Revisionist History? Or honoring a dictator?

Imperial Spain, which financed Christopher Columbus' trip to the new world, and eventually settled predominant stretches of the region began to fall in the 17th century, and fell further still to Bourbon France.

Spanish loyalists set out on a path not unlike our own revolutionaries. They vowed not to respect the rule of France, developed a forward thinking constitution in 1812, and developed an insurgent movent to offer a grass-roots fight against the organized Bourbon forces. France was defeated the following year and King Ferdinand was restored to his throne.

Many Spaniards embraced the liberal changes to their restored country. Ferdinand and his loyalists did not, and the country descended in to civil war. The war ended in an atmosphere not of calm, but of tension. Queen Isabella eventually lost control of her nation, with the liberal revolutionaries establishing a Republic in the 1870s.

The monarchy fought back, selling or ceding its foreign territories developing insurgent movements of their own, bankrupting the country. The following decades brought movements toward a liberal Republic, that was often met by bloodshed of conservative loyalists. The liberals pressed forward against the bankrupt dictatorship. The monarchy fled the country. The liberals established another Republic in the 1930s that greater autonomy for the Basque and the Catalonians, the right to vote for for women, and democratic elections.

The move angered the conservative Nationalists, fearing that the democratic liberals would exacerbate Spain's decline both as a culture and as a world power. The country fell in to a civil war yet again in the 1930s. The elected liberal rulers were attacked by conservatives, anarchists, coalitions of staunch Roman Catholics. The liberal Republicans fought back fiercely, establishing democratic strongholds in key cities, receiving help from the USSR and from international brigades.

The success was short lived, as the nationalists commandeered support from the fascist regimes in Portugal, Italy, and Nazi Germany and pressed onward under the command of General Francisco Franco.

Hundreds of thousand lives later, the Republic fell, and the dictatorship of Generalissimo Francisco Franco began.

Franco issued strict conservative mores, establishing the Roman Catholic Church as par the government and requiring workers to obtain a priest's bill of good character before being able to work. Roles and behaviours were defined along societal bounds, including gender. Politics became starkly isolationist and tyrannical. Mass media was developed for the purposes of state propaganda Democracy abhored, opposition was exterminated, culture stood at a standstill....for 40 years. Yet he levvied his control to push the Spanish economy further from bankruptcy and more in line with his European neighbors.

When Franco's health went in to decline, democratic uprisers and national loyalists organized yet again, each prepared to jockey once again for the power of Spain. Progressive ideas seeped in to government cracking at Spain's isolation and tyrrany, leading to tensions yet again paralyzing the country. When Franco passed away, a parliamentary monarchy took hold, re-establishing a democratic process and writing a constitution. Spain had, finally, joined the modern world.

Franco's critics decried his oppression and human rights abuses. Yet many of his supporters praised how he brought Spain out of bankruptcy and more in line, economically with his European neighbors. Others praised championing of traditional values.

Now, Generalissimo Franciso Franco...is still dead.

Many want his statues to be next. Others, who have a prouder memory of Franco dercy the act as revisionist history.

Is it revisionist history? Or is it moving on from a dark, painful past?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123594813501604681.html