A reader writes:

You often mention the Spanish Civil War when contemplating America’s future. There was a story in The New York Times today that proves the ghosts of that terrible moment in Spanish history and Francisco Franco looms large in modern Spain. The entire story’s well-worth the read for numerous reasons, but I wanted to highlight the following passage:

The growing influence of the far right within the military has also become an issue in other countries, notably Germany, and coincides with a push by governments to restrict individual rights, like freedom of movement, because of the pandemic.

“Spain has its own singularity within what I see as a worrying Western trend of many people increasingly accepting the ideas and the need for authoritarianism,” said Josep Ramoneda, a philosopher and columnist. “Unsurprisingly, the military is particularly fertile ground for authoritarianism.”

José Ignacio Domínguez, a former air force officer who refused to sign the letter that his cohorts had prepared for King Felipe, said that it was an attempt “to get our king to intervene and help overthrow the government.”

Even if the letter was signed by retirees, he said the political leanings of the current armed forces were increasingly those of Spain’s far-right party, Vox. Last year Vox became the third-largest party in Parliament, winning 15 percent of the vote and performing above its national average in provinces with large military bases.

The reader continues:

The part of the story that they always leave out (probably because they’d self-implicate themselves) is that the escalating right-wing extremism we’ve seen in Europe and now seeing awaken in America is a direct result of both the failures of liberal governance and the increasing illiberalism of the dominant left. I say this as someone who believes the right-wing has always possessed a very itchy authoritarian trigger finger, but there’s just no way to explain this phenomenon without acknowledging that the left’s contempt towards anyone that doesn’t share their “be better” agenda and their own slide towards authoritarianism created a very similar response on the right. Extremism doesn’t prevail in stable societies where all people are truly a part of the discussion. Extremism also doesn’t prevail in a society where people genuinely don’t feel under siege. If leftists want to be known as “liberals,” they need to understand that liberalism isn’t a destination, it’s a journey – a means of coexistence. That’s its appeal, because in an illiberal society, the minority doesn’t get much of a vote.

Over the weekend, I met up with a good friend. His ex-girlfriend (whom he’s still friends with) talked about how she moved to a city in southern VA and how, thankfully, this city was very “blue,” but the surrounding areas were “red” and people were very open about supporting Trump, displaying his campaign signs, etc. She talked about how this city containing “normal people like us” was able to exist amid all this “red.” She later talked about how wonderful it was that the cost of living was so low, how beautiful the houses were, etc. Sounds like she really likes living there.

So, what happened there? First, she assumed my politics, thinking that as a non-White person living in Southern California, I must be a deep-blue left-wing Democrat that would see things exactly the way she did. Second, she expressed thinly-veiled contempt for people not like her, implicitly labeling them “abnormal,” while also talking about how wonderful it is to live in places they’ve built, places they keep running and maintaining, and benefiting from.

This brings us back to Spain. What happened to Spain in the 1930s was horrible. I’m no expert on Spanish history, but I’m watching that documentary you’ve cited many times on your blog and I’m struck by how one of the world’s greatest empires could’ve descended into such cruelty and depravity. How people could’ve come to hate their fellow countrymen, let alone anyone, to the point that killing your political enemies became a spectator sport people watched with glee.

But is any of it a surprise? When the other side really does hate you too, hold you, your culture, your family, community, all of it in contempt, how do you respond with love and tolerance? You can’t. What’s happening with the Spanish military is concerning, but when people, like my friend’s ex, just take and take and take and won’t even dignify the other side of the divide as people, berate their beliefs and culture, and set about endlessly transforming everything for the sake of making it “better,” sometimes, I have to think, “Thank God there are people willing to stand up to this madness.”

Of course, in America, that’s not the military. As you wrote last week, the military, too, has become firmly under the control of the left, that there’s virtually no risk of them becoming like the Spanish military. That also means we can’t expect them to defend our liberties or the republic, because whatever loyalty they possess, at this point, is to themselves. I don’t want what’s happening in Spain to happen here, but, at the same time, I wonder – who protects us? Who stands up for us?

Anyway, this story about the Spanish military proves that Western civilization, liberalism, democracy, all of it, has feet of clay and that clay isn’t as strong as we think.

Thanks to the reader for bringing this story to may attention. The story has to do with a declaration (read it here in Spanish) by 271 retired military officers protesting what they consider to be Spain’s drift into disunity and left-wing authoritarianism under the socialist-communist coalition government. It’s irritating, the story, because once again, you cannot trust the US media to explain clearly to American readers what is happening in terms of right-wing politics in Europe. The Vox Party is not “extreme right”. It’s a nationalist and populist party. The leftist Madrid daily El Pais wrote in 2018 about its platform here.

Here is a more recent CNBC story about Vox’s platform. Vox’s main ideas are national unity (meaning, it’s against separatism) and stopping immigration. Better yet, read Kurt Hofer’s TAC piece from a couple of weeks ago about Vox and its leader, Santiago Abascal. Vox is also socially conservative. In January of this year, I wrote about how Vox was fighting the left-wing government over the right of parents to opt their kids out of progressive catechesis in gender theory and LGBT rights. I quoted this from a Spanish newspaper story about it:

In an interview with the Spanish newspaper El Correo, published on Sunday, Celaá [the left-wing Education Minister] said that a “homophobic family […] does not have the right to make their children homophobic as well.” “Parental authority cannot be confused with property,” she added.

Celaá’s claim that children are not the property of their parents was attacked by the leader of the [conservative, allied with Vox] PP, Pablo Casado, who linked the argument with communism.

“Are they telling me that we have families like in Cuba, that children belong to the revolution?” he said on Sunday. “Are we going to arrive at the point where children inform on their parents if they are not good revolutionaries?

Seriously, read more about how extreme the Spanish left is in forcing gender ideology and the sexualization of little children on Spaniards. You absolutely cannot trust the American media to give you a clear picture of what is happening in Europe regarding left-right politics. 

If you could, you would understand that the reaction of the Spanish military officers does not come from nowhere. Last year, the leftist government decided to dig up the remains of Gen. Francisco Franco, the military dictator of Spain from 1939 until his death in 1975, and move them from a national monument to the dead of the Spanish Civil War into a private tomb. According to an opinion poll reported by the BBC, only 43 percent of Spaniards supported this move, with the rest either against it or undecided. You don’t have to be any kind of  supporter of Franco to grasp how divisive and provocative this move was.

Earlier this month, the leftist government expropriated the Franco family’s winter home, which had been bought for him in 1938 by supporters. Again, you don’t have to be a Francoist to see that the socialists are punishing the Spanish right. Previous socialist governments in Spain have not done this. This one is.

Where do they think this is going to end up? Though Franco’s legacy did not long survive Franco, the Spanish Civil War is still within living memory for the oldest Spaniards. Every family has someone who fought for one side or the other. Must it be revived now? What good can possibly come from this? If you are a Spaniard of either left or right, help me understand it.

Thinking of this Spanish showdown helps me to better understand the genius of the victors of the US Civil War, in letting the defeated Southerners have some dignity. I understand the theory behind the contemporary left’s desire to erase all statues of Confederate generals, and names of public buildings that honor Confederate figures. But did they actually believe that prior to these past couple of years, Americans were under the impression that the Confederacy deserved to win the war? I am a Southerner whose ancestors fought for the Confederacy, and I am grateful that the South lost; its cause — the preservation of slavery — was wicked. But I am also grateful that they were all welcomed back into the United States when the war was over. In the 20th century, Southerners became fierce fighters on behalf of the United States, and even today, 44 percent of all military recruits (age 18-24) come from the South, though only 36 percent of the US population in that age group is Southern. Now that the left-wing mobs have gone after statues of the Founding Fathers, we see that the anti-Confederate iconoclasm was not really about the Confederacy, but about defacing and erasing this country’s history when it conflicts with the current left-wing identity politics narrative.

On Christmas Eve, I did as I have done every Christmas since returning to Louisiana, and placed a lit candle at the grave of my ancestor — Columbus Simmons, my great-great-grandfather — who fought for the Confederates. Earlier this year, my daughter found in a box of documents a thin, cloth-bound book that some relative of mine had printed privately a long time ago. It was old, but not worn; it had clearly been put away unread. It was a memoir by the older brother of Columbus, who had dictated it, or hand-written it, before his death. That manuscript was passed down through that line of the family until someone in the 20th century had it typeset and bound. I had no idea it existed until my daughter discovered it.

I read it in a single sitting — it’s not long — and was struck by its portrait of life as a small farmer in the early 19th century. As I recall, there wasn’t a lot about Columbus, except to note that he was off at the war. What struck me most of all about text was the complete absence of politics from the narrative. It could be that the author, whose name escapes me, was not engaged by the great controversies that had plunged the nation into civil war. But I think it more likely that this was just how life was for small white farmers back then. They held no slaves, but if the Simmons brother opposed slavery, he didn’t say so in this book. I suppose he didn’t; he was a simple country farmer, and probably accepted it as the way of the world. Reading this little book brought home to me in a personal way why so many of the Confederate soldiers fought for the South: because they were defending their homes, and those to whom they were loyal. It wasn’t ideological for them. It struck me as more a matter of, the Yankees are here, where they don’t belong, and we have to fight them. 

I’m going to look for that little book tomorrow and re-read it, and blog about it. I was thinking about it the other afternoon, standing at Columbus’s grave, and thinking about how as a young man, he was drawn into fighting this war. What would any of those country boys, North and South alike, have done? Had Columbus Simmons been born in Ohio, or had the unknown Yankee soldier who shot and wounded him in the Battle of Port Hudson been born in Alabama, things would have been reversed. These poor men did what they were told, and did what their beliefs in loyalty told them to do. America is better off for Columbus’s side having lost, but that does not erase the tragic toll of human suffering in that war, including the tragedies of poor white boys who fought and died so that rich white men could own black slaves. Standing there at my ancestor’s grave, praying for his soul, I thought that one day one of my sons, or grandsons, could be compelled to bear arms for their homeland in an unjust cause. I would hope and expect that their descendants would not execrate them.

If the United States of America ever expects me to execrate my fathers, then to hell with the United States of America. This stuff is primal. I can imagine Spaniards whose fathers and grandfathers fought for the Nationalist side in that country’s civil war are feeling the same way when they see the way things are going there — but of course their feeling is far more intense, because this isn’t about a war concluded 150 years ago, but about one in which the fighting stopped 80 years ago, but which really did not end until Franco’s death 45 years ago.

Where does it stop? I remind you what the reader — who is non-white — who sent me the story wrote in his letter:

When the other side really does hate you too, hold you, your culture, your family, community, all of it in contempt, how do you respond with love and tolerance? You can’t. What’s happening with the Spanish military is concerning, but when people, like my friend’s ex, just take and take and take and won’t even dignify the other side of the divide as people, berate their beliefs and culture, and set about endlessly transforming everything for the sake of making it “better,” sometimes, I have to think, “Thank God there are people willing to stand up to this madness.”

Yes. Yes!

UPDATE: To clarify, I’m not saying that we should repay hatred with hatred. I’m saying that most people, in most times, will do that — especially if there is no Christianity within the culture to train them otherwise. MLK did this, but he and his men had extraordinary self-discipline. I don’t think most of us will be MLK. I hope I’m wrong.