The Cross That Means Nothing (And Everything)
The thing outsiders (and some insiders) often misunderstand about Spain is that Francoism did not end the way Nazism ended.
There was no Nuremberg. No national reckoning. No purge of institutions. Franco died peacefully in bed in 1975, and much of the state simply rolled forward carrying his fingerprints into democracy. Judges remained judges. Powerful families remained powerful families. Spain’s celebrated Transition worked because everyone agreed, implicitly and explicitly, not to look too closely backwards.
For decades that bargain mostly held.
But democratic amnesia creates opportunities.
Not primarily for monsters, monsters are rare, but for small men.
That is the part people consistently fail to understand about authoritarianism. Dictators matter, yes. Fanatics matter too. But authoritarian systems are mostly sustained by the mediocre: the functionary who discovers obedience is rewarded more reliably than talent, the politician with no convictions who learns that cynicism is a career path, the lawyer who can translate cruelty into paperwork, the local operator who realises there is advancement to be found in protecting symbols everyone else is too tired to fight over.
Political scientists sometimes call them “loyal losers”.
Not true believers. Not ideological zealots. Just ordinary people who understand that in systems drifting away from democracy, loyalty pays better than merit.
That is why the fight over the Cruz de los Caídos in Cáceres matters far beyond a single monument.
The cross was erected in 1938, a few years after the beginning of Franco’s fascist uprising, inaugurated by Pilar Primo de Rivera while Republican prisoners filled concentration camps and mass graves spread across Spain. It was built as a victory monument. A declaration of domination. A celebration.
And yet today, lawyers and politicians argue, with perfectly straight faces, that it no longer means what it once meant. That time has “resignified” it. That preserving it is moderation while questioning it is extremism.
But symbols do not preserve themselves.
Someone always profits from keeping them standing.
That is how democratic backsliding actually works. Not suddenly. Not dramatically. Not with cinematic villains marching through the streets.
Slowly. Procedurally. Respectably.
One legal appeal at a time.
Read this piece in Spanished in El Salto Diario here or read the English version below.
The Cross That Means Nothing (And Everything)
The smell hits you first.
Burning wood, yes, but underneath that, something sweeter and more horrible, the particular sweetness of burning flesh, a smell that once you know it you can never unknow it, a smell that lives in the back of the throat forever. The cross is enormous, maybe twenty feet tall, and it is fully ablaze now, crackling and spitting embers into the sweltering Mississippi night. And in its orange light you can see the tree. The oak. And swinging beneath the oak, the body. A man. What was a man. Now a cinder. His name was John. Or James. Or Tom. It barely matters now because the men standing in the firelight made sure it wouldn’t. They made sure the man’s name, his identity, his entire life would be swallowed by history the way the fire is swallowing the cross. They stand watching with the placid satisfaction of people who believe, who genuinely believe, that what they are doing is righteous. That the cross burning behind the hanging body of a Black man is a symbol of their faith. Their heritage. Their righteousness. Their culture.
And beside them, inevitably, stand the smaller men: the deputy sheriff hoping for promotion, the local banker protecting his standing, the clerk taking down names correctly in triplicate, the mediocre souls who smell opportunity in smoke.
Now imagine, lifetimes later, someone looks at a photograph of that scene and says: the cross doesn’t mean hate. It means sacrifice. It means community. It has been part of this landscape for so long that it has lost its original significance. It is, at this point, simply part of the scenery.
You would call that person a monster. Or a liar. Or both.
In Cáceres, Spain, there is also a cross.
It was inaugurated on May 11th, 1938 — let’s hold that date up to the light and turn it slowly — two years into a military coup already neck-deep in its own atrocities, cheered on by Hitler and Mussolini, run by generals who speak openly about extermination, cleansing, a holy crusade to purge Spain of the disease of democracy and freedom. The cross was inaugurated by Pilar Primo de Rivera — daughter of one dictator, sister of another, head of the Falange’s women’s division, a woman who was less a person than a dynasty of fascism made flesh — while, at that very moment, close to 200,000 Republican prisoners rotted in Franco’s concentration camps on Spanish soil, while schoolteachers were being shot in olive groves, while the bodies of poets and trade unionists were being shoveled into unmarked pits that the state would spend the next eighty years making sure no one could open.
They called it the Cruz de los Caídos. The Cross of the Fallen.
They meant their fallen. The ones who fell forward, bayonets first, into the bodies of a democratic republic. They were not subtle about this. Subtlety is for a world of shades and nuance. Subtlety is for a world without absolutes. Subtlety is for the losing side.
And the Catholic Church, the self-appointed guardians of the apocryphal sayings of a carpenter from Nazareth, eagerly blessed the whole magnificent slaughter. Priests, men of faith, raised their arms in the Fascist salute beside generals who called the murder of civilians a sacrament. The bishops called it a crusade. Christ, apparently, was fine with all of it. The cross, you see, is also a religious symbol — which is precisely what makes this particular trick so elegant, so revolting, so perfectly faith-based: when the politics get uncomfortable, you retreat into the sacred, and suddenly anyone who objects is not opposing fascism but blaspheming.
Now here is where it gets magnificent in its obscenity.
Back in 2004, when stiff armed salutes and talk of racial purity were relics of WWII films, the Cáceres city council votes unanimously to remove the cross. Unanimously. Every party, every hand in the air, including the PP — the Partido Popular, currently the very same party filing eleven-page legal appeals to keep it standing forever. Rafael Mateos, now the PP mayor and valiant defender of the monument, was his party’s own spokesman that day. He voted to take it down. Then went home. Then did nothing. Even as recently as 2020, pressed again by the national government, Mateos said: agreements must be honored, the law must be followed. Every party nodded gravely. Nobody moved. The cross stayed, as it always stays, rooted in the roundabout like a bad tooth nobody will pull. Because monuments do not preserve themselves. Someone always discovers there is advantage in protecting them. Every authoritarian inheritance creates its own second ladder: a quieter route upward for people too cautious, too mediocre, or too ambitious to climb the first one honestly.
Then the acrid stench of the fires of the far right returned.
Not with jackboots — they learned from history, or at least from its PR failures — but with tailored suits, coalition agreements, and clauses buried in the fine print of power-sharing deals. Dictatorships are not sustained primarily by monsters. Monsters are too rare. They are sustained by reward structures. By the endless supply of ordinary men willing to translate cruelty into procedure if procedure offers them advancement. Political scientists who study democratic backsliding have a name for the people who make this machinery run: loyal losers. Not ideological fanatics. Not true believers with fire in their eyes. Just midlevel operators who understand, with the clear-eyed pragmatism of the mediocre, that the dirty work is where the career opportunities are.
The protection of the Cruz de los Caídos is hard baked into the agreement that handed the Extremadura presidency to María Guardiola. A line item. A transaction. You get the cross, we get the government. And Mayor Mateos — the man who twice voted and twice said the cross should go, a man whose previous positions now read like a CV of temporary sanity — files his eleven pages of footnoted cynicism and gets to keep his job. Somewhere between subsection 4.7 of the Real Decreto and the urban-protection registry, mass political murder becomes a zoning issue.
And now, with a straight face, with lawyers, with footnotes, he argues that the cross has been resignified. That a new plaque installed in 1984, swapping the original Falangist inscription for the words “La ciudad de Cáceres, en memoria de sus hijos muertos por la Patria”, somehow laundered eighty plus years of meaning out of the stone. That the cross no longer means what it was built to mean. That it means, now, something for everyone.
For everyone. The audacity rips the sky open. A monument erected in triumph over the corpses of the defeated, in a ceremony run by a Falangist icon, now rebranded as a shared memorial, a civic heirloom, a piece of harmless heritage that only hysterical leftists could possibly object to. They admit the origin — they have to, it’s in their own legal documents — and then, in the very next breath, argue it doesn’t matter. That time heals. That a new plaque fixes it. That the smell of the burning flesh eventually fades and what’s left is just wood, just smoke, just a cross in a field that doesn’t mean anything at all.
And here the piece has to stop and bite its own hand. Because there is another argument. A harder, uglier one.
You walk out of the Choeung Ek Genocidal Center in Cambodia or the endless fields of Birkenau in Poland and your first instinct is to burn them to the ground, to salt the earth, to ensure that not one brick remains on top of another. That these horrors disappear. And then, slowly, the instinct reverses. The realization comes that the camps and killing fields must stay. The discomfort is the point. Remove the evidence and you hand the revisionists exactly what they need: a cleaned-up past, a country that can look at itself without flinching, grandchildren of perpetrators free to build the mythology that it wasn’t really that bad, that grandpa with sweets in his pocket couldn’t have done those things, that things were orderly, that people had jobs, that the trains ran on time, that the reservoirs — you know how that sentence ends.
Spain never had its Nuremberg. Franco died in bed clutching his mummified rabbit’s foot, the amputated hand of Santa Teresa de Jesús. His judges stayed on the bench. Their surnames live on in the Supreme Court. His mass graves are still mostly unexcavated, the bones still in the clay. And a growing portion of the Spanish electorate now actively supports a party that doesn’t bother to hide its contempt for liberal democracy, for the free press, for minorities, for the very legitimacy of the modern democracy that was born when the dictator finally died. The amnesia is not accidental. It was cultivated — and research into how democratic backsliding actually works at ground level tells us who does the cultivating. It is rarely the fanatics at the top. It is the frustrated and the mediocre in the middle, the ones for whom the second ladder of loyalty always pays better than the first ladder of merit, who make the system durable. Franco built one. Orbán built one. Every backsliding democracy eventually builds one. The trick is not finding fanatics. The trick is creating a career path for the insufficient, the low performers, the frustrated and mediocre.
It was the price of the Transition, that celebrated agreement to look forward and never back, to trade justice for stability, and to leave the dead in their ditches so the living could finally see films that hadn’t been savages by the censors. So maybe removing the cross is exactly what they want. A loud burial. A laundered landscape. A city that can present itself to the world without the embarrassing stone reminder of what it cheered for, what it built, what it never quite got around to dismantling. And claim victim status in the process.
But then again: there is a fundamental difference between Auschwitz and a victory monument.
The camps were built to exterminate. They stand now as indictment, as wound, as the open eyes of the dead refusing to close. The Cruz de los Caídos was built to celebrate. It stands now as a boast, a chest thrust out, an assertion, renewed every morning by its mere presence in the middle of the city, that the winning side won and is still winning and will go on winning, thank you, right here in the roundabout on the way into town. The smoke is now cloying.
That is what they are fighting to preserve. Not heritage. Not memory. Not faith. Not the complex, terrible, necessary act of confronting the past.
Just the winning.
Picture it clearly, because clarity is the only thing they cannot survive.
A cross, burning with an eternal flame, in the middle of a roundabout in a sleepy, sun-baked, conservative provincial capital. Cars circling it on the way to work, on the way to school, perhaps even on the way to Sunday mass. Old men at café tables who do not look up. Young people with their phones who have been told it means nothing, that it is simply there, that it has always been there, that questioning it is extremism while preserving it is moderation. The flame never goes out — they make sure of that, with lawyers, with legal appeals, with coalition deals, with eleven pages of footnoted cynicism, with the patient, practiced, utterly shameless insistence that the burning cross is a symbol of peace.
The smoke still smells the same.
It always does.
