Spain and Syria: graffiti
It may be easy to forget in modern Spain, but Franco’s dictatorship and the civil war are really not that far in the past; certainly General Franco was in power within a hair’s breadth of my lifetime. Occasionally, though, reminders still appear of the scars left behind by this period in Spanish history, which is still only gradually being properly confronted:
And, despite the tendency of Europe and ‘the West’ to behave as if political violence was something that only happens ‘elsewhere’, the parallels between Spain’s recent history and the current events in Syria are only too clear, even if they are crude. It’s therefore unsurprising, given the large Arab and student populations here, to find graffiti like this adorning the walls of Granada:
