Getting rid of his statues will not mean that he never existed, however much the media and the left might wish that were the case. He is still dead though.
I thought I heard this guy was dead.
they probably call him ‘right wing’, right??
I am sure it was a libertarian state under his rule
/sarc
It depends who the other choice is.
We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.
I think on balance Franco was a good guy. He certainly treated his enemies far more benevolently that they would have treated him. He was a staunch ally of the U.S. during the cold war.
He accepted help from Mussolini and Hitler but didn’t give them much in return.
Spain during Franco’s rule was a far better place to live than say Cuba, or Cambodia or China.
Debatable ... but I'm probably one of the only FReepers in this forum that saw him while he was alive. It was May 1966 and I was passing thru the Barcelona Airport on my way to Nice, France. Franco was flying out of Barcelona, presumably to Madrid, and I happened to be there at the same time. Security was enormous, however, I did manage a glimpse of him as he boarded his aircraft on the tarmac. He was perhaps 200 yards away ... and had a military entourage seeing him off.
“This just in....General Franco is still dead”...
You know I don’t think Russia should be tearing down it’s statues of Stalin (at least not all of them) any more than we should be tearing up our confederate flags; you don’t accomplish anything by completely denigrating your own history.
Was Franco a god guy? I would say yes. He defeated the communists, saved thousands of Jews, and played a major role in the defeat of Hitler. That’s good enough for me.
Franco was neither a good guy or bad, he took care of Spain. If Franco would have join the Axis forces The Mediterranean would have been sealed to the allies. Gibraltar would have fallen & there would have been no “TORCH”. There would have been Submarine pins in Cadiz and all of the S. Atlantic would have been their hunting grounds. That is why the Allies never bothered Franco, they owed him, big time.
They should keep one statue to remind themselves how they were all in the Resistance for 40 years.
Yes. Perhaps you spent too many years exposed to leftist propaganda.
I have also read that he protected many Jews during WWII.
If true, then they should have at least one statue remain. That should be honored and remembered.
I see him as a figure comparable to Pinochet in Chile. He saved his country from a communist takeover. He had to do some brutal things in the process. IMO, however, the west has much to thank Franco for. He was a staunch anti-communist and allowed NATO airbases to be established in Spain during the Cold War. If the Iberian pennisula had fallen to the reds, we could scarcely have kept France from going communist after WW II. No telling what would have happened if we had lost France officially (I mean had France become an official "People's Democracy" ala Poland, Czechoslovakia, et al. Real socialism is a wholly different matter than the "Kultur-Bolshevism" practiced by literary types like Sartre.)
On balance, Franco was a hero and we should all thank our lucky stars he acted when he did. Had Spain and Portugal gone communist, we might not have won the Cold War.
There are a couple of good books about this:
Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War (Annals of Communism Series)One of Lady Thatcher's advisors also wrote a book about Franco, although I can't remember the name of the author at the moment.
The Last Crusade (by Warren Carroll)
We tend to get our info about the Spanish Civil War from Republican sympathizers like Hemingway and Orwell. Both wrote some great literature about the struggle. The Spanish Civil War sobered both writers up about the real nature of communism under Stalin (Orwell probably more than Hemingway, who always remained somewhat naive about politics). Both were willing to point out that the left committed atrocities as well as the right. In spite of their sympathies with the communist side, they were both blackballed by the left after the war for saying the communists did bad things too. Orwell became one of those odd creatures on the left who see with perfect clarity all that is wrong with leftism, but remain loyal to their youthful "ideals." He wrote superb diagnoses of the insanity of the left. As a result, he is read much more by folks on the right than on the left. He became and remained a parriah among the "fellow-travellers."
T.S. Eliot sided with Franco's forces, with some reservations. He felt that they represented the side of tradition and were the only viable alternative to the forces of barbarism represented by Stalin. The war divided people at that time much the way the Iraq war divides people in our time. It's almost impossible to get a non-ideological narrative of the Spanish Civil War. I would side with Franco, along with Eliot.
There may be nothing to add, but, just in case there is, this ping is being sent forth.
Why, do the need the space for the new Obama statue?
Shame....say what you want but he kept them from communism