¡A mí la Legión!

The Spanish Civil War is more surrounded by a fog of myth and misconception than any other single event in history. For the political left it has the aura of a crusade, to me a rather delicious irony.

Here, at last, so the narrative went, the working class were making a stand against the onward march of Anti-Christ. Many of the benighted individuals who volunteered to fight in the communist International Brigades went without the first clue of the realities on the ground, without the first clue about Spain or Spanish history. They went at the behest of an even greater tyranny, a tyranny more ruthless towards its ‘friends’ than its enemies, as many were to discover during the Barcelona May Days of 1937, so memorably described by George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia.

There were other volunteers, people who are not part of the martyrology because they chose the ‘wrong’ side; they chose to fight for Franco. I have in mind one particular individual, an Englishman by the name of Peter Kemp.

There is something wonderfully romantic about Kemp, something freebooting and uniquely English. He falls so easily into a buccaneering tradition, along with the likes of Sir Francis Drake and Lawrence of Arabia. Soldier, writer, adventurer, Kemp, was born in August 1915 in Bombay, where his father was a judge. Educated at Wellington School and Trinity College, Cambridge, he started to read for the Bar when the Spanish Civil War began in 1936.

Already alarmed by the menace of communism, Kemp, a High Anglican and self-styled Tory Radical, set off on the right direction, while Orwell, Auden, Spender, Hemingway and so many others set off on the left! In Spain he joined the Carlists, a royalist and legitimist faction within the Nationalist army, about as far removed from contemporary notions of fascism as is possible to imagine. The red-beret of the Requetés, the Carlist militia, a movement that harmonises so well with my own romantic and royalist vision, was just as important in the Nationalist camp as the blue shirt of the Falange.

Later he transferred to the Spanish Foreign Legion, where he rose to command a platoon, a unique distinction for a foreigner. He saw action on the Madrid front, in the Bilbao sector and in the great offensive of 1938 which drove the Republicans out of the Aragon area. Wounded several times, he stayed on duty until a mortar bomb broke his jaw that same year. Then Franco personally approved a long convalescent leave back in England. By the time he recovered the war was over.

His subsequent career was just as varied and distinctive. No fascist sympathiser, in the Second World War he served with distinction in the newly-formed Special Operations Executive, taking part in cross-Channel commando raids. In the Balkans he saw operations in Albania and carried out SOE missions in southern Poland. With the war in Europe coming to an end, he transferred to the Far East, helping to supply arms to French troops in Indochina, where they were fighting the Japanese, on the one hand, and the communist Viet-Minh, on the other.

Later still he was in Hungary during the anti-communist uprising of 1956, when he helped some students to escape into Austria from the advancing Russian forces.

In 1957 Kemp published Mine Were of Trouble, an autobiography covering his time in Spain. In the main this is an account of his military adventures, with little in the way of political apologetics. To the end of his life, though, he maintained that his cause was the just one, that communism was a far greater danger to Spanish civilization than the Nationalist right, far more conservative than fascist.

He also makes the unanswerable point that while Franco accepted Italian and German aid he never allowed them to direct his war in the way that the Republicans allowed the Russians to direct theirs, even importing the NKVD, the murderous Soviet security service, which used the opportunity to extend the Great Purge to Spain.

Kemp died in October 1993, having lived long enough to see the end of communism in Europe, the end of a struggle in which he, at the outset, had played a small but noble part. ¡A mí la Legión!

Speaking for Franco

I noticed from a report in the Times that there are plans to move the body of Francisco Franco, the one-time dictator of Spain, from its present position in the basilica in the El Valle de los Caidos - Valley of the Fallen – near Madrid. The former ruler is an embarrassment to the brave new Spain that has a tired old socialist government headed by Jose Zapatero in it.

A commission has been set up to decide if he should be exhumed prior to re-interment in the capital’s El Pardo cemetery. It will submit its report after the general election, scheduled for 20 November, which just so happens to be the anniversary of Franco’s death in 1975. With the right-wing Popular Party expected to win, the suspicion is that the possibility of a corpse eviction has been leaked; that – in combination with the electoral date itself – there is a subliminal message here: a vote for the right is a vote for Franco. Even those who have campaigned for justice for the victims of Franco accuse the government of using the mausoleum for electoral ends.

Meanwhile the decrepit relics of the International Brigades are set to gather in Madrid to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the formation of armed units that would have handed Spain to Stalin. One of these dinosaurs is quoted in the Times, saying that he fought because “he believed in democracy” and that “these things are still important to me and the Spanish today. There are still fascists who are against democracy.”

Yes, well, maybe there are, just as maybe there are some still around who remember the Barcelona May Days of 1937, when the communists and the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, demonstrated their enthusiasm for ‘democracy’, events that George Orwell wrote about in Homage to Catalonia.

In the light of hypocrisy and body snatching I have decided to reinter one of my corpses, a piece I wrote on the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Caudillo’s death. Here it is, slightly updated. Hold on to your hats!

Marcus Ana Speaks!


Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to praise Caesar, not to bury him. The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones. So it was with Caesar…so it has been with Francisco Franco, one time regent of Spain, one time Caudillo de España, por la gracia de Dios. This year marks the thirty-sixth anniversary of his death, and while the left-wing junta that governs Spain today has done its best to wipe out his memory, removing the last statue from Madrid in 2005, its time to say a word or two his favour.

General Franco happens to be one of my political heroes. There, I’ve said it: I’m a fascist. No, I’m not, but, then, neither was Franco. He was conservative, deeply so, part of a Spanish tradition of conservatism going right back to the early nineteenth century. It was his task, as he understood it, to preserve Spain, to preserve Spanish traditions, to preserve Christian civilization, to defend it against the communist subversion of the Popular Front.

I’ve said this before but it bears repeating: the Spanish Civil War is one of the least understood conflicts in modern European history, a source of left-wing mythology, evidenced by Ken Loach’s tedious movie (did he ever make a movie that wasn't tedious?) Land and Freedom. The war was not a simple struggle between left and right, between workers and ‘fascists’. It was a complex event best understood in the context of Spanish history as a whole rather than set against contemporary events in the rest of Europe. The red-beret of the Requetés, the Carlist militia, a movement that harmonises so well with my own romantic and royalist vision, was just as important in the Nationalist camp as the blue shirt of the Falange.

In the end the Falange, the ‘fascists’, if you prefer, though there were major differences between the Spanish and the German and Italian versions, were no more than an ideological and ceremonial gloss on Franco’s conservative dictatorship.

Do I then defend dictatorship? No, I do not but I think Franco was a historical necessity. If he had not begun the military rebellion in 1936, or if the Nationalists had lost the Civil War, the course of the Second World War might have been very different, no, let me be more precise: it would have been very different.

With the likes of that Stalinist apparatchik Dolores Ibárruri, the appalling La Pasionaria, in control of Spanish affairs Hitler would have had all the excuse he needed to invade after the occupation of France in 1940. With Spain gone Gibraltar would have gone. With Gibraltar gone the Mediterranean would have been an Axis lake. In that event the war would have taken a very different course.

Spanish ‘democracy’ under the murderous Popular Front was an illusion. Even without the intervention of the Nationalists the country was torn between gangs of anarchist thugs - people who specialised in the mass murder of priests and nuns - on the one hand, and the communists on the other, all presided over by a weak liberal centre. The government continued to depend on Stalin for political and military support. Even Julian Besterio, a moderate socialist politician, admitted at the time that if the Civil War had been won by the Republic the communists would have taken full control, which would have been a disaster “for every other element of our democracy.”

So, yes, Franco saved Spain. In his long rule after the conclusion of the war in 1939 he also brought peace and stability, the basis for the Spanish Miracle, the sustained period of economic prosperity from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. At the time of Franco’s death in November 1975 the rate of Spanish economic growth was second only to that of Japan.

I admire Franco as much as I admire Chile’s Augusto Pinochet; I admire him for all the reasons I have given. The fact that his memory was condemned by the European Parliament, the fact that the Polish MEP who spoke in his favour was shouted down as a “Nazi” – by a German socialist, ironically - simply adds to the mix. If the European Parliament condemned the Devil I would look for arguments in his favour.

Franco’s time is past but his country has every reason to be grateful for him and what he achieved. It’s thanks to him that Spain was not wrecked by the communists in the same way that they wrecked Russia and the lands of Eastern Europe.

The Dream and Lie of Picasso

There is one certain truth about Pablo Picasso: he was first, second and last an egoist. But he was a great man of principle, the objection comes, a communist, a lover of freedom, a hater of fascism. After all, this was a man who depicted the horrors of Nationalist Spain in such works as The Dream and Lie of Franco. Alas, it has now come to light that he was actively involved in negotiations with representatives of that same regime in the 1950s with a view to having a retrospective exhibition of his work mounted in Madrid!

If such an exhibition had been held it would have been a major coup for the Falangists, destroying Picasso’s sainted reputation among the left. The Spanish foreign ministry agreed that the talks should go ahead, but on the grounds of absolute secrecy. When details were leaked to the press the whole project was simply abandoned, while official denials were released. But they were sufficiently far advanced for members of Picasso’s circle to write pleading that he should resist the temptation, according to a note left by Jean Cocteau in his diary.

These details are set to be released by John Richardson and Gijs van Hensbergen, working on the fourth volume of Picasso’s biography. Seemingly his views on politics, like so many other things, were a lot more subtle that usually assumed. He apparently told Cocteau of the communists that “I have joined a family, and like all families, it’s full of shit.”

The fact is that his love of Spain, his desire for an exhibition there, was greater than his love of the Communist Party. But greatest of all was his love for himself. Less full of shit, I feel sure, than communism.

The Absent One

In his essay Inside the Whale George Orwell quotes some lines from Spain 1937, a poem by W. H. Auden. They go like this:

To-morrow for the young, the poets exploding like bombs,
The walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion;
To-morrow the bicycle races
Through the suburbs on summer evenings. But to-day the struggle.

To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death,
The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;
To-day the expending of powers
On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.

We studied this poem at school. I read it before I read Orwell and was struck by exactly the same words, exactly the same sentiments: that there were people like Auden who could talk of the ‘necessary murder’ without having the first idea what this entails, no matter how poetic the language. If the 1930s was a ‘low dishonest decade’, as Auden later suggested in his poem September 1, 1939, he and his kind surly made a major contribution to the lowness and the dishonesty. They looked for the best, blind to the worst.

Their struggle, Auden’s struggle, Spender’s struggle and even Orwell’s struggle would not have been my struggle. I can’t help but sympathise with Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the Spanish Falange and himself a poet, who was the victim of a ‘necessary murder’ in November 1936, when he was shot by a Republican firing squad in Alicante. Why? Is it because I’m a fascist; is it because I sympathise with fascism? On both counts the answer is no. He appeals, rather, to my sense of romance, to my idealism, to my impractical love of all sorts of lost causes, from seventeenth century English Cavaliers to nineteenth century southern Confederates.

Ah, but his side won, the ‘fascists’ won, I can hear the reply. Whoever won it was not the cause of Primo de Rivera, who sought a solution to the Spanish problem that was neither Marxist nor reactionary. If his death was a ‘necessary murder’ it was a necessary murder as much for Francisco Franco as it was for the communist Republicans.

Though honoured as El Ausente (the Absent One) by the Franco regime, he was better as a dead saint than a living politician. The simple fact is that Jose Antonio was a dangerous opponent, a thinker and a radical, in every way different from Franco, a man who had little in the way of intellectual depth and no ideology beyond power. The death of a man he had dismissed as a ‘foppish playboy’ was highly convenient.

An ineffectual and meaningless symbol under the old dictatorship, he is fast being forgotten even as a memory in modern Spain, in many ways rather a pity.

Homage to Truth

Homage to Catalonia is George Orwell's account of his experiences as a volunteer on the republican side during the Spanish Civil War. But it's not just another memoir. No, it's far more. For it marks a decisive stage in his progress as a writer and a thinker. Indeed, if one wanted to understand the roots behind the major themes in both Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four this book is essential reading.

Orwell, who had developed a general but rather unfocused sympathy for socialism, came to Spain to fight against 'fascism' without any particular idea of what he was fighting for. Like the majority of the foreign volunteers he was likely to have ended up serving with the International Brigades, controlled by the communists and ultimately directed by the Comintern in Moscow. But he did not. Quite by chance he enrolled in the militia of the Partido Obrero Unificación Marxista or POUM, a local Marxist and anti-Stalinist movement set up by one Andrés Nin, a former associate of Leon Trotsky. Yes, it was by chance, but politically and intellectually it was a decisive step in turning Eric Blair, the author's real name, into the mature George Orwell.

The Spanish Civil War was a struggle between the left and the right, between progress and reaction, between enlightenment and oppression. Well, no, it was far more complex than that. In 1937 on the republican side the struggle had become a war within a war, as Stalin decided to suppress all of the non-communist factions on the side of the government. This was the time of the Great Purge, of the Moscow Show Trails and the general attack on all 'Trotsky Fascists'. This was a time when every weapon was used in a campaign of disinformation, one based on the grossest abuse of language by the communist and socialist left, one based on the systematic rewriting of history. After all, he who controls the past controls the future.

Orwell, who had been serving on the Catalan front, returned to Barcelona in May of 1937. There he discovered that the free and comradely atmosphere that he had encountered when he first came to Spain had changed utterly. He was to be caught up in some extraordinary events now known as the Barcelona May Days, in which one left-wing faction fought against another left-wing faction. In the communist controlled press the POUM was denounced as 'fascist plotters'. With agents of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police at work, Nin was arrested along with many others, and subsequently murdered in custody. Orwell himself had to leave Spain in fear of his life.

Homage to Catalonia is a straightforward account of his experiences at the front and in Barcelona, packaged in some general political musings. The language, as one would expect from one of the great modern masters of English prose, is limpid. It's an honest book, too honest for some; Victor Gollancz, the left-wing publishing house for whom he had previously written, refused to accept his account of his Spanish experience even before a single word had been written. Why? Because he had served with the POUM, that's why. It should be remembered that Gollancz was not even controlled by the Communist Party. This attitude, this unwillingness to say anything critical of the official Soviet line, not stopping short of the Moscow Trials, was to be found right across much of the left-leaning and liberal opinion of the day. Of the British press Orwell was to write:

In Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship that is implied by an ordinary lie...I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various "party lines."

Orwell, as I have said, went to Spain with his politics largely unfocused. He came back a committed anti-Stalinist. He came back believing that there was a standard of objective truth that had to be defended, a standard of truth that should corrupted by the demands of propaganda or the exigencies of dictatorship. He came back believing that two plus two equals four; and if that is granted all else follows.

Remembering the Spanish Civil War

It’s seventy years now since the great tragedy that engulfed Spain between 1936 and 1939 ended. I do not believe that there has been any conflict in history more misred that the Spanish Civil War, one that continues to be misread, if we take Ken Loach's Land and Freedom as an example.

The fact is there was not one civil war but several, some with deep roots in Spanish history, most often concerned with the friction between central power and local autonomy. For the government in Madrid the Anarchists, their allies, were as big a threat as the Fascists, their enemies. It's likely, then, that the victorious Spain, though dominated by bourgeoise democrats, would have continued to rely on the military and political support of Stalin and the Communists. For such support the Communists would clearly demand some kind of return, and in stages are likely to have acquired a dominant position in government, perhaps even fulfilling the prediction of Julian Besterio, the moderate socialist politician, that "if the war is won, Spain will be Communist. For every other element of our democracy this would be calamitous."

Consider what was to happen a few years hence in Poland, for example, another Catholic and agrarian nation. The same pattern of alliance, co-option and control is likely to have emerged in Spain in 1939-40.

The Franco dictatorship was centralist in nature; there is no reason to suppose that the victorious republic would have been any different. The Communist controlled Popular Army would thus have suppressed any attempts at Anarchist resistance, just as it would have moved against the seperatist movements in Catalonia and the Basque country. Would there have been another Civil War? This is possible. There would certainly have been a lengthy period of political instability and counter-insurgency operations. This leads on to the next stage of my analysis: Spain's position in the coming international crisis.

Republican Spain, dominated by the Communists, would, of course, have followed the Russian lead after the Nazi-Soviet Pact was concluded in August 1939, which meant rejecting the coming Second World War as an 'imperialist conflict'. A Soviet satellite standing astride the western gate to the Meditteranean may very well have provoked a response by Britain and France, if not outright intervention then perhaps some military assistance to the remnants of the Nationalist army, which had taken refuge in Portugal in 1939, a situation that would have destabilised the country even further.

Hitler, after his victory over France in 1940, would therefore have a weak and divided Spain, controlled by the Communists, on his southern flank. The outbreak of war with the Soviet Union in 1941 is quite likely to have been followed at one and the same time by an invasion of Spain, or at least a dash for the vital base of Gibraltar; this was certainly within the capability of the German army left in France. We know that Hitler had such a plan even with Franco in control. With Spain governed by Dolores Ibárruri there is no reason to suppose that he would not have put these plans into effect. In the end Franco, if he serves no other historical purpose, may very well have saved Spain from Hitler.

The Basque Witch Trials

The trials of the Basque witches at Longrono, near Navarre, in northern Spain, which began in January 1609, was almost certainly the biggest single event of its kind in history. By the end some 7,000 cases had been examined by the Inquisition. The first phase ended in 1610, with a declaration of auto da fe against thirty-one of the accused, eleven of whom were burned to death. Thereafter proceedings were suspended until the inquisitors had a chance to gather further evidence, on what they believed to be a widespread witch cult in the Basque region. Alonso de Salazar Frias, the junior inquisitor and a lawyer by training, was delegated to examine the matter at length. Armed with an Edict of Grace, promising pardon to all those who voluntarily reported themselves and denounced their accomplices, he travelled across the countryside. As was usual in cases of this kind, denunciations flowed in. Frias finally returned to Longrono with 'confessions' from close on 2000 people, 1,384 of whom were children between the ages of seven and fourteen, implicating a further 5000named individuals. The evidence gathered covered 11,000 pages in all.

Contrary to the usual picture of the Inquisition, ready to believe all and every confession of wrong doing, Frias, the youngest judge in a panel of three, was highly sceptical about the whole thing, saying that he had found no substantive proof of witchcraft on his travels, in spite of the manifold confessions. More than that, he questioned the whole basis of the trials. Because of this disagreement on how to proceed, the matter had to be referred to the Inquisitor-General in Madrid. The senior judges, Alonso Becerra y Holquin and Juan de Valle Alvadro, even went so far as to accuse their colleague of being 'in league with the Devil.' Some of Frias' objections are truly remarkable, considering the atmosphere of the times, and are therefore worth quoting at length;

The real question is: are we to believe that witchcraft occured in a given situation simply because of what the witches claim? No: it is clear that the witches are not to be believed, and the judges should not pass sentence on anyone, unless the case can be proven with external and objective evidence sufficient to convince everyone who hears it. And who can accept the following: that a person can frequently fly through the air and travel a hundred leagues in an hour; that a woman can get through a space not big enough for a fly; that a person can make himself invisible; that he can be in a river or the open sea and not get wet; or that he can be in bed at the sabbath at the same time...and that a witch can turn herself into any shape she fancies, be it housefly or raven? Indeed, these claims go beyond all human reason and may even pass the limits permitted by the Devil.

Confession and acccusation on their own, Frias maintained, were not enough. It is a great pity that this simple guiding principle was not held in mind, all the way from Salem to Moscow.

The Inquisitor-General shared this view. For some time the central office of the Inquisition had been sceptical about claims of magic and witchcraft, and had only sanctioned the earlier burnings with considerably reluctance, and only because of the reported mood of panic from Longrono. As far back as 1538 the Council had warned judges not to believe all that the read in Malleus Maleficarum, the infamous witch-finding text. In August 1614 it ruled that all of the trials pending at Longrono should be dismissed. At the same time it issued new and more rigorous rules of evidence that brought witch-burning in Spain to an end, long before the Protestant north.

Ethnic Cleansing-the End of Moorish Spain

The fate of the Spanish Muslims in the late Medieval and early modern period uncovers what might be considered as the first serious act of 'ethnic cleansing' in all of European history. They were to be the victims of a state policy that had as many racist as religious overtones.

The surrender of Granada in 1492 was accompanied by a treaty, allowing the Spanish crown's new Muslim subjects a large measure of religious toleration. They were also allowed the continuing use of their own language, schools, laws and customs. But the interpretation of the royal edict was largely left to the local Christian authorities. Hernando de Talavera, the first archbishop of Granada after its fall, took a fairly tolerant view.

This changed when he was replaced by Cardinal Cisneros, who immediately organised a drive for mass conversions and burned all texts in Arabic. Outraged by this breach of faith, in 1499 the Mudejar rose in the First Rebellion of Alpujarras, which only had the effect of giving Ferdinand and Isabella the excuse to revoke the promise of toleration. That same year the Muslim leaders of Granada were ordered to hand over almost all of the remaining books in Arabic, most of which were burned. Beginning in Valencia in 1502 Muslims were offered the choice of baptism or exile. The majority decided to accept this, becoming 'New Christians', of very great interest to the newly-established Spanish Inquisition, authorised by Pope Sixtus IV in 1478.

It is important to understand that the Converts, though outwardly Christian, continued to adhere to their old beliefs in private, a conduct allowed for by some Islamic authorities when the faithful are under duress or threat of life, a practice known as taqiyyah or precaution. Responding to a plea from his co-religionists in Spain, in 1504 the Grand Mufti of Oran issued a decree saying that Muslims may drink wine, eat pork and other forbidden things, if they were under compulsion. There were good reasons for this; for abstinence from wine or pork could, and did, cause people to be denounced to the Inquisition. But no matter how closely they observed all of the correct forms, the 'Morisco' or Little Moors, a term of disparagement, were little better than second-class citizens, tainted, it might be said, by blood rather than by actions.

Despite all of these pressures some people continued to observe Moorish forms, and practice as Muslims, well into the sixteenth century. In 1567 Philip II finally made the use of Arabic illegal, forbidding the Islamic religion, dress and customs, a step which led to the Second Rebellion of Alpujarras. This was suppressed with considerable brutality. In one incident troops commanded by Don John of Austria destroyed the town of Galera east of Granada, after slaughtering the entire population. The Moriscos of Granada were rounded up and dispersed across Spain. Edicts of expulsion were finally issued by Philip III in 1609, against people who were now perceived to be a threat to the 'purity' of the Spanish race.

Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera

For me it’s an oversimplification to call Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera a Fascist; but there again it is probably an oversimplification to call anyone a Fascist who was not a member of the Italian National Fascist Party or the British Union of Fascists. The Nazis, for example, almost never referred to themselves as such, and Jose Antonio specifically rejected the label in 1934 as an appropriate descriptive term for his Falange.

The problem is, you see, that the very term Fascism has really no intrinsic meaning, and the various radical and right-wing parties to whom it has been applied have differed from one another in almost every fundamental. There was certainly the common emphasis on the nation; but this kind of ideology was not restricted to parties of the radical right. One might conceivably detect some overlap between the early Fasci italiani di combattimento and the Falange, with the stress on direct action and on forms of National syndicalism; but early Fascism was anti-clerical, whereas the Falange took a stand on Catholicism and other traditional Spanish values.

Mussolini's movement developed in a more reactionary direction by allying itself with the big landlords in northern Italy, whereas Jose Antonio's Falange was just as critical of landlordism as it was of Communism. His political programme, moreover, looked in essence to the recreation of the state headed by Miguel Primo de Rivera, his father, which could not be described in any meaningful sense as Fascist. Jose Antonio was radical; he was conservative; he was Catholic; he was nationalist. Above all, he was Spanish

Was Franco a Fascist?

No, I do not believe he was. He was a Caudillo , a phenomenon of the Spanish-speaking world, to be found time and again across the history of the nineteenth century, in Europe and America. It's just that his particular Pronuncieamento came at a time when all such actions had to be viewed in twentieth century terms, giving the whole thing, insofar as it was a challenge to a left-wing government, Fascist ideological overtones. It might helps one to understand the difference between Franco's 'Fascism' if a comparison is made with that of Mussolini and Hitler, particularly in the way in which each attained power.

In Italy the Fascist state was built on an alliance between radicals and reactionaries, with a slight advantage, to begin with, to the former. But in 1943 the reactionaries, the cliques around the King, gathered sufficient strength to overthrow Mussolini. In Germany Hitler attained power on the basis of a similar alliance, though the conservative elements were far weaker than the radical. In 1944 the failure of a conservative reaction saw the complete triumph of the most radical forms of Fascism. In Spain the Falange radicals were always weaker than the conservative forces behind Franco. In the end, though the only official party allowed after the Civil War, it was entirely subordinated to a conservative dictatorship, providing little more than an increasingly irrelevant ideological gloss.