Abascal glosses Primo de Rivera to the applause of the public at a Vox rally

Abascal has recovered the words of the Falangist leader, tried by the Government of the Republic for uprising and shot on November 20, 1936, to attack those who, he said, “want to start desecrating graves again” and “unearth hatred”. Although he has not named anyone specifically when speaking on this point, Abascal has referred to those who have “again” a “profane mania”, in alleged reference to the Government and its parliamentary partners who this week gave the definitive green light with their votes to the Democratic Memory Law.

With this new law, the remains of the Falangist leader should go from the main altar of the Valle de los Caídos basilica, where they are now, to the common crypts. That movement would be, for Abascal, a way to “unearth hatred to generate tension” by those who “do not love” the homeland and “do not think about love between Spaniards.” If the exhumation of Primo de Rivera materializes, his remains will complete a long journey in just under a century: he was buried in a mass grave in Alicante; the rebel side took it out of there in 1939 and moved it to the El Escorial Monastery; and in 1959, Franco exhumed him again and buried him in the Valley of the Fallen, just one day before the inauguration of that mausoleum.

This Saturday, in addition to glossing the Falangist leader, he boasted about the history of his country that he and his followers, he said, assume “without gag, without fear and with pride.” “We assume the past without hemiplegia [parálisis total o parcial de un lado del cuerpo], without black legends and neither roses. We assume our history without gag, without fear and with pride. They are not going to take away the victories or the defeats from which we have learned so much”, he said, and then defended the statues that these vague people “want to throw down”: “We want to raise them when necessary”.

Those demolished statues could be those of Christopher Columbus in some countries of America, thrown away as a way of resignifying the so-called “conquest”, but also, given their lack of definition and the mentions of the Falangist leader, those of Franco and other members of his Government withdrawn in the last decades effect of the Law of Historical Memory.

Finally, the leader of Vox defended the nation “as a handle for those who have nothing.” “They want to destroy our heritage, especially that of those who have the least. They want to destroy the nation, the protection of the weakest, the support of those who have nothing and are experiencing worse”, he has said. “We have a duty to be grateful, everything we have is inherited, nothing belongs to us, we are its trustees, testamentary executors of a legacy that we will have to deliver improved to future generations”, without clarifying whether part of that legacy is also made up of the ideas of José Antonio Primo de Rivera.

Meloni, Morawiecki or Milei, among the guests

Abascal’s speech was the highlight of Saturday’s Viva 22 festival, an event organized by Vox in the Mad Cool space in Madrid under the motto “The History we made together”, and in which they also participated yesterday far-right leaders from other countries such as the Argentinian Javier Milei, who calls himself an anarcho-capitalist and just a few weeks ago questioned the numbers of disappeared persons from the last military dictatorship in his country; or André Ventura, the leader of the far-right Portuguese Chega party.

However, the headliners of the festival will intervene this afternoon: the neo-fascist Giorgia Meloni, winner of the last elections in Italy, and the Polish Prime Minister Mateus Morawiecki. At the last minute, the event has announced the participation with recorded videos of former US President Donald Trump and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

“Let’s go back to 36”

In addition to political speeches, the festival of the extreme right has scheduled various recreational and artistic activities on Saturday and Sunday. The closing of yesterday’s session was led by Infovlogger and Los Meconios, a techno-pop trio that presented their hit Let’s go back to 36, a song with the musical base of an Aqua theme that began with verses like “we always piss off the communists, feminists and liberals”, or “the left that governs here is called the popular front, surrounded by revolutionaries who are couch potatoes”.

Then, encouraged by the euphoria of the public, they raised the tone and intoned things like “feminists protest gang rape; there are 10 more to investigate, I don’t care if they are from Senegal”, “we are the resistance, we are fascists”, or “if you are gay, you want to go see the LGTB pride, you must show your good homosexual card”. “They will want to send you all to the gulag. Welcome to the resistance”, they sang while the screens at the back of the stage alternated communist and Spanish flags.

“We are up to the balls of progressives, right? Well, we are going to sing to the progressives”, one of the artists harangued before singing another song from his repertoire, Progre es yo, this time with the music of Bajo del mar, which has been quite successful, according to the images of the event, among the younger attendees, many of them minors, who squeezed into the front rows and waved their arms from side to side. Then they sang a version of Rigoberta Bandini’s Ay, Mama entitled, in a show of originality, Ay, Papa, with the refrain: “I don’t know why our penises are so scary”.

This Sunday, the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH) has asked the State Attorney General’s Office to investigate the action, considering that the artists may have committed a hate crime.

Before, on the central stage, numerous people dressed in medieval costumes had appeared, with not very prepared costumes of kings or nobles of the 16th century or even Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. It was a journey through history that was perhaps more generous with Spain than reality was. The common thread of the theater is a frustrated grandfather with his grandson, who prefers to play the game than read about the history of his country, and who takes him out of his deception to show him the great milestones of the kings and the Spanish armies. “Combats, oaths, duels, honor and faith. Discoveries, kings, battles, nation, great inventions, empire. Leaders, blood, heroes and miracles”, summarizes the grandfather, with a pin of the Spanish flag on his lapel.

The supposed story begins, as is usual in nationalist stories, long before Spain was thought of not as a nation but even as an entity: the battle of Covadonga. “Eight centuries it took to drive out the Muslims,” ​​the grandfather tells his grandson, emphasizing “the victory cross” that supposedly united all the Spanish peoples who were fighting against the invasion.

All this happened in a video that the organization projected on the screens of the stage, but at a given moment, actors or extras dressed as Visigoth and Muslim soldiers began to appear, brandishing swords on the stage with music that was supposed to be epic. The grandfather was presenting all the kings and later the great scenes of the history of the past millennium, in a story that concludes with the loss of the Philippines and the last colonies.

At that moment the grandfather tells him: “This is the Spain that we have built. You are the heir of all.” In this enlarged history, the 20th century is not touched much, except to name some artists or researchers. The performance ends with the boy deciding to abandon his Fortnite game, grab a sword, and fight alongside the Christian soldiers against the Moors. Fade to black and fireworks before the final electropop concert with far-right slogans.