A series of posts on viewpoints that aren't related. . . well maybe there are.
The first one is from Chloe Winter's vlog, which is one of the agricultural ones that we link in here. Ms. Winter is a married Galway greenhouse farmer (that's how I'd put it) in her very early 20s (maybe actually 20) who took up greenhouse farming when a close friend of hers died. Galway is very rural Ireland and Galwegians are very rural Irish. I've actually heard them referred to as "Bog Irish" by other Irish. The county is one of the few areas of Ireland where there are bonafide Irish Gaelic speakers and it has its own accent, which Ms. Winter very thickly has.
This entry was surprising, in a way in that its very anti first wave feminist, but in a really genuine way. It may actually be fourth wave feminist. If released in the US (I believe most of Ms. Winter's followers are Irish), it'd create some sort of firestorm in some social medial communities.
Having said that, she isn't wrong.
And her vocabulary and manner of speech is delightfully Irish.
Two different right wing cultural views emerged from Trump servants so far this week. What's interesting in part about them is that many commentators aren't able to realize that they actually express radically different world views, which shows how poorly people are informed and educated in some things.
The State Department, which still calls itself the Department of State, posted a photo of Marco Rubio with this entry, summing up his recent deliveries to European figures:
This flat out puts Rubio in the National Conservative movement and is their thesis to the core. It doesn't say anything, you'll note, about religion at all, it's all about culture. You can perhaps read more into that if you want, any many would, but this is pretty much the Dinneen/Dreher/Reno thesis.
You can pretty much rest assured that its not the Trump thesis. Trump just isn't smart enough or interested enough to grasp something like this at all.
Rubio has endorsed Vance for 2028, but it's probably an endorsement of convenience. By doing this, Rubio has raised his flag in the National Conservative camp. This, moreover, may actually be what Rubio believes.
Rubio is drawing a lot of attention, and getting a lot of excitement, in Reaganite and other genuinely conservative camps. He's not a populist. The big question is whether he can overcome the stench of having been associated with Trump. A secondary question is whether contemporary American culture, less than half of which is all that conservative, sees itself in this fashion very deeply.
In contrast is Pete Hegseth, who will never overcome the stench of Trump.
The Department of Defense posted this item about its activities this past week:
We have gathered at the Pentagon for our monthly worship service.
We are One Nation Under God.
First of all, the Department of Defense has no business whatsoever having monthly prayer meetings. The United States may be One Nation, Under God, but this basically is a forced acknowledgement of a certain type of Christianity, that being a minority branch of it by far, over every other religion. Yes, I'm a Christian, and a member of the original Christian faith, but not every soldier is, and no doubt there are soldiers who have no religion at all.
Moreover, this is Doug Wilson, who appeared here in an earlier discussion. He's a Calvinist who holds really extreme views. You can be rest assured that considerably less than half of the American population wants a Puritan Calvinist regime in the U.S. Indeed, a couple of people responded to this Twitter post with:
Christopher Hale@ChristopherHale 13h
Doug Wilson routinely mocks the pope and the Catholic Church.
It’s beyond shameful that @PeteHegseth allowed him to lead taxpayer-funded anti-Catholic worship services.
Hale a Democratic Catholic blogger who has a pretty good blog dedicated to Pope Leo that you can also find on our blog lists. He served in a prior Democratic administration and I'm still waiting for him to explain how an insider Democrat reconciled that with the Democratic Party's support of abortion. That's an side, but that issue is one of the ones that keeps people like me from being Democrats, even though we aren't voting for very many Republicans any more.
Jim Stewartson, Decelerationist 🇨🇦🇺🇦🇺🇸@jimstewartson 13h
Listen. Doug Wilson is one of the most disgusting revanchist monsters on Earth. He doesn’t think women should vote, wants slavery back, and believes the U.S. should be a theonomy—Government by God. He runs a cult in Moscow, ID.
This is wildly unconstitutional & deeply immoral.
I don't know who Stewartson is, but describing Wilson as a revanchist is correct. Monster might be a bit much, but he doesn't think women should vote and does think that the U.S. should be a Calvinist theocracy. I don't know what he thinks about slavery and I'm not going to look it up, but Wilson is articulate and extreme.
And that's why Hegseth's actions here are really disturbing. Rubio is trying to stake a claim for Western Civilization as special, something the National Conservatives hold and which a lot of people disagree with. Hegseth is here advancing Christian Nationalism of a type that holds a very peculiar view on the United States' place in the world.
Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, dramatizing Manifest Destiny.
Over the weekend, the real imperialist thinking behind Trump's avarice for Greenland was revealed, and not by Trump, but by Ted Cruz.
Look, the whole history of America has been a history of acquiring new lands and new territories, whether you go back to Thomas Jefferson making the Louisiana purchase — about half of the United States of America today — or you go back to America purchasing Alaska from Russia. You want to talk about — at the time they called it ‘Seward’s Folly’ — It turned out to, to be an extraordinarily consequential purchase, Greenland has massive rare earth minerals and critical minerals. There are enormous economic benefits to America, but like Alaska, it is located on the Arctic which is a major theater for major military conflict with either Russia or China,
In short, it's a naked imperial land grab whose intellectual justification dates back to the 19th Century. The age of alliances and of the United States representing hope and freedom is over. The age of grabbing lands to exploit because we can is back.
It's deeply immoral, but Donald Trump is a profoundly immoral man.
He probably also didn't come u pwith this idea, but it was a natural for him. He's not smart enough, or learned enough, to know of manifest destiny.
We've never covered the concept of Manifest Destiny here before, although we've covered some of the latter stages of the exercise of it. We probably should have, as we've mentioned the Indian Wars fairly frequently, which are tied to it. Having said all of that, it's worth nothing that there was never a time at which the concept had anywhere near universal American approval, and it was often hotly contested.
Manifest Destiny had its origins to some degree in the earliest history of the Republic, but less than is sometimes imagined. The term itself was coined in 1845 in an editorial by later Confederate propagandist John L. O'Sullivan, although an earlier editorial by the adventersome Jane Cazneau entitled Annexation is credited by some with being the first work backing it. That advocated for the annexation of Cuba and was penned about the same time. O'Sullivan had used the term "divine destiny" as early as 1839. O'Sullivan entered the scene advocating for the annexation of Texas, and then in an editorial about the Oregon Boundary Dispute wrote:
And that claim is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.
The entire concept is patently absurd, but it had a strong pull on people as an excuse for aggressive expanding. God, the concept holds, made the United States unique and it the country was charged with a divine mission that included expanding its territorial control. It had opposition right from the beginning. None other than U.S. Grant stated:
I was bitterly opposed to the measure [to annex Texas], and to this day regard the war [with Mexico] which resulted as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation. It was an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory... The Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican war. Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times.
An obvious problem with the concept is that once the United States reached the Pacific, the expansion should have been over. It was used to justify everything about the worst of American expansionism up until that point. Thomas Jefferson had seen the acquisition of Louisiana as a 1,000 year long preservation of agrarianism, but everything the country could do to exploit the West and its resources started nearly immediately. The expansion not only left room for yeoman farmers to expand into, the country forces the native inhabitants into reservations and began destructive extraction of minerals nearly immediately. The mixed legacy of expansion can be seen in contemporary illustrations, such as the often seen painting Manifest Destiny, showing a barely clad angelic woman pointing the way west, while in the shadows a Native American family (with fully topless Indian women) look back as they're pushed off the land. Wyoming's state seal has a cowboy and a miner. Colorado's features mountains and a the phrase, Nil sine Numine, Nothing without Providence.
By the time the Frontier closed in 1890, the entire concept was really losing its appeal. The Battle of Wounded Knee that same year raised questions about the morality of Western Expansion in a new bloody way, although the questions has always been there. A sort of national angst set in with nowhere to expand to. That soon found the concepts old backers urging war with Spain.
Supposedly the Spanish American War was over Cuban freedoms and dissatisfaction over Spain's reaction to the explosion on the USS Maine. In reality, McKinley was forced into it, or at least ended up going along, as it looked like the US could grab Cuba and add it as a new territory. Opposition in Congress, however, . . . which affords us a roadmap now, statutorily kept that from happening.
What was wholly unanticipated, however, is that the US would brilliantly deploy its Navy to position it to take the Philippines.
Painting depicting Dewey in the Battle of Manilla Bay. Why, exactly, did we want the Philippines anyway?
Congress hadn't precluded the US from adding the Philippines, or Gaum, as U.S. territories. The Philippines had a long running independence movement and a well educated class that thought of the American arrival as guaranteeing their immediate independence, which they were quickly disabused of. The U.S. ended up fighting to keep the Philippines as a colony, although the war was deeply unpopular and lead to Theodore Roosevelt simply declaring that the US had won it, when in fact it had not. Some part of the Philippines contested for independence all the way into December 1941, when they then took up the cause against Japan. Indeed, some other elements of the movement to gain independence, which by that time had been promised by the U.S., welcomed the Japanese as liberators and collaborated with them, something that was not held against them by the Philippine people later.
Up until the end of the 19th Century the US had been hostile to Great Britain for historical reasons. The UK, however, immediately saw what was occuring, and was in its high colonial phase. The reality of what the US was doing was portrayed in Kipling's poem, The White Man's Burden.
Most Americans had a strong distaste for colonialism, and had it before the Spanish American War. The population bought off on the concept that we need to "Remember the Maine", but that didn't mean owning Cuba. The war did bring the US into the Caribbean like never before, and for four decades the US fought an endless series of Banana Wars, often to secure the interests of American business, that has made us hated in Central America to this day.
The US intervention in Venezuela was a page right out of that book. The US intervened in a foreign nation that really isn't a problem country for us, and now the Administration is busy trying to figure out how to profit from its oil.
Greenland is the same sort of thing.
The justification routeinly features the same sort of rationalization that was used to shove Native Americans off their land. They'd be "better off" with the kind entrepreneurial American hand guiding them, and they would "get rich" with their country more efficiently exploited, never mind if they didn't' want to get rich and they didn't want to exploit their land. In Greenland's case, it's now bitterly clear that part of real estate developer Donald Trump's desire to steal the country is so that rich American enterprises can exploit its mineral wealth.
What if they don't want it exploited?
That though never enters the minds of a certain branch of American capitalism. Maybe most people don't want endless economic exploitation. Maybe we don't want to mine everything. Maybe we don't want endless business growth.
By World War One the US had moved very much away from colonialism. The country started a series of "good neighbor" policies with countries to our south. At the end of the Great War we favored self determination for nations. World War Two's results emphasized this even more, with the US now favoring collective security against nations that were fundamentally opposed to democracy.
Trump has thrown that all in the trash.
People, myself included, have been struggling to figure out what on Earth Trump is thinking, and if he's being paid to destroy the US position in the world. Nobody really knows, but all this does point back to the lunacy of National Conservatism, which looks back on a world that never was. National Conservative thinkers see the US in much the same way the members of the New Apostolic Reformation do, and both forces are at work here. National Conservatives want the US to crawl into the Western Hemisphere, making it solidly Christian, and shut the door behind us. They figure Europe will do the same, if its not too late, in their view, with many looking at authoritarian regimes like those of Orbán and Putin as Eastern European models. Putin, they imagine, will advance Orthodoxy, although there's no reason to believe that his alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church is anything other than convenience. Orbán is supposed to do the same with old world values in Hungary and Eastern Europe. Immigrants to Europe and foreign influences are to be exterminated and tossed out.
That's what's going on in the minds of the National Conservatives, and that's partially what's going on with Greenland.
At this point, I frankly feel that its nearly inevitable that the US is in fact going to invade Greenland. Europe can't really stop us from doing it, although it'll result in bloodshed. It'll destroy the post war order completely. The Trump Administration will set about trying to exploit the minerals of Greenland immediately.
But that won't be the end of the story. It's taken this along, amazingly, for people to get a concept of how horrible Donald Trump and his backers really are, but it's finally occuring. Americans don't want to invade Greenland. They didn't want to invade the Philippines. If, and I feel its a when, we do this, it'll be followed by several realities.
The first will be that exploiting a nation takes time, and those backing this move do not have it. The House will flip in November, even though Trump will in fact take a run at suspending the election. The Senate might flip in November as well, although that's doubtful, but Senate Republicans, their own careers on the line, will begin to back away from Trump. In 2028 a disgusted populace will elect Democrats into office.
The US will leave Greenland, and in a big hurry. It'll be independent. The Trump legacy will be the pile of shit it deserves to be. The US will begin the process of rebuilding itself, but as a much, much, weaker country than before. That will be Trump's legacy.
May God grant that I'm wrong on all of this, and that somebody intervenes to stop this insanity before it's too late.
This again. It never occurs to many that the mines and cities aren't really everyone's dream. It particularly doesn't occur to a rich real estate developer who isn't smart and whose values are shallow.
And the 2028 Presidential Season has begun. Erika Kirk of Turning Point USA has endorsed J. D. Vance.
And yes, it's way, way, early.
But perhaps its not surprising. Trump's mentally departing the stage and chance are good that he'll be out of office in the next few months, Vance is probably looking towards his future right now. His best chances for that position, of course, would be if Trump is escorted out of the building babbling about being the greatest and sent to a gilded retirement home.
But if that doesn't occur, the knives will be coming out before 2028. Marco Rubio will not have sat through four years of soul corrupting dementia not to take a run at the White House. No doubt others are in the wings.
One who may be in the wings, if I'm wrong on his being too demented to carry on in any fashion, is Donald Trump. Everyone keeps noting that he's constitutionally barred but he has no regard for the law in the first place and his threads to run need to be taken seriously.
On Vance, he's a true NatCon, although a recent convert to the philosophy, and his being backed by Turning Point means something, assuming that Turning Point doesn't fly apart or become highly diminished (which I think it will). It's hard to know exactly what's going on, but it might be suspected that it's probable that Kirk's coming out now has the backing of other significant NatCon figures, who know that they need to put their man in power now (Trump really isn't their man, but their tool). A figure like Rubio would turn the clock back.
And so the race is on.
December 22, 2025
It wasn't until listening to the weekend shows that I learned that Marco Rubio has endorsed Vance as well.
That's really interesting, and frankly surprising.
Cont:
And now the rumors are circulating, probably correctly, that Ted Cruz will be running.
Moreover. . . .
The NatCon nerve center and author of Project 2025 starts to come unglued as the Trump Administration does:
I've always thought Roberts' organization would maneuver to put Vance in power in 2026 and shove aside the Pine Tree flag folks, who don't have the intellectual capacity to run a government. The risk has always been that they'd hold the hand they were dealt too long.
They may have.
And Pence, who didn't look like a good candidate before, is starting to with some folks.
Rep. Thomas Massie's wife passed away, and he's remarried.
Trump hates Massie as Massie is not a toady sycophant. In that vein, he's posted:
This from a guy whose been "married" four times and has cheated on at least three out of the four of his wives, admits that he screwed around, literally, earlier, and who hung around with kiddy diddlers.
What a vile disgusting human being Donald Trump is.
Massie's first wife died a little over a year ago. They'd been married some 30 years. His second wife is somebody he's known since 2016 who has worked for Sen. Rand Paul. FWIW, marriages in that time frame are pretty common for people in Massie's situation. Theodore Roosevelt, for instance, remarried about two years after the death of his first wife, and when he did marry, it was to somebody he had known for quite some time.
Trump, on the other hand. . .
November 17, 2025
Q: Your voice sounds rough. Are you feeling alright?
TRUMP: I was shouting at people because they were stupid about something having to do with trade and a country. I blew my stack at these people
Q: Well it sounds like there's a follow up there--
TRUMP: What? I thought you said there was a polyp. I don't want to hear that!
November 18, 2025
Trump had a confrontation with Bloomberg reporter Jennifer Jacobs yesterday on Air Force One in which he once again demonstrated he has dementia
Jennifer Jacobs: “If there’s nothing incriminating in the Epstein files why not…?”
Trump: “Quiet. Quiet, Piggy.”
Trump's clearing being kept in office by the NatCons as he's unintentionally running cover for them. This can only go on so long.
Also, while it didn't at first occur to me, as its so weird, this strikes me as quite misogynistic. Calling a woman "piggy" is really vile, but it does serve to illustrate Trump's history with women, really. Going into their dressing rooms, according to one of Epstein's former girlfriends, groping her in front of Epstein, etc.
cont:
There are times I look at him and I see my grandfather. I see that same look of confusion. I see that he does not always seem to be oriented to time and place. His short-term memory seems to be deteriorating. . . [Trump's] lifelong struggles with impulse control are also “deteriorating as well."
Trump had a full blown late night Thanksgiving meltdown.
He's now openly, and obviously, completely unstable.
This wasn't the only example of this. He also called a reporter stupid for pointing out that assailant who shot two National Guardsmen in Washington D.C. had received asylum from the Trump Administration.
There can be little doubt at this point that Trump is no longer control of himself, and probably only partially in control of the nation. NatCons behind the administration are likely largely in control, but not fully, which is in part which makes Trump doubly dangerous. A NatCon coup is basically going on while Trump retains enough authority to be legitimately dangerous.
Having allowed this to go on so long we're now in the situation where it's actually becoming increasingly difficult for the 25th Amendment to be invoked. By pretending that Trump is not deranged, the bar has been set so high that Trump's supporters will not be able to tell what he actually did that caused him to be removed. We are, therefore, really gambling now. We're gambling that his actions don't cause a war, and that the war doesn't see the use of weapons that have largely become unthinkable in modern times. We're gambling that force isn't used against American citizens. And we're gambling that Trump's disregard for the law doesn't set in on a permanent institutional basis.
60 percent of the people who constantly use the phrase “Trump derangement syndrome” and 98% of those who use it as an all-explanatory theory for any inconvenient arguments or facts, suffer from pro-Trump
Derangement syndrome. Forget the terminology. If you think any information that make you doubt yourself is crazy, you are in a bubble.
Regarding that deline, the New York Times ran a recent article with this headline.
Shorter Days, Signs of Fatigue: Trump Faces Realities of Aging in Office
President Trump has always used his stamina and energy as a political strength. But that image is getting harder for him to sustain.
The article notes that Trump has reduced his workload 39%.
Also of note, those close to Trump are begging to openly admit that they're stressed and fatigued. Poor old Mike Johnson has complained about not having a vacation in two years (yeah, well, suck it up, buttercup, I haven't had one for at least twice that long). Loyal sycophant Karoline Leavitt complained openly about stress recently.
The question now is where all this leads. Those who can invoke the 25th Amendment may simply have waited too long and now need Trump to do something that anyone would regard as fully insane. . . with the question being what that would be.
cont:
Trump is clearly vindictive and unhinged. This will set the stage up for wiping out his executive orders, and perhaps reign back in the excessive use of executive orders.
November 30, 2025
Reporter: Walz called for the release of your MRI results
Trump: They can release it. It was perfect like my phone call where I got impeached.
Reporter: What were they looking at?
Trump: For what? Releasing?
Reporter: no, what part of your body was the MRI looking at
Trump: I have no idea. It’s just an MRI. It wasn’t the brain because I took a cognitive test and I aced it.
Uh huh. . .
First of all, I heard Walz's remarks, and he's right. They don't give MRI's for sport. They had some brain thing they were looking into.
And they tell the patient the result. . . if they're functioning and able to understand it.
And as for cognitive tests, the entire nation gets a dose of bat shit demented from Trump weekly.
December 3, 2025
Not a sign of dementia, but rather of age, Trump is having a hard time staying awake during daytime events.
No doubt this problem is made worse by his staying up late into the night to post rage tweets.
December 8, 2025
President Trump is upset because pardoned Democrat Rep. Henry Cuellar is running again as a Democrat.
Trump, who pardoned him, is accusing him of disloyalty.
Cont:
Trump to ABC's Rachel Scott: "You are the most obnoxious reporter in the whole place. Let me just tell you -- you are an obnoxious-- a terrible reporter. And it's always the same thing with you. I told you."
Let me start off by noting that as a rule, I can't stand Cassie' Craven's op eds. They tend to be in your face unthinking populist, and I also resent (I'm not kidding) the co-opting of a cowboy hat that obviously doesn't fit.
And frankly I don't much like people spouting off about protecting Wyoming or what Wyoming is or was, when they aren't from here. She's from Nebraska, so that's not far off, but Nebraska is not Wyoming.
Well, like some other populist things, or NatCon things, I'll confess that as a real conservative, and for htat matter a distributist agrarian, I find myself occasionally disturbed by a one of their members saying something that taps into something I've said myself. This article by Craven does that:
As much as I hate to admit it, and I do hate to admit it, she has a point, although in the typical populist manner, she starts off by saying something cruel to get to the point. Indeed, it basically takes her 40% of her article to quit being an asshole before she gets to the point that 's worth considering, with this paragraph:
Welfare, in the 14th century meant one’s good fortune, health and exemption from evil. This changed in the 19th and early 20th centuries as public assistance became a role the government took over from the private charities, which had historically helped to ensure that people fared well. Welfare was holistic, community-driven and just as much emotional and spiritual as it was physical.
The shift of society away from the church-based and community associations and toward the government was no good for our fellow man. Adding fuel to the fire were the rapid technological advances that made us distant, isolated, and serotonin-addicted.
This has addled people’s ability to engage in real conversation or romance.
Well, she's correct, sort of .
Craven seems to edge up on the point, actually and then wonder off again, being slightly mean spirited once again. She never gets to the bigger point which is that a welfare system that creates semi permanent benefits, run by a bureaucracy, creates dependency, and corrupts. Indeed, that was the huge difference, other than an inability to cover all who really needed help, from modern welfare and pre Great Depression charity.
Support form charitable organizations, and churches, and the like, was always very temporary. And it tended to come with some requirements. State funded welfare tends not to, although the GOP has attempted to insert some. There are work requirements, of course, but it is difficult to tell how much they're winked at as the principles of subsidiarity have not been applied, so there's no real control. In contrast, I know of a situation in which a Church collects directly for the poor and distributes directly to the poor. In doing so, they do ask "are you working?"
And there are more uncomfortable truths as well. Welfare has, ironically, been a major driver in the decline of Western morality, and more particularly, and arguably much more pronounced, American morality.
Prior to the current welfare regime, children were very much the responsibility of both parents, in every fashion. We've discussed this in the context of the Playboy Philosophy and what not, but what was the case, even into the early 1980s, was that people that had children were normally married, and to a large degree, women who became pregnant out of wedlock either married the father or gave the child up for adoption (or after 1973, aborted). Moral decay brought on by the Sexual Revolution, aided by pharmaceuticals, started to erode the two parent family however and in our current age that's pretty pronounced. An African American commentator got in trouble a year or two ago by claiming that some women "married the government", but there's more than a little truth to that. Kids raised in this environment are more subject to abuse by subsequent "boyfriends" of their mother, and are more likely to be raised in poverty and declining morality. It's simply the truth.
That in turn kicks back to society at large. The American lower middle class tends to wade at least knee deep in a sort of moral sewer even while being horrified by those swimming in it. This wasn't the case thirty year or more ago. The trend line isn't good.
So, Cravens has a point.
But how do you end this? She doesn't opine on that, which is the cowardly way out. Indeed nobody, except perhaps for those deep in the Heritage Society, is doing so. What Project 2025 did, apparently, is to suggest an increase in work requirements, which was attempted sort of sub silentio earlier this year. But then, the entire NatCon group in the government right isn't really willing, in general, to admit trying to bring into play any of their policies. They do them all silently while sometimes denying they're doing them at all.
Which is one of the things I really detest about the Trump Administration. It's dishonest. They should simply admit, if they think it, that "welfare is contributing to moral decay and we have to do something about it."
Of course, the problem here is that most Americans really don't want to do anything about the things they claim they do. Bloated Americans who spend Sundays watching the NFL and who are living with their second or third wives or girlfriends might think about going to the megachurch once a month where the pastor is not going to equate their lifestyle with adulterous mortal sin, or preach about the dangers of wealth to their souls, and might bitch about homosexuals and the like even while being just as morally adrift, but they don't really want the responsibility of responsibility.
Of course, save for some, which explains a movement towards cultural conservatism in the young, thereby being proactive in the culture, even if not attempting to be cultural revolutionaries.
Francisco Franco died at age 82, ending his long dictatorship and bringing the country back to the path of democracy.
Franco, in spite of his long reign, remains one of the most enigmatic of 20th Century figures Often cited to be a fascist, he was not, but he was certainly a fascist fellow traveler in the 1940s, and Spain's true Fascists, the Falangists, were consolidated under his rule and had no choice but to follow them, even though he very occasionally suppressed them. He supported the Axis in much of World War Two while managing to avoid actually having Spain become a full blown combatant. German submarines had refuge at Spanish ports for a time, and early in the Battle of Britain the Luftwaffe used northern Spain for launching aircraft on Great Britain1 Fascistic Spanish troops fought as a German foreign legion.2 Always savvy to political winds, he began to draw away from the Axis late war. He might be best compared to Petain in his political alignment, but even that is imperfect.
A monarchist at heart, he restored the Spanish monarchy late in his rule, but even at that he did not ever release power. Death brought that.
Franco's rule commenced with the Spanish Civil War, which he was not originally the right wing military head of. The war itself was basically a military revolt against an incoming Communist regime. Franco fought the war well, but it also maximized violence in some notable ways. Approximately 420,000 Spaniards were killed by way of extrajudicial killings during the Civil War, and in state executions immediately following its end in 1939, a remarkable figure given that Republican combat deaths were about 110,000, and Nationalist about 90,000. Killings tapered off thereafter and into the 50s. His rule emphasized Spanish nationalism and traditionalism, enforcing by force of law.
Economically, his policies were murky, and for some time the country adopted autarky, which was the economic theory favored by the Nazis, and which didn't work out for them either. Economic disaster resulted in reform.
Like France, Spain attempted to retain its empire post World War Two, but Franco was forced to yield to the times. When France yielded to Moroccan independence, Spain largely did as well, but retained some holdings. Spain fought a war with Morocco to hold on to the Spanish Sahara, but in 1975 it ultimately ceded to Moroccan wishes. Spain,under Franco, provided bases to the OAS in its effort to retain French control of Algeria.
Unlike most of the far right dictators of the European 20th Century, Franco always retained a bit of a following in certain sectors of the US, and still does. In some circles he was viewed as the only alternative to Spanish communism, and in fact, in terms of the Spanish Civil War, that might actually be right. That wouldn't excuse the nature of his rule, however.3
Others, more alarmingly, are currently attracted to his politics. A Wyoming Hageman intern, for example, resigned his position when he was found to be a follower of Francoist websites, although he later successfully reemerged as a Turning Point USA figure at the University of Wyoming, brining the late Charlie Kirk to the campus.. Some figures on the Illiberal Democracy, National Conservative, side of the GOP are very close to being Francoist in their views. Indeed, absent the economic aspects of it, Francoism is nearly the model of how certain Illiberal Democrats imagine Western nations should be run.
This is one of those things I can actually remember from 1975 and place the date on. For some reason, on this date, I was traveling with my father in our 1973 Mercury Comet. I think we were going to Cheyenne. The radio news broke in continually with updates on Franco's physical decline.4
A report by the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee confirmed that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency had tried twice to assassinate Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, and once to tried to poison Congo Premier Patrice Lumumba. It also confirmed that the CIA had supplied aid to insurgentes who later assassinated South Vietnam's President Ngo Dinh Diem and Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo.
However, it also confirmed that "No foreign leaders were killed as a result of assassination plots initiated by officials of the United States", which is good I guess, but it wasn't for want of trying in the case of Castro. Diem and Lumumba were in fact both assassinated, but not by the US, in spite of the ongoing belief that the US actively participated in Diem's assassination.
Dr. Heinrich Schuetz was sentenced to ten years in prison after being convicted of war crimes in Munich, West Germany. In 1942 as an SS colonel he had injected bacteria into eleven Catholic priests at Dachau.
Footnotes:
1. Churchill has his diplomats quietly approach the Spanish government and informed them that the UK was aware of where the Luftwaffe plains taking off in northern Spain were coming from, and that the UK would bomb the airbases if it didn't stop. It stopped.
2. The unit started off as an outright Spanish contribution to the German effort in the USSR, but after the Allies complained, troops in the Spanish Army were ordered to return home to Spain or resign. Those who resigned remained behind as a unit in the German SS.
3. My mother, who was well aware of the Spanish Communist sacrilegious desecration of Catholic churches, took the position that Franco was Spain's only choice against Communism. My father took the much more nuanced view that whichever side won, the Spanish were going to lose.
In the US, the Republicans were generally seen, in the Great Depression, as liberal democrats, which they largely were not. As the war progressed, the Republicans became more communistic as Spanish Communists, with support from Moscow, presumed victory and began to purge the rival forces on the left. American leftists famously contributed the Abraham Lincoln Brigade of volunteers to the Republican cause, some of whom were American Communists. In the pre Cold War era, the full nature of Communism was not really very well understood in the US.
In Europe, in contrast, the war drew volunteers to both sides. Both Irish and English mercenaries volunteered, for example, to serve under Franco.
4. The fact that it was a Thursday means my father took a very rare off day from work. What I think we were doing is going to Warren Air Force Base so we could pick up uniforms for the Civil Air Patrol. When we were there I recall a supply sergeant gave my father a USAF "Dumbo Collar" OG-107 Field Jacket. My father unsarcastically loved it and wore it as a winter outdoors coat for the rest of his life.
I was 13 years old.
The next time I would be on Warren AFB would be when I was 17. I had applied for admission to the Air Force Academy and was required to go there for a physical. My father likely drove me down as I probably wouldn't have driven to Cheyenne as a 17 year old. I can recall when I checked in the Air Force medic noted my name and told me he had the same first name, albeit in Spanish.
As I was also an applicant to the U.S. Military Academy (and the Naval Academy) I took an Army physical at the local Army National Guard armory.
I obviously didn't get in, which I'm glad about, I think.
