Posted on by Erik Chipchase

useless-catalanfacts:

Some photos taken in 1943 and 1944 of the prisoners of the Modelo jail in Barcelona (Catalonia) being forced to take part in Catholic religious acts in the early years of the fascist national-Catholic dictatorship of Spain led by general Franco.

Thousands of these inmates were political prisoners, taken for having fought against the fascist coup or for their activism before the war. Religion was one of the main pillars of the fascist dictatorship, who saw Catalans and leftists in general (what the fascists called rojo-separatistas: “separatists-reds” in Spanish) as dangerous Godless criminal atheists and radical anti-clericals.

Religion was used as another weapon to punish them by forcing them to take part in Catholic masses and a program of national-Catholic re-education.

Outside of prisons, the Catholic religion was mandatory, too. Everyone had to be baptised and do the catechesis and communion, marry through the church (any previous marriage done outside of the Catholic church was not considered valid and their children legally bastards), the Catholic church had a huge power in the dictatorship’s government and control in education, and influence in the public morale and permitted behaviour.

Photos from the Arxiu Municipal de Barcelona.

Posted on by Erik Chipchase

silenttccries:

[…] While [Umberto] Eco is firm in claiming “There was only one Nazism,” he says, “the fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change.” Eco reduces the qualities of what he calls “Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism” down to 14 “typical” features. “These features,” writes the novelist and semiotician, “cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.”

  1. The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
  2. The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
  3. The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
  4. Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
  5. Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
  6. Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
  7. The obsession with a plot. “Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged.”
  8. The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
  9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
  10. Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
  11. Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
  12. Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
  13. Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
  14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”

(link)