The commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the attack on Carrero Blanco has made viral the proverb that states that there is no harm that does not come for good, which, as those who suggest that ETA was not the only organization involved in the blast, Franco recalled days later in his televised New Year’s speech. But, without prejudging the underlying issue, the proverb is not meat for this dish because it does not refer to how the evil it refers to comes about, but to how it must be dealt with in order to benefit from it. Like Kennedy’s famous phrase, also used by Nixon and worn out by corporate rhetoric, which fallaciously says: “In Chinese, the word crisis is made up of two characters. One represents danger, and the other, opportunity.” Or the phrase: “Not all tragedies are harmful”, which, in Mario Monicelli’s film Vogliamo i colonnelli, released months before the massacre, is uttered by the Christian Democrat interior minister, a parodic imitation of Giulio Andreotti, when , right after the accidental death of the president, drives a transition towards an authoritarian regime under the pretext of the situation created by a failed neo-fascist coup. That the occasion is painted bald and must be caught in flight is the oldest principle of politics. And these three sentences are limited to versioning it.
Franco’s version has, in any case, a style of its own, as can be seen if read in context. In the Middle Ages, works known as prince mirrors made a fortune, in which those who had to learn the art of governing could instruct themselves by contemplating the ideal model they had to imitate. Some Christmas messages from the Caudillo offered a curious narcissistic variety of this literary genre. In his own words, the dictator painted himself as the image in which the television viewers were to recognize the embodiment of the good ruler who steered the State with the right hand like a captain his ship, both during the calm as in the storm The speech of December 30, 1973 responds in a scholastic way to this approach. The famous “It is not in vain that the popular saying says that there is no evil that does not come for good” follows the sentence “Turning evil into good is a virtue of the political man”, which can be interpreted as a concretization of the rule of Thomas Aquinas according to which, since human power comes from the divine, it must imitate him based on the maxim of Augustine of Hippo according to which the true power of God does not consist in preventing evils , but to remove the good from the evils it allows. I don’t think any conspiracy theory has followed this theological thread, which invites fantasizing about the tolerance of evil by power. But it is also not often remembered that Franco, in the same speech, openly put the conspiracy theory into circulation for the first time, talking about “the violence of a small minority, postulated from the outside”.
