UNLESS YOU'RE A SPANIARD:

As I continued exploring Spain and reading about the Spanish Civil War, I began to reconsider my opinion of Franco, and the question of whether I'd have fought for his Nazi-supported Nationalists or for the Soviet-supported Republicans began to weigh upon me. On Thursday, in what is perhaps the Spanish government's most final and unambiguous repudiation of Franco's legacy yet, the dictator's remains were removed from their grand resting place at the Valley of the Fallen, supposedly a monument to those who died on both sides in the Spanish Civil War, and re-interred next to those of his wife at a family cemetery in Madrid. The issue of Franco's grave had divided Spaniards along partisan lines for years. The center-right People's Party had tacitly favored leaving the Generalissimo where he lay, while the Socialists, who currently control the government, vocally demanded that he be removed and painted anyone who disagreed as by implication a crypto-Falangist.

When I visited Franco's former tomb, I understood more fully than ever the ideology (or, more accurately, faith) that drove him and his faction and continues to inspire those who still mourn his regime. The experience made me ambivalent about his proposed exhumation. Franco was buried behind the altar of a massive basilica, hewn into the side of a mountain by a labor force composed partially of prisoners of war. Between side chapels dedicated to different branches of the Spanish military hung massive tapestries depicting scenes of apocalyptic warfare from the Book of Revelation. For the first time, I saw why Franco's supporters referred to the civil war as "La Cruzada." As one of the traditionalist Catholic meme pages I follow so unambiguously put it, Franco's rebellion was nothing less than "open war against Satanism."

The equation of communism with Satanism is no understatement. Whittaker Chambers certainly believed that when he referred to communism as "man's second oldest faith," with a creed first articulated when Satan whispered to Eve, "Ye shall be as gods." For evidence, one need look no further than the actions of the Spanish Left, who gained Orwell's approval when they burned churches and slaughtered priests, or the militant atheism of the Soviet Union, which certainly would have been replicated in Spain had Franco been defeated.

The idea that a Republican victory would have resulted in a stable, social-democratic Spain is bunk. Any apparent moderation or liberalism was a carefully crafted deception designed and executed by Stalin's Politburo to further its diplomatic goals and trick soft-hearted Western liberals into opposing Franco.

Peter Hitchens has suggested that maybe "if Franco had lost, a Stalinist Spain would have been loyal to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, joined the Axis in 1940, and tipped the balance in favor of Hitler at a decisive moment," and that is certainly a possibility. Another is that World War II would have ended with an Allied victory, but that among those victorious allies would have been a Soviet puppet state in Western Europe, complete with gulags and Stalin-esque purges that would have made Franco's White Terror, which killed an estimated 100,000 people, look like amateur hour. We barely made it through the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Spanish Missile Crisis might have destroyed us all.

For these reasons, I've come to the same conclusion as Rod Dreher: if I had to choose a side, I would have fought for Franco, but only because his enemy was evil incarnate.

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