The current generation of radical socialist leaders, Rodríguez Zapatero, José Blanco, or Patxi López, only lived their adolescence under Franco.  Born in the beginning of the 1970s, they only lived franquismo as children and students.  Equally, we could make a list (and it wouldn´t fit on this page) of the journalists and intellectuals that criticize the extreme right who also did not live through the Franco years due to their young age:  they started their career and their fortunes under democracy.  All of these people are the new radicals, the new communist-oids – they are the new Spanish “neocoms.”

 

Other neocoms lived prosperously under the dictatorship; some, like Jesús Polanco, even became rich under the dictatorship, faithfully collaborating with the regime and constructing their media empire on the franquista repression of the small left that opposed it.  It is also not crucial to show the list of writers, journalists, and politicians that made a fortune under Franco´s shadow.  These people did live under franquismo - and very well.  Collaborating, naturally…

 

How can a left that profited so much under an authoritarian right regime and lived crudely by its side, now exhibit the revolutionary fervor of others?  It is because of a combination of two factors:  first, an ignorance of historical questions, ideologies, and basic politics, including their own socialist orthodox.  Their ideological speech is limited to grandiloquent and empty words.  Secondly, there is an obsessive longing to erase the past, therefore giving them revolutionary legitimacy that they neither have, nor should have.  Not having lifted a finger against franquismo, the Spanish neocoms are now dying to wash their consciences clean. 

 

In addition to a past that they lack, the neocom left faces a current reality that disturbs them.  Following their transformation into a media power in the Transition Period or their installation in power in March 2004 on the red carpet of subsidies with an official Audi and breakfasts at the Palace, today represents Power capitalized.  Schizophrenic, they use opposition vernacular, while they do not have the minimum intention of abandoning the small bourgeouis pleasures that they currently enjoy. 

 

Sick from illegitimate politics, searching obsessively to provide themselves with a biography that they do not have, and remorseful of building a new media-political aristocracy, the Spanish neocoms invent history: their own and that of everyone else.  The trolls are coming out from every corner, advising against the power and the right while, without knowing why, they happily embrace anything that sounds revolutionary, from Arnaldo Otegi, Hugo Chavez, or Ahmadinejad.  Without doctrine or their own history, they become frantic before the liberal and conservative right, which reminds them of the superiority of the ideas that they live yet hate.  Today the Spanish neocoms seek in the right to escape from themselves.  It would be much cheaper to visit the psychiatrist’s office – at least for everyone else.