His father was dictator in the 20s and from his writing it's fairly obvious he felt his father's one weakness in leadership was his rhetorical strategy. Jose is not a fascist, he instead envisions something different for Spain. He acknowledges some strengths of fascist government as well as some weaknesses. He admires the nationalization of the credit system in Hitler's Germany and wants something similar for Spain's workers complete with a guild system like older days. He seems to reject though the philosophy of race and soil that is so prevalent in Germany. Instead, he wants something higher to unite the Spaniards as well as all Latin American descendants around the world, as he says empire is a part of who Spain is. He says that uniting spirit is the Catholic faith which will work with the State he has envisioned for Spain but never trample on it. He hates the Liberal capitalist systems of the West. He says capitalism always turns to Communism which he says is abhorrent. He says Marx was correct in his critique of capitalism but not in his solutions, and is anti-revolution generally. His vision of what a state is is one with a destiny, one that has a mission, and one that is very aware of its people's history, culture, and religion. He wants military at the center of Spanish life and the family unit to be its greatest weapon. He critiques Liberal systems like the US and UK to be merely systems of laws that keep society in somewhat order as they inevitably fall into decadence. I am writing out some of my favorite quotes from the book below, mostly to reinforce them for myself and to highlight some common themes strikingly similar to the situation today.
"One must believe in something. When has anyone got anywhere with a liberal point of view? The only fruitful cases, frankly, that I am aware of have come from the politics of belief, in one sense or another. When a State lets itself be won over to the conviction that nothing is good or evil and that its only duty is that of a policeman, that State perishes at the first warm blast of positive belief, in a series of municipal elections."
"Liberalism is on one hand, the regime without faith, the regime that hands over everything, even the essentials of the country's destiny, to free discussion. For Liberalism, nothing is absolutely true or false. The truth is, in each case, what the greater number of votes say. Thus it does not matter to Liberalism if a people agrees upon suicide, provided that the proposed suicide is carried out in accordance with the electoral practice."
"The leader should not obey the public; he should serve it, which is a different thing. To serve it means to direct the exercise of the command for the people's good, achieving the good of the people ruled, even though the people itself be unaware of what its good is; in other words, to feel himself in tune with the people's historical destiny, even though dissenting with what the masses feel a desire for."
"The urge to set everything rolling, come what may, is a frame of mind typical of exhausted and degenerate periods. To set everything rolling is easier than collecting loose ends, tying them up again, sorting out the serviceable from the perished... Is not perhaps Laziness the Muse of many a revolution?"
"Liberalism (it may be described thus because the raising of a barrier against tyranny was just what the revolutionary Constitutions aimed at), liberalism has its great period, the one during which it establishes all men as equals before the law, a victory from which there can be no retrocession. But this victory once achieved, and its great period over, liberalism begins to find itself with nothing to do, and spends its time destroying itself."
"Socialism, thus understood, sees nothing in history but the play of economic forces; everything spiritual is suppressed, religion is the opium of the people, patriotism is a myth of the exploitation of the under-dog; Socialism says all this. Nothing exists but production and economic organization. Workmen, therefore, must wring their souls well out, lest the least drop of spirituality should remain within them... Finally, Socialism proclaims the monstrous dogma of class warfare; it proclaims the dogma that warfare between classes is indispensable and produced naturally in life, because there is no possibility of there ever being any appeasing agent. So Socialism, which started out as a just critique of economic liberalism has brought us, by a different route, the same fruits of economic liberalism: disunity, hatred, separation, forgetfulness of every bond of brotherhood and solidarity between men."
"If the Socialist revolution were nothing more than the setting up of a new order in the economic field, we should not be alarmed. The fact is that the Socialist revolution is something far deeper. It is the victory of the materialist interpretation of life and history; it is the violent substitution of irreligion for religion; the substitution of the closed and embittered Class for the Patria; the grouping of men by classes and not the grouping of men of all classes with in the Patria which is common to them all; it is the replacement of individual freedom by an iron subjection to a State which not only regulates our labour, as in an ant heap, but also implacably regulates our recreation. It is all that. It is the sweeping advent of an order that annihilates western Christian civilization; it is the sign that marks the close of a civilization which we, brought up as we are in its essential values, decline to recognize as doomed"
"While the Lateran Treaty is being signed in Rome, we here are making allegations that Fascism is anti-Catholic; Fascism, which in Italy, after ninety years of Masonic Liberalism, has restored the Crucifix and religious instruction in the schools. I can understand the uneasiness in Protestant countries where a conflict might be possible between the national religious tradition and the Catholic fervor of a minority. But in Spain, what can the exaltation of that which is genuinely national lead to, except the discovery of the Catholic factors in our world mission?"
"The Spanish Monarchy had been a historical executive instrument for the attainment of the of the greatest of universal ends. It had founded and maintained an empire, and it has sounded and maintained it precisely though that which constituted its prime virtue: the virtue of representing the unity of command. Without unity of command one gets nowhere. But the Monarchy ceased to be a unity of command quite a long time ago. By Phillip III, the King no longer ruled; the King, continued to be the outward symbol, but the exercise of power fell into the hands of strong men and of Ministers: of Lerma, of Olivares, of Aranda, of Godoy. When Charles IV came to the throne, the Monarchy was now no more than a shadow without substance. The Monarchy which had started in the camp that retired to the seclusion of the Cortes. The Spanish people is implacable in its realism; the Spanish people, which demand that its patron Saints shall bring rain when it is needed, and turns their images back to front on the altar if they don't bring it; the Spanish people, I repeat did not understand this shadow of a Monarchy without power. That is why that shadow fell from its place on April the 14th 1931, without even a platoon of the Lifeguards putting up a fight."
"The Republic, instead of laying itself out to better the people's lot by a generous police, excited it by aggressive propaganda and then left it empty-handed- no less hungry than before, and angrier. A crude and embittered Marxism prevented the national and the social from being harmonized. Social policy in many respects took on an insolent frame of mind, an air of conquerer's arrogance. Children in schools began raising the clenched fist, and Socialist workmen began looking about them in the street with the haughtiness of people who, if they tolerate the rest of mankind's existence at all, do so out of pure condescension. A Russian, Asiatic, despotic atmosphere brooded over everything. The dictatorship of the proletariat was beginning to loom ahead."
"'Right' and 'Left' are barren and incomplete values. The Right, through seeking to ignore the distress and urgent economic demands of the times, ends up depriving their religious and patriotic appeals of all human validity. The Left, through closing the minds of the masses to what is spiritual and national, end up by degrading economic conflict into the savagery of wild beasts. Today two total concepts of the world stand facing one another; whichever wins will finally break off the customary alternation. Either victory will go to the spiritual, Western, Christian, Spanish concept of life with all the service and sacrifice it involves, but with all the individual dignity and national honor it possesses, else victory will go the materialist and Russian concept of life, which beyond subjecting Spaniards to the savage yoke of a Red Army and a ruthless policy, will disintegrate Spain into local republics."
"Local separatism is the decadence that arises at the exact moment when men forget that their Patria is no the obvious physical thing that can be perceived even in the most primitive state of spontaneity."
"The 'feeling' of the movement now coming to the fore is fundamentally anti-Spanish. It is hostile to the the Patria. It scorns chastity by encouraging the collective prostitution of young working girls at those country festivals where every sort of impurity is practiced; it undermines the family, which has been supplanted in Russia by free love, by collective eating-houses, by facilities for divorce and abortion, and it disowns that sentiment of honor which has always inspired the actions of Spaniards even in the humblest circumstances. Today every villainy reigns in Spain: men are slain in cowardly fashion, a hundred against one; the truth is falsified by authorities; defamation is inflicted by filthy libels, and the mouths of the injured parties are stopped so that they cannot defend themselves; the traitor the informer are rewarded...Is this Spain? Is this the people of Spain? You would think were living in a nightmare, or that the ancient Spanish people- serene, courageous, generous- had been replaced by a frenzied and degenerate plebs, drugged with Communist propaganda pamphlets. Only in the worst moments of the nineteenth century has our people known times like these, and they themselves lacked the acuteness of today."
"For several decades we had been listening to defeatist teachings and propaganda, and we had almost reached the stage of losing faith in ourselves. The Spain of those days was the heir of a Spain of weaknesses, of limping indecisions, of picturesque posturing: the Madrid of the Fornos cafe and the "Cuarta de Apolo," of swashbuckling journalists, of those who gaily flaunted their capes while the remains of the Spanish Empire were being lost. We had got accustomed to a life of mediocrity and coarse pretentiousness"
"When confronted with the resolute will to attack, a cold passive intention to resist is not enough to suffice. One faith must be opposed by another. Not even in the greatest imperial times, when so much exists that is worth of preservation, is the passive aim of preserving it sufficient. A nation is always a job to be done, and Spain is so in a very special war. Either the executrix of a world mission, or the victim of a speedy process of integration."
"When one possesses a fixed feeling in regard to history and life, that feeling itself provides the solutions when faced with concrete facts, just as love tells us in what case we ought to fight and in what cases we ought to embrace, though a true feeling of love has no sort of ready-made program of embraces or of strife."
"We will take down the economic machine of capitalist ownership, which swallows all the profits, and replace it by individual ownership, family ownership, common ownership, and syndical ownership."