Spain: A country tempered by sadness

Public adulation of Franco has ended; private sorrows remain.

Spain returns to the shadows of its Civil War past

One reason the United Kingdom must act from within the European Union.

Away with the tyrannical General Franco!

Some 350,000 Spanish citizens died during Spain’s calamitous civil war (1936-39) and a further 200,000 afterwards – of hunger.

The wages of sin: Time to abandon Spain’s pact of silence

Many countries have been persuaded that it is better to ignore and suppress the past in the interest of forgiving and forgetting. Such arguments are often put forward by those who have most to hide and most to lose. The opposite argument – that past sins must be publicly acknowledged – recognizes that in violent conflict everyone is scarred for life.

Spain’s right to memory under threat

The politics of public or “collective” memory are alive and well in Spain, where a controversial dictionary of national biography has whitewashed the career of its former dictator, General Francisco Franco.