Spain Left to Chance

Spain Left to Chance

By José Antonio Primo de Rivera

Taken from Las Cadenas de Obligado

Translated from the Spanish by Roberto Hope

In very few parties is there a lack of a useful man. What there is no remedy for is the party system. We have seen this repeatedly in the succession of experiments which has been our lot to bear, and we will see it again in the next elections.

The experience — which on the other hand has done nothing but to confirm what reason had already announced — can be formulated with the exactitude of a law of mathematics. There is no possible politics, nor possible history nor possible homeland if every two years everything is put to revision motivated by some election.

The great historical architectures have been at least the work of a lifetime of a leader or a king. Most of the time they have been the work of an entire dynasty. In some other places, it has been that of a revolution which has imposed its principles and has stuck to them during forty or fifty years by the succession in power of men anointed by the right of the revolution itself. If it is not that way, all effort is useless, neither two nor five years is time enough to accomplish anything, and it is well known that popular impatience leans every two years or every five to change its posture. There is no time period without some discomfort, and the simple judgment of masses always tends to receive what is good of any period of time as a natural and free thing but to see what is bad a consequence of the ineptitude of the rulers. Rulers are never judged for what they have done but for what they have not done. This way, as there is no one in the world who is capable of doing everything that is imaginable, nobody is free from merciless criticism for everything he has not done.

This criticism of what is lacking, this crying for what remains is the best source for that set of fallacies, injustices, fabrications, called electoral propaganda. The most famous builders of nations would have not concluded their work if every two years or every three, in full effort, when it was still so difficult to glimpse their final outcome would have had to submit themselves to the irresponsible direction of all the demagogues in all the taverns in all the towns.

The suffrage system not only suffers all of the vices of demagogy, but it stimulates them. To gain votes it is necessary to excite the electors. Between one candidate and another, strifes to death are struck: each of the two has to increase the dose of the excitant posed by the rival. When the known reserves are exhausted, it becomes necessary to make use of new venoms not previously tested. There are political drugs such as nationalism, which maybe would never have appeared had they not have been required by some candidate, in an electoral trance, to flagellate the sensibility of the voting masses, perhaps already weakened by the abuse of other worn out drugs. 

There cannot be a single normal man that defends in good faith this diabolical system. Only hating the people can one wish to have a system which turns them into a field of experimentation for all the imbeciles, ambitious, frenzied, spongers, and phonies. On a guileless, tender popular mass, prone to credulity and rage, the storming of all the electoral scum, skilled at the game of torture and deception is allowed. Some candidates will come out triumphant, and others defeated, from the ones and the others little will be known until the next elections; but in their wake will remain, poisoning the souls, enormous stores of rancor without possible relief, because demagogues, in order to feed the rancor, inflame unrealizable appetites.

Why is it that the public sale of drugs or pornographic novels is not tolerated while this free market of political narcotics is tolerated? It is tolerated simply because a State which admits this system does not believe in itself nor in its proper justifying mission and to have the injustice of its existence be forgiven, has to simulate that its own existence is put at stake every two or three years. Our State, which will have the conscience of its great mission at the service of Spain´s eternal unity, will not let Spain be exposed to this turbid fate in the urns.