Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label Franco

Spanish-Moroccan Letters of Forbidden Love

In Salamanca, a woman named Concha met Nasar, a Moroccan soldier stationed nearby.   Madly in love, she wrote to his superiors for permission to marry him in 1938. But for Spanish colonial authorities, such contact absolutely had to be banned .  They expressed disgust at Concha, who they disparaged as old, "ugly, fat like a hippo and with a slight limp".  They suspected that Nasar had only shown interest because Concha happened to own a house, which is what awakened his "volcanic love". **** Continuity Not very different from what I read and heard from many Brits about refugees when I arrived in London: “they come here for the benefits.” The tabloid papers popularised the idea of the refugee and asylum seeker ‘invading our country’ and ‘living on the benefit system ’, etc. The language continues today and even intensified: leaders in the EU such as Suella Braverman, Giorgia Meloni and François Borel talk about ‘invasion’ of Europe by ’swarms’ of immigrants/refugees,
"[L]ike many other brutal dictators all over the world, Franco partly owed his long, dark reign to powerful friends in Britain." Franco's Friends