Where the News Ends
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin Impressions of Franco Spain MADRID A FIRST VISIT to a country is likely to produce the sharpest, most clear-cut impressions. And one feeling that...
...Spain entered the economic union of West European nations, the Organization for European Economic Cooperation...
...And now the crucial question is whether Spain will be willing or able to proceed farther along the road of economic liberalism or whether Franco will resort to methods of statist control...
...And one feeling that has grown on me during my two weeks' stay in Spain is: This is what Russia might have been, if General Denikin had beaten the Red Army (as he came fairly close to doing in the autumn of 1919) and the Whites had staged a triumphal entry into Moscow...
...He predicted that a day might come when a new popular upheaval might make life unpleasant for priests and Americans, the latter unpopular, he believed, because of their Government's military and economic aid to Franco...
...One witty Spanish intellectual told me: "We have a dictatorship tempered by anarchy...
...This attitude, to be sure, is repudiated as cynical and defeatist by representatives of the opposition—some of them Catholics, who have varying degrees of political and economic liberalism, some socialists, who enjoy a semi-legal tolerance as long as they do not get to the point of overt action...
...And in the universities there is a considerable measure of academic freedom...
...Historical parallels cannot be pressed too far, of course...
...But an industrial depression has accompanied these intrinsically desirable financial reforms...
...Spain is different from Europe...
...In one provincial city, for example, I met a professor who pulled no punches in criticizing almost every aspect of Franco's regime, with special emphasis on its alleged corruption...
...Still larger, in a more distant future, looms the question: After Franco what...
...The Falange, the only legal political organization, is a pale shadow of the Russian Communist party or Hitler's Nazi party and its power and influence are waning...
...Our meeting was private, but the professor's views were no secret, inside or outside Spain...
...As a prominent Spanish lawyer and writer put it to me: "We need reconciliation, the integration into the national community of the half of the people who fought on the other side of the barricades...
...inflationary curbs were imposed...
...The peseta was stabilized at a rate low enough to stimulate tourists and exports...
...But by and large the Spanish groups that supported Franco were a good deal like the Russian groups which backed Denikin and other leaders of the White movement...
...And if one could imagine a Russia in which Communism had been defeated after a very bloody and exhausting struggle, one could also understand the sentiment I found among some middle-class professional men in Spain: "We don't feel identified with this regime...
...Only after there is more education and a higher standard of living can we take a chance on parliamentary democracy without fearing a new lapse into anarchy and chaos, with perhaps a still worse dictatorship at the end...
...Thomas Aquinas or a Papal encyclical—what he probably could not publish in a newspaper...
...The Cabinet Ministers are Franco's personal nominees, not the representatives of a ruling party...
...A king, with vision and magnanimity, could be the agent of this needed reconciliation...
...We would like to see progressive liberalization all along the line—political, economic, intellectual...
...It seems clear that Franco's system, though quick to use military courts to crack down on what is considered subversive action, falls far short of the totalitarianism of Stalin or Hitler...
...Streets named in honor of Franco's principal lieutenants in the Civil War—General Mola, General Sanjurgo, General Queipo de Llano, Jose Antonio de Rivera—would probably have been matched in Moscow by streets renamed after Kornilov, Markov, Wrangel, Mamontov and the other White leaders...
...At present Spain is passing through an interesting economic test...
...Last year, facing bankruptcy, Franco was forced to give up much of the economic autarchy (accompanied by creeping inflation) which had characterized the Spanish economy for the last two decades...
...Franco cannot do this, because he is the leader of one side...
...Often one department of the Government will concede what another will refuse...
...A professor may say in a lecture—especially if he illustrates his point with a suitable quotation from St...
...There is surprising agreement, even among some Leftists, that a return to monarchy would offer the best prospect of progress and reform...
...But after the experience of 1936-39 we rate the value of peace and order more highly than the men of the last generation may have done...
...What separates Franco's personal rule from the standard pattern of Communist or fascist dictatorship is the absence of both a coherent body of doctrine and a party with some assurance of continuity...
Vol. 43 • October 1960 • No. 38
