Roberto Bizzocchi, A Lady's Man (original) (raw)
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This chapter surveys the literature on violence over civilians during the Spanish Civil War produced in the last decace by historians who can be considered representative respectively of pro- and of anti-Republican sensibilities. By showing the theoretical flaws and weaknesses of their perspectives, it goes on to denounce a particular kind of "pro-democratic" denialism inscribed in their work which reflects their moral prejudices when dealing with violent rhetoric and action during the 1930s. In trying to search for an alternative approach capable of dealing with the complex character of victims-perpetrators, it shows the epistemological and interpretive relevance of Carlos García-Alix´s documentary on the life and deeds of an Anarchist militant involved in killings of civilians during the war who committed suicide after being caught and tortured by the Francoist forces in 1939.
Violence, Continuity, and the Spanish State: Some Considerations
Journal of Contemporary History, 2016
Massacres and repressive regimes have plagued mankind since the beginning of time. Yet, the emergence of organized state governments by the twentieth century made such phenomena all the more horrific, increasing the scale and efficiency with which death could be inflicted on political, ideological, ethnic, and social enemies. Indeed, by the end of the Second World War, this new kind of state-led extermination demanded a new term: genocide. The American historian Timothy Snyder recently broadened our understanding of this phenomenon, expanding it beyond its Nazi-centered perspective, to refer to Central and Eastern Europe as the 'Bloodlands'. In his book he outlines how ideology and deep cultural and ethnic tensions planted the seeds for the exterminatory policies of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Indeed, Snyder notes the extraordinary state-sponsored violence by these two states separated 'east European history from west European history'. 1 Paul Preston's The Spanish Holocaust disputes this last assertion. 2 Given the scale and proportion of deaths resulting from the Spanish Civil War and the bloody repression of the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco which followed, Preston rightly seeks to place the Spanish experience firmly in the context of the broader 'European Civil War'. Preston's use of the word 'holocaust'-stopping short of the term 'genocide' used by a handful of Spanish historians-makes the historical and moral association of the Francoist cause with that of Nazi Germany all the more explicit. While such links make some scholars-as well as a significant minority of the Spanish population-uneasy, few historians of twentieth-century Spain would dispute the fact that the Spanish Civil War and the first phase of the Franco regime were particularly violent and bloody.
Rethinking the Postwar Period in Spain: Violence and Irregular Civil War, 1939-52
Journal of Contemporary History, 2019
There is a consensus among scholars regarding the slow transformation of ‘hot-blooded terror’ into ‘cold-blooded terror’ during the Civil War and the postwar period in Spain. This article challenges this framework in two ways. First, it argues that the Spanish Civil War did not end in 1939, but lasted until 1952, divided into three stages: symmetric nonconventional warfare (July 1936 – February 1937), conventional civil war (February 1937 – April 1939), and irregular civil war (April 1939–52). Second, it argues that the narrative of ‘cold-blooded terror’ after 1939 has obscured the complexity of the political violence imposed by the Franco dictatorship. The author argues that throughout the three stages of the CivilWar the Francoists implemented a process of political cleansing, but that from April 1939 two different logics of violence were deployed. These depended on the attitude of the vanquished resignation or resistance – after the defeat of the Republican army. The logic of violence directed against the subjugated enemy was channelled through institutional instruments. In contrast, the logic of counterinsurgency directed against the guerrilla movement, alongside instruments such as military courts and the prison system, imposed a wide repertoire of brutal practices and massacres against civilians and combatants.
The Journal of Modern History, 2016
painfully obvious to the Italian participants that they could never reach the same position or serve in the diplomatic corps. In this case as well, the women of the "Lost Wave" argued, laws excluded women from participating in all the services necessary for running the country and therefore denied them full citizenship and equality with men. The question of opening up all public careers to women had a long and tangled history, but on August 5, 1960, Cocco presented a bill supported by eighteen deputies that would have done so, and it was officially published on February 9, 1963. However, that was not the end of the matter; it took years to get to the point where all public careers (including careers in the police and the military) were open to women. In the book's conclusion, the author tells about her interviews with surviving "Lost Wave" women and their assessments of their own work. In all, Tambor's work is a good contribution to the historical literature and clears the way for scholars who might want to expand our understanding of women's roles in postwar Italy.
UNIVERSITY OF BUCHAREST REVIEW – Literary and Cultural Studies Series, 2019
The aim of this article is to address to what extent some institutional form of remembering the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) as a collective trauma could be considered an instance of Jeffrey Alexander and Neil Smelzer´s notion of ’cultural trauma‘. Or to put it in other words, in which sense the notion of cultural trauma may cast a new light on one of the different ways in which the Spanish Civil War was remembered and retold during the transition to democracy (1977-83). Spanish society remembered the war as a collective trauma, so painful that it encouraged society to promote a ‘pact of oblivion’ toward victims of Francoist repression. According to this traumatic memory, the Spanish Civil War was a ‘fratricidal struggle’, whose outbreak was a consequence of the tensions that underlie Spanish history. It led to the blurring of distinctions between victims and culprits because both sides were considered equally responsible. Therefore, everyone could claim the ownership of suffering. However, this representation did not fit in with the historical records; it was a consequence of the social influence of some ‘memory makers’ that developed new narratives and re-defined the ownership of suffering. Because of this divergence between the historical record of the war and society’s traumatic memory of it during the transition to democracy, I would like to analyse the possibility of studying the nature of the latter by means of the concept of cultural trauma. After all, Alexander´s critique of psychoanalytical insight into collective trauma could be useful when analysing traumatic historical experiences where it is not clear whether the traumatic nature of those memories come from the events themselves or from the cultural frames that attributed significance to those events. Keywords: Spanish Civil War; cultural trauma; violence; responsibility; victimhood; perpetrators; the war of madness.
The 'Logics' of Violence and Franco's Mass Graves. An Ethnohistorical Approach
International Journal of the Humanities Volume 2, Number 3 Article: HC04-0302-2004
A civil war supposes the end of the whole social order and its traditional social values. Since that moment, an extreme and cruel violence appear against people and communities. The experience of those traumatic facts meant a painful heritage not only for the direct victims, but for the next generations too. The Spanish Civil War produced an important group of unrecognized victims, even today. These people experienced a total alienation, they were treated as an object, and became second class citizens during the so long Francoism. They were the leftist men repressed in the rebel part of the country at the beginning of the War. Those so called reds were exterminated and their relatives suffered humiliations, punishments, expropriations and were deprived of their social rights. The knowledge of these victims and experiences has emerged recently in the present life of Spain because the relatives are claiming for the recover the corpses of those murdered by the fascist groups. The bodies were hidden into mass graves which are becoming to be excavated. The claims are directed to obtain the dignification of those murdered through a new burial and the recover of their memory and biographies. In order to dignify these people, first we need to know and think about the tremendous trauma that the assassinated and their families experienced.
A Genealogy of Genocide in Francoist Spain
The extermination that was associated with the violence of the Spanish Civil War period and the early 1940s has been studied in depth in recent decades. Until now, however, the concept of genocide has not been discussed with an eye to understanding and interpreting this violence. The hermeneutical and comparative potential of the concept is, however, unquestionable. This article aims both to contextualize the origin and development of the debates about the concept of genocide, and to show what the concept could add to the debate in the case of Spain. In particular, this paper proposes to apply the concept of genocidal practice to the study of the Francoist violence, through analysis of the discourses, the reasons for the violence, and the memories of the events. From this point of view, an analysis will be made of the relationship between the practice of genocidal violence and the discourses of denial devoted to preserving the impunity of the perpetrators to this very day in Spain.
Revealing New Truths about Spain's Violent Past
2016
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