THE DUSTBIN OF HISTORY
Ian Buruma

Guardian/UK
9 Dec 07

The new Spanish law against rallies and memorials celebrating the late
dictator Francisco Franco will not foster free thinking, but impede it

In October, the Spanish parliament passed a law on historical memory,
which bans rallies and memorials celebrating the late dictator
Francisco Franco.

His Falangist regime will be officially denounced and its victims
honoured.

There are plausible reasons for enacting such a law. Many people
killed by the fascists during the Spanish civil war lie unremembered
in mass graves.

There is still a certain degree of nostalgia on the far right for
Franco’s dictatorship. People gathered at his tomb earlier this
year chanted "We won the civil war!", while denouncing socialists
and foreigners, especially Muslims. Reason enough, one might think,
for the Socialist prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero,
to use the law to exorcise the demons of dictatorship for the sake
of democracy’s good health.

But legislation is a blunt instrument for dealing with history. While
historical discussion won’t be out of bounds in Spain, even banning
ceremonies celebrating bygone days may go a step too far. The desire
to control both past and present is, of course, a common feature of
dictatorships. This can be done through false propaganda, distorting
the truth, or suppressing the facts. Anyone in China who mentions
what happened on Tiananmen Square (and many other places) in June
1989 will soon find him or herself in the less-than-tender embrace
of the state security police.

Indeed, much of what happened under Chairman Mao remains taboo.

Spain, however, is a democracy. Sometimes the wounds of the past are
so fresh that even democratic governments deliberately impose silence
in order to foster unity. When Charles de Gaulle revived the French
republic after the second world war, he ignored the history of Vichy
France and Nazi collaboration by pretending that all French citizens
had been good republican patriots.

More truthful accounts, such as Marcel Ophuls’s magisterial
documentary The Sorrow and the Pity (1968) were, to say the least,
unwelcome. Ophuls’s film was not shown on French state television
until 1981. After Franco’s death in 1975, Spain, too, treated its
recent history with remarkable discretion.

But memory won’t be denied. A new generation in France, born after
the war, broke the public silence with a torrent of books and films on
French collaboration in the Holocaust, as well as the collaborationist
Vichy regime, sometimes in an almost inquisitorial spirit. The French
historian Henri Russo dubbed this new attitude "the Vichy Syndrome."

Spain seems to be going through a similar process. Children of
Franco’s victims are making up for their parents’ silence. Suddenly,
the civil war is everywhere, in books, television shows, movies,
academic seminars, and now in the legislature, too.

This is not only a European phenomenon. Nor is it a sign of
creeping authoritarianism. On the contrary, it often comes with
more democracy. When South Korea was ruled by military strongmen,
Korean collaboration with Japanese colonial rule in the first half
of the 20th century was not discussed – partly because some of those
strongmen, notably the late Park Chung Hee, had been collaborators
themselves. Now, under President Roh Moo-hyun, a new truth and
reconciliation law has not only stimulated a thorough airing
of historical grievances, but has also led to a hunt for past
collaborators.

Lists have been drawn up of people who played a significant role in
the Japanese colonial regime, ranging from university professors to
police chiefs – and extending even to their children, reflecting the
Confucian belief that families are responsible for the behaviour
of their individual members. The fact that many family members,
including Park Chung Hee’s daughter, Geon-hye, support the conservative
opposition party is surely no coincidence.

Opening up the past to public scrutiny is part of maintaining an
open society. But when governments do so, history can easily become a
weapon to be used against political opponents – and thus be as damaging
as banning historical inquiries. This is a good reason for leaving
historical debates to writers, journalists, filmmakers, and historians.

Government intervention is justified only in a very limited sense. Many
countries enact legislation to stop people from inciting others to
commit violent acts, though some go further. For example, Nazi ideology
and symbols are banned in Germany and Austria, and Holocaust denial is
a crime in 13 countries, including France, Poland, and Belgium. Last
year, the French parliament introduced a bill to proscribe denial of
the Armenian genocide, too.

But even if extreme caution is sometimes understandable, it may
not be wise, as a matter of general principle, to ban abhorrent
or simply cranky views of the past. Banning certain opinions, no
matter how perverse, has the effect of elevating their proponents
into dissidents. Last month, the British writer David Irving, who was
jailed in Austria for Holocaust denial, had the bizarre distinction
of defending free speech in a debate at the Oxford Union.

While the Spanish civil war was not on a par with the Holocaust, even
bitter history leaves room for interpretation. Truth can be found
only if people are free to pursue it. Many brave people have risked
– or lost – their lives in defence of this freedom. It is right for
a democracy to repudiate a dictatorship, and the new Spanish law is
cautiously drafted, but it is better to leave people free to express
even unsavoury political sympathies, for legal bans don’t foster free
thinking, they impede them.

In cooperation with Project Syndicate, 2007.

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