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Yo repito a menudo que en España está ocurriendo un fenómeno muy grave: las cosas entran por el oído, se expulsan por la boca y no pasan nunca por el cerebro... casi nunca pasan por la reflexión previa.
I often repeat that a very grave phenomenon is taking place in Spain: Things enter through the ears, they are expelled through the mouth but never pass through the brain ... they are never reflected upon first.
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A bit under a year ago, I commenced something that I thought - naively - I would manage to write in a week while covering things in far more detail than a TLIAW can allow for and without just going into the typical presidential list style. I was wrong, and it somewhat transformed itself into a proper timeline with updates that I felt were too short and narrow to give a good picture, with the exception of the last one - regarding Catalan politics. I feel that this longer post approach is the way to go, with a more serious timeline, better re-researched (aided by the fact I'm temporarily back in Spain for some time) and with fancier graphics and some extra background for those who are not keen observers of the recent Spanish political history - which I would imagine includes most of the forum.
Verbosity aside, this is my second and ideally more successful attempt at
Memorias de Nuestros Padres. The TL will explore a very different Spanish Transition and its posterior evolution, not more socialist nor more Francoist, neither more successful nor less so, and certainly neither utopian nor dystopian. Just different. I am not sure until what point I will take it just yet, but at least ideally until the late 1990s. To some degree it is a story of Adolfo Suárez and Santiago Carrillo, their failures and successes and their respective defenestrations - something, by the way, that Spanish political parties TTL will be quite adept at, unlike OTL, with the exception of
Alianza Popular - but who remembers Hernández Mancha?
The Spanish political transition was and is hailed as an ideal model for other countries to follow in a playbook of how to go from a dictatorship to a democracy without tearing the country apart (again). It may seem as a model today, but back in the day, it was dirty, very bloody, full of loops, u-turns and constant improvisation in what one could easily call brinkmanship, certainly not statesmanship. But still impressive nonetheless. The most impressive part about was that it was accomplished thanks to two men so ill-prepared for democratic and political party-based politics: Suárez and Carrillo. The former as a political upstart who could lead a country, but not a party, too used to the Francoist way of politics; and the latter, the leader of a supposedly democratic party ruled according to Stalinist principles and with his fair share of - very literal - skeletons in the closet. And in between, ambitious BDR-funded socialists, a politicised military, the influential Catholic Church, nationalists, terrorists of all kinds and shapes and the scions of Madrid's political families, the
crème de la crème of Madrid's Great Sewer and a press that has never been so free - and so nasty. Those were the Spanish 1970s and the remain much alike in
Memorias de Nuestros Padres.
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Special thanks goes to
@shiftygiant for making the graphic displayed in this post.
The first update should come next week, I imagine on the 10-11 September weekend with a post named '
El ocaso del centinela'. You win a cookie if you get the reference.