Jacob Heilbrunn: How Bad Was Franco?
Jacob Heilbrunn, a senior editor at the National Interest, is the author of They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons.
No, I'm not referring to actor James Franco. Instead, my attention was caught by a fresh dispute that has been triggered in Spain by the publication of its dictionary of national biography. Professor Luis Suarez, an admirer of Gen. Francisco Franco, has apparently written the entry for him. The eighty-six-year-old Suarez maintains that Franco was an authoritarian, not a totalitarian, leader. He also overlooks the fact that tens of thousands were murdered by his regime.
The professor has touched a neuralgic nerve. The Spanish Civil War, which lasted from 1936-39 and served as a rallying cry for the international left, was the dress rehearsal for World War II. Both Stalin and Hitler intervened in it. It's certainly possible that had the communists won the war, they would have instituted an even bloodier reign than that of Franco.
The distinction between totalitarian and authoritarian leaders was emphasized in a famous article in Commentary in 1979 by Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, who was herself an expert on Latin America. Franco did purge the Republicans who had fought against his Nationalists, just as the reverse would have occurred had the Republicans won. It's also the case that the Franco regime melted away with his death and a transition to a democracy took place. But when the Soviet Union collapsed, Kirkpatrick had to revise her original notion that while authoritarian regimes could become democracies, totalitarian ones never would. With the end of the cold war, the totalitarian versus authoritarian dispute largely went away, especially as China turns into some kind of weird capitalist hybrid regime.
In Spain, however, the Franco era remains a hot-button issue...