Kirjahaku

Living in Fear is a reminder of the threat to democracy posed by the current rise in extreme right-wing politicians and political parties in the Western World. July 22, 2022, the Spanish Parliament approved a new Historic Memory law that, among other measures, declared Franco's government illegal, nullified the rulings of the dictatorship's courts and made the government responsible for recovering the bodies of the hundreds of thousands of people killed during the civil war and the subsequent dictatorship.85 years after Franco's death, it appeared that justice would finally come to all Spaniards, without revenge or reprisals. It might not be so, as the recent July 24 2023 national elections saw an active rise in the number of extreme right-wing members of Parliament. A wave of great unrest and fear is again sweeping the country.Living in Fear, the single volume updated edition of Damnatio Memoriae, is directed at drawing readers' attention to the Francoist genocide of Spain, the pre-WWII human catastrophe that served as a testing ground for Hitler's forthcoming holocaust.

The Spanish Civil War that began 17 July 1936 with Franco's military coup, did not end with the defeat of the supporters of the legal government 1 April 1939. From the moment the first shot was fired, the military insurgents embarked on a wave of massacre, torture and repression against half of the Spanish population that was terrorized, helpless for 40 years, until Franco's death in 1975. Aside from a brief lifting of the forced lid of silence in the 1950s, the rest of the world remains ignorant of the genocide that, closely modelled on Hitler's methods in Nazi Germany, led to the post-war slaughter of tens of thousands by firing squad or extra-legal methods buried, unidentified, by the hundreds in mass graves, many of which are only now being uncovered. Damnatio Memoriae, supported by dozens of eye-witness interviews, addresses this dark period in great detail as it sheds light on the repression that destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands of dissenting men and women imprisoned for many years in more than 180 concentration camps, countless prisons and slave labour workers battalions where many died from torture, starvation and disease. Today, the surviving relatives of this half of the Spanish population, especially children who were taken from their parents to be re-educated, are attempting to identify the remains of the lost members of their families, give them some dignity in death, and obtain some closure to their pain.

The Spanish Civil War that began July 1936 with Franco's military coup, didnot end with the defeat of the supporters of the legal government April 1939. From the moment the first shot was fired, the military insurgents embarked on awave of massacre, torture and repression against half of the Spanish population, until Franco's death in 1975