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‘WE’VE GOT TO KILL AND KILL AND KILL’  
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Dan Kaufman
November 13, 2025
The New York Review of Books
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_ As Francisco Franco’s reputation grows on the far right, a new
history of his regime reminds us of its unrelenting violence. _

Nurses giving the Nationalist salute to General Francisco Franco, the
leader of the fascist forces during the Spanish Civil War, 1938,
Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Getty Images

 

REVIEWED:

ARCHITECTS OF TERROR: PARANOIA, CONSPIRACY AND ANTI-SEMITISM IN
FRANCO’S SPAINby Paul PrestonLondon: William Collins, 463
pp., $29.99; $21.99 (paper)

In 1936, soon after the start of the Spanish Civil War, Captain
Gonzalo de Aguilera Munro, a senior press officer for the far-right
military forces fighting to overthrow the Spanish Republic, offered a
theory to explain the conflict’s origins. “You know what’s wrong
with Spain?” he asked John Whitaker, a correspondent for the
_Chicago Daily News_.

Modern plumbing! In healthier times—I mean healthier times
spiritually, you understand—plague and pestilence used to slaughter
the Spanish masses. Held them down to proper proportions, you
understand. Now with modern sewage disposal and the like, they
multiply too fast. They’re like animals, you understand, and you
can’t expect them not to be infected with the virus of Bolshevism.

Aguilera, who had been educated at Jesuit boarding schools in England,
was the Count of Alba de Yeltes, the eleventh-generation heir to
enormous _latifundios _(estates) in Salamanca and Cáceres provinces.
He played polo, read _The_ _New Yorker_, and cut a flamboyant figure
on the battlefield with his high boots and riding crop. The economy of
agricultural Spain was a precapitalist feudal system in which workers
were essentially slaves. Aguilera sought to preserve this structure.
“It is a race war, not merely a class war,” he said to H.R.
Knickerbocker, an American reporter.

You don’t understand because you don’t realize that there are two
races in Spain—a slave race and a ruler race. Those reds, from
President Azaña to the anarchists, are all slaves. It is our duty to
put them back into their places—yes, put chains on them again, if
you like.

Rural discontent had been building in Spain throughout the nineteenth
century and into the twentieth, culminating in 1918, when agricultural
workers began a wave of strikes. After three years the military, which
was aligned with the landowners, succeeded in suppressing the revolt.
For much of the next decade the country was ruled by a military
dictatorship. Unrest and violence increased after the resignation and
death of General Miguel Primo de Rivera in 1930, and elections held
the next year led to the creation of the Second Spanish Republic, the
country’s first real democratic government. The new coalition of
center-left and socialist parties enacted reforms that included the
creation of a secular public education system and the seizure of
portions of the latifundios for redistribution to peasants.

Landowners like Aguilera openly flouted the government, and in the
1933 elections the right won power. Soon after, a drought caused rural
unemployment to spike to more than 40 percent in some areas. Starving
agricultural workers took to the roads, desperately searching for
fallen olives and acorns, which were ordinarily used for feeding pigs.
In February 1936 the rural masses, along with Spain’s growing urban
proletariat and its small professional class, elected a left-leaning
Popular Front coalition government. It too tried to enact economic and
social reforms. But in July 1936 a group of reactionary military
officers staged a coup.

The coup plotters meant to restore the supremacy of Spain’s
elite—the right-wing officer corps, the Catholic Church hierarchy,
and wealthy landowners. The coup failed, morphing instead into a
three-year civil war that resulted in the deaths of 500,000 people;
tens of thousands more were killed after it ended. “The wholesale
execution of prisoners and civilians were the trump cards of the
‘best’ elements in Spain,” Whitaker wrote of the rebel leaders,
who were backed by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. “They were
outnumbered by the masses; they feared the masses; and they proposed
to thin down the numbers of the masses.” Aguilera was more blunt.
“We’ve got to kill and kill and kill, you understand?” he told
Whitaker.

As Paul Preston shows in his revelatory _Architects of Terror_,
Aguilera was no outlier. 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.)

Preston’s account shows the extent to which antisemitism animated
and unified the Spanish far right during this time. It is particularly
timely given the American far right’s renewed admiration for Franco,
the debate over whether the term “fascist” applies to Donald Trump
and his strain of right-wing populism,

 
and the Trump administration’s weaponization of antisemitism as a
cudgel against universities across the country. Although the histories
of Italian and German fascism continue to be in the foreground, there
is far less discussion of Spanish fascism, which endured much longer
and is more openly venerated.

 
 

In a moment when spurious accusations of antisemitism are regularly
launched against the left, Preston’s account is a useful reminder of
the left’s general, if inconsistent, antipathy to it and of the far
right’s reliance on it. During the Spanish Civil War an estimated 20
percent of the International Brigades, the volunteer army of more than
35,000 men and women who helped defend the republic, were Jewish.
Meanwhile Franco’s last public speech, delivered several weeks
before his death in 1975, made clear that he still believed in the_
_contubernio.

For the propagandists (Tusquets, Pemán, Carlavilla) the myth of the
contubernio became the single most important means of uniting the
Catholic, monarchist, and fascist factions of the right. In 1932
Tusquets, the contubernio’s most influential proponent, published
_Origins of the Spanish Revolution_, a conspiratorial survey of the
past century of Spanish history based on the _Protocols_. The book was
an enormous success and made Tusquets a star of the European far
right. In 1934 the International Anti-Masonic Association invited him
to tour Dachau, which had recently opened as a concentration camp for
political prisoners. “They did it to show us what we had to do in
Spain,” Tusquets wrote afterward.

Pemán, a novelist, poet, and playwright, propagated the idea of the
“anti-Spain,” an internal enemy nation populated by those citizens
who were deemed not conservative, religious, or nationalist. Like many
fascists, Pemán obsessed over purification. In a 1937 radio broadcast
he called the civil war a “magnificent struggle to bleed Spain.”
His most influential work, _Poema de la bestia y el ángel _(1938),
drew on the _Protocols_. (The fictitious Elders of Zion are described
as “leaning over the map of Spain, one hundred hooked noses like
crows’ beaks…plotting the division of Spain.”) Pemán’s
influence was more than just rhetorical. During the civil war Franco
named him president of a new education commission; Pemán wasted no
time in purging 16,000 teachers, sending many of them to prison and
ordering several hundred to be executed.

The military officers Preston profiles also believed in the
contubernio. “The Jews,” Mola told his staff, “are an
accumulation of age-old malice, evil intentions and ancient racial
resentments.” The racism and brutality that Mola, Franco, Queipo de
Llano, and Aguilera displayed throughout the civil war had already
been evident during their colonial service, when they enforced
Spain’s occupation of northern Morocco. Africanistas, as these
officers were called, blamed the contubernio for the decline of
Spain’s empire and were especially enraged and motivated by the loss
of Cuba and the Philippines in the Spanish-American War.

In the 1920s the Africanistas suppressed a series of rebellions of
Berber tribesmen in the Rif Mountains. In his memoirs, Mola wrote that
he delighted in walking over a ravine filled with the crushed skulls
and exposed, discolored intestines of a group of rebels. Soldiers
under his command cut out the hearts of their opponents with a
machete. Like Aguilera, Mola wanted to restore Spain’s feudal
system. “This war will solve for us the agrarian problem,” he
wrote in his diary.

During the civil war Mola oversaw the execution of close to three
thousand Republican men in Navarre. He had women’s heads shaved and
forced them to drink castor oil. Many were raped. “Death would be
insufficient” for the defeated Republicans, he said. In areas he
controlled, lists were drawn up of vegetarians, Esperanto speakers,
Freemasons, nudists—anyone who behaved differently from the far
right’s ideal Spaniard—to be arrested, tortured, and sometimes
executed. At times Mola’s nihilistic military strategy went too far
even for some of the Nazis aiding him. During the siege of Bilbao, he
implored a shocked Nazi air force colonel to bomb the city’s
industrial factories, even though they were about to be seized by the
fascist forces. “If half of Spain’s factories were destroyed by
German bombers, the subsequent reconstruction of Spain would be
greatly facilitated,” Mola told the officer, who appealed to Franco
to overrule him. (Franco gave partial authorization for Mola’s
request.)

Mola’s contentious relationship with Franco may have cost him his
life. Franco was suspected of sabotaging the plane that crashed and
killed him. But he also had his admirers, notably Adolf Hitler. “The
real tragedy for Spain was the death of Mola,” Hitler said. “There
was the real brain, the real leader.”

Most of Preston’s subjects tried to whitewash their pasts after
World War II, perhaps none more successfully than Pemán, who
reinvented himself as a liberal monarchist. In 1981, two months before
Pemán’s death, King Juan Carlos awarded the ailing poet the Order
of the Golden Fleece, one of the highest honors for Catholic nobles.
Aguilera had a more notorious end. One afternoon in 1964 his son
Agustín began massaging his father’s sore feet. Suddenly Aguilera
pulled out an old revolver from his African service and shot Agustín
in the chest. Aguilera’s elder son, Gonzalo, burst into the room,
and Aguilera shot him in the chest, too, killing him instantly.
Aguilera then went looking for Agustín, who had stumbled out, and
found him lying dead in a pool of blood. His wife hid until the
Guardia Civil arrived. “Kill him, he’s a savage,” she implored
them. Aguilera died in a psychiatric hospital nine months later. He
was never charged for the murders.

In January 1939 Franco’s troops captured Barcelona. Soldiers
ransacked the city’s two synagogues and bolted them shut. Three
months later the republic fell. Franco’s regime expelled all the
Jews who had come to the country after 1931 and barred Jewish children
from attending public schools. Republican prisoners were forced to
produce two new editions of _The_ _Protocols of the Elders of Zion_.
In his first New Year’s Eve radio address as the country’s leader,
Franco praised the antisemitism of the Third Reich and the Spanish
Inquisition. “Now you will understand the motives that have impelled
some nations to combat, and to block the activities of, those races
marked by the stigma of greed and self-interest,” he declared. “By
the grace of God and the clear foresight of the Catholic Kings, we
were freed many centuries ago from such a heavy burden.”

After his victory Franco permitted the Nazis to capture German Jewish
refugees and transport them back to the Third Reich. In 1941 he
established the División Azul (Blue Division), a unit of some 47,000
Spanish soldiers who fought on the eastern front alongside the Nazis,
despite Spain’s official neutrality. That same year his government
handed a detailed registry of Jews living in Spain to Heinrich
Himmler, the SS chief and the architect of the Final Solution. At
Franco’s request, Tusquets also created a “Jewish-Masonic”
section within Spain’s military intelligence service to hunt for
those presumed to be Jews or Freemasons.

After the German defeat at Stalingrad in early 1943, Franco began to
shift his foreign policy to curry favor with the Allies. Central to
this effort was covering up his regime’s antisemitism. (The campaign
also reflected Franco’s belief that the international press was
controlled by Jews.) Grudging, limited permission was granted to some
Jewish refugees to travel through Spain, as long as they did not stay.
In 1943 Nazi officials informed Franco’s government that they would
soon end the “special treatment” of Spanish Jews in occupied
Europe and begin arresting and deporting them as they did with Jews
from other countries. They urged Franco’s government to repatriate
the Spanish Jews. “We run the risk of an intensification of the
international hostility against us, especially in America, where we
will be accused of being assassins and accomplices of murderers,”
the senior official José María Doussinague explained to Francisco
Gómez-Jordana Sousa, the minister of foreign affairs. But “it is
unacceptable to contemplate the solution of bringing them to Spain
where their race, their wealth, their Anglophilia and their
freemasonry would turn them into agents of all kinds of intrigues.”

The regime floated a plan to let small numbers of Jewish refugees stay
while they awaited visas to go elsewhere. “Only after one group
leaves Spain—going through the country like light goes through
glass, without a trace—do we allow in the next group,”
Gómez-Jordana wrote. Meanwhile, as Preston details, the Franco regime
was fully aware of the Holocaust. There were, for example, dispatches
sent by Ángel Sanz Briz, a Spanish diplomat stationed in Budapest,
directly to Franco. Sanz Briz had obtained the testimonies of two
prisoners who had escaped from Auschwitz. They described the
systematic murder of some 45,000 Jews from Salonica. The Hungarian
government granted Sanz Briz permission to issue two hundred
passports, but he defied these limits, ultimately distributing about
two thousand. Similar efforts by Spanish diplomats in Greece, Romania,
France, and Bulgaria managed to save several thousand more Jews, but
Preston makes clear that they were acting without the approval of the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs. After the war Franco issued two decrees
aimed at expelling Sephardic Jews.

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.

Preston notes that the White House was fully aware that Franco was the
author of the articles. It didn’t matter. Spain had been excluded
from the United Nations and the Marshall Plan, but the United States
and Franco were eager to establish a cold war alliance. The myth
Franco propagated that he had been a savior of the Jews during World
War II and defeated communism during the civil war gave them cover to
do so. In 1953 the two countries signed the Pact of Madrid, which
allowed the US to build five military bases in Spain. Soon after,
Agustín Muñoz Grandes, Franco’s minister of the army and the
former leader of the Blue Division, spent two weeks in Washington
meeting with counterparts. The United States created a bespoke
Marshall Plan for Spain, rescuing its moribund economy. Franco’s
far-right Catholic dictatorship would become a model across Latin
America; Francoism could be found in Alfredo Stroessner’s Paraguay,
Jorge Rafael Videla’s Argentina, and Augusto Pinochet’s Chile,
among other places. (Pinochet, one of only a few heads of state to
attend Franco’s funeral, used the occasion to meet with neofascist
Italian terrorists who had recently shot two Chilean dissidents exiled
in Europe in an attempted assassination.)

It was William F. Buckley who was perhaps more responsible than anyone
for Franco’s absolution among American conservatives. “General
Franco is an authentic national hero,” Buckley wrote in _National
Review_ in 1957. “He is not an oppressive dictator. He is only as
oppressive as it is necessary to be to maintain total power, and that,
it happens, is not very oppressive, for the people, by and large, are
content.” Buckley, who admired Franco’s authoritarian Catholicism,
failed to mention that the war the general helped launch against a
democratic government caused half a million deaths and sent several
hundred thousand people into exile or that after the war his regime
executed tens of thousands of Republicans and imprisoned as many as a
million people in concentration camps and used them for slave labor.
Nor did Buckley mention Franco’s antisemitism, which never abated.
Twelve editions of the _Protocols_ were published during his
dictatorship.

Preston has made a lifelong investigation of twentieth-century Spanish
history. _Architects of Terror_, which draws on some of his earlier
writings, showcases his particular strength as a politically engaged,
rigorous, and accessible historian who is unafraid to imbue his work
with moral outrage. Its narratives are gripping, with telling, often
macabre details. “En route from Valladolid to Burgos, Mola had been
annoyed when his car was delayed while the road was cleared of a large
number of corpses,” he writes. “He demanded that future executions
take place away from main roads and that the bodies be buried
immediately.”

Preston grew up poor in postwar Liverpool. When he was a baby, he and
his mother contracted tuberculosis. His mother died after seven years
in a sanitorium, and Preston was raised by his grandparents. This
background, he has said, gave him an affinity for the Spanish
Republic. “You could not really be from working-class Liverpool and
not be left-wing,” he told Sebastiaan Faber, a Spanish professor at
Oberlin, in 2013. “In my feeling for the Republic I think there is
an element of indignation about the Republic’s defeat, solidarity
with the losing side.”

Preston won a scholarship to Oxford, then studied at the University of
Reading under Hugh Thomas, an upper-class historian who later sat as a
Tory peer. Thomas’s book _The_ _Spanish Civil War_ (1961) became,
for a time, the definitive account of the conflict. (Preston was
Thomas’s research assistant for a later edition.) Franco banned the
Spanish translation, but clandestine copies still circulated widely in
Spain. Previous Spanish-language histories of the civil war were
largely written by either supporters of the regime or exiled
Republicans who lacked access to historical records and often bore
political grudges. Preston called Thomas’s book “the first attempt
at an objective general view.”

An even greater influence on Preston was Herbert Southworth, a former
copper miner from Oklahoma. During the Depression Southworth landed a
job at the Library of Congress and began writing book reviews about
the Spanish Civil War for _The_ _Washington_ _Post_. The articles drew
the attention of the Spanish Republic’s ambassador in Washington,
who asked Southworth to work for the government’s information
bureau. During World War II Southworth was recruited by the Office of
Strategic Services (the forerunner to the CIA) and stationed in
Morocco, where he broadcast radio programs into Francoist Spain
attacking the regime. After the war he stayed in Morocco, bought
abandoned radio transmission towers, founded a radio station, and made
trips to Spain to buy books. In 1960 the Moroccan government
nationalized the station. Southworth left for France, where he bought
a chateau to house his library, which by then was the largest private
collection about the Spanish Civil War in the world. He waged war on
the Franco regime in books—_The Myth of Franco’s Crusade _(1963),
_Antifalange _(1965)—which were smuggled into Spain. They were so
damaging to its image that Franco created a special propaganda unit
largely to counter him.

Before completing his thesis, Preston had sent Southworth one of his
articles and received an enthusiastic response. “After that, I felt
as if he had made me his heir,” Preston recalled in an interview
with Enrique Moradiellos, a Spanish historian. “I visited him often
and he became my teacher, a sort of adoptive father.” Preston
followed Southworth’s model of political commitment. In the late
1960s he learned Spanish from Colombian exiles in London and later
became an adviser to left-leaning groups during Spain’s democratic
transition. _Franco _(1993), his groundbreaking biography, exposed the
caudillo as a venal and brutal dictator. _The Spanish Holocaust
_(2012), a dark, magisterial accounting of the depth of violence and
repression during the civil war and the dictatorship, further
destroyed the myth of a benevolent caudillo.

Preston has also challenged some of the left’s
hagiography—including George Orwell’s depiction of the anarchists
in _Homage to Catalonia_—but never abandoned his overarching empathy
for the Spanish Republic.

 
And he has pushed back against historians who have accused him of
bias, notably the revisionist American Stanley Payne. “It’s
accepted that being critical of the Nazis is a reasonable place to
start,” Preston told Faber.

 

That is obviously not the case with a critical stance on the Spanish
Right during the Civil War or the Franco dictatorship thereafter.
It’s a real problem. You’ve almost got to argue from first
principles every time.

Payne laid the foundation for the far right’s recent embrace of
Franco and even dismissed Franco’s antisemitism. “Though a certain
amount of anti-Jewish language was inherent in the regime’s
ultranationalist discourse, the caudillo was not particularly
anti-Semitic,” Payne claimed in his influential biography _Franco
_(2014). Recently Payne has offered further absolution in _First
Things_, a right-wing Catholic journal, praising Franco’s
“modernization and transformation” of Spain. Besides the mass
executions and concentration camps, this “modernization” included
making it illegal for a woman to have a driver’s license without
permission from her husband or father, reviving legal acceptance of
“honor killings,” and providing sanctuary to war criminals like
Karl Bömelburg, the head of the Gestapo in France, and Ante Pavelić,
a Nazi collaborator and the founder of the Ustaše, Croatia’s
fascist movement. Franco’s regime, which protected hundreds of Nazis
along with high-ranking officials from Vichy France and Mussolini’s
government, was far more hospitable to fascist refugees than it ever
was to Jewish ones.

Despite this history, or perhaps because of it, Franco’s reputation
continues to grow on the American far right. Some activists associated
with the Claremont Institute, a California think tank that has become
a leading center of the MAGA right, have taken to celebrating him.
“America is going to need a Protestant Franco,” Josh Abbotoy, a
former Claremont fellow, tweeted. Others in the pro-Trump orbit, like
Jack Posobiec, have been even more enthusiastic. Posobiec had a
“Franco Fridays” series on X that regularly shared paeans to
Franco with millions of followers. “FRANCO SAVED SPAIN AND FOUGHT
FOR CHRIST,” Posobiec wrote in 2023. Posobiec’s _Unhumans: The
Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them)
_(2024) devotes a chapter to the Spanish Civil War, which praises
Franco as “A Great Man of History” and features a jacket blurb
from J.D. Vance. Posobiec and his coauthor, Vance writes, “show us
what to do to fight back.”

In Spain, the effort to revive Franco’s reputation has been
accompanied by ostentatious philosemitism. In 2015, for example, the
government headed by the Partido Popular, which was founded by members
of Franco’s regime, enacted a law offering descendants of Sephardic
Jews expelled during the Inquisition a path to Spanish citizenship.
This not only obscured the antisemitic roots of Francoism but also
served as a useful cloak for the right’s increasing hostility to
Muslims.

This shift has only intensified with Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and
it is not limited to Spain. A deputy from France’s far-right
National Rally dismissed Palestinian civilian victims as “collateral
damage” even as the party’s candidates in the 2024 legislative
elections included a lawmaker who tweeted that “gas brought justice
to the victims of the Shoah” and another who was photographed
wearing a hat with a Nazi insignia. Last May, on the day the Spanish
government recognized a Palestinian state, Santiago Abascal, the
leader of Vox, Spain’s far-right party, went to Israel to denounce
the measure.

This blend of philosemitism and antisemitism has also become a feature
of the Trump administration. In June, for example, Trump bombed Iran
at Israel’s behest and shortly after referred to “Shylocks” at a
rally in Iowa. More recently, _The Boston Globe_ reported that a
Justice Department attorney defending the administration’s crackdown
on Harvard over allegations that the university fostered antisemitism
wrote an essay “from the perspective of Adolf Hitler” as a Harvard
undergraduate and later praised _Mein Kampf_. Last month Tucker
Carlson dispensed with the pretense of philosemitism altogether by
interviewing the Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes on his podcast. Fuentes
told Carlson that “organized Jewry” was a threat to the United
States. After Carlson was widely condemned for not pushing back, Kevin
Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, defended him.

Meanwhile, senior members of Vox have expressed their belief in the
“Great Replacement,” an antisemitic conspiracy theory that claims
Jews are orchestrating the extinction of the white race by promoting
nonwhite immigration to the West. “There is a real will in Brussels
to implement a population replacement in Europe,” Jorge Buxadé, a
former vice-president of the party, said in March 2022. Pedro Varela
Geiss, another Vox deputy, is a former bookseller who specialized in
Nazi and other antisemitic literature. But Vox and Israel are also
drawing closer to each other. In February the Israeli foreign
minister, Gideon Sa’ar, established formal communication channels
between Israel and several European far-right parties with antisemitic
roots, including Vox. This Janus-faced game (made easier by Israel’s
own ethnonationalism) is reminiscent of how Franco, who was once
praised by Golda Meir, masked his antisemitism with outreach to
Israel.

Some of those even to the right of Vox have been more explicit about
reviving the contubernio. Preston concludes his book with a 2021 rally
led by Isabel Peralta, an eighteen-year-old far-right activist, at a
Madrid cemetery, beside a monument to the Blue Division. “It is our
supreme obligation to fight for Spain and fight for a Europe that is
weak and has been brought down by the enemy,” she said.

An enemy that is always the same, albeit with different masks: the
Jew. Because there is no greater truth than that the Jew is to blame.
The Jew is to blame and the División Azul fought for that reason.
Communism is a Jewish invention.

But there have also been more hopeful echoes of the Spanish Civil War
reverberating in Europe. Last year Raphaël Glucksmann, then the
leader of the Socialist Party in France, who is also Jewish, helped
organize the New Popular Front, a coalition of France’s fractious
left parties with other political leaders. They chose the name as an
homage to the Popular Front of the 1930s, when in France, as in Spain,
left parties came together to defeat an ascendant far right in the
1936 elections. (León Blum, a Jewish socialist who entered politics
in response to the Dreyfus Affair, became prime minister.) The New
Popular Front came in first in the 2024 legislative elections, defying
virtually every prediction, with the National Rally relegated to
third. As the results became known, a crowd of tens of thousands
filled the streets of Paris, chanting “¡NO PASARÁN!,” the
defiant cry of Republican Spain, which had once, at least for a time,
turned the fascists back.

_DAN KAUFMAN is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine
and the author of The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of
a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics. He is
currently a fellow of the Watchdog Writers Group at the University of
Missouri. (December 2025)_

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