Manuel Chaves Nogales was a liberal. I’m not saying it, it was the way in which he defined himself “I was what sociologists call a liberal petit bourgeois” he wrote. Liberal in the original sense, nothing to do with the metamorphosis forced by the Chicago school towards what is known as “neoliberalism”, a model of economic thought that is widespread in the world today. Chaves Nogales, who was liberal and republican, drank from the Enlightenment and what is so little valued now called “tolerance”, a subject to which Voltaire even dedicated an entire book.
Yesterday Carlos Mazón also brought a book to Les Corts Valencianes, one from Chaves Nogales, A Sangre y Fuego, which includes nine reports on tragic stories that the journalist recorded at the beginning of the Civil War; stories that define the barbarism committed by both sides after the coup d’état by Franco’s forces. The work includes a prologue that should be required reading in all faculties of journalism, politics or common sense, if the latter exist. The president read a portion of that prologue in which the great Sevillian journalist makes two things clear: that both left-wing and right-wing radicals wanted to kill him because he was a liberal and that “every revolutionary, with all due respect, has seemed to me always something as pernicious as any reactionary”. The selection read was very important.
It would have been interesting to know how Chaves Nogales valued being cited at a time when the democratic fractures between ideological blocs are increasingly deeper, both in Valencia and in Spain; with a certain civil war spirit in the era of social networks. Because yesterday in Les Corts Valencianes, in the harshest debate of the new legislature, his legacy was remembered just when the Law of Concord came up, the legislative proposal of the PP and Vox that seeks to recognize the political victims since 1931, that is , since the reinstatement of the Second Republic. For the left, this law “equates” Francoism with democracy.
There was even scenery on the issue. With the socialist deputies holding photographs of those retaliated by Franco’s regime. One of these, that of Miguel Hernández, was assumed by Carlos Mazón, who took her to his seat, next to that of Vicente Barrera, of Vox, of the ultra formation that makes it difficult to care for the memory of the great poet in his hometown, Orihuela, as an example. The president stressed, questioned by the socialist ombudsman José Muñoz who accused him of “whitewashing Francoism”, that “Franco was a dictator and Francoism a dictatorship.” Those from Vox continued to defend this law that they have encouraged to distort the democratic memory of the Botànic.
Another great journalist, this time from Valencia, called Jesús Civera, said in an article in Las Provincias entitled “A good historical panquemado”, that “the inevitable collapse of political reason by including the Second Republic in the list of atrocities in Instead of setting the beginnings in the Civil War – and linking them with post-Transition Spain – it is not part of the quota of formal democratic homologations, and even interferes with Euclidean geometries. I will not be the one to question Civera, who is also well versed in the work of Chaves Nogales.
In any case, Mazón bringing up the Sevillian journalist yesterday had an effect. I am not referring to the specific debate that yesterday soured the atmosphere in Les Corts Valencianes. If not to the fact that Nogales advocated that exceeding the margins of moderation, tolerance and respect was leading us, in those years of lead, to tragedy. It seems that some (Vox) have insisted on recovering these fratricidal impulses in the opposite direction of what Nogales advocated, with the risk that memory, history and the supposed harmony will be used to once again generate pain in a society, ours, to which there are beginning to be plenty of excuses for the fight encouraged by those who must work in the opposite direction.
Chaves Nogales, once he fled Spain, was in France, from where he had to escape by boat to the United Kingdom, pursued by the Gestapo when Nazi troops arrived in Paris. He wrote another book, which is called The Agony of France. It is a formidable epilogue to understand what happened in dark Europe and what happens when the extremes impose their dogma and destroy liberal thought. If you have time, read both works, they are an excellent warning in these turbulent times.