Europe’s Valley of the Fallen: Reflections on Franco, Feminism and the End of Man

Spain’s former dictator General Francisco Franco and Falangist leader José Antonio Primo de Rivera are buried in the basilica. Franco ordered architects Pedro Muguruza and Diego Méndez to construct the basilica in the Neo-Herrerian style to reflect the “grandeur of the monuments of old, which defy time and memory.” The precinct which contains the basilica covers 3,360 acres of woodland. The site also contains a Benedictine Abbey and guesthouse.

General Franco wanted the monument to constitute a “national act of atonement” for the horrors of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). 40,000 people from nationalist and Republican sides of the conflict are buried there. The Left in Spain wants to have Franco’s body exhumed from the basilica in order to turn the building into a museum against fascism. But Santiago Cantera, the Prior of the Benedictine abbey adjacent to the basilica, is refusing to allow authorities to enter the building. He says the government cannot exhume the body without the consent of Franco’s family. An academic and intellectual, Cantera was previously an Independent Falange Party politician before becoming a Benedictine monk.

The Valley of the Fallen holds the remains of hundreds of victims on both sides of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). It was built as an attempt to reconcile a divided country. One could not imagine a more “patriarchal” place in the world to visit on International Women’s Day than the site of Franco’s tomb; for surely Franco’s regime was the epitome of masculinist oppression of women. However, Pío Moa, a former communist opponent of Franco, in his book Franco para Antifranquistas – 36 preguntas clave – Franco for Anti-Francoists, 36 key questions, says that the opposite is, in fact, the case. The following essay is a reflection on the concept of women’s liberation in the context of Franco’s Spain and patriarchy in general. Do authoritarian and patriarchal regimes oppress women? Is the Roman Catholic Church misogynistic?

Patriarchy is the condition of women’s freedom

During the Franco dictatorship, Spanish women, he argues, thrived more than ever before. Some interesting statistics are marshalled to support his claims. Although Franco was not a member of the Spanish Falange, many members collaborated with his regime. The Falange had a revolutionary social ideology. They wanted to transform and renew Spanish society, which they saw as decadent and corrupted by capitalism.

The Falange had a special female division. The Sección Feminina extolled female scientists Marie Curie and Lisa Meitner as models for Spanish women to follow. Even the notorious 16^th century Nun Lieutenant, Catalina de Erauso, was studied. Catalina de Erauso was a Spanish nun who escaped from her convent, disguised herself as a man and embarked on a series of military and Lesbian adventures in Latin America. In post-structuralist discourse, Catalina de Erauso is a perfect example of “gender fluidity” — an example to follow. But in Francoist Spain, she was seen as a wonderful weirdo: to be studied and appreciated as part of history and folklore — not as a model to follow.

Women’s education grew exponentially during the Franco dictatorship. In fact, girls outnumbered boys in primary schools and third-level education was encouraged.

By 1970, women’s participation in the industry had increased by 25%. Pilar Primo de Rivera, the head of the Falange’s Sección Feminina, was responsible for promulgating the 1961 Law for Women’s Political, Professional and Labour Rights. It is said that the Falangists promoted a view of woman as inferior to men. There is no evidence for those claims. The Falangist view of women was that they were different to men, and therefore had different roles in society — which would not be a particularly radical or controversial position to take in a rational culture.

The Spanish Falange wanted a modern, progressive Spain where, as they pointed out, women would be cleaner, children healthier, people happier and homes brighter. It is true that voting at the municipal level was done by men as they were the heads of their families and the family was the basis of society. Again, why should that be a problem for women? Today, most women tend to rely on their husbands in deciding how they are going to vote, while politically-informed women will often influence their husbands.

In a unified family, the man’s vote should represent all the interests of his family as a whole. In the political arena, the family would speak with one voice.

The Falangist view of women was in accordance with the social teaching of the Catholic Church: Women had a special role in society as the mothers and primary carers of children. This has often been misinterpreted as the promotion of woman as “inferior” to men, but what kind of a culture would consider the reproduction of life as inferior to other activities? A hyper-capitalistic society, perhaps, where the goal of human life is to serve to maximise the profits of money lenders?

During the Franco dictatorship, the Spanish economy was second only to Japan in the rapid pace of its economic development.

The corporatist and protectionist model of political economy ensured modest wage increases and important gains for the working class. Unemployment remained under 2 per cent for most of the Franco years due to the rapid industrial development of the country. It rose immediately and astronomically after 1975. 

During this era, Spain became one of the most developed countries in the world. Women benefited enormously from social stability. Domestic violence against women was far lower than today. Rape was rare; today it is rising exponentially.

In order to justify the introduction of divorce in the 1980s, the Spanish Left claimed half a million people were waiting to separate. However, by 1987 only 20,000 couples had divorced. By 2006, the number had risen to 100,000.

Today over 30 % of all mothers are unmarried, the birth rate is falling and, as of 2011, 118,000 abortions were carried out in Spain. We are a long way from veiled supplicants in Franco’s Basilica! At 63%, Spain has the fifth highest divorce rate in Europe. Abortion was legalised in 1937 by Francisco Largo Caballero’s “socialist” regime. It should be known that genuinely socialist societies such as Stalin’s USSR banned abortion and promoted large families. Ask any Leftist what he thinks about abortion and you will invariably get prevarication. Leftists claim to oppose war and the oppression of the weak, but tearing babies from their mother’s wombs on an industrial scale, dumping them in bins and using their body parts for medical experimentation is perfectly civilised and progressive!

While I was in the Valley of the Fallen, I spoke to Brother Cantera. At the door of the monastery’s reception, I was coldly greeted by a rather diffident monk. It seemed he assumed I was going to be hostile. I could see fear in his eyes. Once he appeared satisfied I was not another enemy, he became the most amiable person in the world and arranged a meeting with Brother Cantera.

In my meeting with Brother Cantera, we spoke about the decline of Christendom in Europe and the fall of civilisation.

He showed me an article about the “ecological conversion” of ecumenists in the Catholic Church, who now hold prayer groups with members of other faiths to worship Mother Nature.

“It looks like a meeting of druids”. He shook his head. “It is at its core diabolical” he lamented. Brother Santiago is regularly demonised in the Spanish press. I found him to be a thoughtful, kind and deeply humble man.

When I returned to Madrid, the streets were full of feminists with cropped hair in gaudy colours, Dr. Marten boots and nose piercings. Many of them looked like Cataline de Erauso!

Franco was an inveterate and ruthless enemy of Free Masonry and of secret societies. Outside one of the main cinemas a massive ad for the latest US TV series  ‘American Gods’ with all the usual, hackneyed Illuminati symbolism of trash culture. Contrary to popular myth, Franco had never opposed the Spanish Republic. His opposition was to the rise of Free Masonry and secret societies.  As a general in the Spanish army, he witnessed the nefarious rise of Free Masons among his ranks and in the political arena.

Free Masons spoke about “democracy” and the “popular will,” but Franco understood that the popular will in Spain at the time was Catholic.

The people did not want a so-called “secular state” but jobs and economic progress.

The so-called separation of Church and State is a myth. The Catholic Church always distinguished between the spiritual and the temporal realm.

Is Fascism the ideology of the working class?

At this point, some readers’ minds might resonate with obstreperous echoes of the word fascism. So, what about fascism? Was Franco a fascist and am I defending fascism? Few people actually understand the term fascism.

The fascist movement in Italy grew out of the labour and peasant struggles in the late 19th-century Sicily. It was a movement of the poor against the rich land-owners and capitalists.

The Fasci Siciliani dei Lavoratori (Sicilian Workers leagues) was a left-wing movement, composed mostly of Socialists and Communists who were fighting for proletarian emancipation in Sicily.

The word fascio means bundle. A fascist is a bundlist. Sticks can easily be broken but it is harder to break bundles. By uniting, the working class can achieve important gains against capitalists and sometimes even overthrow them. In an etymological sense, therefore, any grouping of working-class interests is fascist. But there is a sociological sense in which this is also true today. If you stand with the working class, you are a fascist. Is not anti-fascism the ideology of the ruling elite?

If we are to make any political progress this century, we need to reappropriate language and decontaminate it.

Fascism means collectivism and, as such, it can be a good or a bad thing depending on what the concrete policies are.

Fascism was a radical ideology which sought to combine what was important in tradition, namely Catholicism, with what was necessary for labour, namely decent remuneration. It was left-wing in terms of labour and right-wing in terms of values. But conservatives considered fascism to be a radical, left-wing movement. Franco was a conservative. While he admired many aspects of German National Socialism and Italian Fascism, his ideology is best described as Catholic, monarchist and conservative. It is the reason why Franco marginalised the radical Spanish Falange.

The Spanish Falange was led by José Antonio Primo de Rivera, an intellectual whose ideas were inspired by José Ortega Y Gasset, Lenin, Spengler, Nietzsche and Mussolini.

The Spanish Falange fought against the ruling class but wanted an organic corporatist state.

Many analysts confused corporatism with corporatocracy. The latter is a society controlled by corporations.

Corporatism is a form of society based on professional corporations or guilds and class collaboration. It corresponds to the structures of the medieval guilds. Some refer to it as a form of guild socialism.

Corporatists believe democracy in the workplace should replace parliamentary democracy. But, unlike Communists, they believe in natural hierarchies and natural law.

Communists always viewed Fascism as a form of financial oligarchy – a terroristic system used by the oligarchs to prevent social revolution. But that corresponds more to liberal democracy than fascism. Like Communism, Fascism has become a meaningless word in contemporary discourse. The term is used by elites to silence the working class. The problem of working-class militancy today is not that they are Fascists, but rather that they are not!

Franco the anti-fascist

When Franco took power, he marginalised the radical Falangists and created a hybrid regime preserving much of the corrupt ruling class. For that reason, Spain’s Falangists saw him as a traitor.

The difference between Francoism and Falangism could be compared to that of the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks among the Russian social democrats.

The Mensheviks, of whom Trotsky was a member, were compatible with imperialist interests, while the Bolsheviks wanted a social revolution.

Rather than a proletarian dictatorship like Stalin’s Soviet Union where the means of production were socialised, José Antonia Primo de Rivera called for a dirigist state working organically with syndicates. In Marxist terms, Rivera’s vision would still have amounted to capitalism as the extraction of surplus value from labour would have been maintained.

The classic Marxist critique of Falangismo is that it is a petty-bourgeois ideology which fails to overcome the fundamental contradictions of capital accumulation.

But it is nonetheless interesting to imagine how such a society would function in the context of a reinvigorated Church preaching against usury.

Soviet fascism

After the 1957 Khrushchev reforms in the USSR, which reestablished capitalist relations of production, there was no higher moral order to guide workers other than the quasi-divine “party” and its increasingly corrupt nomenklatura. It was not socialism that failed in the USSR, but rather state capitalism. Socialism under Stalin brought the greatest economic and social progress in Russian history.

After the Khrushchev counter-revolution in 1956, so astutely described by the great Irish Communist Neil Gould, Marxist-Leninists such as Bill Bland described the USSR as a fascist state.

In other words, for Bland, the post-Stalin USSR was a state which claimed to be socialist but in which capitalist relations of production directed the economy. The capitalist restoration in the USSR led to 30 years of economic decline until the rise of neo-liberalism in the 1990s.

It was also the “socialist” America of Roosevelt which led to the greatest economic prosperity not just in America.

Goebbels praised Roosevelt’s economic policies, which were not dissimilar to those of the German National Socialists.

When José Antonio Primo de Rivera was arrested and put on trial by the Republican government in 1936, he argued that he, too, had fought the Spanish ruling class. He was nevertheless executed. It attests to the mediocrity of the petty-bourgeois left in Spain that they shot an enemy sympathetic in many respects to their own cause.

Franco’s eventual collaboration with NATO and US financial institutions in the 1960s was opposed by the Falangists. In our post-modern world of meaningless slogans, clichés and learned ignorance, we rarely engage in meaningful debate, discussion or exchange of ideas. Learning about José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the Fasci Siciliani and other movements have made me realise that perhaps I am in many respects a “fascist” or falangist.

Of course, the subtlety of the polemics I’m trying to articulate here will be lost on the simple-minded.

I have often been accused of being a fascist. Henceforth, I will consider the appellation to be a compliment for which I am most unworthy!

Like the fascists and Falangists, I don’t believe in bourgeois parliamentary democracy. Like the Spanish Falangists, but unlike many fascists, I believe that only a revival of traditional Roman Catholicism in Europe will save humanity from self-destruction. The Catholic doctrine on the dignity of labour and the evil of usury makes it incompatible with capitalism.

As a former Communist, I appreciate the valour, good-naturedness and heroism of the Communist struggle in Spain’s civil war, so well documented in Arthur Landis’ book Spain: the Unfinished Revolution. Falangists claim Communists carried out atrocities against Catholics during the Spanish Civil War. But they ignore the fact that Trotskyists had, to a large extent, infiltrated the Communist movement. In his book, Soviet Policy and Its Critics, J.R Cambell writes:

‘Yet one of the most important problems facing Spanish workers was to win religious-minded peasants for the Popular Front. Church burning hindered this vital task and helped the counter-revolution. So much so that in various parts of the country, before the Fascist rebellion, Fascist groups were caught red-handed burning churches. They were under no illusion as to the use they could make of the burning of churches “in the time-honoured manner of oppressed peasants”. The resistance of the mass of Catholic workers outside Spain to the organisation of effective solidarity action is but part of the price paid for the burning of churches.’

Anti-Communists would do well to ponder the above lines.

Just as anti-Francoist lies have served neoliberal opportunism, so too have anti-Communist lies served the same forces.

The Falangist and Communist views of the Spanish Civil war have been written out of history. Instead, most people’s views of the war are based on the British Trotskyist and police spy George Orwell and his book Homage to Catalonia. It is true, nonetheless, that Spanish nationalists have good reason to detest the Soviets for intervening in a Catalonian separatist war. But few Spanish nationalists are aware that the thousands of heinous crimes committed against Catholic clergy were mostly carried out by Trotskyists and anarchists and were condemned by the Communists.

Catalan and the Union of Zionist Russian Republics

Today Spain is facing another separatist crisis in Catalonia. It is obvious from the biased reporting of the Russian foreign press that Moscow supports the separatists. They are also, ironically, supported by the EU. And by Israel. The long-term globalist plan for European nations is regionalisation. Spain will break up into “independent” statelets controlled – not by the European Union which will collapse – but by the Eurasian Union. It is the reason why Eurasianism is not the long-term answer to our problems. As Orwell put it: ‘Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.’

According to the former deputy of the Popular Party Milián Mestre, Russia and Israel want military bases in Catalonia. In a previous article, I already showed the close financial and security ties between the Catalan separatists and Israel. Milián Mestre, who has met Putin personally, claims the Russians would like to expand their influence in the Western Mediterranean.

The Russians claim to be neutral peace-brokers in the Catalonian separatist affair. But it is clear they are on the side of the separatists. Although the EU officially opposes the separatists, European elites support them. They understand that nations must disappear and give way to a global state “two-party” system with Eurasia on the Right and Oceania on the left, both controlled by the same globalist oligarchy.

There is something uncanny about all those dystopian writers of the twentieth century: Orwell, Huxley, Wells. It is as though they had the inside story about the future or perhaps, as important political figures among the elite, they were privy to plans they were only allowed to disclose in fiction.

The long-term aim of the Zionists is to provoke a war between Russia and the United States so that Israel can support both sides and emerge as the ruling state in the world.

It is likely that Europe will again be the theatre of that war. It makes geopolitical sense for Russia to support the Catalan independence movement. But that will not console Spanish nationalists who want to save a nation-state which has existed since at least the twelfth Council of Toledo in 681 A.D.

We cannot tell if Putin’s Russia is a willing or unwilling actor in Israel’s plans for world war. What is certain, however, is that Russian Jews are heavily involved in Catalonia; that they have significant power in Russia and that Israel is their state. The Catalonian police force, the “Mossos,” are trained by the Israelis and high-ranking Catalan officials have said that Israel will be their bank. One will notice without surprise that “pro-Russian” leftist Jews in the West have all rallied around the Zionist Catalan “independence” movement.

How ironic that Catalan’s anarchists and feminists are receiving favourable coverage from the press agencies of their nemesis Putin!

The return to Eden

Adam and Eve (1932) by Rosario de Velasco, a Falangist painter

In order to deepen our conceptualisation of women under authoritarian Catholic regimes, we need to turn to theology.

In Genesis, Eve, seduced by the fruits of the Tree of Life, succumbs to Satan, causing Adam’s fall. In Christ, God became a new Adam and had himself nailed to the tree so that we could be reconciled with Him and not doomed to wander forever in the valley of the fallen under the tyranny of Satan. This is perhaps the deeper significance of Spain’s Valle de los Caídos in our contemporary context.

When he was dying on the cross, Christ said to his mother Mary: ‘Mother, behold thy son!’. He was referring to the Apostle John, who was standing with her at the foot of the cross. Then Christ said to John: ‘Behold thy mother’, whereupon Our Lord exclaims: ‘It is consummated’. Mary has become the Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church, which will stand till the end of time, the eternal rock against whom the powers of Hell will not prevail.

As the Church, she becomes the mother of humanity. The death of the Son of Man becomes divine nuptials: the sanctification of the eternal regeneration of life. The Blessed Virgin is a new Eve to whom the banned children of Eden cry from the valley of mourning and weeping, the Valley of the Fallen. Fulton Sheen tells us that the Blessed Virgin passes through three phases. First, as a dream in God’s mind, then as a mother, and finally as a bride. The New and Old Testaments of the Bible can be seen as a wedding between God and Israel. In Isaiah 54:5 God says to Israel, ‘For your maker is your husband’.

Mary represents the Old Testament Israel expecting the future Messiah. At the foot of the cross, Mary, as Israel, becomes the bride of the Lord, or the universal Church.

The Old Testament is matriarchal, violent and irrational. Is it any wonder that the Jews behave in the way they do, having veiled their hearts from the truth of the New Testament? Is it any wonder that they would promote feminism, homosexuality and every kind of pseudo-science and moral perversion in the world? For if Mary remained the Old Testament, would she not rather have been Mary Magdelene before her repentance, the Whore of Babylon? And is that not the ideal of eco-feminism, of the European Union, our New Babylon?

Christianity is the neural structure of human reason.

Our fall from grace has banished us to the dark and barbaric world of the Old Testament, into the hands of matriarchy and irrationality, in short, tyranny. The priesthood of this new tyranny is Judeo-Masonry. The object of its worship is Mother Nature, who kills God in her womb.

Christianity is wrongly accused of denigrating women. The truth is that no civilisation in history has elevated the status of women in society more than Christianity. It is a woman, not a man, who is coronated in Heaven. God came into the world through a woman and every man is called to imitate Christ’s suffering for her well-being. Each man comes to life through a woman and passes to eternal life through the womb of Mother Church.

Before the Free Masonic infiltration of the Catholic Church in the Vatican II conference of 1962-1965, women wore veils in Church — not because they were inferior to men but because in Catholic theology women have a particular relationship to God. The man’s role is to be the head of the family. He is therefore required to sacrifice himself for the family, just as Christ did on the cross.

Being the head of the family does not make men masters over their wives, free to treat them according to their whims. On the contrary, it requires total devotion to them, a prospect which would terrify most modern men.

Christ’s sacrifice on the cross gives birth to the Church and Mary is its mother. The Church is the only means by which the perdition of souls can be averted; it is the womb of eternal life, where creation takes place. In the mass, we die spiritually and are reborn through the mystical body of Christ in the Eucharist.

Just as the tabernacle and the ciborium are covered during the mass, so too is the woman; her veiling signifies her sanctity. In Catholicism, the goal of life is not career, power and profit but sanctity. The Catechism of the Catholic Church is simply a basic rule book of how to get out of this world of suffering alive! It doesn’t promise us utopia in this life but the basic tools to remain human in the face of suffering.

In post-Christian Europe, man has become a mourner in the Valley of the Fallen. In this tenebrous Theatre of the Absurd, geolocalisation of left and right has become meaningless chatter.

The war on Christianity is a war on truth

All over Europe, Churches are being vandalised and desecrated. Most of the attacks are scarcely even mentioned by the liberal media. In Spain, nuns are routinely verbally and physically attacked by feminists. Naked Femen activists are protesting in churches.

The entire feminist movement is an insult to human intelligence; it was manufactured by American oligarchs in the 1960s in order to alienate women from their nature, induce them to imitate men and turn them into wage slaves.

Feminism is the ultimate misogyny. The oligarchs who promoted feminism boasted about their exploits.

It is feminism which is enslaving our women, not patriarchy. Girls in our schools are being indoctrinated in the new cult; it is a perverse form of institutionalised rebelliousness: the “rebels” are being aided and abetted by the system they claim to oppose. I saw a poignant illustration of this in Madrid on International Women’s Day: a supermarket had a special offer for its customers to celebrate Women’s Day. A group of feminists sprayed graffiti over the advertisement with the words ‘feminism or barbarism’. How ironic, and mind-numbingly stupid!

It took 18 years for the Franco regime to build the basilica in the Valley of the Fallen. The Spanish Left has tried to claim that slave labour was used in its construction. In fact, workers were paid good wages and prisoners of the war were given massive sentence reductions in exchange for their labour.

In 2010, the socialist Spanish government closed the basilica on the pretext that it was unsafe. After a massive protest by Spanish Catholics, the basilica was reopened. The Valley of the Fallen is a cogent symbol of Europe itself: a rotting corpse fought over by vultures. The controversy over Franco’s tomb is really about globalists trying to own history.

Franco has come to represent everything globalists are trying to destroy: natural law, the family, Christendom and patriotism.

The basilica and the cross are powerful symbols of Christianity’s capacity for resurgence.  As I left the Valley of the Fallen, it had just been announced that the court appeal by the monks to stall the exhumation of Franco had been received. This has nothing to do with Franco; the globalists want to turn the basilica into a temple of Satan. The Benedictine appeal is the last stand of Spanish Catholicism against the New World Order.

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Original article

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