The complex, devised by the dictator Francisco Franco, celebrates the Nationalist victory in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), keeps the bodies of thousands of victims of the conflict, as well as the leading [para]fascist ideologue and the dictator himself, and provides a material narrative that exalts the dictatorship.
With the advent of [neoliberalism] in 1978, the Valley remained unchanged, untouchable, and an important focus for fascist and extreme right celebrations, both national and international.
Despite this author’s lousy politics (being a totalitarian theorist in the 2020s should be pretty embarrassing), there is some useful information in here after the first couple of pages. Byspel:
The ideology of the Francoist régime has been described as national‐Catholic, as it blended a reactionary, authoritarian strand of Catholicism and ultranationalism. Nevertheless, its relationship with the fascist ideologies of the 1930s and 1940s was more than obvious. It was, in fact, made explicit by the régime itself: the dictator publicly expressed his desire to build a totalitarian régime in Spain (Andrés‐Gallego, 1997: 28) and fascist ideologues, politicians, and intellectuals acknowledged the inspiration of Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy (Janué i Miret, 2015), which were Franco’s allies during the war.
The years between 1937 and 1943 are those in which fascism had greater sway in Spain and this was materialized in monuments and public buildings. Thus, the conceptualization of the Valley of the Fallen as a landscape of memory (Delso et al., 2018) was influenced by [the Third Reich’s] landscape notions (Hagen and Ostergren, 2019; van der Laarse, 2014) and the monument’s gigantic dimensions are typical of the fascist architecture of the period: a committee of [Third Reich] leaders even visited the works in May 1942 (Olmeda, 2009: 50).
[…]
In the almost 20 years it took to build the monument, the global context changed; the régime evolved and so did the political factions within the régime. This had repercussions in the conceptualization of the Valley. Shortly before it was completed, the authorities decided to present it as a monument to national reconciliation. For this, they took the bodies of some 8000 Republican victims and buried them inside the basilica, in most cases without the consent of their relatives (Gallego Vila and Queralt Barjau, 2020).
The discourse of reconciliation was only that: a discourse. In practice, the monument continued celebrating the [fascist] victory in the war. The architecture and the iconographic program were unambiguous, and the words of Franco himself on the day of its inauguration, too.
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The author also unconsciously reveals the failures of the capitalist status quo in suppressing fascism:
The Valley of the Fallen is in fact being excavated in two different ways: on the one hand, exhumations in the crypts of the basilica were scheduled for December 2021, but they have been planned since 2016, when a firm legal ruling authorized the disinterment of anarchist brothers Manuel and Antonio Ramiro Lapeña, executed in 1936 and transferred to the monument in 1959. The families, however, encountered a Kafkaesque labyrinth of religious, bureaucratic, political, and legal obstacles, which have prevented the exhumations from being carried out (Ferrándiz, 2019: S69).
Along with the Lapeña brothers, 84 more demands for exhumation (all from Republican victims) have been filed that will be attended to. These will be carried out on humanitarian grounds: the relatives have the right to recover the bones of their beloved ones to bury them in a dignified manner. But the exhumation is also a powerful performance: a way of disassembling the monument and revealing its true nature—a necropolitical machine that violates the rights of the living and of the dead.
(Emphasis added in all cases.)
Events that happened today (October 26):
1935: Due to a food shortage in the Rhineland–Palatinate and Saarland, Berlin proclaimed meatless and butterless days for those regions on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Meanwhile, Benito Mussolini called international sanctions against Italy ‘the most odious of injustices’ during a speech commemorating the 13th anniversary of the March on Rome.
1937: The Third Reich commenced expelling 18,000 Polish Jews.
1942: In the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands during the Guadalcanal Campaign, one U.S. aircraft carrier was sunk and another carrier became heavily damaged, while two Axis carriers and one cruiser took heavy damage.
1944: The Battle of Leyte Gulf ended with an overwhelming Yankee victory. Hiroyoshi Nishizawa, Axis aviator, was killed in this action.
1956: Walter Wilhelm Gieseking, Axis composer, perished.
1960: Toshizō Nishio, Axis general, died.
1961: Sadae Inoue, another Axis general, expired.