Talk:Pact of Forgetting

This article is really bad. I just went through and edited out some of the most glaring errors. Based on the way it is written, I would guess it has been heavily edited by a person (or people) not fully fluent in English. Given the content, my guess is that Spaniards with limited English knowledge have tacked on all this additional stuff about the judge attacking the Pact. There is very little information actually given on the Pact and its significance. Rather, it goes on and on about the judge and on tangents about Franco's crimes. I recommend that it be totally re-written with a focus on the actual Pact and its historical and political significance. — Preceding unsigned comment added by James XV (talk • contribs) 16:54, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

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8 years gone and not much change, rather for the worse. I think this entry is generally misleading and needs major re-writing. The key problems are:


 * it presents an ideological cliché as a fact. No-one in Spain has heard about any “Pacto de Olvido” until the mid-1990s; the term was invented and floated afterwards;
 * it misrepresents the tacit agreement of the transición as a general decision to keep silent on war and Francoism. In fact, the agreement was 1) not to prosecute politically-motivated wrongdoing juridically and 2) not to use the past in daily politics. In broad public discourse (films, tv, press, historiograpy, novels, you name it) there was no silence and no forgetting at all; the debate on war and Francoism was boiling hot in the 1980s and 1990s

Other problems are:


 * it does not properly present the background (the background was atrocities committed by both warring sides during the Civil War, which gave rise to the feeling that a vicious circle of mutual charges must be avoided)
 * it contains no information on what was the prevailing approach to the past in Spain of the 1980s and 1990s (so effectively, how the alleged “pact” was being implemented)
 * it provides no info on what factors led to major change at the turn of the centuries (why alleged “forgetting” gave way to “remembering”)
 * there is too much on Garzon etc., too little on the pact itself
 * there are unreferenced bold statements (Zapatero and the decision to dismantle the “pact”)
 * some references are made up (The Guardian article referenced contains no information that the Spanish judiciary upheld the amnesty)
 * there are some factual errors (“Franco-led military coup” – there was no such thing; LMH did not order removal of “symbols of Francoism” but removal of symbols which exalt Francoist repression)
 * language employed is at times biased (right-wing charges are in quote marks, left-wing charges are not)
 * there are sentences which appear to be clumsy translations from Spanish (“Especially during 1936–1939, Nationalist Forces seized control of cities and towns in the Franco-led military coup and would hunt down any protesters or those who were labeled as a threat to the government and believed to sympathize with the Republican cause”)

I might be tempted to re-edit the article. The above is supposed to provide some general guidance on my rationale. Rgds, --Hh1718 (talk) 07:57, 23 June 2021 (UTC)


 * Well done. It needed addressing. I am also concerned that too much reliance is placed on press. I have some more reliable sources to add in coming weeks. Peter Brew (talk) 07:54, 7 October 2023 (UTC)