FRANCISCO FRANCO

It would be tempting to regard de Gaulle as a French Franco was it not for the existence, during the Occupation, of Vichy France under Pétain. Likewise it would be tempting to regard Franco as a Spanish Mussolini were it not for the existence, before and during the Spanish Civil War, of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, leader of the Falange, the Spanish Fascist Party. Clearly, a compromise has to be settled for in Franco's case, since he seems closer to Pétain than to either de Gaulle or Mussolini, a military dictator with fascist leanings who nevertheless was not a fascist.

That honour rested with Primo de Rivera, who, like Mussolini and Hitler, was a genuine idealistic revolutionary, too revolutionary, it seems, for Franco's liking. For de Rivera would have transformed Spain in a fascist way, debarring or liquidating the royalist Right, whereas Franco was anxious to draw the various right-wing strands together in order not only to placate the different allegiances which existed, but to prevent the kind of internecine factionalism endemic to the Left which, more than anything else, was ultimately responsible for its downfall.

For Franco, however, a wavicle cohesion of the Right was the only logical retort to the particle frictions and squabblings of the Left, and although the outcome was less than fascist, it at any rate served his purpose of crushing, on a broad front, the Socialist-Communist-Syndicalist-Anarchist-Marxist-Soviet opposition, and returning Spain, after protracted bloody warfare, to something approaching stability.

As a dictator Franco was neither fish now fowl, royalist nor fascist, but a pragmatic combination of both, if intrinsically a man of the traditional Right. Not for me to admire him for that, and he got scant admiration from Hitler, who simply considered him a reactionary bourgeois. Yet he did at the very least save Spanish civilization from the almost certain destruction that would have befallen it, had the Left taken over and the Republic survived.... Which, as I see it, means that, even after Franco, Spain is still capable of taking a path opposed to and superior than communism, since barbarism did not triumph there and consequently the future is undecided - at least in a manner of speaking.

What, then, is this alternative path? The reader familiar with my work will know that I call it Centrism (pronounced Centerism), the supertheocratic ideology of what is potentially if not (at this moment in time) actually a true world religion, which manifests itself on the political front as Social Transcendentalism, and he will also know that Social Transcendentalism is not a new nationalist ideology but a supra-national ideology which desires nothing less than the establishment of a Centrist federation.

The choice for the world is there ... between the (Second Coming) ideology of Centrism, and the (Antichrist) ideology of communism, and Spain has yet to make it ... thanks to Franco who, if he failed to erect the highest and best, at any rate prevented the lowest and worst from dragging Catholic Spain down to the particle materialism of the Devil's last stand in the world.