Franco Still Lives in Their Hearts: The New Right’s Weird Obsession
The beauty of constitutional democracy, and why it has been orders of magnitude more successful than thug politics, is that it is about the effort to secure a rule of law, limited government, and institutions that resolve disagreement in peaceful ways, allowing for the growth and health of civil society. Thug politics, on the other hand, is a dead end. Francoism is a dead end.
A 1937 demonstration in Salamanca, Spain, celebrating the Francoist occupation of Gijón. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
The new right has a few icons: Andrew Jackson, Caesar, Napoleon, Viktor Orbán, Nayib Bukele. Perhaps none of them are as admired, however, as General Francisco Franco, the dictator of Spain from 1939 until his death in 1975. Even some postliberal intellectuals have shown signs of admiration. In a since-deleted tweet, postliberal Adrian Vermeule went so far as to call Franco’s Spain the “good society” in response to an observation that in 1950s Spain, civil war communists and socialists were still seen publicly doing forced labor—Franco saw this as their path to redemption.
A little postliberal admiration for Franco is no surprise to me. James M. Patterson and I have been working for over a year now on a critique of Catholic postliberalism called Why Postliberalism Failed. About half the book looks at reactionary Catholic anti-liberal movements to see how previous attempts—including Franco’s Spain—fared at establishing a postliberal order. The answer is that they did not fare well, if we are judging their success according to Catholic principles like faith, hope, charity, the acquired virtues, or Catholic social-ethical principles like the common good and justice. That does not stop some postliberals from dreaming.
“Reasonable minds disagree whether Franco was better than the likely alternatives in 1930s Spain. To argue that he is better than what we can do now in the United States, however, with the blessing of our constitutional republic, is an insane position to take.”
But isolated academic postliberals are not alone among members of the new right in seeing the Spanish dictator as a model leader. A recent discussion about Franco came up because a far-right disciple of Nick Fuentes, who went by the online name Pinesap, declared himself a devotee of Franco in his debate with progressive journalist Medhi Hasan.
Responding to Pinesap’s comments, I posted online my puzzlement about the new right’s fixation on Francisco Franco. I was subsequently “ratioed,” as it is called in online parlance; that is, a quote-tweet critiquing my view by rightwing influencer Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry received 1,300 likes—ten times as many as the original post. He said that what I called the “awful” stuff Franco did “was not awful at all, it was good.” He also argued that Franco deserves more credit for the “economic miracle” in late-1950s Spain, for the high birthrates, and, among other things, for being (again according to Gobry) a “philosemite.”
As we already pointed out on the Why Postliberalism Failed podcast, this defense of Franco by Gobry is difficult to sustain if one has a deeper knowledge of Franco and his regime. For one, it is somewhat strange to credit him for Spain’s economic growth, because it was caused by pivoting away from his terribly misguided policy of autarky, thus finally allowing trade with an already booming West.
Defenses of Franco usually start after the civil war had already begun and after the infamous events of the Red Terror had occurred (e.g., the roundup and murder, or worse, of thousands of priests and nuns by some of the leftwing forces). Although the rightwing folk wisdom is that the republicans were mostly communists, the communists only occupied 17 seats out of 473 in the parliament following the 1936 election, and the socialists only 99 seats. There were republicans who would have preferred a government that was less anti-clerical but who were more afraid of the threat of fascism on the right.
It was not until the right’s attempted coup and the subsequent civil war that the most radical elements of the left stood out. Still, even before the war the ruling coalition, called the Popular Front, was already unacceptably anti-clerical, and the back-and-forth violence between 1931 and 1936 fueled hatred and prejudice on both sides. For the sake of argument, I’ll assume that historian Stanley Payne is right that the civil war was inevitable, but I remain skeptical. Once the war began, however, it was not unreasonable for people, especially Catholics to side with the Nationalists.
But does Franco then become good because he defeated Spain’s radical left? Not unless we want to say that Stalin became good just because his troops defeated the Nazis on the eastern front. No, Franco was monstrous during and after the Spanish Civil War and should not be viewed as an exemplary statesman. This myth of Franco as a hero who just did what had to be done is especially dangerous today, as it is used by the far right to justify their theory that thug politics is the only way to stop the far left.
Franco’s Crimes
People on the right have been taught certain truisms about Franco for decades: that he saved Spain from communist takeover, that he refused to collaborate with Hitler, that he was actually a friend to the Jews because he allowed them to escape through Spain, that he was able to transition Spain from premodern poverty into the modern industrialized world. One obstacle to understanding that Franco was in reality a villain, especially from 1936 to 1948, is that the English-writing historian who offers the most detailed and documented account of the Nationalist atrocities of the Civil War period, and the time that follows it, is Paul Preston, who seems to have leftwing sympathies. But to dismiss him as a leftist is a rather simplistic way of assessing his scholarly work. The questions that matter are these: Does Preston make some claims about Franco that reveal serious vices in Franco’s character and governance? Yes. Does he typically back up those claims with credible source material? Yes. I’ll give some examples.
Defenders of Franco tend to assume that the people his men killed were primarily communists who themselves were engaged in war crimes. But that is inaccurate. Franco considered guilty anyone who supported the republic or even anyone who opposed the Nationalist coup attempt. Among the presumed guilty were communists and socialists that did not partake in anticlerical violence. Ricardo Zabalza, was a socialist politician with no connection to the leftwing atrocities of the war, and he was sentenced to death by firing squad. The most serious charge against him was organizing a harvest strike in 1934, two years before the war. Awaiting his execution, he wrote to his parents:
When you read these lines, I will be just a memory. Men who describe themselves as Christians have wished it so and I, who never knowingly did anyone harm, submit myself to this test with the same clear conscience that has ruled my entire life.” (Preston, The Spanish Holocaust, 483)
The list of the guilty was not limited to those who endorsed communism or socialism, but it also included conservative republicans, Basque and Catalonian nationalists, or any individual suspected of harboring leftist—or even republican—sympathies. For example, Preston mentions the case of Manuel Carrasco I Formiguera, a devout Catholic from Catalan, who was a member of a Christian-democratic party, Unió Democràtica de Catalunya. He was executed by the Francoists, and under Franco’s insistence, for being a republican and Catalan nationalist. One of Franco’s men commented, “I know all about Carrasco being an exemplary Christian but his politics are criminal. He has to die!” (Preston, 459).
Franco was not only bent on securing a post-republican Spain; he was dead set on annihilating any sympathy for republicanism among the people. That is why anyone sympathetic to republicanism or opposed to the coup was liable to be marked as a criminal, and often a mere accusation of wrongthink by one’s neighbors was enough. In addition to guilt by association, convictions based on hearsay, and treating certain political ideologies (especially membership in the Freemasons) as liable to criminal or even capital penalties, Franco used the kooky psychological theories of Antonio Vallejo-Nájerato to justify his government’s kidnapping of 30,000 children from leftwing parents, placing them in Francoist homes.
Central to Franco’s paranoid crusade was his belief in the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy theory. His conspiracy theorist friend Father Juan Tusquets, who believed wholeheartedly in the validity of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, had already before the war begun to compile an extensive list of suspected Freemasons. Franco had Tusquets lead the “Judeo-Masonic” section of his Military Information Service during and after the war, with Tusquet’s extensive files contributing to a 1940 list of 80,000 suspected Freemasons, even though the number of Freemasons in Spain in 1936 was less than 10,000 (Preston, The Spanish Holocaust, 487–89). This witch hunt was significant because Freemasons, according to Franco, were automatically guilty of treason and were often executed extrajudicially.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry’s claim that Franco was a philosemite is difficult to sustain. It is true that Franco allowed probably 20,000 to 30,000 Jews to travel through Spain to escape persecution in Europe. But his policy of granting transit visas came after pressure from the Allied powers and pressure from within his government that not doing so would hurt their international reputation (Preston, Architects of Terror, 314–22). Not being a Nazi, moreover, is a low bar. Franco was still antisemitic in the ordinary sense of the word. In his May 19, 1939 Victory Parade speech he would even say, “Let us not deceive ourselves: the Jewish spirit, which permitted the alliance of big capital with Marxism and which was behind so many pacts with the anti-Spanish revolution, cannot be extirpated in a day and still beats in the hearts of many” (Preston, The Spanish Holocaust, 471). Around the same time Franco also praised Germany’s antisemitic legislation, which he compared favorably to the expulsion of the Jews by Ferdinand and Isabel in 1492 (ibid., 472).
In 1943, Franco even passed along to Pope Pius XII a letter purported to be written by FDR, which Franco believed proved that there was an international Jewish conspiracy to use the Allied powers to destroy Catholic civilization (Preston, Architects of Terror, 311). The Vatican apparently did not take it too seriously, and it is agreed now to have been a fake letter produced by German propagandists. That Franco’s shift of rhetoric about Jews after 1943 was only for political purposes is clear from the fact that in the late 1940s, he published articles about the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy under a pseudonym, Jakim Boor, which were collected in the volume Masonería. Preston highlights a passage from one of the articles, where Franco blames the UN’s attitude toward his government and their inattention to crimes against the Catholic faith in Europe on the fact they are led by Freemasons and Jews. This is because, Franco adds, “freemasonry, like Judaism, hates the Catholic religion”:
Dominating as they do the international assemblies and their member governments, why would they condemn, or take measures against, what deep down pleases them? What a difference between the hypocritical and feeble condemnations of this that flash across the agencies, the press and the airwaves that they control and their outrage, when a handful of Jews were the target of German racism, that impelled them to go to war (Preston, Architects of Terror, 322, emphasis mine).
Franco had a prejudicial mentality about his political enemies. Like many in the new right today, politics involved Manichean lines between friends and enemies and an effort to the reward the former and punish the latter. But the opponents of the Nationalist military coup were not a monolith, and they did not necessarily support the worst atrocities of people on the left just because they supported republican governance. And they certainly were not controlled by a massive conspiracy of Freemasons and Jews. This was delusional thinking on the part of Franco and his cronies, and it underpinned their cruelty.
The most respected English-speaking historian who is sympathetic with the Nationalists, Stanley Payne, has some legitimate criticisms of Preston’s book The Spanish Holocaust. I too am uncomfortable with the description of Franco’s war crimes as a holocaust, and Payne is right that the number of republicans who were killed or imprisoned was only a small fraction of them. Payne can be forgiven, moreover, for thinking that Preston sometimes handles the Spanish left with kid gloves.
Nonetheless, in Payne’s review of the book, he relativizes the atrocities of the Nationalists, arguing that they were typical of counterrevolutions of the early twentieth century. That is relevant. But there is a danger that, in countering presentism, we could slip into moral relativism. Even if we only acknowledge claims Preston makes about Franco that Payne never challenges, there is ample evidence to condemn his conduct from 1936 to 1948. There were plenty of people in the 1930s who could make that judgment as well.
Franco may not have been Hitler, but there are many degrees of evil leading up to Hitler. Indeed, Franco was all too happy to join an alliance with Hitler. The fact that he did not had nothing to do with moral principle, as is sometimes insinuated by Franco’s apologists today. Payne himself acknowledged that it was because Hitler could not meet Franco’s demands for territorial spoils after the war (Payne, The Franco Regime: 1936–1975, 272). Someone who would have collaborated with Hitler in World War II if he only he had been offered a better deal, is not a model statesman. No, Franco was a paranoid, conspiratorial, and morally vacuous thug.
Reasonable minds disagree whether Franco was better than the likely alternatives in 1930s Spain. To argue that he is better than what we can do now in the United States, however, with the blessing of our constitutional republic, is an insane position to take. But that is why this all matters. The neo-Francoists of the new right, like Franco, sometimes see everyone to their left as “woke.” This was once a term reserved for leftists, but now it is applied to other opponents of the new right (even the libertarian South Park writers). For the more intellectual postliberals, even people like me are dismissed as “right-liberals.” What is implied is that we are either for them or against them. And they believe that the lesson from Franco is that the only way to stop the left is by having the courage to use coercive power. But that is just old-fashioned thug politics, tried for thousands of years and found wanting.
The beauty of constitutional democracy, and why it has been orders of magnitude more successful than thug politics, is that it is about the effort to secure a rule of law, limited government, and institutions that resolve disagreement in peaceful ways, allowing for the growth and health of civil society. Thug politics, on the other hand, is a dead end. Francoism is a dead end.
Go ahead and pray for Franco’s broken soul, but, otherwise, forget him. He’s still dead.
