Skimming Nigel Hamilton's new biography of Bill Clinton, I came across this comment on Clinton's trip to Spain in 1970 (p. 222):
"...Franco's archconservative Spain had been as awful and as stifling as the Soviet system Bill Clinton had encountered in Moscow and Prague: stultifyingly male chauvinist, repressive, cynical, and at the same time politically fundamentalist, with no tolerance for divergence or diversity."
Gary Coleman's line on Different Strokes comes to mind: "What you talkin' 'bout, Willis?" More seriously, to cite three remarks pertinent to Hamilton's equivalency between the regimes:
--"...Franco never managed to take over the totality of Spanish culture" (Carlos Fuentes, The Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New World, p. 338).
--"A year before [in 1968], there had been big student demonstrations in Madrid that demanded liberalization of the regime...More than a million workers had participated in strikes that year..." (Peter Pierson, The History of Spain, p. 167).
--"That the Spanish regime was obviously authoritarian, not totalitarian, is first of all simply an inescapable fact, for it did not attempt to control the entire economy and all social, cultural, and religious institutions" (Stanley G. Payne, The Franco Regime: 1936-1975, p. 626).
Big student demonstrations weren't an option in Moscow and Prague--especially after the Soviets "normalized" the latter with tanks in 1968--much less a million striking workers. Here's Payne's take on the equivalency: "Hamilton is way over the top, to put it mildly." (If any readers or contributors visited or lived in Spain during Franco, I'm interested in your recollections of how repressive it was.)