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!”
This post follows where I wrote in the post: “The Life of Garcia Lorca and Fascist Spain.”
Garcia Lorca, knew with a massive dread that his days were probably numbered. Yet he soldiered on in his project to improve the live of Spaniards and Spanish people in general.
We won the house. That means our Democracy is not yet dead. But it is still endangered as illustrated by what Donald Trump did yesterday.
The Athenians were driven to put the vetting job into jury functions or ruling councils by experiences with demagogues or military rule. The difficulty of controlling officers was such that Athenian born philosophers came to be somewhat cynical about the prospects for survival of Democracy. But the lesson of history, including recent history, is that without formal vetting and accounting, monarchy, dictatorship, oligarchy and plutocracy all degenerate into tyranny, kakacracy (rule by the worst) and kleptocracy (rule by thieves); and resulting violence, inequity, & misery. There really is no good alternative to creating a system of scrutiny that has integrity.
Vital to our Survival as a Nation and a World are:
Tomorrow is the midterm election. Both Maryland and National Republicans are transparently lying with claims that they'll be "bi-partisan" and moderate. Kathy Afzali is running ads attacking David Trone as an insider, bashing County Executive Gardner for the over-growth in the county and pretending that she's not an insider. The whole party is running a campaign of blatant lying. Trump and his Trumpers country-wide are suddenly for the ACA they spent the past 8 years trying to end and claiming they are for protecting people against Insurance Companies messing people up over pre-existing conditions, blatant lies. I'm writing on this on the website "The Brunswick Democrat" but I'm worried. This sort of lying works. It is known as the Big Lie. Trump practices it. He learned it from a long series of dictators and demagogues.
Will they succeed?
Please Vote
One reason I started latching onto José Antonio Primo De Rivera and Federico Garcia Lorca, is that after fascism fails in a country, no one usually will admit they ever were fascist. That is not so much the case with José Antonio Primo De Rivera. To Spanish speaking Fascists, Primo de Rivera is still a hero. Why? Because he too died at the outset of the Spanish Civil war. General Francisco Franco made Primo De Rivera a hero, and thus he became enshrined in Catholic, Falange, Fascism ever more, as a hero. He was no hero. Spanish Fascism didn't originate with Primo De Rivera it originated as much with his father and King Alfonso.
There are three main lessons to be learned from Rivera, his life, and his death:
I started reading a biography of Federico Garcia Lorca as a diversion from what is going on with Trump and his Trumpers. With Horror I soon realized that what was going on in Spain was so similar to the present that reading that book was no longer a pleasure but something I had to dive into. The reason? The Right Wing in the United States is looking more and more like the 1930s Falange down to the details. The result was that I had to study the Falange down to its details, before I could digest what happened to Garcia Lorca. They murdered him. For more on this:
Falange was fascism in a pure form. In the end, whether it is falangism and its offshoots, Nazism, Stalinism, Pol Potism, Maoism, or whatever, these ideologies are authoritarian, kleptocratic, kakacratic and violent. They were and are driven by a cruel mood of the citizenry and their leadership and a viciousness that is not even masked by the pretend glories and righteousness of the totalitarian movements that conduct the viciousness. The Falange went to war with liberals, progressives and people of good will in Spain. They went to war with principles of ecumenicism, equality, liberty, fraternity, good will, multiculturalism. They saw different dialects as an enemy of the State. They saw religious liberty as heresy. And they saw human freedom as perversity. Ironically that dogmatic authoritarianism led the Fascists to go on a vicious and blood thirsty rampage.
People of fundamental good will, like Federico Garcia Lorca, never had a chance of surviving the raw power of such hate. Even so killing Lorca made him a hero and a martyr to a cause and his name still stands for something opposite of the fascism of the Falangists and of Franco. Franco is now a name remembered by most people with Shame. Lorca is now celebrated by much of the Spanish Speaking World. He is still a difficult subject for people with rigid beliefs. He was to the left, and gay. For more:
This continues: The Life of Garcia Lorca and Fascist Spain
The Word Falange comes from the Spanish for "Phalanx". Similar fascist movements in other countries have a similar meaning. I have a series of posts on Falangism:
I was going to update this later within the post. But I found myself exploring a maze of related subjects and things happening in the United States kept taking me down new rabbit holes. So I've got a number of separate and related posts now, instead.
