On the 120th anniversary of his birth, the remains of Falangist leader José Antonio Primo de Rivera are today being removed from his tomb at the Valley of the Fallen (Valle de los Caídos), a vast memorial to the dead of Spain’s Civil War. Isabel Peralta reported today from the scene of José Antonio’s reburial in Madrid, and was interviewed by the Spanish press (see videos above and below).
José Antonio founded the Falange Española in 1933 in an effort to transcend petty factionalism and offer Spaniards a non-Marxist critique of capitalism:
“The National-Syndicalist State will not stand cruelly aloof from economic conflicts between men, nor will it look on impassively as the strongest class subjugates the weakest. Our regime will make class struggle totally impossible, since all those cooperating in production will constitute an organic whole therein. We deplore and shall prevent at all costs the abuses of partial vested interests, as well as anarchy in the workforce.”
In November 1936, aged 33, José Antonio was murdered by leftist assassins in the prison yard at Alicante. After the nationalist victory in 1939 his Falangist followers carried José Antonio’s remains 300km to the Escorial near Madrid, and in 1959 he was reburied nearby at the newly consecrated Valley of the Fallen, a huge cathedral carved out of a mountain, where Spain’s caudillo Francisco Franco was also buried in 1975.
For decades the Valley of the Fallen was a place of pilgrimage for Falangist veterans and Spanish nationalists from various factions, who were often joined on November 20th each year (the anniversary of both José Antonio’s murder and Franco’s death) by comrades from across Europe. H&D‘s assistant editor Peter Rushton was part of BNP delegations to the Valley on several occasions during the 1990s.
The left-wing government in Madrid have for several years made clear their determination to desecrate José Antonio’s grave as an act of political spite. Last autumn they introduced new laws designed to criminalise aspects of Spanish history. One was designated a “democratic memory law” and the other was a new law against “anti-semitism”, which effectively means a law exempting Jews and Zionism from criticism.
