The Crusade

The former Spanish Interior Minister Jorge Fernández Díaz declared in an interview that the success of Franco's coup was a miracle, the result of divine intervention, by the grace of the Mother of God. It’s an extremely ‘whacky’ thing to say. But it's more than this. My generation was one of the last to be taught that the Franco rebellion, a fascist, ultra-conservative (as Arrimadas would say) overthrow of a democratically elected government, was in fact a reaction against communism and religious persecution, “una Cruzada” [a Crusade]. This is what the pro-Franco propaganda claimed, especially aimed at the conservative democratic sectors of England or France.

Clearly, the anti-clerical atrocities committed by certain factions on the republican side helped support this biased interpretation of the events. However, democratic Catholics soon realized that this was not the case: Bernandos, a royalist, Catholic conservative who initially sympathized with the Franco regime, ended up writing Els grans cementiris sota la lluna [The Great Cemeteries Under the Moon], condemning the atrocities committed in Mallorca. The fact that Fernández Díaz has chosen this precise moment to revive the idea of the Crusade, with miracles included, is significant. He’s not some anonymous member of Vox. He’s a former minister of the PP who was in charge of the police and was pally with the public prosecutor. He must think that the ban has been lifted. That being an apologist for the Franco dictatorship is no longer a sin, either morally or politically.