WI: Franco tries to expell the Catalans to France

What is meant by the 'Stalin' that Franco wasn't? I don't seem to recall Stalin expelling all the Ukrainians.

Excellent point. Even the monster Stalin didn't expell Ukrainians, and Catalans were, if anything, more important to the Spanish state than Ukrainians were to Russia.
 
True, but as I've said I feel that the Ukrainian situation is the analogous one in terms of people's historical views; the circumstances were very different in those other cases (several, quite possibly all of them would not have happened without the war).

Because he later attained respectability in the western countries, it is easy to forget that Franco, in connection with his own war, killed a really appalling portion of Spaniards.

No question about it: Franco was a monster. Both Stalin and Franco killed ruthlessly several people that were opposed or could be opposed to their own regime.
Stalin has the plus of being psychotic and also randomly directing his murderous wrath towards loyal people and towards whole ethnicities. That's what I meant by "Franco is not Stalin".
 
And we're telling you that unless you are in the ASB category, he's not going to try to do that. It would be like Reagan trying to expell New Englanders into Canada.

This pretty much sumarizes the plausability of the WI and the understanding of the relations amongst spanish peoples and regions by the part of the OP.

Excellent point. Even the monster Stalin didn't expell Ukrainians, and Catalans were, if anything, more important to the Spanish state than Ukrainians were to Russia.

The question is not that if he was a bastard, but if he was an intelligent bastard.

The deaths of the Civil War (and the post-war trials, and the apalling conditions in that the republican prisoners where kept (even Himmler thought that they were too harsh)) could be justified with propaganda (even now there are people who swallow the Francoist version of the Civil War hook, line and sinker), and using the carrot and stick strategy with the pressumibly hostile sectors of the populations (see the treatment of the Basque country pre-ETA).

Deporting the population of one of the most developed parts of the country, where a important part of the population had supported the military coup, it wasn't as justifiable over the eyes of the falangist-conservative-carlist conjunction of interests that supported the regime (Carlists and conservatives were strong in Catalonia, by the way)

And this. some people seems to think that Franco didn't have supporters in Catalonia (or the Basque Country). Two of his main funders and closest allies were catalans, for example. On the other hand, as abhorrent as francoist idea of the spanish nation and spanish identity was (as francoism in general), specially regarding the linguistical/cultural diversity of the country, Franco was still a sissy compared to what happened in that field not yet in postwar Eastern Europe, but also in certain prestigious western countries since the 19th century.
 
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