Careful with the nostalgia

Be careful what you wish for, people say. Good advice, I reckon. But I think it needs to be extended.

Be careful what you’re nostalgic about, I’d recommend.

Julio Cervera in 1886.
A suitable object for nostalgia?
Not for everyone, perhaps

Nostalgia can be quite a pleasant emotion. It has you remembering a time when you liked life better. Sadly, though, the rosy picture may be a tad mythical. I’ve been around for pretty much three generations now, and in each of those generations I’ve constantly heard people complaining about how the young are more uncouth, ruder and less perceptive than the speakers were at that age.

In my experience, young people in any generation can be pretty unbearable. I’ve often wondered how my parents put up with me at all, given the arrogant, self-righteous and self-satisfied attitudes I adopted and proclaimed to anyone I could force to listen when I was in my late teens or early twenties. 

So when I hear young people today behaving in precisely the same way, I just think, “right, good, they’re no better than I was”. I feel no hostility towards them. But equally I feel no nostalgia for those far less than rosy times.

Nostalgia becomes far worse when it seeps into politics. There seems to be a longing in many quarters for a supposedly better time when powerful leaders simply didn’t put up with intolerable behaviour. That’s using ‘intolerable’ to mean what the speaker wouldn’t tolerate.  Although, if the speaker is, say, Boris Johnson, it means intolerable in anyone but himself, his friends, his numerous families (including, I imagine, the kids he refuses to acknowledge) or anyone who’s providing him with money to advance his career or redecorate his flat (if you don’t know about Boris Johnson’s redecorating of Number 10 Downing Street at huge cost and in the worst of taste, just search for ‘Wallpapergate’).

Faced with the intolerable, the leaders for which so many are nostalgic responded with the hard smack of strong government. It’s funny, these people generally hate big government, but when it’s beating up people they dislike, they want it to have all possible power.

So we have support for the likes of Boris Johnson, or Donald Trump, or, in Hungary, Viktor Orbán, who only the other day was denouncing the terrible mixing of races in Europe. I suppose that must be important for the nostalgists. I don’t think we’ve had a European leader denouncing racial mixing explicitly since the days of Hitler.

In Spain, where I live, the nostalgia takes the form of wistfulness for the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. This was a time when those who opposed his brand of Catholic Nationalism wouldn’t just be defeated, in elections (there weren’t any) or in war (the regime started with nearly three years of bitter fighting), but had to be exterminated. And watching Trump sending an armed mob to attack the US Capitol, or Putin dealing with his opponents, one can see the same pursuit of extermination is alive and well today.

I went hunting for Franco’s last speech recently, and I was fascinated by some of the comments on a transcript of it. 

“And this was by far the best period in Spanish history…” claimed one.

“What a pity you’re not here now, we need you!” wrote another.

“I feel very proud of this and of our Spanish past” was a comment that particularly caught my attention, since it’s that past I want to talk about today.

But first: why was Franco giving that speech, on 1 October 1975, only six weeks from his death?

Well, just four days earlier, five men convicted of terrorism by summary military courts, had been executed by firing squad. Franco’s regime executed some 200,000 people – you know, not just defeating but exterminating opposition – but almost all of them during the Civil War or immediately after it. Those final shooting on 27 September 1975, as I’ve pointed out before, were a reminder that he still had the power to order them and was still willing to exercise it.

A painting by Equipo Crónica marking the executions
Note the date, the wall, the eyes blanked as by a blindfold,
the broken palette of the artist

The executions were met by demonstrations in many cities. In the Portuguese capital Lisbon, they turned violent and the Spanish Embassy was invaded, gutted and set on fire. Franco’s last speech was a response to these events. I was particularly struck by one sentence in it. The troubles, he reckoned, were:

… all due to a left-wing conspiracy of freemasons in the political class in collusion with communist-terrorist subversion in the social sphere which, though it is all to our credit, brings shame on them.

Franco really loathed the masons. Now, I’m no fan myself. My father was the first male in three generations of our family not to be a mason, and my brother and I followed his example. But if other people want to join the masons, well, as long as they behave in a law-abiding and ethical manner, I say good luck to them. 

Remember that Franco-nostalgic comment about being proud of the Spanish past?

Well, our great friend, Ana Cervera, has written to me about Julio Cervera Baviera, the uncle of her grandfather (check my working, but I reckon that makes him a great-granduncle).

He was an engineer and a military man, who used the time of his service in North Africa to write about the military geography of the region, publishing two books on the subject. In 1898, during the Spanish-American war, a moment of glory for the States but of profound disaster for Spain, when it lost its last overseas colonies from an Empire which had once been the envy of all its rivals, Cervera served with distinction in Puerto Rico.

The following year, he spent three months working with Guglielmo Marconi. That’s the man generally credited with inventing wireless communications. Cervera took out several patents, including one for a predecessor of the remote control. 

More striking still, he developed radio communications eleven years before Marconi. What’s more, where Marconi only sent coded signals, Cervera set up equipment to send and receive voice messages between the Spanish mainland and the island of Ibiza, 85 kilometres away.

That doesn’t give him absolute priority in the invention, since someone else got there even earlier: that was Nikola Tesla, after whom Elon Musk’s electric car is named. Tesla eventually established his precedence in a case against Marconi that went all the way up to the US Supreme Court.

All in all, it seems to me that Cervera is a man who contributed significantly to the honour of Spain. He enhanced that past, that history, that Franco’s supporters seem to like so much. They ought to feel nostalgically well-disposed towards him.

Well, you can see where this is going, can’t you? Yes, Cervera was a Republican, the kind of man Franco fought his war against and executed in droves. Cervera even served as a Spanish MP promoting Republican values, in 1909-1910.

And would you believe it? He was a freemason.