It is ironic—and ultimately tragic—that in Spain, as across the West, the popular imagination increasingly fails to distinguish between ‘memory’ and facts.
Apart from deciding who is eligible for financial compensation, the Law of Historical Memory from 2007 has been used to define how history is taught. Its trajectory will be accelerated with the Law of Democratic Memory of 2022.
Rejecting the Franco-era state to this degree, however, implies rejecting the political reform that led to the current democratic constitution. Indeed, some analysts suspect this is partly the law’s intent.
