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Comment by syrusakbary | Hacker News Reader

This has been a big topic in Spain in the last 10 years. It's great to see that most of the cases are being opened to the public now. Note: I'm from Spain

While it's true that this happened under the fascist rule of Franco, I'm not sure that the fascists had nothing to do with it, so I think the article title is a bit misleading.

In my view, this issue was mainly caused by two things:

1. Imbalance of power, where powerful entities were able to "buy" influence over the hospital personel (usually with some relation with the Church) to get the babies of poor people that will not be able to fight back (because of lack of knowledge or resources)

2. Lack of a formal registry log of births and hospital happenings

If any of these two things are addressed, I'm pretty sure we will hardly get into a similar situation again.

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> I'm not sure that the fascists had nothing to do with it

How will large-scale abduction of babies and deceiving of the parents by telling them that their baby died can happen without the cooperation of the state - openly or clandestinely. Especially considering how a lot of those related to these incidents belonged to the Catholic church and they were not only protected by the fascists but were an actual appendage of the regime...

Plain corruption and some useful idiots, like all such stories. there is no need to be political influence on the mix for the evil.

It keep happening in the 80 and 90's.

> Imbalance of power, where powerful entities were able to "buy" influence over the hospital personel (usually with some relation with the Church) to get the babies of poor people that will not be able to fight back (because of lack of knowledge or resources)

I don't think it's unreasonable to draw a connection between this and the fascist principle of individual subordination. Particularly when Franco's government directly controlled the church and mandated its omnipresence[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Catholicism

directly from the article:

"But one of the most lasting abuses of the era was borne by children. In the late 1930s and 1940s, Antonio Vallejo-Nájera, a leading psychiatrist in the regime who was trained in Nazi Germany, promoted the idea of a Marxist “red gene” carried by the children of Franco’s left-wing opponents. The gene, he said, might be suppressed by removing children from their mothers and placing them with conservative families. Franco’s men soon began the abductions on a large scale. They targeted children orphaned by Franco’s firing squads and took newborns belonging to women who had given birth in jail as political prisoners. All were sent to be raised by regime loyalists. The era of the “stolen babies” had begun."

the transfer of the babies, predominantly from low class families to high ranking Catholics, allies of Franco's regime of course makes the ideological connection clear.

Antonio Vallejo-Nájera was explicit about the political/eugenic character of these transfers:

"Vallejo’s conclusions were that the only way to prevent the racial dissolution of the Spanish was to take away the red children from their mothers in places "away from democratic environments and where the exaltation of bio-psychic racial qualities is encouraged". By 1943, 12,043 children had been taken from their mothers and handed over to orphanages or Francoist families"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Vallejo-N%C3%A1jera

> Antonio Vallejo-Nájera was explicit about the political/eugenic character of these transfers

There's nothing "eugenic" about a policy with a premise of "these children have bad genes, but we can overcome that by getting the right people to raise them". That is the opposite of eugenics.

You're assuming fascist ideology needs to be internally consistent. If you look at historical examples, it rarely is.

No it isn't, which is why the man himself identified as a eugenicist. For starters there is the obvious (scientifically wrong) idea of tying complex, abstract beliefs to identifiable genes ('marxist genes' etc), there's the identical goal, in his own terms "improving the spanish racial body and ridding it of bad elements", the only difference is the means which he dubbed 'environmental eugenics', which is to say eugenics by the means of Lamarck instead of Mendel.

These forms of eugenics that stop one level before literal Nazi Lebensborn programs are by no means less vile and came in many different forms during the 19th and 20th century. They're no less deserving of the label.

I feel like "Being a Commie is genetic" is perfectly representative of the oddball ideological thinking that eugenics policies rapidly acquire, even if they didn't forcibly sterilize them.

I don't think either of these things have anything to do with it. The reason this happens is because it's easier to execute parents than to execute children and infants. Especially when you want a child of your own and have been having trouble conceiving.

It wouldn't have happened as often if the people being executed were usually racially distinct from the executioners, such as in South America, because of the difficulty of integrating that child into the family, and the relative ease of killing children of a different race.

This is flamebait.

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