When extermination is more satisfying than mere victory

It’s one thing to defeat your enemies. It’s another to crush them.

That’s an idea forcefully portrayed in the latest film by Spanish director Alejandro Amenábar, While at War. 

“You will win, but you will not convince”
Karra Elejalde as Miguel de Unamuno in While at War

The key scene is in a lecture hall of the University of Salamanca, on the Spanish national day or ‘Race Day’, as it was called in the time of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, at the time leader of the military insurrection that led to a three-year civil war. 

The room is full of uniformed men, many of them armed, including some in the blue uniform of the Phalange, the Spanish Fascist movement. Facing this hostile and dangerous crowd, the internationally celebrated logician and philosopher, Miguel de Unamuno, declares, “you will win, but you will not convince”.

It works better in Spanish, with its play on words: “Venceréis, pero no convenceréis”. 

Unamuno got out of the hall unscathed, but died a few months later under house arrest. He never saw how true his words proved. Franco and the Fascists won the war but that wasn’t enough for them. They crushed their enemies with 200,000 executions during the fighting and in the years immediately after it.

That’s the difference between a democratic and a dictatorial system. In a democracy, the losers are beaten at the ballot box, they don’t get bombed to death in the presidential palace by their own nation’s air force, as happened to Chile’s Socialist President Salvador Allende on the orders Augusto Pinochet, the man for whom Maggie Thatcher later showed such friendship. 

What’s more, the losing side concedes defeat and, perhaps through gritted teeth, congratulates the winners. But it doesn’t expect to be arrested or assassinated on its way home. It isn’t even driven out of politics, but can generally regroup and prepare the ground to try to win again at the next elections. 

Because the victors win by convincing voters, unlike the men Unamuno denounced. The defeated side will be given another chance to convince them back. 

Sadly, that kind of thinking seems increasingly unfashionable today. 

In Britain, political opponents are not yet being arrested, let alone assassinated. They are, however, being politically destroyed. The government headed by Boris Johnson, and directed by his chief adviser Dominic Cummings, despises Parliament although, for centuries, Parliament has been the main way the British system prevents the executive abusing its power.

Actually, they despise it precisely because it’s a brake on their authority.

Last autumn, the government attempted to prorogue Parliament, to prevent it having a say over the conditions for Britain’s departure from the European Union. Suspending Parliament is a classic tool of the authoritarian. A great many Members of Parliament fought to prevent that happening, including some leading members of Johnson’s own Conservative Party. So he kicked them out of the Party, meaning they couldn’t stand in the subsequent general election.

All of them lost their seats. They lost their frontline political positions. They weren’t just defeated, they were politically destroyed.

In the US, it has long been clear that Donald Trump has no wish to see his opponents merely beaten. His language is that of hatred and incitement to violence. He has now dropped increasingly sinister hints that even if he is defeated for re-election, he may refuse to leave office, and his supporters have been talking about the use of weapons to achieve their aims.

It looks as though there too the mood is for winning without necessarily convincing. For crushing opposition rather than merely winning against it. For using intimidation and, ultimately, violence to eliminate any possibility of adversaries toppling the ruling group.

The 27th of September is a good day to be thinking of authoritarian government holding onto power by ugly means. Especially here in Spain. That’s because the last executions carried out by the Franco government took place on that day in 1975.

One of a series of paintings by Equipo Cronica for the 1975 executions
Each shows the date, a black band for mourning, 
a face with eyes blanked out representing the mask of the man being shot,
the wall he stood against and the artist's broken palette

There hadn’t been many executions after the first wave of terror, from the time of the overthrow of the Spanish Republic in 1939 until about 1948. Between that year and 1975, only 48 people were executed.

On that day, five more opponents, all convicted by military tribunals of the murder of policemen, were executed by firing squad. There is doubt at least over the guilt of some of those shot. But that’s not what’s most striking about the deaths.

The most appalling aspect is that they were confirmed by the Council of Ministers, chaired by Franco himself, the day before the executions. 36 years after the end of the Civil War and, even more shockingly, less than two months before his own death, Franco was still keen to destroy those who opposed him.

It seems that the instinct to eliminate dies hard.

That’s something worth bearing in mind, given the slide towards authoritarianism in some of our democracies today.