MUCH was made of the controversial exhumation of General Francisco Franco’s (1892-1975) remains from the Valle de los Caídos at San Lorenzo de El Escorial, in 2019, but this token attempt by the Spanish Government to distance itself from the historical excesses of Fascism cannot hide the fact that the country’s politicians should have gathered before the shrine to worship at the very feet of their former dictator. Not because the old regime was a model of freedom and justice, it was just as murderous and authoritarian as those it had vanquished between 1936 and 1939, but as a direct consequence of the fact that modern Spanish ‘democracy’ owes everything it has to Franco himself.
Not only did the 1937 inauguration of his triumphant FET y de las JONS party ensure the convenient survival of capitalist interests by defeating the Communists – who, in turn, had butchered the more genuine Anarchist resistance – but on September 23rd, 1953, Franco signed the infamous Pact of Madrid. This treacherous alliance with the United States did not come without a price and allowed the financial parasites in Wall Street to burden the Spanish people with a usurious millstone of debt.
Between 1954 and 1961 Franco’s government received military aid to the tune of US$500 million. Between 1962 and 1982, Spain accepted a further US$1.23 billion in the form of grants and loans. Meanwhile, from 1983 to 1986 the United States provided annual payments of US$400 million, which was reduced to US$100 million between 1987 and 1988. Throughout this period, around 200 Spanish officers and NCOs received training in the United States every year. This, in return for enormous rates of interest and for allowing the Americans to establish military bases at Rota, Morón, Torrejón and Zaragoza. So much for the great Spanish patriot, who enslaved his people and turned their land into a glorified aircraft carrier.
Shortly after signing the Pact of Madrid and selling his country down the river, Franco – a close friend of Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon – had even expressed a desire for Spain to join NATO. It goes without saying that if the Generalissimo had not taken these perfidious measures, he would have been forced to endure the same fate as that suffered by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. The actions of Franco, therefore, which paved the way for modern Spanish ‘democracy,’ are precisely why the careerists and leeches of the modern-day Spanish Government should have prostrated themselves before the Valle de los Caídos in gratitude. They, after all, are just as rotten as the crumbling remains that were shuffled away from the penetrating glare of the collective national gaze like a famous retiring actor who has performed his final role. Exit stage right. Nonetheless, the theatre of the absurd is still open for business and the show must go on.
