In front of the video compiled and broadcast by Real Madrid television about the history of Barça under the Franco regime, it is inevitable to think of that sentence written by George Orwell in the famous novel 1984, which recreates a totalitarian world oppressively controlled by Big Brother: ” Whoever controls the present controls the past and whoever controls the past will control the future.”
It is a case of barroera propaganda in the purest interwar style, but produced with the cynical shamelessness of our era of cascading post-truths. The falsehood of the message does not support the slightest contrast with the documented history of sport in Spain, as explained in these pages, with his usual solvency, by colleague Xavier G. Luque.
Once the maneuver has been denounced, we should calmly rehearse a reflection that transcends this unfortunate episode: can a video like this shape the mentality and judgment of the new generations who are unaware of everything that really happened?
I emphasize the young audience, since I take it for granted – perhaps I am too optimistic – that those who are already of a certain age (whether they are Madrid fans or not) have a perfect memory of what Real Madrid and FC Barcelona meant to the powers that be dictatorship, a regime whose action was not neutral in relation to symbols, and less so in the area, so sensitive, of mass sport, a true factory of identity and loyalties. We will not discover at this time how authoritarian and totalitarian systems use the passions generated by sport to project positive images on scaffoldings of structural terror and violence.
It may be that, from Catalonia, we do not see the corrosive impact that a video of these characteristics has on the quality of the collective consciousness of Spain as a whole. Catalan society – even those who are little or no Catalanists – know that it is grotesquely ridiculous to present the Blaugrana entity (with a president shot by the Francoists) as something it was not; grandparents remember it and have told it to their children and grandchildren. But the thesis of the video broadcast by the Real Madrid channel can easily resonate with viewers in Malaga, Zamora, Huesca or the Spanish capital itself.
They, especially if they are young, can swallow the propaganda as if it were a rigorous documentary. Dismantling, later, the lie will not be easy at all. Given that football is a realm where the irrational, the primal and the tribal reign supreme, falsehood can take root and multiply unimpeded.
A world of fake news automatically generates a world of fake history. History is taken by storm by the hardware store owners to distort it to their heart’s content. The facts of the past do not matter at all. The Orwellian dystopia becomes a stark reality: you have to control yesterday to dominate the future. If Donald Trump did it from the White House, anyone can do it. From the Bernabéu stadium, too. Without anyone (apart from Catalonia) protesting.
The American professor Alison Landsberg has coined the term “prosthetic memory” to refer to the narratives that replace the memory that comes from the concrete experience of each individual and human group. Prosthetic memories are gaining ground; sometimes through seemingly innocuous formats, others through perfectly planned campaigns. The video that presents Barça as a team of the Franco regime aims to become the real – indisputable – memory of many Spaniards.
