Presented by José Antonio Primo de Rivera as a speech to Falangists at the Teatro Calderón, Valladolid, March 4, 1934

The following speech by José Antonio Primo de Rivera was made at the first major meeting of the Falange Española de las J.O.N.S., the unified movement created by the merger of the Falange Española and the Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional-Sindicalista in early 1934. Three thousand fascists and national-syndicalists converged on the city of Valladolid for the event, filling the grand Calderón Theater which had been bedecked with massive black-and-red banners and Spanish flags. José Antonio, Ramiro Ledesma, Julio Ruiz de Alda, and other leaders of the new movement took the stage to a storm of fascist salutes, before the Jefe Nacional gave his address – a short, powerful speech stridently rejecting liberalism, socialism, and reaction while advocating a new path leading to a uniquely Spanish form of revolutionary-nationalism. The speech and meeting proved to be a baptism of fire – as the Falangists left the theater they were shot at by communists, with a street-fight promptly breaking out in which one Falangist was killed. Nonetheless, the meeting was regarded by the participants as a great success. 

This is not the place to applaud anyone or to cheer. Here no one is anybody, each is only a mere component, a soldier of this task-force set on a task which is ours and that of Spain.

Let me tell anyone about to cheer yet again that I will not thank him for the acclaim. We have not come here to be applauded. What is more, I might almost say that we have not come to teach you anything. We have come here to learn.

There is a great deal to be learnt from this land and this sky of Castile by us, who in many cases live far removed from them. This land of Castile, which is the land of no airs or graces, the essence of land, the land which is neither local color, nor the river, nor the boundary, nor the hillside. The land which is certainly not the sum of a  number of estates, or the basis of certain landed interests to be haggled over in assemblies, but which is land itself, land as the repository of eternal values, austerity of conduct, the spirit of religion in life, speech and silence, the solidarity of ancestors and descendants.

And above this quintessential land, the quintessential sky.

The sky so blue, so bare of passing clouds, so utterly without the greenish reflections of leafy groves, so purely blue that one might say it was almost white. And so Castile, with the quintessential land and the quintessential sky gazing at one another, has never been resigned to being a mere province; it could not help but aspire at all times to being an empire. Castile has never managed to understand what is local, it has understanding only for what is universal, which is why Castile denies itself the certainty of limits, perhaps because it is unlimited, both in scope and in stature. And therefore Castile, that land encrusted with wonderful names – Tordesillas, Medina del Campo, Madrigal de las Altas Torres – that land of the Chancery [i.e. the medieval Chancery], of fairs and castles, that is, of justice, trade and militia, gives us an idea of what constituted the Spain we no longer possess, and oppresses our hearts with a deep sense of loss. Continue reading →