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Suddenly, and for no reason at all, I'm sure.
The Spaniards mostly don't care about him either way, it's the chattering classes that seethe over him, but that's not exactly what I'd call the result of a dispassionate analysis of his pro's and con's.
Well Pinochet basically did for no reason at all. Guy literally pulled an illegal military coup on a democratically elected government, bombing the presidential palace and then rounding up everyone who had been involved in leftist politics. The government doing a mediocre job at governing is not sufficient reason to violently execute all your opponents. Franco maybe had more justification (the republicans in the civil war also did some bad shit) but he took it too far.
I don’t know man, every Spaniard I’ve talked to hates his guts. Maybe that’s just selection bias on my part, but the government’s actions (voting to exhume him 179-1 and also voting to exclude him from other military cemeteries by the same margin) speak to a pretty universal dislike of the man and his regime.
If I were to shit on Lenin, Stalin, or Mao who did similar shit I would get no pushback on this forum, but because these guys are right wing and traditionalist, they get defended here. This is why leftists don’t usually frequent this place.
Last I heard the atrocities on each side were roughly equal. The Republican cope was that their atrocities were "the spontaneous and chaotic expression of the anguish of the masses", and that this somehow makes them less morally objectionable.
Yeah. Keep in mind that I'm nit saying he's particularly loved (though he certainly has his fanboys), but the kind of person that lets Franco live rent-free in their heads is a particular type of Polite Company Participator that we're all well familiar with.
You're making the leftists look pretty immature. These kind of conversations are completely normal, even if they're controversial, and if someone won't join or will leave in a huff over people taking a no-no position, they'd do more to stifle the conversation with their presence than to enrich it.
Also, we actually had a few Lenin, Stalin, and Mao fans over the years. We even had a guy who thought that if you think they're worse than Hitler you must be a Nazi. I don't recall any liberal handwringing over what the trads will think about this.
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