Franco
Preston, Paul
Inevitably, Marxist smog blocks out the ancient sunlight, as Lady Bracknell mounts her soapbox to denounce, for example, Mrs. Thatcher's "police state." Her memories are tailored to fit her present...
...I rang Corin [her batty brother] and asked him to come to my home then and there...
...The outbreak of civil war consolidated extremism on both sides...
...He came, and I told him I wanted to apply immediately to become a Trotskyist and a member of the Socialist Labour League...
...She maintains that in 1963 the British critics ganged up on her husband, the late, left-wing Tony Richardson, and panned his hit movie Tom Jones...
...Former comrades fight one another...
...Communism has failed, but so has the New World Order...
...but I mean to ask of him admission into the one Fold of Christ...
...How very like the experience of John Henry Newman, who, in Apologia Pro Vita Sua, recalled how he had written a letter to friends on October 8, 1845: "I am this night expecting Father Dominic, the Passionist...
...Franco outlived most of his original enemies, and his countrymen have yet to officially repudiate him...
...On the other hand, does the Generalissimo belong in the despicable FRANCO: A BIOGRAPHY Paul Preston Basic Books/ 1,002 pages/$37.50 reviewed by FRANCIS X. ROCCA 65 The American Spectator March 1995 camp where he is usually put, a poor man's Fiihrer or Duce...
...His "great political talent," as Preston shows, was the ability to gain and keep the support of several overlapping yet contentious factions...
...Vanessa believes the Bosnian Mussulmen are victims of Serbian "fascists," much as William Safire does...
...They were not...
...Not only did he kill his enemies...
...O 66 The American Spectator March 1995...
...O Francisco Franco, of course, did not go back to his plow...
...he deliberately prevented the rescue of the Falange's founder, Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, because he was more useful as a martyr than a rival...
...When she joined the WRP it was called the Socialist Labour League...
...Gosh, life is confusing...
...It is thanks to the generation of Hitler and Stalin that the word "dictator" has become a synonym for "tyrant" and "mass murderer...
...there were many factions, on right and left, with trouble and totalitarianism on their minds...
...Was there no room on the street for these emaciated victims of bloated capitalism...
...She'd turn up at the Oscars in a red ribbon, naturally, but would be of no more concern to us than Richard Gere or Cindy Crawford...
...like the Marxist dog she is...
...Her memories are tailored to fit her present beliefs...
...He never fully committed himself to any of these groups, and to some extent he exploited and betrayed them all, but he kept each satisfied that its best hope for survival lay with him...
...the Republic had to rely on left-wing militias and Soviet aid, and that gave the Communists their opening...
...Professor Preston's reads like one long indictment, each of its innumerable counts meticulously documented and strenuously argued, rather than a disinterested account of an immensely consequential life...
...The idea has gained ground that she is anti-Semitic...
...He evidently wanted to enter on the Axis side, both out of ideological sympathy and in the hope of rebuilding a Spanish empire, and the only reason he did not was that Germany would not meet his price in aid and prospective African territory...
...She insists that in 1967 the London papers were slavishly pro-American in their coverge of Vietnam...
...And this is not to mention possible threats to democracy from the left...
...Long after he was able to deliberately manipulate them, he benefited from these divisions...
...At times, she even sounds like a bleeding-heart liberal, as when she writes that just after the war, in her privileged part of London, "little children played in the gutter in bare feet...
...Preston shows that Franco's "neutrality" was of a very qualified kind: he provided the Nazis and Italian Fascists (who had helped him crucially in the Civil War) with vitally important minerals, factory goods, and access to the Peninsula...
...Her conversion happened in September 1973, and conversion is the only word for it: I realized at that moment that I had no other way to live except in a political struggle with a party that knew that a serious study of history is necessary if we are to gain understanding and prevent a recurrence of repression...
...Catholics are reminded, most recently by Pope John Paul II, that the Republic against which the Nationalists fought was the scene of unspeakable religious persecution, the rape and murder of clergy and the desecration of churches, and (as Orwell and others discovered in their run-ins with increasingly powerful Communists) of ideological intolerance just as fierce...
...Yet while Preston stresses how inept Franco was in his dealings with the Axis, and with the Allies who tried to ensure his neutrality with badly needed oil, it is easy to imagine an even rasher, more deeply deluded dictator who would have driven an easier bargain and plunged his country back into war...
...Franco was a killer...
...Zounds...
...And while he shared Napoleon's taste for pomp and self-promotion (as well as his shortness of stature and the distinction of youngest general in European history), he had nothing of the Corsican's flair and immortal charisma...
...And so it goes...
...Preston puts it nicely: "His strength lay in his position as the keystone of the Francoist arch...
...To be sure, some antiZionists are anti-Semites, but then, as anyone who has explored the darker recesses of the European mind will know, some pro-Zionists are antiSemites...
...Or Meryl Streep...
...Napoleon is for us a Romantic and colorful character, his portrait part of the standard decor of little boys' bedrooms...
...His image still circulates, by the millions, on the five- and twenty-five-peseta coins in Spanish pockets...
...Julius Caesar, who overthrew that Republic, has always had his defenders even among liberals...
...the Church, the military, the monarchists (parliamentary and absolute), and the Falange...
...Thick with bureaucratic detail on diplomatic negotiations and cabinet shuffles, the book is twice as long as necessary...
...Like Julius Caesar, he tried his hand at literature, but it is doubtful that future generations of schoolchildren will learn Spanish by translating Raza, his autobiographical novel-cum-screenplay...
...after "saving" Spain from liberal democracy and the malevolent forces (Communism and Freemasonry) which he was sure were latent in it, he ruled as caudillo for more than thirty-five years...
...The Trotskyite Miss Redgrave is not...
...Preston only weakens his case by failing to let the facts he has so assiduously collected speak for themselves...
...Since the verdict on his life is still not in, perhaps any serious book on the subject is bound to be polemical...
...And if that arch had collapsed...
...If it had not been for the WRP, Vanessa would today be known as a fine actressan English Meryl Streep-who got mixed up in radical left-wing politics in the 1960s and 1970s but who was now into pyramids and crystals...
...J t is true that "the revolution which Franco believed himself to have been forestalling was itself precipitated by the military rebellion" in which he took part and came to lead...
...The author's loathing for his subject frequently provokes him to swipes at "the dumpy Franco," and he eagerly underscores the occasions when he "declared pompously" or "oozed self-righteous delight...
...Even visiting Nazis were shocked, on visits to the Nationalist zone during the Civil War, by the extent of the repression and executions...
...Similarly, though Preston amply documents Franco's economic ignorance and increasing obliviousness in the postwar period, and convinces us that the relative prosperity of the sixties happened only in spite of the disastrous policies of autarky and syndicalism that the caudillo had imposed on the nation, it is stingy to deny him at least a little credit for eventually (if intermittently) favoring the Opus Dei technocrats and their realistic policies over the fascist Falangists who had helped him to power...
...Franco may have practically annihilated his ideological enemies (although guerrilla resistance continued into the fifties), but he did not preside over a regime of political uniformity...
...Mind, Vanessa finds "fascists" in Croatia too...
...They did not...
...He does not know of my intention...
...The conservative Chesterton was an anti-Semite (like the conservative Hilaire Belloc and the conservative T. S. Eliot...
...Chesterton was very much in favor of a Jewish homeland, because he considered English Jews aliens...
...Where Franco's responsibility is clear is in his unwillingness, despite the advice of many on his side, to compromise or show mercyhis determination quite literally to take no prisoners...
...Francis X. Rocca is a writer living in Madrid...
...Vanessa Redgrave was strongly opposed to the Gulf War, 0 r-N urs is the century that gave dictators a bad name...
...In the end-addled by Parkinson's disease, marching for exercise to the legionnaire's anthems of his youth, and hectored by scheming relatives-he died of natural causes, his power and illusions unthreatened...
...V anessa's selective memory comes to us courtesy of the Workers' Revolutionary Party...
...But it was not a stable and peaceful democracy that the generals overthrew...
...Once upon a time the archetype was Cincinnatus, the noble Roman with whom George Washington would be reverently identified, who took up absolute power reluctantly, then returned to his plow as soon as he had saved the Republic...
...former enemies make common cause...
...Franco held on to power out of lust for it, and he had no plans to give Spain liberty, even as his legacy-but whether Franco's removal would have led to anything better is not a question we can answer simply...
...Given that even under authoritarian rule, rogue elements of the Falange were provoking bloody conflict as late as 1956, Preston's vision of a Bourbon and democratic restoration in 1945 seems overly idealistic...
...J f only she had stuck to acting...
...If democracy had survived in Spain until the start of World War II, it is hard to know whether the country could have stayed out of that conflict...
...Preston not only denies Franco credit, he scolds him for his disloyalty...
...and would not therefore have found myself looking into the most beautiful, and terrifying, pair of eyes on earth...
...On the other hand, if she had stuck to acting the world would have been denied this fascinating account of bourgeois radicalism, and I would never have cornered her in Newham Town Hall all those years ago ("Miss Redgrave, Miss Redgrave, would you like to make a statement to the Times...
...He was known, to ally and enemy alike, for his preternatur al coldness...
...but then so were such non-Marxists as Patrick Buchanan and his Holiness Pope John Paul 11...
...It seemed to many then, as it does in retrospect, that it was not a question of whether large-scale violence would begin, but when...
...In that, of course, she is at one with the Serbians, who have not forgotten the Ustashi...
...In fact, she is antiZionist, which is not necessarily the same thing...
...Franco kept Spain out of World War II, some have argued, and although he took his time leaving the stage of politics, he left it set for a peaceful transition to democracy-a democracy which remains vital, if fractious and shaken by frequent scandal, almost twenty years later...
...Old alliances collapse along with the old certainties...
Vol. 28 • March 1995 • No. 3
