#Which sure Jan my grandmother didn't speak Welsh because her parents didn't feel like teaching it to her

[georgia-stanway]

Could you please explain what the Real Madrid / Barca situation is? I see everyone commenting on it but not saying what happened.

OK I'm really not an expert so anybody please correct me on anything but basically laporta (Barcelona president) accused Madrid of being the regime's club, ie the fascist Francoist regime. This is a point of huge debate and while Franco did say madrid was his favourite club there isn't really any [conclusive] evidence that they particulaly benefited from Franco [edit: this is a little too conclusive a summing up for what is an incredibly convuluted and debated topic of which there isn't an easy conclusive answer. This tifo video goes into a bit more detail.] and like everyone else they experienced their fair share of suffering. Laporta was very wrong to say this. It uses an awful period of history to try and get one up on madrid and is very disrespectful to the victims of Franco.

However instead of being the bigger club, Madrid decided to go one step further in the irresponsible and disrespectful use of history and make a video saying that it was Barcelona that benefited from Franco. It raises things like Franco laying the first stone of camp nou and receiving medals from barca but completely removes them from any and all historical context. This was a dictatorship. You worked within the regime or you were destroyed. This is particularly the case because of barca's association with Catalan nationalism and just catalan culture in general, which was very much actively surpressed by Franco. The video ends with a quote from Santiago bernabeu basically saying fuck anyone who says that real Madrid is regime's club but it also conveniently ignores the fact that bernabeu fought for Franco during the civil war.

I don't know enough about the topic to be able to properly discuss the ins and outs of both clubs during this period. But I am a history student and I am a little bit able to talk about this from a public history perspective and basically it's bad. It's really bad. It presents a narrative by removing the context that people will take at face value. It is incredibly damaging to any attempt to help either club and Spain itself acknowledge and come to terms with the Franco era, something that it is very important to do both to honour the victims of the regime and because of the rise in fascism across Europe. It also has implications in discussions of catalan culture and independence. Many many catalans will tell you how they have been insulted and told not to speak their language by Spaniards. An active real Madrid player has literally said to 'bomb catalan and basques' for booing the Spanish national anthem. It is very disrespectful and actively contributes to anti-catalanism to insinuate that the Francoist suppression of catalan wasn't that bad. And in general it is just incredibly disrespectful to the victims of the regime.

To be clear both clubs are behaving very badly hear in using franco to try and one up each other, but madrid just made everything 10x worse by releasing a widely accessible propaganda video