Spanish Catholic cover-up of Catholic atrocities

The New York Times' Victoria Burnett reported today that the Spanish government has just blocked an attempt by the judge Baltasar Garzon to investigate the mass killings by Franco and his Catholic fascist government during the Spanish Civil war
(1936-1939) and during the fascist regime between the 40's and the 70's. Garzon wished to investigate 114,000 murders and 19 mass graves attributable to the Catholic fascists.

This cover-up, I assume, is the result of pressure from Spanish Catholics, who want to forget about the evils committed by the institution they belong to, and who want to continue to place undue blame on the Spanish anarchists for the violence of the
1930's. During the late 18th and 19th centuries, the Spanish anarchists among the peasantry and the urban Spanish developed anarchist consciousness and practice for 60 years. Finally, after the fascists, led by Franco, conducted a coup against the liberal Spanish government, the anarchists launched a war first against the fascists and then against all centralized institutions in Spain.

The anarchists lost because every powerful government on the planet did its part to repress the anarchist uprising. The Communist Russian government withheld aid from the anarchists, instigated Spanish communists to undermine the anarchist effort through violence and sabotage, and instructed Communist parties around the world to distance themselves from the anarchists. The liberal Spanish government refused to give information to anarchists about the location of the fascists, and denied arms to anarchist soldiers. The liberal governments of the West refused to support the anarchist effort (in effect lending its support to the fascists) and the the subservient Western media neglected to report on the most significant events of the conflict, instead depicting it in vague terms, as a struggle between liberal democracy and fascism.

At the time of fascist dominance in Europe, the Vatican, under pope Pius XI and XII, of course, lent its support to the European fascists and emphatically supported the Holocaust. Franco, unlike the other major fascists dictators, who were merely endorsed by the Catholic Church and raised Catholic, ran a distinctly Catholic dictatorship. During the civil war and during his reign, he purged tens of thousands of gays, gypsies, and political dissidents, and massacred entire city populations in Northern Spain. One of the cities levelled and depopulated by Franco and his German friends was Guernica; this gruesome destruction was depicted in Pablo Picasso's famous painting, La Guernica.

Why am I talking about the Spanish government/Catholic Church cover-up of fascist atrocities? For two reasons:

1) Everyone must understand that the effort by the Spanish government to cover-up the real events of the 1930's is mirrored by similar efforts by all Western governments. Governement in the Western world have, since, the beginning of the Spanish struggle of the 30's, conducted a determined effort to purge the memory of the Spanish anarchist movement from history. When the civil war is brought up in a history texbook (which it often isn't), the only mention of anarchists (if there is any it all) is of the murders of clergymen by anarchist peasants in the 1930's. We hear nothing of sympathy for fascism by Western governments, and even less about the 60-year struggle of anarchists against government and Church domination. And we are not invited to blame the fundemental structure of the Catholic Church for Spanish fascism...which brings us to my second reason.

2) We ought to remember the key role played by religion not just in the European fascist movement, but in all government oppression throughout history. All throughout the history of human civilization, the institution of government has been closely tied to the institution of religion. Government and God have a close relationship because both are founded on the same assumptions: humans are naturally stupid and violent, and are thus incapable of running their own affairs free from the control of higher powers; justice and goodness are abstract ideas separate from and superior to material human existence.

The former idea implies the necessity of permanent entities that are above human error--in a word, superhuman entities. In order for government to exist, its subjects must be tricked by the fallacious argument that government, though controlled by human individuals, somehow is not sullied by the any of the negative qualities attributed to its subjects (greed, aggressiveness, stupidity, immorality). In other words, in order for government to exist, it must be assumed to be a superhuman entity. Similarly, God, though merely an idea created by fallible human minds, is thought to be somehow above the material functions of the concrete structure of the human brain. The concept of "God", the entity representing the ultimate expression of superhuman, otherworldly perfection, has tended to have a close relationship with the concept of the state, which represents superhuman worldly perfection.

The latter idea, a religious idea with its roots in Platonism, is essential to the existance of government because government claims legitimacy on the ground that it, as an entity elevated above human material existence, deserves to have a monopoly on the interpretation of justice and goodness. Implicit in this claim is the traditional religious idea that goodness and justice are incomprehensible, ethereal ideas that emanate from superhuman sources.

This connection between God and the State is indestructible, and is absolutely essential to all absolutist governments, even absolutist governments ruled by self-described atheists like Hitler and Mussolini. When the figure "God" is not allowed to exist, he must be replaced by some roughly equivalent entity that also represents infinite goodness and justice, like the "Nation".

The libertarian Catholic Lord Acton once pointed out that "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely". Similarly, absolutist notions of the infinite Goodness of the divine father accompany the infinitely corrupt institution of absolutist state, and somewhat less absolutist Deistic notions of the subtle but still infinitely Good and Just God accompany the modern corrupt liberal republic.

How about an end to all delusions about perfect superhuman moral entities, and accompanying this advance, an end to government?