The threat of religious fundamentalism today seems far-away; physically and politically marginalised on the bleaker shores of ‘civilisation’. But fifty years ago, an extreme religious nationalist group, a minority in its own country, took control of a western democracy and ruled it by blood and bigotry for over forty years: Franco’s Spain
The roots of fundamentalism
Religious fundamentalism is not moral or philosophical but a social phenomenon. It takes root amongst socially dispossessed classes and feeds on the profound alienation and loss felt by the dispossessed. This is true of the white underclass of the mid-West, the exiled tribesmen of the Taliban or the aristocratic-military clans of Nationalist Spain. Though dripping with the sacred, it’s aims are always profane: the recovery of lost ‘place’ or moral supremacy. Where it has a political dimension—and it often does—its followers will also seek the recovery of political power and economic privilege. This was true of both the Spanish Nationalists in 1936 and the Taliban in the 1990s. In 1939 the Falangist ruling class and its religious allies took control of the State, its institutions and functionaries, running the country as one vast monopoly board. Banks and trading houses, industry and commerce were controlled by allied families; pulpit, blackboard and the means of mass communication by the Church. Although the restoration of democracy and the revival of a free civic life in Spain since the 1980s has quite broken the hold of the Church on most people, many of the economic alliances, (and with them cultural and political power), still persist.
Paradise lost
Shattered by a profound sense of displacement and loss, fundamentalists look back to a supposed time of purity and moral rectitude. Archaism is a source of strength, whether inspired by Bible or Q’uran. The terrorist repression which crushed the Spanish people after Franco’s victory revealed the backwardness of social and human relations, a backwardness hailed as a virtue in those days of triumphant fascism and Nazism. Two barbaric systems, that of the past and that of the present, combined and encouraged one another.
Fundamentalism—because of its origins in the lust for power through moral ascendancy—brings together forces seeking moral, cultural and economic revanchism; a return to social relations based on older customs and power relationships. In Spain, people were forced into Church-sanctioned and defended roles: the all-powerful husband and father, the obedient and fecund wife, the dutiful child etc. State, Church and Family were the pillars of an imagined Spanish golden age, which would return if people remained loyal to the Falangist State, obedient to the Church and kept their economic and social place. Just as the Taliban prescribed modes of social behaviour, (men to wear beards, women the burka and so on), in a conscious reaching back to the supposed purity of earlier times when Islam was a unified and imperial force, sweeping away the decadent societies on its borders.
Because of this, fundamentalism takes root most easily in societies and communities that are stagnant or decaying, where ruling forces are losing their sense of power and purpose but new political and social forces have not arisen. This explains the rise of fundamentalist and socially-conservative religious movements in Europe between the wars as much as it does fundamentalism in the Islamic world; more concerned with overthrowing corrupt and stagnant dictatorships in Egypt, Pakistan and Indonesia than challenging the West.
Land, blood and bigotry
Because of the yearning for lost power and wealth, while fundamentalism masquerades as a movement aiming to re-establish a moral or theological society, its leadership group is usually seeking to protect or acquire control of economic, cultural, intellectual and social life. By 1936, a powerful anti-clericalism had taken root in Spain, threatening the power, privilege and economic survival of the Catholic Church. The Church was (and remains) a big landowner and the violent movements for land reform threatened this concentration of power and wealth: where peasant poverty was most extreme and widespread, the illiterate rural classes looked on [the Church] as an instrument of oppression. In the same way in Afghanistan, before and after the Russian invasion of the 1980s, the stable tenure of the opium fields broke down; struggle for the land—latifundia in Spain, poppy fields in Afghanistan—became inextricably linked with a war for the soul of the nation.
One powerful emotional prop of the Falangist regime was the ‘pact of blood’, the bond between those who had fought and then carried out the mass reprisals against the ‘vencidos’, the defeated. Another was the myth of martyrdom, especially the Falangist leader Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, but all the other ‘absent ones’ too. Blood cemented together the disparate groups who inherited power in Spain after the Nationalist victory and ongoing pogroms, mass executions and summary killings were aimed at keeping them united. This idea that blood and loyalty is owed to those who have sacrificed themselves, martyrs and prophets, is of course a powerful current within jihadist Islam, including the Taliban. In both, there was and is a conscious effort to infuse the nation and community with the idea of (dutiful and obedient) suffering and sacrifice, to enable those who control the message to control the people.
The ideology of the Movimiento Nacional which was forced upon the Spanish people after the Nationalist victory in 1939 was infused by fear and hatred of a supposed Judeo-Masonic-Marxist international conspiracy, whether the western democracies (in the 1940s) or—after Spain had entered the US camp in the 1950s—international communism. Fundamentalism thrives on the fear of the ‘other’, who is not primarily an economic or military threat but a moral disease, a cancer of immorality and licence. Even with victory the philosophy of fundamentalism requires new enemies to be conjured up: “Nevertheless the struggle of Good against Evil is not ended. It would be puerile to believe the Devil has yielded. He will invent new snares and new masks and he will take new forms in keeping with the times” – Franco 1959.
Morality and control
The institutions of fundamentalism use ‘morality’ as a tool to seize power and then control society. In Spain the Associacion Catolica Nacional de Propagandistas, founded by the Jesuit Ayala, consciously aimed to conquer power. It believed that if the church did not enter politics then politics would enter and destroy the church. As such it had an ideological—not moral—antagonism towards secularism, the irrational belief that a moral crusade had been forced upon the faithful by an alien progressivism; just as the Taliban and other regressive movements often believe, propagate and feed upon.
In Spain, all literature, media, newspapers and education were in the control of the Church. Bishops issued legally-sanctioned decency regulations. What gave them force were the variety of state-funded institutions, laws and executive agencies established by the Falange. In Spain it was the Guardia Civil, the Social Brigades (active everywhere repressing ‘subversion’ but also given special, summary powers to crush strikes or student agitation), town mayors, provincial governors and the like. In Afghanistan, the Taliban relied on a religious police force—the munkrat—under the control of the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice to enforce rules regarding appearance, dress, employment, access to medical care, behaviour, religious practice, and freedom of expression. People who violated the edicts were subject to summary punishment: beatings, detention or both.
The Jesuits returned and took over the education of students. New laws had to conform to Catholic doctrine. Primary education was put under the control of the Church, which required pupils and teachers to attend Bible classes. Teachers were watched over by parish priests and candidates for the professions had to have good churchgoing credentials. But though the Church wanted to control education, it did not see a point in peasants being educated at all. In 1950 only 58% of children attended primary school and 8% secondary school, where they were brainwashed about the degeneracy, immorality and unclean nature of the ‘reds’ (in fact any progressive). This echoes of the worst Islamic propaganda, which regularly portrays the unbeliever as degenerate and unclean. With impurity—of course—came censorship, taken to extreme lengths: books banned, poets imprisoned or exiled, satellite dishes banned. In Spain films were re-touched: a bare-chested boxer must be given a vest, the word thigh banned, an actress’s breasts made smaller. In Afghanistan floggings, loppings and executions for possessing or distributing banned books, music or films; a flight from reality in the pursuit of purity.
Immorality is frequently equated with political treachery. Both the Nationalists in Spain and the Taliban in Afghanistan believed that moral depravity (adultery, sexual licence and homosexuality) would so rot society it would easily fall prey to its enemies: In any Islamic country where adultery becomes common, that country is destroyed and enters the domination of the infidels because their men become like women and women cannot defend themselves. In Nationalist Spain, tens of thousands each year were condemned for being a ‘red’, which implied moral depravity. Under the Law of Social Danger, homosexuals were declared grandes pecadores but also rojos (reds). The Republic had recognized women’s right to divorce and, to a certain degree, to sexual liberty. With the triumph of Franco in 1939, affectionate and sexual relationships returned to the traditional model. Sex was considered wrong, love was eternal and only within marriage and a moral double standard between the sexes reigned: men could have extramarital relationships but husbands were allowed (indeed expected) to beat and kill wives suspected of adultery. Anything which suggested sexual non-conformity or defiance of church laws was construed as political deviancy, leading to arrest, torture, imprisonment and execution. Tens of thousands were imprisoned or killed.
Another aspect of this control and a parallel between Spain of the 1930s and Afghanistan of the 1980s, was the preparation of young men and boys for crusade or jihad in all-male environments with high levels of authoritarian and religious indoctrination. In Spain it was said that “… the young must train for the struggle, must worship violence. In the young, patriotic violence is just, necessary and desirable. We must wholeheartedly accept a moral code based on violence and a warlike spirit” – Onesimo Redondo, right-wing Libertad group, 1931. By segregating and excluding women, perpetuating a blood-soaked machismo based on the pillars of patriotism, piety and ignorance became profoundly easier: “… They had no memories of their tribes, their elders, their neighbours … They admired war because it was the only occupation they could possibly adapt to. Their simple belief in a messianic, puritan Islam which had been drummed into them by simple village mullahs was the only prop they could hold on to and which gave their lives some meaning.” – Rashid.
The death of faith, the beginning of freedom
Why then, is Spain today a place of vibrant culture and sexual freedom? Because the desire for freedom and social justice had been driven underground—the message to us today of Pan’s Labyrinth—but not eradicated. In the 1960s and 70s it gained new champions: students, poets, intellectuals, the remnants of the old labour movement and—to their credit—Christians inspired by the new creed of liberation theology. Social change too played its part: tourism, labour emigration to other European nations and economic development introduced more liberal customs to society, though not without a fight: one newspaper declared tourists a ‘grotesque cavalcade’ and called for ‘Christ’s scourge on these desecrators’. The car and student apartments facilitated sexual encounters without commitment. The contraceptive pill became available, despite the opposition of Franco’s government. The boundaries of freedom were widened by the courageous action of millions of people, not all agreeing on all things, but desperate for a return to an open and tolerant society purged of the grotesque institutions of repression and control.
In this we understand the plight of Afghanistan. Unable to break free from Islam as the fundamental basis of all institutions and social behaviour, without a free civil society or strong movements for progress and, more importantly, without any intellectual or social idea of progress, Afghanistan risks a return to fundamentalism and with it the death of society.
Social progress comes about through struggle against oppressive forces and institutions. The hundreds of thousands of courageous men and women who fought in Spain for thirty years—and carry on fighting today—have earned the measure of freedom they have. In Afghanistan—and Pakistan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia—the struggle goes on because the idea of fundamental religion, that religious belief must be the basis of civil society, has not been finally discredited and defeated.
Extracts taken from:
Spain: Dictatorship To Democracy by Raymond Carr and Juan Pablo Fusi;
Spain Under Franco by Max Gallo;
Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia by Ahmed Rashid.