Enjoying a little justice done

Would you like a little good news? After all, there’s not that much of it around. We ought to make the most of what there is. 

A man from a village not far from where we live in the Valencian Region of Spain, Xirivella (over to you to find out how to pronounce, bearing in mind that it’s not the same in Castilian Spanish and in Valencian), has just been awarded a small compensation payment. Just 4000 euros, as it happens. It would only take four months to earn that on the minimum wage in Spain. 

The man is Antoni Ruiz. And the compensation was for the time he spent in gaol in the dying days of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship. That time was 94 days, not that much less than the four months a minimum-wage earner would take to earn the same amount. But Ruiz declares himself more than satisfied with the decision, because monetary and symbolic values are different, and in his case, it’s the symbol that matters far more than the money.

What was the crime for which he was imprisoned?

Well, it wasn’t anything most of us today would regard as a crime at all. In fact, it was something most of us today would regard as a human right.

It was for being gay.

I’ve argued before that Franco wasn’t really a true Fascist. He was much more of a Francoist, an obsessive narcissist who believed that he had a God-given entitlement to power, and a divine mission to rescue his country. Rather like, say, Donald Trump. Franco just happened to share a lot of his views with Fascists. Again, rather like Donald Trump, come to think of it.

Fascists, rather like their greatest enemies, Communists, are totalitarians. What puts the ‘total’ in ‘totalitarianism’ is the sense that everyone, absolutely everyone, should believe the same things the totalitarian does. What’s more, those beliefs apply just as much in the private as the public sphere. And the totalitarian has the right to pursue you right into your private life to make sure that you’re complying, using police with practically unlimited powers, the Gestapo, the KGB or, in Franco’s case, the armed police or ‘Greys’, from the colour of their uniforms.

A friend of mine, who was an adolescent at the end of the dictatorship, has told me about how he and his friends would behave when they met up in public places, perhaps for a little underage drinking. Unlike their opposite numbers in the democracies, who otherwise behaved the same way, they’d have to post one or two of their group to keep an eye out for the ‘Grises’, so they could all vanish into different side streets if they ever showed up. Being caught wasn’t funny.

Poor old Ruiz made the mistake of coming out, at 17, to his family. 

A nun who found out demonstrated her commitment to the gospel of love that is central to Christianity, by denouncing him to the police. They came hammering on his door at 6:00 in the morning and carted him off into custody. 

He admits he didn’t spend long in custody. In a regime which in its early days was entirely capable of shooting people it regarded as opponents, or condemning them to thirty-year gaol sentences, and which was still shooting people just months before Franco’s death, I suppose Ruiz was lucky things were no worse. Even so, it was, as he says, a ‘bad time’, which he spent surrounded by common criminals, even serious ones, including murderers. 

He lived that way, let’s not forget, as a man innocent of any genuine crime.

To see the Spanish state compensating him, even if it’s nearly half a century on, is a welcome sight. Particularly at a time when there are plenty of sad indications that the pendulum is swinging back the other way in many countries.

For instance, when Fascism fell in Italy in 1945, one of its servants, Giogio Almirante, set up the Italian Social Movement to keep the Duce’s mission going. Decades on, following many mergers and splits and changes of name, one of its inheritor organisations is Brothers of Italy (Fratelli d’Italia). Those, by the way, are the first words of the Italian national anthem, and the name is yet another example of that infuriating habit the far right has, of grabbing for itself the symbols of a nation to which many people belong without necessarily agreeing with them.

Homophobes' rogue gallery:
Franco, Mussolini, Meloni

The present leader of that party is Giorgia Meloni. Back in 2019, she declared:

Yes to the natural family, no to LGBT lobbies! Yes to sexual identity, no to gender ideology!

You see what I mean about totalitarian? An appeal to the ‘natural family’ is a call to maintain the ban on gay marriage in Italy. But legalising gay marriage doesn’t make it obligatory. No one is saying that allowing gays to marry need affect in any way the lives of other, straight, people.

All the ban does is damage gay people. But that’s what totalitarianism does. It punishes difference, forcing others to comply with the majority view.

What makes this so sad and so topical is that Giorgia Meloni is likely to be Italy’s Prime Minister in a few weeks. That will strengthen the homophobic axis in Europe that already includes such nations as Hungary and Poland.

Ah, well. I said that good news was a bit of a rare commodity at the moment. So let’s celebrate the long-delayed recognition of the injustice Antoni Ruiz suffered. 

And hope he gets some fun spending his 4000 euros.