| In his essay from our December 4 issue, about the high regard for Generalissimo Francisco Franco on the modern right, Dan Kaufman quotes Captain Gonzalo de Aguilera Munro, “a senior press officer” for fascist Spain’s military: In healthier times—I mean healthier times spiritually, you understand—plague and pestilence used to slaughter the Spanish masses. Held them down to proper proportions, you understand. Now with modern sewage disposal and the like, they multiply too fast. They’re like animals, you understand, and you can’t expect them not to be infected with the virus of Bolshevism.
Kaufman argues that the far right in interwar Spain—a coalition of landowners, monarchists, conservative Catholics, fascists, and the military—was united by a belief in the contubernio judeo-masónico-bolchevique, “a strange, contradictory, all-encompassing theory that Jews had created Freemasonry and communism to destroy Spain and achieve world conquest.” Animated by the contubernio, Franco and his allies rose to power in a civil war that killed 500,000 people, including numerous civilians. Yet despite this bloody record, Kaufman points out, “there is far less discussion of Spanish fascism, which endured much longer and is more openly venerated,” than of Italian and German fascism. Below, alongside Kaufman’s essay, are six articles and one poem from our archives about the violent, antisemitic history of Francoist Spain. As Francisco Franco’s reputation grows on the far right, a new history of his regime reminds us of its unrelenting violence. “Few dictators have enjoyed the reverential afterlife of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, who ruled Spain with an iron fist from the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939 until his death in 1975. Franco’s resting place, El Valle de los Caídos (or the Valley of the Fallen), on the outskirts of Madrid, is Spain’s grandest public monument, completed in 1959 to mark the twentieth anniversary of the end of the civil war.” —August 24, 2018 “In recent years, curiosity about Europe’s Jewish past has led to the invention of new festivals, in Spain and beyond, striving in Disneyland-like forms to reenact it. These festivals serve very different purposes. Some, which tend to be well-informed and respectful, seek to revive lost Jewish arts, cultural, and religious traditions and educate the public about them. Others play upon philo-Semitic notions of the Jew as an exotic, soulful, and mystic figure. Still others are merely spectacles cooked up to draw national heritage grants and tourist dollars.” —January 27, 2018 Franco’s dictatorship, inaugurated in April 1939, put an end to the civil war; over four hundred thousand defeated Spaniards were locked in concentration camps until 1947; half a million fled the country. The regime lasted until Franco died, in 1975. The human toll is as contested as the memory of the violence. Somewhere between 200,000 and 250,000 were deliberately executed by Franco’s army and police. They did not die in battle, but were for the most part killed during Franco’s campaign to exterminate supporters of the Republic. As many as 50,000 were killed after the civil war. The dictatorship imprisoned hundreds of thousands more. Among Franco’s Nationalists between 130,000 and 145,000 are estimated to have been killed in battle or executed by the Republicans.
—June 5, 2014 “In Spain, Orwell never for a moment stopped observing himself and everything around him: Who can forget his extraordinary description of exactly what it feels like to be hit by a bullet? (‘The sensation of being at the centre of an explosion.’) Yet he also managed to write in the first person without ever sounding self-centered. You can open Homage at almost any page and see how he deftly amasses rich, sensory detail, but always in the service of a larger point.” —December 19, 2013 “Franco himself emerges as a colorless figure, a bourgeois family man, with no private vices and no civic virtues beyond a military sense of duty and honor, addicted like his subjects to TV and football, his mind inhabited by the ghosts of the past and snatches of stale Falangist rhetoric.” —November 17, 1994 I fought in the machine-gun company of the French Battalion of the Eleventh Brigade at Madrid in the winter of 1936.… That we lost was a tragedy for Spain, which was condemned to forty years of stifling obscurantist dictatorship. “History to the defeated,” Auden wrote, “May say Alas! but cannot help or pardon.”… Albert Camus summed it up for all of us who still mourn the Republic. “It was in Spain,” he wrote in 1946, “that men learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can defeat spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own reward. It is this, no doubt, which explains why so many men, the world over, feel the Spanish drama as a personal tragedy.”
—March 26, 1987 A New York Review Online Event The State of the Left
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