The precarious and difficult situation in which we live due to the economic and financial crisis that plagues the "Europe of two speeds", among other parts of the world, generates endless consequences that have ...
The precarious and difficult situation in which we live due to the economic and financial crisis that plagues the "Europe of two speeds", among other parts of the world, generates endless consequences that have led countries like Spain to occupy one of the first positions in Europe in especially dramatic indicators such as the rate of population below the poverty line or the social inequality index (GINI)
For both our economic model and society, this serious situation requires an explanation that has arrived and continues to arrive from multiple professional fields; economists, sociologists, historians? as well as under an innumerable number of approaches, which are often intentionally perverted with the aim of giving greater credibility to some political-economic approach; liberal, social democrat, fascist, etc?
Any of the theories that emerge from this attempt to explain why we have reached this situation must be analyzed with special care to avoid falling and taking on arguments that do not conform to reality and can lead us to defend theories as absurd as the one that is collected under the hidden slogan (of the Spanish right) that "with Franco, life was better"
Indeed, this phrase is increasingly repeated, and if we do the simple exercise of writing it in any search engine on the network, we will realize the dangerous dimension it has reached, based on false arguments that are being assumed with astonishing ease and that can lead to very dangerous consequences, such as the erosion of the democratic model that was so costly to wrest from the fascist regime.
Undoubtedly, this is an affirmation that derives from the lack of historical memory that characterizes us as citizens and that is used by the intellectual circle of the Spanish extreme right to achieve "social coverage" to a historical moment that some political parties have not yet condemned, and that reproduced, to the letter, many of the approaches that these parties defend today. Ideas that deepen the ditch of social inequality.
A strategy with which they have already achieved, for example, that socially and academically we talk about "Francoism" and not fascism, a concept under which they have managed to soften the disastrous procedures that were carried out under a dictatorial regime and that followed each and every one of the premises of the fascisms of the West of that historical moment. It was no different!!
The way in which the UN "measures" the standard of living of the population of a country focuses on the evaluation of a series of indicators that, as soon as we analyze them, throw to the ground any idea that supports the claim that in the times of the Spanish dictator life was better than today and that go beyond focusing this debate on personal experiences of specific moments.
The Welfare State model that we enjoy in Spain, increasingly curtailed, is one of the key and basic elements to demonstrate the true difference between one historical moment and another. A model with which the State currently guarantees its citizens a series of services universally, without the need to go to the market, promoting social equality and that in the final moments of the regime was light years away from that applied in the rest of European countries. Something that puts us on alert of the clear social underdevelopment in which Spain lived and that agrees with and explains the high levels of illiteracy, low life expectancy, misery, lack of associative culture, gender inequality, emigration, etc? that democratic Spain inherited.
But let's not stop there, let's think about what worries citizens the most today, according to the CIS, employment, and beyond the moment in which we live, that the working class has the possibility of negotiating its framework of labor relations is basic. Fully assumed today, but which was not the same in an era of repression such as the Franco regime, which was based on the extermination of free workers' organizations, the fierce persecution of its members and leaders and the complete eradication of collective labor rights.
We cannot fall into the error of simplifying the analysis of how people lived, based on terms such as "security" or "not paying taxes", because they are simply elements associated with the concept of lack of freedom and repression in the first of the cases and of a precarious system, and enhancer of social inequality in the second. Both, an essential part of any fascist and dictatorial model.
Given all this, I believe that before venturing to pronounce ourselves in one sense or another we must be aware of what really happened in this country, of the damages it caused and to what extent they are the cause of many of the structural problems that our society drags.
Under the fascist model led by Franco, life was NOT better.
