In my profession, we spend years learning and discussing how bad Franco was. And OK, fine. But I’m reading the novel titled Los asquerosos by the author Santiago Lorenzo, and I can’t figure out how what he’s describing is better than Franco.
It’s not this one novel, of course. It’s the reality that pretty much all of contemporary Spanish literature describes. The main character, Manuel, is a hard-working, intelligent young man who’s doomed to go from one precarious, part-time gig to another. He’s superfluous, unnecessary in his own country. Manuel manages to eke out a very modest living but there’s no hope he’ll ever have enough money and time to start a family. Owning his own housing is not remotely realistic.
Manuel ends up in one of those thousands of abandoned villages that litter the peninsula. It’s empty, dead but you can still see what the village looked back when there was life in it. That was back in the Franco era. Which was wildly imperfect but at least it wasn’t this slow-motion death of a nation.
I’ve seen those abandoned villages many times. It’s painful even for somebody who is not from there.
I think we should pipe down with the criticisms of Franco, is what I’m saying. The democratic regime we support created these empty villages and the birth rate of 1.16. And a government that screeches tirelessly about Palestine and the imaginary right-wing menace while millions of dispossessed Manuels lose any hope of ever starting a family.
Clarissa's Blog 
Some seem to be up in arms about tourists but not a word about the millions of Maghrébins and sub-Saharan Africans who have been invading the country in the last five years. Plus, all the Venezuelans and Columbians that now seem to be everywhere in Spain bringing with them weird habits such as obesity and buttock lifts.
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Living under any sort of dictatorship is going to suck, but from what I’ve read about Franco, it would have sucked less than living under Castro. Then again, I have a conservative bias and temperament so in all honesty, I could live under a Franco type regime. I’m Catholic, mind my own business, like kids and I could probably just be a kindergarten teacher living peacefully. At least such a regime only requires some lip service and regular churchgoing and lets you keep your money, I could live without pornography and seeing LGBT stuff everywhere.
I’m not a fascist, but I’m describing a theoretical scenario if I had to choose between a Franco type dictatorship and a Communist dictatorship, it’s a sort of lesser of two evils scenario. What I hear about Spain depresses me, the crazy liberalism, the LGBT garbage, all the immigrants who can’t behave themselves and the Spaniards who are too woke for their own good. Latin Americans are not Spanish, even if Americans constantly conflate the two.
Heck, I could call myself Spanish and it would be accurate since all my great-grandparents were from Spain and my family only spent a few generations in Cuba, we’ve been Spanish for much longer than that. Just because someone can speak Spanish doesn’t make them Spanish, by that reasoning I’d be English because I speak English, I’m an American. If I went to Spain and saw a bunch of South Americans and Muslims and work garbage, I am going to be seriously pissed
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I’d take Franco any day over Hillary, Obama, or Biden.
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Pinochet is the correct answer.
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Yeah, Pinochet had his issues and was certainly heavy-handed with his opponents, but if Chile stayed under Allende they’d be as messed up as Cuba. Problem is that many Latin American countries are run either by Fascists or Communists, very few are democracies and the citizens seem to prefer this. Unfortunately democracy or republics only work in some areas, much of the world can’t run a functioning government
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My dad always asserted that Pinochet’s methods were ugly, but that he’d saved Chile from the trash-heap and literally nothing else would have worked, because S.American culture. I’m still not sure he’s wrong.
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“a hard-working, intelligent young man…unnecessary in his own country…no hope he’ll ever have enough money and time to start a family.”
Sorry for the editing, but this is not just Spain, although their feminasti legal rot is particularly execrable, it is the entire Western world. Let us hope and pray that the Trump administration can begin to heal and rebuild your country. For several years of his first administration male wages actually increased for the first time since the early 70’s. Wages are creeping up again, and that matters for everybody, because women naturally will not raise families with men earning less than their own. And even the Democrat bimbo/sneakyfucker mafia are now desperately trying to figure out men ;-D
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One of the main reasons the apartheid government was originally elected was to save small town/rural SA. Eventually it was concluded that this project was a failure and only worked for people lucky enough to get government jobs.
https://expositions.bnf.fr/ballen/us/arret/1/index7.htm
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