Forwarded from Nestor (reply to Ed George)

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

(This was posted on June 7, but never made it to the list.)

...and Ed George's analysis of the Spanish reality

The second best selling essay book in Spain today is "The Myths of
the Civil War", by Pío Moa.

Moa, who drifted politically from the whereabouts of Franquism during
the 50s to the creation of a Communist revolutionary armed group in
1976 (a year after Franco's death) and currently considers himself a
Liberal, explains that the Civil War began with a left wing upheaval
against democracy, an interpretation that runs both against fact and
the established position that the Franco regime began with a right
wing attempt to overthrow a Constitutional Republican government.
The book seems to be quite irrelevant from the point of view of fact
and serious scholarship.

What makes it relevant is its immense popularity, and the analyses
that Ed George advanced to this list on the actual foundations of the
current Spanish "democracy". In fact, the book says everything that
the Spanish bourgeoisie and state bureaucracy would have wanted
history to be like. Somewhere in the book, Moa writes that "Franco's
victory saved Spain from a traumatic revolution [...], his regime
saved her from participation in the World War, modernized the society
and established the conditions for a stable democracy".

Its popularity expresses the innermost link between the two main
responsibles for the killing in bud of the Spanish Revolution, the
Francoists and the Stalinists of the 30s. The link between Carrillo
and Suárez that George so clearly exposed receives a great backing
from the cultural choices of the Spanish literary public.

This e-mail has been triggered by a small piece of news on _Clarín_
today Saturday. The original source is London's _Guardian_. Maybe
someone can dig deeper.


Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org