Coincidentally, about a week before toddy opened this thread, I started reading Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. Decent book which takes place during Spain's Civil War in the mid/late 1930s. It's written from The Republic (anti-fascist/Franco) point of view and I'm finding that very very interesting, not really knowing much about it before. While I tend to shy away from anything political both in Spain and in my own country, knowing the political history (and present) of Spain helps me, I believe, to understand the people themselves and why they feel the way they do about certain issues.

I'm only about halfyway through the book but it's about an "American" who goes to Spain, after having spent a number of years there previously, to help The Republic. He falls in love (of course!) with a young Spanish girl (OF COURSE!!!! :p ) and joins a "band" to destroy certain KEY structures.

There's killing & violence, no real sex described, no bad words either. I find it funny when he writes "I obscenity in the milk of your fathers" when saying what someone said. This makes me giggle, knowing, as I do, the actual phrase in Spanish.

Anyway, that's all I have to say about Franco.. and it's only indirectly about Franco, this book, but it mentions him from time to time as well as what the Fascists were doing, what they stood for, and the civil war itself. Anyone wanting to know more can read this book by Hemingway, written in 1940, right after the end of the Spanish Civil War.

Also, on my local National Public Radio station this morning they had the piece that Toddy quoted (in his initial posting in this thread) about how some decendents of and/or survivors of the Spanish Civil War are asking the government to exhume (?) the murdered bodies in mass grave sites and give them proper burials.

My ladyfriend's mother, whom is about to turn 80 years old, still tells stories of how she and her family lived (read: hid) in a cave or caves in the mountains above Santander and could hear the bombings going on in the city down below. She was only a girl then and all "survivors" of the Civil War will soon be gone. What will that mean to Spain when there are no more people living to remember firsthand?

That's really all I have to say about Franco in this thread. I'll leave the details to those better informed than me.

Saludos, MadridMan