Neither your hatred nor your tears affect me.
When the Law of Democratic Memory and Recognition was passed in 2018, we said it was a law that, in and of itself, justified an entire legislative term, because it gave voice to silence and dignity to the names erased from history. Today, as the far-right conglomerate has decided to begin its repeal, strangely, I feel no sadness for the victims, nor for their children or descendants. Their memory is already written in the invisible, on the walls that heard their footsteps. The seed has been planted and has germinated. I feel sorry for my country, which, under the siege of political violence and hatred, has forgotten that democracy is also a form of tenderness.
In recent weeks, in Parliament, we have seen a common thread between the president's anti-immigration rhetoric, the regional debate, and the recent attacks on democratic memory. This thread is rooted in a political logic of exclusion and denial that seeks to fracture the social fabric through delegitimization. Hate and political violence operate here as mechanisms to dehumanize and divide society. However, we must bear in mind that by erasing the names of one party, we erase the map that should guide us through the fog that clouds the present horizon. Fascism does not re-emerge in uniforms and blue shirts, but with words of contempt and calculated vote-mongering.
I belong to a generation, and circumstances, that made me feel, without veil or artifice, the kindness with which the old Republicans treated me and the coldness of the Falangists' scrutiny. Over the years, I understood that this difference was not simple courtesy but a harbinger of life, a key to understanding the human condition. That is why we retain a sensitivity that is not nostalgia but a duty: the repair of what is broken, the recognition of what is hidden, the promise that nothing will ever be the same again. Because those who today raise their harsh, inquisitive voices against history lack the strength or the dignity to intimidate us; they lack the moral capacity to enslave our spirit or erase our memory. Perhaps their noise becomes unpleasant, but our resistance is calm and permanent, like the invisible channel of a river that takes in new water.
President Prohens is wrong when she says that "the only ones talking about this issue are the left." Justice, truth, and reparation are not for one side; they are universal compasses that guide how we understand the world and how we act in it. When it is dehumanized, what remains is a void where injustice and submission dwell, a shadow that clouds the politics of things and the relationships between people. Although she tries to appear normal, in the moral vacuum where she resides, subservience to capital and contempt for the environment grow; it is there that words lose their weight, and action loses their meaning. When we talk about principles, we talk about politics, economics, the general interest, and the common good; we talk about people's happiness and the country's progress. Madam President, do not deceive us by dismembering reality or falsifying the truth. The world is not a broken puzzle; it is a fabric that holds everything together. Separating the threads is not dividing, but undoing. The truth cannot be fragmented, and anyone who tries to do so only reveals its fragility.
The president is wrong to banally use Maria Corina Machado as an example in the parliamentary debate and ignore the letter addressed to her by Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, also a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Especially because this is not a disagreement between laureates, but rather the underlying issue raised is none other than the poverty that devours dignity. The president too often tends toward superficiality, under which cloak she hides her fear of equality and justice. But since the president doesn't do this, we'll delve a little deeper into the topic: Pérez Esquivel tells Corina Machado: "It's surprising how you cling to the power of capital and the markets, and I must tell you that they have no allies or friends, only cold and calculating interests." The Argentine Nobel Prize winner's letter could be addressed to President Prohens; more or less in the same shadow as the Venezuelan opposition leader.
"A classic," said Calvino, "is a book that never finishes saying what it must say," in the belief that "we never finish translating it definitively," as if it were a constantly evolving organism that always tells us new things. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry considered that "a civil war is not a war but an illness. One fights almost against oneself." And Hugh Thomas, for his part, said that the "climate of enmity, silence, and suspicion" he encountered when speaking of the Spanish Civil War was a consequence of the magnitude of the tragedy. Superimposing the three ideas would be good for thinking about the future and for reflecting on the world as a whole. The result of the combination is the Republic, which challenges us as a democratic precedent for speaking about the future.
Paul Preston, in the prologue to The Spanish Holocaust, echoes the proclamations of General Emilio Mola, one of the main instigators of the uprising, to the effect that the objective was "to eliminate without scruple or hesitation all those who do not think like us." A bad example to follow. Erasing every trace of the "other," as Prohens's policy attempts, is to deny the fact that one grows and changes in society, thanks to wounds, confrontation, and dissenting voices, not to the silence that suffocates them. The moral baseness of concealment is the lime on the whitewashed tombs of an unhealthy society.
