Talk:Francisco Franco

Objectivity Improvements

There are some glaring failures of objectivity in this controversial article. (Content must be written from a neutral point of view.)

For example, Hitler's policy is described as "shrewd and pragmatic": "A hundred per cent Franco's victory was not desirable from a German Point of view; rather were we interested in a continuance of the war and in the keeping up of the tension in the Mediterranean."[89]

Yet Stalin's Politburo - espousing virtually the same sentiment - is a "shocking" "Machiavellian calculation": "it would be more advantageous to the Soviet Union if neither of the warring camps gained proponderant [sic] strength, and if the war in Spain dragged on as long as possible and thus tied up Hitler for a long time."

Conservative/Right-Wing Bias

I think it is somewhat misleading to pretend that Franco is not generally considered a Fascist by most people and organisations, whether they be leftist, centrist or even centre-right. Generally, only conservative apologists for America and Britain who want to portray Fascism as a left-wing ideology and deny that their countries ever worked with Fascists contest that figures like Franco and Pinochet were Fascist. Realistically speaking, most people when asked would agree that Franco was a Fascist. The ideological similarities between Franco, Hitler and Mussolini's dictatorships should be evidence enough of this. 82.5.76.181 (talk) 01:25, 11 January 2023 (UTC)

Franco's post-war regime (and Franco ruled for thirty years after the end of the war) cannot be described as fascist. It was an authoritarian and conservative regime with several modern additions. The statement contained in your second sentence is problematic too: in Italy, for example, Renzo de Felice, the most important historian of fascism, does not consider Francoism in its definitive form as a fascist regime. The mere fact that a pillar of the regime was the Catholic Church prevents it from doing so. Alex2006 (talk) 10:49, 14 January 2023 (UTC)

@Alessandro57: Do you mean that the Catholic Church did not represent a pillar of Mussolini's regime? A regime that, since 1929, established catholicism as the only official cult of the State, the only religion that should be taught in schools, the only rite of marriage officially valid, etc.? By the way, just like in Franco's Spain. So this is definitely not a valid argument. PedroAcero76 (talk) 00:31, 16 January 2023 (UTC)

Italian Fascism was always anti Catholic, and the Catholic church was never associated with power in Italy as it was by Franco in Spain. Catholics in Italy had no part either in Fascism's seizure of power or in the administration of the state, as was the case in Spain (needless to remind you of the role of the Opus Dei under Franco). The Conciliazione, which in any case was already "ripe" before Mussolini, was made because through it Mussolini hoped to gain the benevolence of the church toward the regime and to increase its prestige toward the Catholic part of the population, and the church hoped to rescue from Fascism its structures on the territory, especially the Azione Cattolica, which was seen as the only competitor of fascism in the education of youth. From this point of view the Conciliazione was in the long run a success for the church, because it enabled it to raise a ruling class that was precisely the one that took power in 1948, but it was always seen by Mussolini as a rival power, as evidenced by the clash over the Azione Cattolica that occurred only two years later, in 1931, when Mussolini ordered the dissolution of all Catholic youth organizations and the incompatibility between membership in the PNF and the youth catholic organization. This meant in practice exclusion from almost all employment, public and private. Pius XI reacted to then with the encyclical "Non abbiamo bisogno" which reaffirmed the primacy of Catholic education over Fascist education. The final crisis was averted at the last moment, but the tension between the two powers remained and grew after 1938 and the racial laws. If you are interested in the relations between Italian fascism and the Catholics I can recommend the corresponding chapters in De Felice's work on Mussolini: in the second tome of the second volume is described the Conciliazione, while in the first tome of the third volume you find the crisis with the church in 1931 which I described above. Alex2006 (talk) 06:19, 16 January 2023 (UTC)

We had an RfC about this less than a year ago. You can read it here. The consensus is that we include Franco in lists of fascist leaders and describe the scholarly controversy over whether and to what extent he was a fascist in the article. Anyone who tells you that the answer is "clearly, unequivocally fascist" or ""clearly, unequivocally not fascist" isn't apprised of the state of scholarship on the topic. Cheers y'all. Generalrelative (talk) 08:57, 16 January 2023 (UTC)

Thanks GeneralRelative, I missed it! Alles klar :-) Cheers, Alex2006 (talk) 09:20, 16 January 2023 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 14 February 2023

I just want to remove flags and icons from military person infobox per MOS:INFOBOXFLAG. 112.205.163.46 (talk) 08:37, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

 Done Lightoil (talk) 02:41, 19 February 2023 (UTC)

Conservative, not fascist

Franco was a staunch conservative and is identified as such in the introduction. I readded the conservatism template, in which he had been included for a long time. Strictly speaking, the fascism template ought to be removed altogether since Franco was a conservative Christian monarchist and not a fascist falangist, but I moved it to the section under which any potentially fascist elements of his government are discussed. Trakking (talk) 08:41, 19 February 2023 (UTC)

You can find the current community consensus about the inclusion of the fascism navigation template in this article here: Talk:Francisco Franco/Archive 6#RfC: "Fascist" categories and sidebar. It endorses the addition of the fascism sidebar in this article. As whether a plurality of additional sidebars (and whether they should be favoured in a heading location over the fascist one) should be added, please seek a new consensus here, opening a request for comment. What do you mean by being a "staunch conservative"? If your are implying that Fascism has nothing to do with a conservative and/or reactionary worldview from an intellectual point of view in a sort of oil and water dichotomy, that would read like a longstanding propaganda point of American Francoites, quite alien to scholar analysis. I would personally add no movement/ideology vertical navigation template to any biographical article (as I consider them a playground of ideology fanboys/fangirls and pov-pushers to gatekeep biographies, and push misinformed capricious and haphazard personal opinions and flimsy set-theory-based arguments devoid of any nuance, belonging to a namespace lacking sufficient source-based editorial oversight and well as generally wrecking the article layout), but that is not the current consensus in this article and I abide to it.--Asqueladd (talk) 13:33, 19 February 2023 (UTC)

+1 to each of these points. Very well put. Generalrelative (talk) 15:05, 19 February 2023 (UTC)

Before we continue this debate, let's get one thing straight. Fascism was not a right-wing conservative movement. Traditional European right-wing politics throughout the 19th and 20th century meant Christianity, Aristocracy, Monarchy. It meant tradition, family life, subsidiarity, property rights. The fascists did not believe in any of that; they were enemies of the old traditional order. They believed in concepts like proletarian nation. Proletarians! Does not sound very right-wing, does it? Even the fascist godfather himself Mussolini started off as a socialist and had a proletarian anarchist as father.

I grew up on one of the most expensive streets in Sweden. I have kin that is one of the wealthiest families in Switzerland. I have family in Austria, family in Norway, family in the United States—very right-wing countries. Do you think there are any fascist sympathies among any of these people? The answer is no. Proletarian, revolutionary, secular fascists are indistinguishable from communists. Their main goal is the same: a totalitarian one-party state with egalitarianism and "progressivism". A recommendable read on the topic is the 400 page long work The Menace of the Herd (1943) by Austrian aristocrat and polymath Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, who traces fascism/national socialism to left-wing people like the Jacobins and Marxists. The most fascist nation today is North Korea—that communist hellhole.

Also—I am a teacher in History and specialize in political philosophy, which gives me authority. I will invite a few persons who might contribute with additional expertise on the topic: @Gondolabúrguer, @Alejandro Basombrio, @Kanclerz K-Tech, @LongLivePortugal. Trakking (talk) 16:39, 19 February 2023 (UTC)

You most certainly do not have authority here. I might very well be an academic professional with a PhD and peer-reviewed publications on this topic, but it wouldn't mean I outrank you either. I could be a sentient potato and my contributions would be just as valid so long as they're based on reliable sources. Seriously, you need to familiarize yourself with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines before editing further. Start with WP:VERIFY. See also WP:CANVASS. Oh, and don't skip Talk:Fascism/FAQ. Once you've read all that, we can indeed "continue the debate". Generalrelative (talk) 16:55, 19 February 2023 (UTC)

@Generalrelative: Yes, I do have great authority in the sense of "knowledge," not in the sense of "power," which very few people on Wikipedia exert. You and your comrade try to exert power, but you have no authority, no exhaustive knowledge, behind your actions. This is the difference. Trakking (talk) 17:20, 19 February 2023 (UTC)

Hello.

I believe that Francisco Franco was an authoritarian Conservative, like ROC's Chiang Kai-shek. And unlike USA's Ronald Reagan.

Definitely, F. Franco and C. Kai-shek were not Fascists. They were Christians, not Deists, not materialists, not Gnostic, not millenarians. And definitely they were authoritarians - Ronald Reagan was not. However, F. Franco and C. Kai-shek were authoritarians many degrees below the level of Fascists, who themselves were authoritarians many degrees below the level of Socialists - Socialists are totalitarians, almost always.

(Sometimes, Socialists are simply dumb enough to have only a short-term vision, therefore losing power in the long term. In these cases, they have the wrath of psychopaths usually associated with Socialists, but only aim at the following day. Then, a non-Socialist leader comes in the next future election.)

In conclusion: F. Franco was not a Fascist. Gondolabúrguer (talk) 17:11, 19 February 2023 (UTC)