Guess Which Brutal Authoritarian Dictator The Right Has A Crush On Now?
Good thing he's still dead.
Is the fascism? Or is it the popped fur collar? The jaunty cape itself? The military fatigues? The teeny tiny mustache? Maybe it’s Maybelline. No, it’s probably the fascism.
Whatever it is, some on the Right are now pretty hot to trot for Generalissimo Francisco Franco — which I can honestly say is not a take I have heard outside of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and the whole bit there was that she was actually quite daft and thought the fascists were just super into art and that being into fascism herself made her seem very chic and European. Though now that I’m reading up on it, it seems that William F. Buckley was also a fan.
This week, noted Pizzagate idiot Jack Posobiec embarked upon a quest to rehabilitate the image of Franco, a brutal, oppressive, authoritarian falangist/fascist dictator who killed hundreds of thousands of people. I’d love to be surprised by this, but it seems only natural after they all embraced Pinochet so eagerly.
He says it in all caps, so you know it’s true.
The picture he shares here, of the Pope praising Franco, is from the famously anti-Semitic, pro-Mussolini, pro-Hitler Father Coughlin’s Social Justice newsletter.
“The communists were slaughtering everyone,” he cried. “Someone had to stop them. His name was Francisco Franco.”
I’m not going to get too into it, but this is a not a man who is very good at timelines. The Red Terror happened after the attempted 1936 military coup that lead to the Spanish Civil War and would eventually lead to Franco declaring himself dictator of Spain. Yes, communists in Spain at that time did kill people and they specifically targeted Nationalists, Royalists, spanish nobility and members of the clergy. Estimates of this range from 38,000 to 110,905. I can “condemn” it now, just as it was condemned by many socialist and liberal Republican leaders during the Spanish Civil War, because I am not a psychopath.
The thing is, at the time the Red Terror was happening, the White Terror — committed by the Nationalists and Royalists — was also happening, was far worse and lasted far longer, with death tolls ranging from 160,000–200,000. Unlike the Red Terror, the White Terror was organized and calculated, as well as supported by the right-wing leaders at the time.
The White Terror also includes Francoist political repression during his regime. This included things like firing all of the professors, putting all the gay people and Romani people and political dissidents in the over 190 concentration camps he established throughout the country, undoing divorces, barring women from working or traveling without approval from their husbands, barring women from having bank accounts and other measures meant to strictly enforce gender roles. Women had won several new rights during the Second Spanish Republic era, and all of them were rolled back under the Franco regime. There were laws about what sort of media women were allowed to produce and censorship of many works written by women. Oh! And men were allowed to kill their wives if they cheated on them.
The Nationalists did some other incredibly horrible and disturbing things to Republican women, but we’re not going to get into that right now. You are free to look it up yourself.
The idea that Franco put a stop to any killing is absurd. In addition to the 200,000 or so killed in the White Terror, approximately 200,000 people died of starvation in the first few years of his reign, approximately 30,000 and 50,000 deaths in concentration camps or through state executions. It wasn’t just his political enemies in those concentration camps either — it was also gay people, Romani people and anyone else Franco considered a threat to his regime. He also transferred about 10,000 people to Hitler’s concentration camps.
Posobiec isn’t the only one on the Right praising Franco this week — his comments are filled with other terrible people who share in his admiration for the man. One person he quote-tweeted even said:
Great to see all the Franco posting on the timeline. Communism and far leftist ideologies should be criminalized and we should bring the full force of the State against offenders. Close the borders, deport illegal aliens. Fund robust autarky programs and vocational training programs.
They are not being shy about what it is they want, and what they want is absolutely motherfucking horrific.
I'm going to keep saying this throughout the coming year: TFG is being quite open and explicit about his desire to be a dictator, to the point of suspending the Constitution, such that if by chance he actually "wins" the 2024 election, he can then claim a mandate from the American people for said dictatorship. The scariest part is that he might actually be right.
We HAVE to defeat these people.
The appeal of the authoritarian is that they will make the undesirables go away. Those people over there? The source of all your problems? If you give me power I’ll make them go away and then you’ll have the freedom to do what you want. You can run things the way you want to run them.
But it never works out that way. The authoritarian just wants power. And they’ll tell you what you want to hear to get it. And they’ll do whatever it takes to keep it.
And they deliver. They make those other people go away. But the minute you start questioning why things aren’t improving for you, guess what. You get to be one of those “other people” too.