Fighting Franco; Stormin' Norman Podhoretz; Italy's Red Cities
Reading, Watching 12.21.26
This is a regular feature for paid subscribers wherein I write a little bit about what I’ve been reading and/or watching.
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You can buy When the Clock Broke, now in paperback and available wherever books are sold. If you live in the UK, it’s also available there. It makes a great present for the history buff or politics junkie in your life!
I was very pleased to see that the UK edition made the Top 10 books of the year list on Comment is Freed and was also one of the New Statesman’s books of the year!
Also, Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year! — Unpopular Front will be closed until the week of the 5th.
In case you missed it, Max Read, Jay Caspian Kang of Time To Say Goodbye, and I had a live conversation this week that accidentally drew thousands of viewers.
If you enjoyed my interview with John P. McCormick on Machiavelli, check out his appearance on The Political Theory Review podcast with Jeffrey Church.
Neoconservative pugilist Norman Podhoretz died last week. Check out David Klion’s obituary in The Nation. David’s also working on a book on the neocons that I’m sure will be terrific.
Unlike essentially every other major contributor to Partisan Review, Podhoretz lived long enough to see Donald Trump take over the GOP, and unlike second-generation neoconservatives like Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan, and David Frum, he came to welcome it—at first with reservations, but later with real enthusiasm. “His virtues are the virtues of the street kids of Brooklyn,” he told the right-wing Claremont Review of Books in 2019. “You don’t back away from a fight and you fight to win. That’s one of the things that the Americans who love him, love him for—that he’s willing to fight, not willing but eager to fight.” Where the younger Kristol saw Trump’s boorish behavior as an affront to republican virtue, the elder Podhoretz saw a kindred spirit.
I read Podhoretz’s infamous memoir Making It a few years ago; I remember thinking it was fun, lively, well- and sometimes even brilliantly written, but then I remember getting depressed. I found his “honesty” about the baseness of his own and others’ motivations to be at first cheeky and refreshing, but then bleak and sad. He depicted a world with no transcendence and no real values. It was all just social climbing, slights, and petty grievances. It doesn’t surprise me at all that, unlike many other neocon literati, he liked Trump. As Trump’s favorite song goes, “That’s all there is.’
In The New York Review of Books, Dan Kaufman reviews Paul Preston’s Architects of Terror: Paranoia, Conspiracy and Anti-Semitism in Franco’s Spain. I had no idea the degree to which antisemitism was a tool of Franco’s regime and a part of his worldview.
The book is structured around six chapter-length biographies of figures who shaped the fascist revolt that destroyed the Spanish Republic and led to General Francisco Franco’s nearly four-decade dictatorship. In addition to Aguilera, they include Mauricio Carlavilla, an undercover police agent, best-selling propagandist, pimp, and organizer of a plot to murder the republic’s prime minister, Manuel Azaña; Juan Tusquets, a Catalan theologian and antisemitic author; José María Pemán, a member of the Falange (Spain’s fascist movement), incendiary antisemitic poet, and orator; General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, who led the rebel forces in the country’s southern provinces and became a popular radio broadcaster known for encouraging his soldiers to rape and murder civilians; and General Emilio Mola, who was responsible for the forces in the north, where he oversaw the killing of more than 40,000 civilians. Franco, who emerged as the rebellion’s supreme military leader through cunning and luck, is a presence in each profile, by turns a collaborator, tormentor, and rival.
They all shared a strong belief in an antisemitic conspiracy theory called the contubernio judeo-masónico-bolchevique, which Preston translates as “filthy Jewish–masonic–Bolshevik concubinage.” Rooted in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the nineteenth-century forgery that claimed to document a Jewish conspiracy that controlled the world, the contubernio was a strange, contradictory, all-encompassing theory that Jews had created Freemasonry and communism to destroy Spain and achieve world conquest. (Since their expulsion in 1492, virtually no Jews lived openly in Spain; in 1936 the country had fewer than six thousand Jews and about the same number of Freemasons.)
What’s even more remarkable is the commitment to antisemitic propaganda of the Franco regime after the Holocaust:
In 1949 Franco’s government released a fifty-page propaganda pamphlet claiming it had acted out of “sympathy and friendship towards a persecuted race” during the war, but his antisemitism continued. In the late 1940s and early 1950s he published a series of articles under the pseudonym Jakim Boor praising the Protocols for exposing “the Talmudic doctrines and their conspiracy to seize the levers of power in society” and dismissing the Holocaust as “a handful of Jews falling foul of race laws.” The fifty-odd Jakim Boor articles were eventually published as a collection called Masonería, and the regime released a cartoonish announcement that Franco had granted an audience to Boor.
This makes William F. Buckley’s encomiums to Francoist Spain in National Review all the more scandalous.
