Francisco Franco died 40 years ago today, but our ‘liberal’ media still can’t leave him in peace. Thus, for example, the BBC:
“Franco fought a brutal war against democracy with the aid of Hitler and Mussolini and thereafter presided over a regime of state terror and national brainwashing through controlled media and the state education system.”
This is nonsense. Franco didn’t fight against democracy as an abstract principle. He fought against the Popular Front that was about to turn Spain into Stalin’s satellite.
Having destabilised Primo de Rivera’s transitional regime, the Popular Front, inspired by Stalin’s Comintern, installed its own government that was eventually taken over by the ‘Spanish Lenin’ Largo Caballero.
In short order, Spain sank into anarchy, with every traditional institution being destroyed and even the army disintegrating. In Stalin’s eyes, that made the country ripe for a Bolshevik takeover: the ‘revolutionary situation’ seemed to be in place.
That the Soviet chieftain didn’t get away with it was owed to the invisible hand of historical serendipity that plucked the right man out of relative obscurity and put him in the right place at the right time.
Franco landed with a small force and saved Spain from the on-going communist mayhem: the torture and murder of priests, the rape and evisceration of nuns (not always in that order), the mass murder of the ‘rich’, the almost total elimination of the traditional ruling classes, the looting and destruction of property.
The last time I looked at his photographs, Franco didn’t have wings on his back. He wasn’t an angel, far from it. It would have been so much better if the man picking up the banner of anti-Stalinism had been a Mother Teresa or, at a pinch, perhaps even a Neville Chamberlain.
However, that option wasn’t on offer. The choice wasn’t between Mother Teresa and Neville Chamberlain. It was between Franco and Stalin. Given that stark option, I’d take Franco any day: history shows that wherever the communists take over, they instantly wipe out about 10 per cent of the population, to begin with.
No doubt trendy Beeb lefties would still prefer Stalin. And to support this morally defunct preference, they are as ready as ever to misrepresent facts – even those few they get right technically.
Yes, as a pragmatic man, Franco looked for help anywhere he could find it. Internally, that led to an alliance with the Falange; externally, to one with Mussolini and Hitler. Actually, an alliance is an inadequate word to describe what essentially was a one-sided arrangement.
Franco accepted Hitler’s help having scored the diplomatic coup of promising nothing except money in return. Not only did Spain under Franco refuse to enter the Second World War on Germany’s side, but his government even denied Hitler the right of passage to Gibraltar.
Franco eagerly traded salutes with the Nazis, but balked at trading favours. It was by design that he was so unreceptive to Hitler’s overtures that the latter likened talking to Franco to having his teeth pulled.
Paris was worth a mass to Henri IV, and Madrid was worth an outstretched right arm to Franco. But he was far from being the fascist of leftie mythology. He was the last throwback to Christendom among the great leaders of the modern world, which earned him its undying enmity.
Today’s lot detest such men above anyone else. Hence they always talk about Franco’s alliance with Hitler, somehow forgetting to mention that the Republican side was financed, armed, trained and led by Stalin.
Soviet pilots were flying Soviet I-16 fighter planes over Madrid; Soviet tank crews were driving Soviet BTs into battle; the Soviet NKVD was butchering other leftist groups, including Orwell’s POUM anarchists; Soviet ‘advisers’ were leading divisions and armies.
Had Franco not stepped in, Spain today would be like Romania, and many in Spain realise this. Franco’s tomb in the Valley of the Dead remains a national shrine, and hundreds of Spaniards come every day to pay their respects.
Are they all lovers of tyranny? Some no doubt are. But a majority have a firmer grasp of history than the BBC, which proves that an ideology, especially a wrong one, can never allow a compendium of facts to become valid history.
BBC-type woolly thinking has become typical in the West. And since our politicians mostly come from the same genetic stock as Beeb hacks, it often lies at the foundation of foreign policy.
By peddling the falsehood that all regimes failing to emulate our sainted ‘democracy’ are equally rotten, they lead our countries into wars designed to unseat assorted tyrants in the name of universal suffrage – only to realise that each subsequent tyrant is much worse.
We ousted (or helped oust, or at least cheered from the sidelines) Batista to get Castro, the Shah to get the Ayatollahs, Mubarak to get the Muslim Brotherhood, Saddam and Qaddafi to get the current bloodbath, which we’re trying to make worse by ousting Assad.
The fog of mendacious verbiage descends and we no longer see reality. Il Caudillo did and, if I lived in Spain, I’d today be praying for his soul.
P.S. There are many such subversive thoughts in my book How the West Was Lost, now available in its second, paperback and electronic, edition.