Today is Memorial Day, the day we honor those who have fallen fighting for their country and freedom.
Memorial Day first started to be observed after the Civil War. That war was the bloodiest in American history and the casualties of that war were unprecedented. The number of killed and wounded in the three previous declared wars, the War of Independence, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War, were insignificant compared to the slaughterhouse that the Civil War became. After the war people in both the North and South began to commemorate the soldiers who died for their country. The date of this commemoration varied throughout the country until it settled on May 30.
In 1968, Congress passed the Uniform Holidays Bill. This law moved the dates of four holidays, including Memorial Day, to the nearest Monday to create three-day weekends. This, I think, was unfortunate. I believe that converting the day on which we honor our fallen heroes into a long weekend tends to diminish the significance of this day. It becomes no more a day to take off work and for businesses to have sales. There should be more to Memorial Day.
Homage to Catalonia is George Orwell’s description of his experiences fighting the Spanish Civil War. Like all Orwell’s nonfiction, Down and Out in Paris and London, and The Road to Wigan Pier, Homage to Catalonia is a deeply personal and unflinchingly honest narrative. Unlike many political writers, Orwell was interested in people more than ideology. He favored truth and decency above party platforms. Orwell’s account is biased, but he admitted his biases and warned the reader not to take his or any other account at face value.
George Orwell
Orwell was a partisan for the Republicans first and a journalist reporting on the war second. For this reason, I believe he misses some salient points about that war. Orwell spent the war entirely on the Aragon front. He fought with the POUM Militia, a faction of dissident Communists. He sympathized with the Anarchists who had gained control of Barcelona. Orwell spent much of the war in the most radically left-wing Spanish province with the most extreme left-wing faction of the Republican forces. That naturally skewed his perceptions.
George Orwell believed that Francisco Franco had almost no public support in Spain. He correctly understood that Franco was not genuinely a Fascist. Franco was a conservative who sought to restore the ancien regime of Spain. Orwell believed only conscripts and foreign mercenaries from Germany and Italy fought in the Nationalist army. Only the very rich and romantics supported Franco. I am not so sure about that.
Francisco Franco
I concede that few Spaniards may have loved Franco. The Spanish Fascist or Phalangist Party was a minuscule, fringe organization before Franco took it over as a vehicle for his political ambitions. Likely, not many people in Spain were enthusiastically in favor of Fascism. Many Spanish must have regarded the Republic as the legitimate government. Under normal circumstances, perhaps, an attempted coup by a few officers would have gained little public support.
Conditions in Spain during the 1930s were not normal. The Spanish far left was determined to convert Spain into a Soviet Socialist Republic, no matter what the voters in Spain wanted. The Spanish left’s policies frightened many Spaniards. Small farmers and shopkeepers did not want to see the socialists nationalize what little property they owned. Pious Spaniards were horrified by the Socialist and Anarchist attacks on the Catholic Church. Spanish patriots did not want the outlying territories of Spain, such as Catalonia and the Basque territories to become autonomous, perhaps as a prelude to independence. For these reasons, many people in Spain supported Franco out of fear of the Communists.
To test this hypothesis, I decided to google Spanish support for Franco. (In fact, I used Duckduckgo. I do not use Google. Google is evil). I did not discover how much support Franco enjoyed during the Spanish Civil War. I did learn that the Leftist dominatged Spanish Cortes has recently enacted a law banning praise for or support of Francisco Franco.
Spain’s Senate house has approved a landmark bill that will ban expressions of support for the former dictator Francisco Franco, and seek to bring ‘justice’ to the victims of the 1936-1939 Civil War and the ensuing dictatorship.
The new ‘Law on Democratic Memory’, which was already approved by the Spanish Congress in July, will for the first time also make unearthing mass graves a ‘state responsibility’.
Organizations that praise or support the policies and leaders of Spain’s 20th-century dictatorship, including the private Francisco Franco Foundation, will now be banned under the legislation. Fines for non-compliance will range from 200 to 150,000 euros.
The new law does not allow for crimes under the dictatorship to be prosecuted, however.
The bill was approved by 128 lawmakers in the Senate on Wednesday, with 113 votes against and 18 abstentions.
So, the Spanish government is defending democracy by limiting democracy. It is protecting freedom by restricting free expression. It is preventing a possible dictatorship by dictatorial means. How Orwellian.
I am not very familiar with Spanish politics. I do not know how many people in Spain would support a Franco-style dictatorship. I imagine that few Spaniards pine for the bad, old days of authoritarian rule. Even if there does happen to be a substantial number of people in Spain who desire a restoration of Fascist rule, it is not going to happen.
Spain is a different country in the twenty-first century than in the 1930s. At the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, Spain was a badly polarized country with little experience of democratic government. Today, Spain is a mature democracy. The Spanish military is not likely to rise against its own elected government. It seems to be unnecessary to ban any expression of support for a dictator who has been dead for half a century. In any case, banning the praise of France will not change the minds of any die-hard Francoists. It only gives the appearance that they are the victims of government persecution.
Franco is dead,
I think I know what is going on here. The Left-wing parties behind this legislation are not frightened by a revival of Fascist dictatorship. They are taking the opportunity to ban opposition. At first, they will act against overt expressions of praise for Franco. Before long, right-wing or conservative statements will be considered subtle Francoist dog whistles. Opposition to the Spanish left will be equated with supporting Fascism. Eventually, anything but enthusiastic support for the left will be de-platformed and canceled.
This Spanish law would only be a minor concern to me if the trend toward censorship were confined to Spain. Unfortunately, they are part of a wider trend seen throughout the formerly free world. Nation after nation is increasingly imposing controls on speech, ostensibly to fight disinformation or hate speech. Even in the United States, with our First Amendment, we see the government attempting to control information with the collusion of social media platforms. It seems fewer and fewer people anywhere see any virtue in freedom of speech.
George Orwell did not think Franco would win the Spanish Civil War. His fear was that whatever government, whether of the left or the right, that emerged from that conflict would be a dictatorship. In the short term, Orwell was wrong. Franco did win the war. In the long term, it looks as if he might have been correct. Post-Franco Spain is becoming less free. It also appears that the dystopian world he imagined in Nineteen Eighty-Four is getting closer to reality here and in Eurasia.
Charge of the Mexican Cavalry at the Battle of Puebla (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Today is Cinco de Mayo or the Fifth of May. Contrary to what is commonly believed, (including by myself), Cinco de Mayo is actually more of an American, or at least a Mexican-American, holiday than a Mexican one. Cinco de Mayo is only celebrated regionally in Mexico, primarily in the states of Puebla and Vera Cruz. Schools are closed on this day, but it is not an official national holiday in Mexico.
Cinco de Mayo celebrates the Mexican victory over the French at the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862. In 1861, the Mexican government was bankrupt and President Benito Juarez suspended payments on Mexico’s foreign debt. In response, Britain, France, and Spain sent naval forces to occupy the city of Vera Cruz and demand payment on the debts Mexico owed them. Juarez managed to come to an arraignment with Britain and Spain, but the French, ruled by Emperor Napoleon III had other ideas.
Louis Napoleon III was the nephew of Napoleon I Bonaparte. He had somehow managed to get himself elected president of the Second Republic of France in 1848. Still, he decided that president was not a grand enough title for a Bonaparte, and in 1851 he seized dictatorial power in France and named himself Emperor. Despite being the nephew of Napoleon I, Napoleon III was not a particularly aggressive Emperor and was mostly content to have France at peace with other European powers. With the crisis in Mexico, however, Napoleon III saw an opportunity for France to gain an empire in Latin America. The United States was involved in the Civil War and was in no position to try to enforce the Monroe Doctrine. In fact, an additional benefit to the French occupation of Mexico would be to give France a base with which to send aid to the Confederate States, keeping the nation divided and unable to resist the French conquest.
The French army invaded Mexico with 8000 men under the command of General Charles de Lorencez late in 1861. This army marched from Vera Cruz in April 1862 and defeated Mexican forces led by Ignacio Zaragoza Seguin on April 28. Seguin retreated to the city of Puebla where the Mexicans had two forts. Seguin had only 4500 badly armed and trained men to defend the city. It seemed likely that the French would crush the Mexicans and march on to Mexico City without any further resistance.
On May 5, Lorencez attacked the forts with 6500 men. Against all odds, the Mexicans successfully defended the forts against three assaults. By the third assault, the French artillery had run out of ammunition, so the infantry had to attack without artillery support. They were driven back and the French had to fall back. Then, Seguin attacked with his cavalry while the Mexican infantry outflanked the French on both sides of their positions. The French were routed with 462 men killed, while the Mexicans only suffered 83 dead. This unlikely victory has been an inspiration for Mexican patriots ever since.
The victory was a short-lived one. Napoleon III sent reinforcements to Mexico and the French were able to conquer the country. Napoleon III placed the Austrian Hapsburg Maximilian as the first Emperor of the Mexican Empire. He was also the last Emperor since as soon as the United States was finished with the Civil War, the US government made it clear to Napoleon III that it would not tolerate a French colony on the southern border. Since Napoleon III did not want to fight a war against battle-hardened Civil War veterans, he removed the French troops. Maximilian, even though he sincerely tried to govern Mexico well, was quickly overthrown and executed.
Although Benito Juarez declared that the anniversary of the Battle of Puebla would be a national holiday, Cinco de Mayo was first celebrated by Mexicans in the American Southwest, the territories the US gained in the Mexican War. The former Mexicans began to celebrate Cinco de Mayo both as a way to express their Mexican identity and to show their support for the North in the Civil War. It may seem odd that these unwilling Americans would care about a war half a continent away, but the Mexicans were against slavery, and Hispanics insisted that California enter the United States as a free state. Cinco de Mayo gained popularity in the 1960s with the rise of Latino activism and still more in the 1980s when beer companies realized that the celebratory nature of the holiday would be a good marketing tool to sell more beer.
So happy Cinco de Mayo, or should I say Feliz Cinco de Mayo!
David's Commonplace Book 