"Remember the Alamo!”: Just one of many "incitements to perpetuate myths, prolong hatreds and justify conflicts"?

After the Generalísimo

FELIPE FERNÁNDEZ-ARMESTO

Jeremy Treglown
FRANCO’S CRYPT
Spanish culture and memory since 1936
336pp. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $30.
978 0 374 10842 7

“Remember the Alamo!” “Remember the Boyne!” “Remember the Maine!” “Remember, remember the fifth of November!” More often than not, appeals to “social memory” are really incitements to perpetuate myths, prolong hatreds and justify conflicts. Collectively “retrieved” versions of the past, like individual reconstructions “recovered” on the psychoanalyst’s couch, often seem self-interested and maddeningly unfalsifiable. Yet in a world struggling for relief from the anguish of conflicts, or “closure” of cycles of violence and vindictiveness, we want to know the whereabouts of the mass graves, the identities of the camp guards and torturers, the truth about the rapists and quislings, the destination of the paper trails, the names of the dead. Of all the history wars raging around the world none is more intense than Spain’s.