The Spanish Holocaust
power on 14 April 1931. After the dictator’s departure in January 1930, one of the first to take up the defence of establishment interests was Dr José María Albiñana, an eccentric Valencian neurologist and frenetic admirer of Primo de Rivera.
    The author of more than twenty novels and books on neurasthenia, religion, the history and philosophy of medicine and Spanish politics, and a number of mildly imperialist works about Mexico, Albiñana was convinced that there was a secret alliance working in foreign obscurity in order to destroy Spain. In February 1930, he distributed tens of thousands of copies of his Manifiesto por el Honor de España . In it, he had declared that ‘there exists a Masonic Soviet which dishonours Spain in the eyes of the world by reviving the black legend and other infamies forged by the eternal hidden enemies of our fatherland. This Soviet, made up of heartless persons, is backed by spiteful politicians who, to avenge offences against themselves, go abroad to vomit insults against Spain’. This was a reference to the Republicans exiled by the dictatorship. Two months later, he launched his ‘exclusively Spanish Nationalist Party’ whose objective was to ‘annihilate the internal enemies of the fatherland’. A fascist image was provided by its blue-shirted, Roman-saluting Legionaries of Spain, a ‘citizen volunteer force to act directly, explosivelyand expeditiously against any initiative which attacks or diminishes the prestige of the fatherland’. 5
    Albiñana was merely one of the first to argue that the fall of the monarchy was the first step in the Jewish–Masonic–Bolshevik conspiracy to take over Spain. Such ideas would feed the extreme rightist paranoia that met the establishment of the Second Republic. The passing of political power to the Socialist Party (PSOE – Partido Socialista Obrero Español) and its urban middle-class allies, the lawyers and intellectuals of the various Republican parties, sent shivers of horror through right-wing Spain. The Republican–Socialist coalition intended to use its suddenly acquired share of state power to implement a far-reaching programme to create a modern Spain by destroying the reactionary influence of the Church, eradicating militarism and improving the immediate conditions of the wretched day-labourers with agrarian reform.
    This huge agenda inevitably raised the expectations of the urban and rural proletariats while provoking the fear and the determined enmity of the Church, the armed forces and the landowning and industrial oligarchies. The passage from the hatreds of 1917 –23 to the widespread violence that engulfed Spain after 1936 was long and complex but it began to speed up dramatically in the spring of 1931. The fears and hatreds of the rich found, as always, their first line of defence in the Civil Guard. However, as landowners blocked attempts at reform, the frustrated expectations of hungry day-labourers could be contained only by increasing brutality.
    Many on the right took the establishment of the Republic as proof that Spain was the second front in the war against world revolution – a notion fed by numerous clashes between the forces of order and workers of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), the anarchist union. Resolute action against the extreme left by the Minister of the Interior, Miguel Maura, did not deter the Carlist newspaper El Siglo Futuro from attacking the government and claiming that progressive Republican legislation was ordered from abroad. It declared in June 1931 that three of the most conservative ministers, the premier, Niceto Alcalá Zamora, Miguel Maura and the Minister of Justice, Fernando de los Ríos Urruti, were Jews and that the Republic itself had been brought about as a result of a Jewish conspiracy. The more moderate Catholic mass-circulation daily El Debate referred to de los Ríos as ‘the rabbi’. The Editorial Católica, which owned an influential chain of newspapers
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