Spanish Fascist Research Articles

Making Democratic Citizens in Spain: Civil Society and the Popular Origins of the Transition. By Pamela Beth Radcliff (Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. xvii plus 414 pp.)

In her impressive new study Pamela Beth Radcliff argues that two types of civic associations in Spain played a crucial role in laying the foundations for the democratic society that emerged after the death of Franco. Eschewing monocausal explanations, Radcliff offers a detailed and nuanced account of the agency of ordinary men and women in the fascist Movimiento party's family associations and in the more loosely-constructed grassroots neighborhood associations. She contends that these associations, emerging across Spain in the last fifteen years of the regime, constituted the core of a nascent civil society flourishing within the constructs of authoritarianism. Inasmuch as these associations proved to be all but dead on arrival once the transition to democracy actually took place, her narrative emphasizes a lost opportunity to construct a democratic system involving real citizen engagement. Radcliff's argument is important on several levels. She offers a new periodization for the transition that de-emphasizes political developments taking place between 1975 and 1978, treating them instead as the culmination of earlier processes. Her focus on the Movimeinto's creation and management of the family associations provides a clearer picture of how Spanish fascist social thinking evolved in response to decreasing influence within the regime. And she recovers the activities of women in both family and neighborhood associations, who moved toward redefining gender roles and fomented habits of democratic participation.

“Coser y desgarrar, conservar y arrojar”. Visiones del enemigo y estrategias de supervivencia psíquica en la División Azul

This article analyzes the fears and projections of the Spanish fascist soldier in the Blue Division, all through the analysis of language from a psychoanalytic view. In some way, the aim is to understand how the enemy is seen and how is produced the process of contempt toward the enemy that made possible the deployment of an extreme brutality in combat. In this sense, we’ll see an absolute correspondence among the Russian people (civilians and soldiers), Communism, Judaism and the landscape. So much so that the fascist soldier lives under a permanent feeling of siege. At last, we can see how the fascist face this threat at the same time that he avoids it running away in a violent drive understood as act of faith.

Fascistization and fascism: Spanish dynamics in a Eeuropean process

This article defends the hypothesis that the regime built during the Spanish Civil War should be included within the historical category of fascism. The concept of fascistization is used to examine the evolution of the radical right wing and its convergence into a Spanish fascism that culminated in a civil war. This concept answers the main objections commonly held regarding the fascist nature of the regime that began in 1936: namely the minority standing of the Spanish fascist party, the existence of heterogeneous components in the movement that led to the civil war, a dictatorship that relied upon traditional segments of society to establish hegemony and the irreconcilable relationship between fascism and the essentially catholic nature of the new regime. Here it is shown that such objections can also be launched against other regimes usually considered fascist and that fascistization was not an alternative to, but rather the implementation of fascism under the conditions defining Spain in the 1930s.

‘Catalanism Only Will Win by the Force of Songs’, Revisited 100 Years After. The Role of Catalan(ist) Pop-Rock Music in Socially Sanitizing Working-Class Neighborhoods of Barcelona (1976–2000)

Abstract: During the last years of the Spanish fascist regime, two politically contrary music scenes emerged in Barcelona. While Catalanist folk music emerged for political freedom, Spanished rock’n’roll, punk, and heavy scenes emerged in the working-class suburbs of Barcelona, denouncing bad conditions of everyday urban life. The great success of this last music scene in Barcelona in the 1980s led to the then nationalist, conservative government of Catalonia to promote a new socially and politically sanitized music scene in response to such class-based contestation. This study aims to explore how a new Catalan(ist) pop-rock scene was created to socially and culturally sanitize the working-class suburbs of Barcelona along the decades of the 1980s and 1990s.

Quixotism: The Imaginative Denial of Spain's Loss of Empire (review)

Reviewed by: Quixotism: The Imaginative Denial of Spain's Loss of Empire Alda Blanco Britt Arredondo, Christopher . Quixotism: The Imaginative Denial of Spain's Loss of Empire. SUNY P, 2005. 266 pages. In a bold and much needed revisionist critical move for Hispanism, Christopher Britt Arredondo forcefully argues in Quixotism: The Imaginative Denial of Spain's Loss of Empire that Hispanists should eliminate the use of the term "Generation of '98" in order to "clear the ground for an alternative understanding of the literary and intellectual culture of early twentieth-century Spain" (8). With this book Britt Arrendondo joins a growing and healthy tend within Hispanism of reformulating Spanish literary history, questioning the premises upon which it has been written to date, and problematizing the notion of "generation" as the favored way of classifying twentieth-century authors. Unlike previous scholars devoted to the study of the so-called "Generation of '98"—Ricardo Gullón and Inman Fox, for example—who were extremely critical of the term put into circulation by Azorín and yet, nevertheless, continued using it as a convenient way of referring to this disparate group of authors preoccupied, if not obsessed, by the decadence of Spain after the final loss of its colonial empire in 1898, Britt Arredondo completely rejects it because "in the form it had been handed down to the present, it reproduces the implicit assumptions concerning Spain's heroic and classical past that motivate the nationalist imperialism professed by Unamuno, Ganivet, Maeztu [and] Ortega" (12). His alternative is to propose the use of a critical category, Quixotism. By reconfiguring the literary terrain at the turn of the century through this category he hopes to "contribute to the modernization of a field of study that remains, to this day, unnecessarily constrained by the memory of its nationalist legacy" (vii). Thus, this study is meant to be a "counternarrative" in the "extranational," "antinationalist" tradition, a tradition that for Britt Arrendondo has been marginalized and silenced within Spanish culture and Hispanism, and which includes, among others, Blanco White, Américo Castro, Juan Goytisolo, and Eduardo Subirats" (180–81). In order to establish the term and the category of Quixotism, he dissolves the "Generation of '98," regroups several of its members (Ganivet, Unamuno, and Maeztu) into a new set which he links by what he deems to be their nationalist and imperialist thinking as articulated through the "iconographic association of [End Page 87] the Spanish nation with the figure of Don Quixote" (6), and incorporates Ortega into his new critical category. Because the dual purpose in this book is "to expose the intellectual roots of Spanish fascist culture" (vii), which for him originates in the thinking and writing of Unamuno, Ganivet, Maeztu, and Ortega, and "denounce the complicity of certain scholars with that culture" (vii), he sets out to prove the four main arguments around which he organizes his study. Given the novelty of Britt Arredondo's approach to the study of turn-of-the-century meditations upon the "problem of Spain" and his introduction of Quixotism as a new critical category, I believe it is important to quote from the text rather than to gloss or summarize it. His first argument is that "the Quixotism proposed by these thinkers extols obsessive devotion to utopian ideals as a solemn, dignified, and virtuous habit of mind. Quixotic behavior [. . .] is a sign of nobility. Fittingly, the Quixotism of Ganivet, Unamuno, Maeztu, and Ortega constitutes an attempt to recuperate, if not altogether reinvent, Don Quixote as a sometimes stoic and mystical, sometimes redemptive and messianic hero who embodies the leadership ideals that these intellectuals believed could regenerate post-1898 Spain" (12–13). Secondly, he argues that "[r]ather than promote a critical understanding of the historical events that had led to Spain's demise as a world power, they set out to deny that their nation's loss of empire was irrevocable" (13). His third claim is that these thinkers "produced conjectural national histories that presented the 'true' history of the Spanish nation's decline from empire as 'false.' Against this background of 'false historical reality' they affirmed their own 'truer' versions of the nation's 'essential history.' According to these...

The Forgotten Falangist: Ernesto Gimenez Caballero

In October 1973, the Falange, Spain's only legal political party, celebrated the fortieth anniversary of its founding. Time and decades of unchallenged political power have swept away much of the movement's original leadership and purpose. As the anniversary date approached, however, there still remained a few camisas viejas (founding members of the Party) to recall the old days with fondness, remembering the time when the Falange sought to lead Spain toward fascism. Undoubtedly, Ernesto Gimenez Caballero was among them. A figure now largely ignored or dismissed by foreign students of the Falange's initial years, Gimenez Caballero played a singular role in the movement's inception and in the enunciation of a fascist programme for Spain's future. A tall, lean man, now in his seventies, Gimenez Caballero was once regarded as 'the Spanish D'Annunzio',1 the intellectual progenitor of the movimiento nacional. History, especially that published in the English language, has not been particularly mindful of his career. Those recent sources which have discussed him at all have described his works as 'weird outpourings' or 'such a farrago of nonsense that they can scarcely be taken seriously'.2 Spanish publications, however, continue to assign him a primary role in the history of the Falange, referring to Gimenez Caballero as 'the first of the Spanish fascists' or ranking him along with Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera and Ledesma Ramos as the only 'brilliant men' the movement ever attracted.3 There is ample evidence to justify the position taken by these Spanish-language sources. The founder of the Falange, Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, was an avid reader of Gimenez Caballero's fascist views long before he embarked upon a political career. Because of Gimenez Caballero's primacy as a champion of Spanish fascism, he was