Naturally, As soon as I finished my post “The Death of Garcia Lorca”, I'm lying in bed and I start thinking:
“Hoover!”, “Garcia Lorca!”, “Emma Goldman!”, “Red Scares!”
Garcia Lorca should have lived a long and productive life had he not been shot down in a fusilade of bullets along with other "rebels" in 1936.” There are real parallels.
Darn! I'm not done. Oh no! Oh My! “Charlie Chaplin was in many ways our Garcia Lorca!”
I wasn't being fair to the subject. The parallels between what happened in Spain and what happened and is still happening in the United States are closer than we like to think. I thought:
“we bit a bullet and avoided violent revolution in the 20s and 30s.”
I'd gone to sleep feeling all comfortable and consoling myself.
“We didn't have a Communist or a Fascist Revolution that involved mass arrests and thousands of people being shot and placed in mass graves like happened in Spain. No our little cultural wars, rarely erupt into overt large scale armies marching up and down the countryside and hot battles between opposing armies. I was thinking.”
I wake up sweating and realize!
“Oh not so fast Chris.”
So I wake up at the witching hour, sweating. My conscience reminding myself.
“There are strong parallels here. Sure we didn't have the drama of Generalissimo Francisco Franco crossing from North Africa to the Spain and invading his own country. We didn't have a flag waving asshole (yes that word) like José Antonio Primo De Rivera raising arms against his own country, being arrested and killed by the Government he sought to overthrow.”
But we did have J. Edgar Hoover and General MacArthur, who were every bit as Fascist as they. And we did have bloody battles over labor and equality issues. We had labor turmoil here too. Where Spain had an open hot war in 1936, we have Franklin Roosevelt in 1934 who kept a lid on the bloody ambitions of our “Bourgeoisie.” versus our Labor. Indeed, Most of us forgot that folks who work for others for a living were once classified as only slightly better than animals and slaves.
Indeed, while even labor in our country thinks of ourselves as slightly burdened “Bourgeoisie”
Our bosses haven't always shared that attitude. Class distinctions didn't arise on the shop floor, they arose in Board Rooms and Country clubs. Most of us think that being classified by others as “working class” doesn't mean we were inferior to anyone. The fact that that is true just means that our education system was somewhat successful in indoctrinating values of Democratic Republicanism in our parents and grandparents. And also that our cultural left was somewhat successful and not executed wholesale in bloody fusilades of bullets. But that doesn't mean we didn't (or don't) have the same forces of conflict.
“We aren't so different from the Spanish”
Which is why I've been writing this series of blog posts. The differences between MacArthur and Franco, are not so big. Spain had it's J. Edgar Hoovers, but because they served different masters, they have a different fame. If the Spanish killed Progressives in mass murder, we killed "reds" while marching to strike in Coal Fields. If Garcia Lorca was murdered, we deported Charlie Chaplin.
So the parallels between our fascism and Spanish Falangism are very real, and I'm not done writing about the subject.
Now I can go back to sleep, though not as comfortably.
Further Reading and Sources
- The Death of Garcia Lorca
- https://holtesthoughts.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-death-of-garcia-lorca.html
- Related Sources:
- http://www.espacioebook.com/sigloxx_27/lorca/lorca_yerma.pdf
- https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Spanish/YermaActI.php
- http://www.theliteraryreview.org/poetry-2/lament-for-the-death-of-ignacio-sanchez-mejias/
- Posts in this Series:
- These start with:
- Parallels between Falangists and the American Right Wing
- And:
- This post flows from the introduction in the post: The 26 Point Plank of the Falangist Party
- Then I break down the subject into a number of posts:
- Right Wing Imperialism, & Myth Making
- Right Wing Explicit Authoritarianism and Totalitarianism
- Right Wing National Syndicalism and Corporatism
- Right Wing Land Reform and Privatization
- Right Wing Chauvinism and Indoctrination
- Right Wing Violent Revolution And Dictatorship
- Parallels between Falange fascists and US Fascists on Abortion
- https://holtesthoughts.blogspot.com/2018/10/falangist-fascism-and-terror-versus.html
- https://holtesthoughts.blogspot.com/2018/10/TheDeathOfPrimoDeRivera.html
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