Are We All (Still) Miguel Ángel Blanco? Victimhood, the Media Afterlife, and the Challenge for Historical Memory

[...] the figure of the victim is mobilized almost universally in Spain, not only by those claiming to speak on behalf of the victims of ETA, but also through the recent flurry of "victim testimonies" of the Spanish Civil War,2 the political mobilization of the recently excavated mass graves from those years, and even suspected ETA members' public denunciations of police torture and the self-victimization of convicted prisoners' high-profile hunger strikes. Victimhood enables a guiltless return to a conservative Spanish nation while at the same time garnering legitimacy by appealing to what Alain Badiou calls the hegemonic "ethical ideology of human rights" (Ethics 9), a notion which I will return to in the conclusion.\n Instead of fashioning elaborate representations of heroic killing in classic fascistic style, it was preferable to glorify violence in excessive and highly stylized spectacles of masochism-representations of violence committed against those aligned with the regime.