Politics: The Cost of a Dictator

As some Americans move towards a dictatorship, we need to know the costs of authoritarianism. 

Along those lines let me offer Pedro Almodóvar on Spain’s tragic past: ‘You can’t ask people to forget’:

Yet behind all these cinematic celebrations of the present was a ghost. When Almodóvar started making films, he promised himself one thing: his movies would give the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco the ultimate two-fingered salute. They wouldn’t explicitly condemn his fascist politics; they wouldn’t ridicule the general who ruled Spain for 39 years until his death in 1975; they would simply act as if he had never existed....

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He is not only now willing to discuss Franco, he thinks it is essential. Now, he says, is the time to remember Franco lest his victims be forgotten. And Parallel Mothers, which received a nine-minute ovation when it premiered at the Venice film festival last September, does just that.

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 "After Franco’s death the political parties of Spain forged the Pact of Forgetting. The pact stated that in order for there to be a smooth transition to democracy, there would be no prosecutions for those responsible for human rights violations or similar crimes committed during the Francoist era. Not surprisingly, it was controversial. Today, Almodóvar says the notion of forgetting is nonsense. “You can demand it in a symbolic way. What you can’t do is ask people to forget. The families of victims of the civil war will never forget them. Remembering is part of the soul of who we are.”

Those wanting authoritarianism are thumbsuckers wanting to hide from reality by imposing their own fantasy of history. We have enough of that now without; a dictator imposes their fantasies by violence.

And that violence produces victims. Some of those victims thought they were immune from harm.  That is the lesson from the Moscow Trials the Trumpists will ignore.

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1/22/22