Mario Garcés -- Transition

The author denounces a general attack on the spirit of the Transition at the hands of a left that, as he denounces, uses a manipulated historical memory.

I am convinced that more than half of the new thinkers who have an opinion about the role of Martin Villa in the Transition and in the events for which he is being tried in Argentina, had no idea who he was until half a television news programme ago. But the neo-melancholy that has compulsively appropriated a significant part of the sociological left in this country has prevented a rational judgement of Martín Villa's role in those critical days of our recent history. The left has taken advantage of the process to turn the whole period of the democratic transition into a general cause, as a sort of belated revenge on those who joined the change of regime with indolence and apprehension.

When a nation like Spain combines the concepts of memory, democracy and history, nothing positive can happen. Memory is subjectivity, history is objectivity and democracy is axiology. This being so, any alloy of these terms constitutes a rational but also an emotional shredder.

If memory is composed of a double plane of subjectivity, that which emanates from the subconscious and that which underlies thought, memory hardly contributes any constituent value to the neutrality of historical fact. Thus, the epic of the story has replaced the ethics of thought based on reason, and the Transition has given way to the customary tradition of denying ourselves as a country. In the face of hope as the message of an exemplary Transition, the left rides on the back of a tragic vision of life, that of the past, as an exorcism that self-justifies its current raison d'être. A grave historical error.

It must be acknowledged that where the Spanish right gave up fighting the cultural battle, the left appropriated melancholy. So much so that in the months that I have been in Congress I have had to see how different manifesto-laws were passed whose only objective was to normatively articulate the past. This rampant left, a tributary of Frankfurt and its school, opted for diversity, for the collectivisation of society and for the revision of the past at will until an idealised narrative was created. A narrative based on exhuming the "war of the cemeteries" so that the living would not forget that there are two Spains: theirs and the other.

"Among all the viruses that plague us, not the least is the annihilation of the spirit of the Transition".

On the other hand, the undervalued Vázquez Montalbán of that socialist Catalonia incinerated by the pragmatism of the present left, already anticipated it when he pointed out that that time, the Transition, "was very cruel for the supporters of memory as the only landscape in which desires are possible". Years later, Vázquez Montalbán's prophecy has come true, and cruelty has mutated into opportunity. An opportunity that unfailingly distances the real Spain from the official Spain. The Spain that rejected eternal revanchism in order to replace it with perpetual peace, as Vázquez Montalbán pointed out. Kant.

Martin Villa is still alive to give an account of the facts of which he is accused. He will be the one to give his testimony. But it cannot be denied that, behind these judicial proceedings, there is a mendacious and opportunistic investigation. It is a general attack on those years, on the spirit of the Transition, by those on the left, defeated by a declining way of thinking, who think that they can feed the sentimentalism of the new readers of rewritten history. They thus exacerbate historical memory, this great semantic contradiction, in order to give an ideological response to the past that consolidates the project of a left that is heir to the worst propagandist tradition.

Because memory is not an emptiness, but memory cannot be selective, not even oblivion. That is why we must not exhume the agonising sense of guilt, the guilt that is a battlefield in Spanish cemeteries and even in the ditches. That happened, in fact, as did the Transition. And among all the viruses that plague us now, not the least is that of collective disaffection and the annihilation of the spirit of the Transition. The only spirit that makes us free and equal.

This article has been published in El Español. You can access it by clicking here.

Photo credits: EFE