It was supposed to be a day in which the current Spanish state paid lip-service to the memory of the legitimate 2nd republic overthrown by Franco in the preamble to the second world war. Accordingly ex-political prisoners who were imprisoned for their Republican loyalties during the Franco dictatorship were invited to sit in the lower house of the Spanish parliament and look like nice well adjusted elderly people who despite knowing that more than 200,000 of their fellows are still in unmarked graves, feel really special and adjusted now. Then one of them started waving the flag of the 2nd republic about.
naughty old geezer has his flag confiscated - last time he got jail.
It's a beautiful flag. I know you're not really supposed to be into flags if you're an anarchist. But some flags are noble. Alas, for Jose Bono the Spanish man in charge of the proceedings it is an unconstitutional flag and so he left off gurgling platitudes about the legacy of the republic and the suffering of its supporters being the common history of all and not just famous or important people in history books & gave a jolly good authoritarian telling off to the old geezer with the flag. He then had the tricolour confiscated. Oddly enough in all my years of watching the Spanish state go through its contorted flag fetish thing (Aznar tried to break the unofficial world record by flying the largest ever flag from a pole in central Madrid until the Catalans broke the record by making an ever bigger one, which alas they couldn't hoist) I've never know a "un-constitutional Franco fascist eagle flag" to have been confiscated. Oh well - that's liberal socialist government for you.
You can read about this here in Spanish in case you haven't understood my English :-
http://www.elpais.com/articulo/espana/Bono/reprende/represaliado/franquismo/exhibir/bandera/republicana/Congreso/elpepuesp/20080614elpepunac_4/Tes
http://www.lavanguardia.es/lv24h/20080614/53481409554.html
You can watch a video of it all at those news links or just simply on Youtube. Strange to think that Youtube were there. They get everywhere these days.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=TFWjUmN1bzQ
http://youtube.com/watch?v=AnIDoDZmPW0
You can read about this here in Spanish in case you haven't understood my English :-
http://www.elpais.com/articulo/espana/Bono/reprende/represaliado/franquismo/exhibir/bandera/republicana/Congreso/elpepuesp/20080614elpepunac_4/Tes http://www.lavanguardia.es/lv24h/20080614/53481409554.html You can watch a video of it all at those news links or just simply on Youtube. Strange to think that Youtube were there. They get everywhere these days.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=TFWjUmN1bzQ http://youtube.com/watch?v=AnIDoDZmPW0 
