I’m really getting sick of people saying that to me, “Oh that guy Franco? Wasn’t he just another dictator?” This is typical. This is a typical response of someone from a liberal democracy who has the right to own the comfy chair they’re sitting in, reading a paper not owned and controlled by the government, shaking their head at the uncivilized of this world who just can’t seem to stop killing one another. Why can’t they get it right, we ask. Maybe it’s us who can’t get it right.After having visited the Benedictine Abbey of the Holy Cross of the Valley of the Fallen, just outside of Madrid, I feel I’ve come the closest I ever will to knowing what it feels like to be oppressed under ‘just another dictator’.
The Abbey boasts the tallest memorial cross in the world, 152.4 metres of granite at whose base rest giant, black, ominous angels who will not let the Spanish people forget. In 1960, Pole John XXIII declared the underground crypt a basilica. The dimensions of the underground basilica, as excavated, are larger than those of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. A long vaulted crypt was tunnelled out of solid granite by 12,000 political prisoners (so the story goes) working without pay, who were given the opportunity to “redeem” themselves and given two days of their sentence for each day of labour. During the 18 years it took to build, 14 people died in its construction. It pierces the mountain to the massive transept, which lies exactly below the cross.
The valley that contains the monument, preserved as a national park, beneath which lie the remains of 40,000, whose names are accounted for in the monument's register.
Although the valley contains Nationalist and Republican graves – several former Republicans' bodies were moved there from temporary graves at the end of the war – the tone of the monument is distinctly Nationalist and anti-Communist, containing the inscription "¡Caídos por Dios y por España!" ("Fallen for God and
Additionally, Franco's timing of his announcement of the decision to create the monument left no doubts: on 1 April 1940, the day of the victory parade to celebrate the first anniversary of his triumph over the Republic, Franco announced his personal decision to raise a splendid monument to those who had fallen in his cause.
Needless to say, I don’t want to overdramatize it but, this place felt like where you and the devil row in a boat that you know is taking your soul to hell. The black marble is shiny like water and the lone cruzifix deep in the basilica is very eerie. The fresh flowers on Franco’s tomb made me shudder. No one speaks and it is very cold.
A place like this makes it pretty hard to brush him, or any of them for that matter, off as ‘just another dictator’. Just do me a favour and don’t utter that phrase around the people who still remember what it was like not to be able to leave their country or get divorced or have an abortion or speak their native language or deny their heritage for fear of persecution for longer than I’ve been alive. Show a little respect, please.
