Politics of the past: the use and abuse of history - Socialists ...

Resistance and Exile
Miguel Angel Martinez
The topic of my contribution is resistance and exile: the resistance
I experienced against Franco’s dictatorship in Spain and the exile
was the price that many of us had to pay – perhaps one of the less
dramatic prices – for being part of the resistance.
To put this experience into context; Spain went through a terrible
war between 1936 and 1939. Fascists had mounted a revolution
against the democratic and constitutional order. Thousands died,
and when in 1939, they were finally victorious, many other men and
women were forced into exile, in many cases for the rest of their
lives. The outcome of the war brought great disappointment to democrats
and to Spanish socialists in particular. Pavel Kohout described
Hitler’s 1938 takeover of the Sudetenland as a betrayal of
Czechoslovakia by Western democracies. We suffered a similar
betrayal, abandoned as the Nazis and the Italian fascists helped
Franco to impose his enormous military superiority.
Dreadful repression followed; many thousands of democrats – most
of them socialists – were executed by the victors, and many hundreds
of thousands imprisoned or exiled. This repression played
out against the backdrop of the Second World War. While Franco
constantly demonstrated his sympathy for the Nazis, many of our
comrades were fighting alongside the Allies or in the resistance in
the countries in which they had sought refuge. The struggle ended
with the Allied victory and we thought that Franco would be treated
like any other fascist leader. This was the second time the Western
democracies betrayed us, and our second great disappointment:
we were told that our country suddenly belonged to the free world.
Ironically, nobody seemed to care that the prisons and cemeteries
were full of men and women whose only crime was the defence of
freedom.
207 Miguel Angel Martinez is Vice-President of the European Parliament.