Spain still scrabbling around for meaning and values in dust of Civil War secularism

The template for the conduct and outcome of all public controversy, both in Spain and elsewhere, should be the YouTube footage of the “notorious” kiss by the director of Spanish football Luis Rubiales of the team skipper Jenni Hermaso. In the original unedited footage, Rubiales and Hermaso can be seen enthusiastically hugging one another, both with their arms around the other’s back, before Rubiales plants a kiss on her lips, and she then pats his ribs with apparent approval. The edited footage that dominates the modern YouTube recordings of the encounter merely shows the planting of the kiss that ended Rubiales’s career and landed him a $10,000 fine as a sexual offender: a suitable currency that marks the triumph of the US culture of victimhood in the very country that has traditionally revelled in its opposite value, victoriousness, personified in the matador. 

Orwell was spot-on with his observation, “He who controls the past commands the future. He who commands the future conquers the past.” In plain sight and in full vision, a clumsy moment of impetuous idiocy has been turned into an act of premeditated sexual predation, and a career ruined. We all know that had Hermaso planted such a kiss on Rubiales’s lips, there would have been no outcry, no lynch-mob and no career-ruination. The “facts” of the kiss have been edited to comply with the myth; and so it goes. Until indigenous forces in Europe generate enough political energy to repel the invasion of what before the martyrdom of Blessed St George Floyd (of Blessed Memory) was called political correctness, and is now called “wokeness”, we can expect to see more of this life-destroying deculturization of Europe’s values.

So for moment, we must always presume the worst outcome for any public event in Europe that addresses the issues of narrative and mythology, which means that the Left will always win. This has been so since the 1930s, when the Left began the infiltration of universities across the Western world, creating myths that dominate almost all popular discourses to this day. Perhaps no subject has been so irradiated with toxins of political fiction as the Spanish Civil War. Recent events suggest that the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) under Pedro Sánchez wants to reshape the meaning and lessons of this terrible war, using the Orwellianly-named Democratic Memory Law in 2020. This follows years of work to create an official version of the Civil War, which will involve the elimination of any statue, street, or other symbolic reminder of “Francoism”, including the removal of public crosses, considered ‘fascist’ by the Left. 

This now apparently includes Valle de Cuelgamuros (the Valley of the Fallen) and its huge basilica that was built in 1959 in honour of the 33,000 victims buried there. For many Spanish Christians, including Cardinal Antonio Cañizares and Bishop Juan Antonio Reig Pla, the Valley of the Fallen represents a common sanctuary for reconciliation and prayer. Thus the Valley of the Fallen is now at the centre of an intense political and cultural dispute, which is barely less divisive than the World Cup kiss. 

The Democratic Memory Law has meanwhile invoked an exotic form of verbal witchcraft that means that public spaces that are in any way linked to the Francoist regime can be renamed. Symbols that are considered to be sympathetic to Franco’s dictatorship have been removed. The plan to transform the Valley of the Fallen into an exclusively secular space would effectively involve the expulsion of the Benedictines, who are naturally opposed to all these measures and taking legal action accordingly. Félix Bolaños, Minister of the Presidency, has declared that the government seeks to “desacralize” the temple, removing Catholic worship and converting the site into a museum solely dedicated to “historical memory”— an Orwellian euphemism for imposing an official version of history on Spain’s landscape. 

Europe saw such a travesty after the French Revolution, and equally in the name of a greater secular good, as holy places were levelled, abbeys ground into dust, monasteries destroyed and religious communities dispersed. Symbolically, anyway, this is what Spain’s doctrinaire secularists now wish to be done to the public memory of their Civil War, as if secularism was an innocent party during that catastrophe, from which it is possible to weave a virtuous narrative.

No such narrative is possible. When one force backed by Stalin and the Comintern and its opposing force is backed by the Third Reich and Mussolini, then virtue, decency, goodness and most of all, Christianity, are removed from the board. In the shredded, bloodied, dismembered aftermath, it remains the Christian duty to remember the horrors upon which any subsequent civilisation was then built. Prime Minister Sánchez is still determined to turn the Valley into a secular museum promoting his ‘official version’ of the war. To leftists, “secular” is always morally superior to anything smacking of God (unless the latter is Islamic, in which case it is nearly as good as “socialism”).

The ahistorical bizarreness of this is truly astounding. The Spanish Civil War was an explicit celebration of martial secularism, as totalitarian Marxism, a largely dechristianised fascism and a psychopathic national socialism unleashed a satanic id on an entire society. Not merely were two visions of Spain at war, so too were two different forms of communism, as the Comintern and its tool the International Brigade, simultaneously unleashed a murderous purge of Spanish Trotskyites. That this brigade is still celebrated attests to the power of leftist mythology. For example, the personally vile and unapologetic Irish veteran of the Spanish Civil War Mick O’Riordain and other International Brigade volunteers (including British KGB agent Jack Jones) twenty years ago were honoured with a civic reception by the Irish government. Irish veterans who had served with Franco’s forces were of course not so honoured. Ecumenism can invariably detect the virtues of leftists – usually in the brainless phrase “their hearts were in the right place” – but never of their opponents.

That the Falange, a debased and corrupted form of politicised Catholicism, won the war merely tells us that all human endeavours can be infiltrated and conquered by evil. The underlying and enduring truth remains: it is that Europe was defined and created by Christian forces. It is that not merely made modern tolerant, law-abiding, knowledge-based societies possible, but the civilisation they shaped could in various different forms be exported around the world. All viable states everywhere model themselves on European precedents: the rest – North Korea, Myanmar, Haiti, half of Africa, and possibly even China – are heading for demographic calamity and civilisational ruin. 

Since the end of the Second World War, much of Europe has flirted with that calamity. Germany, France, Denmark, Sweden and the UK have implicitly rejected the concept of identity as “racist”, allowed vast numbers of immigrants with different values and visions to enter their societies. Denmark has woken up, possibly in time, but the rest, probably not, while poor old Spain still hungers after some glorious secular future with which to camouflage its bloody past. In fact, the civil war was secularism at its purest: carnal, brutal and rapine. What else was the systematic mass-violation of nuns by communists? Was the repeated symbolic rape of the Virgin Mary not an implicit rejection of the values of Gethsemane and an endorsement of Gehenna? This was the hill where Christ was crucified – also known as Golgotha, the place of skulls – where in a previous era living children had been sacrificed. 

It is all there in the New Testament, the foundational document of Western European civilisation. To be sure, we have the logicians of Ancient Greece to help us understand argument and reason – but the moral font of our societies was written by Jews. There is no other source for Europe’s various civilisations – from Russia’s eastern marches to their westernmost reaches on the Americas’ pacific shores. Yet the Christianity that made Europe is what the EU denied when creating its constitution, just as St Peter thrice denied Christ, as if there were some other mysterious source for what we believe and who we are. Why else would poor Spain scrabble around in the desolate dust of an unprincipled post-Christian secularism, desperately searching for meaning and values? What can anyone possibly find there but a barbaric heathenism, the repeated murder of Spain’s many Lorcas, the slaughter of Trotskyites, the rape of nuns, the smoking cinders of their convents and the smouldering and libidinal triumphs of a godless Gehenna? 

Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, author and broadcaster. He has reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia.