s repression was not only political. It did not only persecute communists, socialists, anarchists or republicans. It also controlled private life, morality and culture. For decades, women saw their rights and autonomy extremely restricted (no right to have their own passport or open a bank account); homosexuality was persecuted and punished; and writers, teachers, artists, intellectuals and film-makers suffered censorship, persecution and, in many cases, exile.

Franco did not seek only to silence political opposition: he also imposed a particular way of thinking, living and being.

It was also a dictatorship marked by corruption and by the enrichment of those connected to power. Historical research has documented the personal enrichment of Franco and those around him, by using political and economic power. By the end of the Spanish Civil War Franco accumulated the equivalent to €40 million. That is based on an article in the Spanish newspaper el Diario.es.

We cannot forget the forced labour of Republican prisoners, which was used in multiple constructions during the dictatorship, like the factory of Seat.

The dictatorship was very cruel till the very end, and many people were murdered in the last few years. One particularly painful example is Salvador Puig Antich, an anarchist from Catalunya who was executed by garrotte in 1974, despite the multiple international campaigns calling for clemency.

I also want to remember the Atocha lawyers’ massacre in 1977. They were labour lawyers linked to the workers’ movement and the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) who defended workers’ rights. They were attacked by members of the far right; five people died. The public response was massive, with more than 100,000 people in the funeral, that became an extraordinary demonstration of the dignity and discipline of the Spanish labour and democratic movement at a time of immense political tension. It marked a real turning point, as just a few months later the PCE became legal.

In 1977, the Amnesty Law was passed. That law played a fundamental role in securing amnesty of people who had been persecuted for political reasons. However, over the years, it was also used to prevent judicial investigations into crimes committed during the Franco dictatorship.

For decades, many families had to search for their missing relatives by themselves, often helped by historical-memory organisations, by searching for mass graves and trying to reconstruct what happened to their relatives, taking the matter to court as though it were an ordinary criminal case.

In the meantime important figures politically connected to the dictatorship were able to occupy political positions during the democracy.

And this brings us an important question: can a full democracy be built without also confronting the memory of the victims of a dictatorship?

It was not until 2022 that the Democratic Memory Law was passed. It declared the dictatorship’s courts and convictions illegitimate, and created a few mechanisms to advance the search and identification of missing people. However, there is still not an official international recognition of the crimes of Franco under the legal classification of genocide.

More recently, we have seen another example of how the legacy of the past continues to affect democratic rights in the present. The Spanish Supreme Court decided to suspend temporarily the registration on the electoral roll of Spanish citizens living abroad who had obtained Spanish nationality through the Democratic Memory Law. This decision followed legal challenges relating to the potential impact of votes cast from abroad. The consequences are extremely serious: thousands of Spanish citizens have seen their right to vote suspended.

What kind of historical reparation is it to recognise these people as Spanish citizens and then stop them from exercising one of the most fundamental rights of citizenship, the right to vote? In case they vote for something that they don’t like.

So now I come back to the beginning of my speech and to that slogan: “They did not pass, and they shall not pass.”

And after thinking about it more carefully, I realised that this is precisely why that slogan still matters. Because it is not only a description of the past. It is a commitment to the future. 

History shows us that fascism does not simply disappear because a war ends. It can survive in institutions, in political speeches, in silence, in privilege and in the ways we understand society.

The memory is not only recovered through laws. It is recovered as well, by restoring the names of those who have been deleted from history; by giving a voice back to those who were forced into silence; by telling the stories that nobody wanted to hear and to ensure that future generations know what happened and understand why this cannot happen again.

Because memory cannot simply be about looking back at the past. It is about using the past to protect our present and build our future.

And maybe that is why, after so many years, we continue to say the same words: ¡No Pasaran!

Noelia Sanchez is a committee member of the PCE-GB Felicia Browne Branch.

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