The War and its Shadow Quotes

“They would become the migrant labourers who made the “economic miracles” in Spain, France, Germany, Switzerland,”
― Helen Graham, The War and Its Shadow: Spain's Civil War in Europe's Long Twentieth Century

“With the triumph of the Popular Party on 20 November 2011 in a general election dominated by the debt crisis and nearly five million unemployed, desmemoria is likely now to be in the ascendant.”
― Helen Graham, The War and Its Shadow: Spain's Civil War in Europe's Long Twentieth Century

“The current extra-parliamentary protest movement of the indignados in Spain may potentially make some healthy inroads into this.”
― Helen Graham, The War and Its Shadow: Spain's Civil War in Europe's Long Twentieth Century

“While these criticisms would be more accurately levelled at Spain’s 1977 Amnesty Law, it is nevertheless true that the 2007 law, while it ostensibly addresses what is due to the victims of Francoism, also protects to a very high degree the right of perpetrators to “privacy”
― Helen Graham, The War and Its Shadow: Spain's Civil War in Europe's Long Twentieth Century

“a tendency uncritically to accept the prevailing “order”, and to view the evidence of financial corruption and political clientelism as inalterable,”
― Helen Graham, The War and Its Shadow: Spain's Civil War in Europe's Long Twentieth Century

“the law seeks, as it were, an end in symbolism, but does not offer any means of allowing citizens to address what was actually done to whom, by whom and why.”
― Helen Graham, The War and Its Shadow: Spain's Civil War in Europe's Long Twentieth Century

“historical memory law of 2007”
― Helen Graham, The War and Its Shadow: Spain's Civil War in Europe's Long Twentieth Century

“an increasing number of court cases in which relatives of deceased perpetrators brought ideologically charged cases for defamation against historians and journalists who had examined instances of Francoist crime,”
― Helen Graham, The War and Its Shadow: Spain's Civil War in Europe's Long Twentieth Century

“That state has gone, but its narrative enthralls those deaths still today. It is for this reason that the Francoist dead and the Republican dead are still not, nor ever were in the 1980s and 1990s, similar quantities to be “remembered and named”.”
― Helen Graham, The War and Its Shadow: Spain's Civil War in Europe's Long Twentieth Century

“Causa General”
― Helen Graham, The War and Its Shadow: Spain's Civil War in Europe's Long Twentieth Century

“These dead were in some regards the antithesis of the Republican disappeared in that their deaths were, from the start, supercharged with state symbolism and the disinterred bodies of many of them (such as those at Paracuellos, but there are many other examples) were made highly visible in the 1940s as part of a ceremonial process of state “sanctification”.”
― Helen Graham, The War and Its Shadow: Spain's Civil War in Europe's Long Twentieth Century

“memory movement of the 1990s.”
― Helen Graham, The War and Its Shadow: Spain's Civil War in Europe's Long Twentieth Century

“the attempted military coup of February 1981, the Tejerazo.”
― Helen Graham, The War and Its Shadow: Spain's Civil War in Europe's Long Twentieth Century

“allowing the maintenance of dictatorial “impunity”.”
― Helen Graham, The War and Its Shadow: Spain's Civil War in Europe's Long Twentieth Century

“emergent populist conservatism.”
― Helen Graham, The War and Its Shadow: Spain's Civil War in Europe's Long Twentieth Century

“recuperative and commemorative work.”
― Helen Graham, The War and Its Shadow: Spain's Civil War in Europe's Long Twentieth Century

“As early as 1977, the now iconic comic strip Paracuellos appeared. It was provocatively named – for Paracuellos, the village outside Madrid where the Republicans shot over two thousand prisoners during the wartime siege of the capital,12 lay at the heart of regime martyrology.”
― Helen Graham, The War and Its Shadow: Spain's Civil War in Europe's Long Twentieth Century

“Franco won the civil war with the aid of the Axis. He remained throughout the Second World War entirely politically committed to the triumph of the Nazi New Order in Europe, and he contributed a great deal materially to that end and all the time without the “alibi” of occupation. Yet through a series of favourable historical circumstances he also survived its collapse. This set of circumstances made for a political “career” unique in Europe. Franco was never defeated in any war. Under the changed Western priorities of the cold war world, Franco’s Spain took its place (in the days before inter-continental missiles) as a “sentinel of the West” with an international veil drawn over the regime’s murderous “past”
― Helen Graham, The War and Its Shadow: Spain's Civil War in Europe's Long Twentieth Century

“the democratic opposition, meant that there was no departure of Francoist state personnel from either the executive or the judiciary,”
― Helen Graham, The War and Its Shadow: Spain's Civil War in Europe's Long Twentieth Century

“harsh neo-liberal “adjustment” (the so-called “ajuste duro”) of the 1980s.”
― Helen Graham, The War and Its Shadow: Spain's Civil War in Europe's Long Twentieth Century

“the enduring institutional and social opposition to the civic campaigns to find and identify the extra-judicially murdered in the unmarked graves where they still lie. Most recently this “Franco effect” has been apparent in the unprecedented – and largely successful – bid inside Spain to gag the judge who sought to challenge the impunity of the dictatorship.”
― Helen Graham, The War and Its Shadow: Spain's Civil War in Europe's Long Twentieth Century

“there are some striking similarities with the post-Soviet experience where a heterogeneously configured and relatively marginal civic memory movement also struggles against a state that neither properly recognizes, still less commemorates the unlawfully murdered.3”
― Helen Graham, The War and Its Shadow: Spain's Civil War in Europe's Long Twentieth Century

“like Stalin, Franco pursued an intransigent political idea of “purifying” state and domestic order with extreme levels of brutality and coercion.”
― Helen Graham, The War and Its Shadow: Spain's Civil War in Europe's Long Twentieth Century

“The transition of the 1970s in Spain was thus a feast of change, but also a civic famine, in that it left unresolved the huge weight of forty years of violent dictatorship, addressing none of the vast accumulated social hurt, the damage done.”
― Helen Graham, The War and Its Shadow: Spain's Civil War in Europe's Long Twentieth Century

“For fear was the great unspoken protagonist of the transition process in Spain. Fear most of all of another civil war:”
― Helen Graham, The War and Its Shadow: Spain's Civil War in Europe's Long Twentieth Century

“After the death of Franco himself in November 1975 removed the crucial symbolic impediment, this process was impelled by reformist Francoists who understood that dismantling dictatorial structures dating back to the civil war and 1940s was the price of continued prosperity in new economic times.”
― Helen Graham, The War and Its Shadow: Spain's Civil War in Europe's Long Twentieth Century

“100,000 members of the Falange were still permitted to carry guns.”
― Helen Graham, The War and Its Shadow: Spain's Civil War in Europe's Long Twentieth Century

“By 1973 for the first time, the Franco dictatorship could guarantee neither internal social order nor economic prosperity for its own base. The political situation was blown open, quite literally, by the assassination in December 1973 of Franco’s closest confident, the acting head of government, Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, who was blown up by an ETA bomb in Madrid.”
― Helen Graham, The War and Its Shadow: Spain's Civil War in Europe's Long Twentieth Century

“late Francoism: the extravagant bureaucracy easily circumvented by insiders;”
― Helen Graham, The War and Its Shadow: Spain's Civil War in Europe's Long Twentieth Century

“Catalyzed by an international economic crisis that crystallized with the oil crisis of 1973, in essence it was a crisis of the dictatorship’s domestic political legitimacy.”
― Helen Graham, The War and Its Shadow: Spain's Civil War in Europe's Long Twentieth Century