Lest We Forget

Elvis (or Franco) is not dead

The growth of forgetfulness, or willingly not remembering, in this week's Camino a Ìtaca. Revisionism on the right of some of the past's worst atrocities and what they may lead to. Click over to read the originally published version in Spanish in el HOY or read the English translation below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

What hit me most wasn’t the room filled with shoes or the shorn hair of the victims piled up in the next. Nor was it the infamous sign above the entrance cynically stating that work will set you free. What I remember having an impact on me most was the sheer size of the place.

It was enormous.

The lone railway line that led to the guard tower gave it the impression of a city and in fact that’s what it was, a city of death. The work camp at Auschwitz was brutal and brought on a sense of tremendous sadness, but it was the dimensions of the extermination camp down the road at Birkenau that actually made me feel nauseous.

It also raised doubts and questions within me. Why was this place still here? Why had they chosen to create a museum around a place where more than a million people were killed, a place of such desolation and grief.

And then I realized, as unpleasant as the experience can be, it was essential that it remained visible so that we don’t forget. Memory is crucial in order not to repeat the atrocities of the past. Without it we are damned to repeat errors gone by, a frightening prospect indeed.

What is even more terrifying than forgetting though is when attempts are actively made to whitewash and even deny the horrors of the past. Holocaust deniers, white supremacists and fascist sympathizers are no longer a small, fringe slice of the population, but a growing international phenomenon.

From the Trump supporters claiming that slavery wasn’t such an awful thing, to Milei challenging the reality of state terrorism under the fascist dictatorship in Argentina, to Meloni supporters openly displaying busts of Mussolini and Abascal’s fondness for the national catholic dictatorship here in Spain, these new political neofascist archetypes aspire to destroy democracy from within democratic institutions.

These new strains of populism differ slightly from country to country, but they also share many of the same traits. They are marked by attacks on the checks and balances, intolerance of a free press, disbelief in science and a cult of personality. These new far-right populists make intolerance the center of their politics and an ideological legitimation of dictatorships.

In the communities that the ultraright have been welcomed into coalitions with the PP, one of their first moves is invariably to try and overturn the historical memory laws, laws that were precisely set in place in order not to forget.

Extremadura is no different. At the behest of their extreme right coalition partners, the PP is promoting a new law of concordance that will dilute and whitewash the coup d’etat and ensuing crimes of the dictatorship.

Fascist ideology is grounded on the notion that some people in society are better than others. At its core is the belief that there is a select group, or race that sits above the rest. In Nazi Germany it was the Aryans while here their adherents glorify a mythical Hispanic race.

Left unchallenged, this whitewashing and normalization of fascist ideas becomes terribly dangerous. Those who rode down that lone train track in that camp scream at us to never forget.