← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · triskelion
Thread ID: 8405 | Posts: 6 | Started: 2003-07-24
2003-07-24 06:04 | User Profile
Ramiro de Maeztu was a leading Falangist intellectual and activism. What follows is an intorduction to his thoughts.
Stoicism and Transcendentalism
Ramiro de Maeztu
Its Spanish idearium begins Ganivet seating the thesis of which: "When the ideal constitution of Spain is examined, the moral element and, in certain way, monk deeper than in her are discovered, like serving to him as foundation, are the stoicism; not the vital and heroic stoicism of Catón, neither the calm and majestic stoicism of Aurelio Frame, nor the rigid and extreme stoicism of Epicteto, but the natural and human stoicism of Séneca. Séneca is not Spanish, son of Spain by chance: he is Spanish by essence; and nonAndalusian, because when he was born not yet the vandals had come to Spain; that to be born later, in the Average Age perhaps, he was not born in Andalusia, but in Castile. All the doctrine of Séneca is condensed in this education: "you do not let yourself overcome by anything strange your spirit; it thinks in the middle of the accidents of the life, that you have within you a force mother, something hard and indestructible, like an adamantine axis, around as they turn the stingy facts that they form the plot of the newspaper to live; and they are as they were the events which on you fall, they are of which we called prosperous, or of that we called adverse, or of that they seem to envilecer to us with its contact, mantente of such way signs and raised, that can at least be always said of you that you are a man."
These words are deserving of reflection and analysis, and they would not be it if they did not say of our somewhat important spirit, that the intuition of we ourself and the examples of History assure to us to be certÃÂsimo. And what in them it has of certain and important, it is that, in effect, when falls on the Spaniards an adverse event, like losing a war, for example, we did not adopt exaggerated aptitudes, as the one of you suppose that the justice of the Universe is violet, because the luck of the battles finds to us be opposite or that all the civilization is in decay, because they are frustrated our plans, but that we conduct ourselves in such a way that "always it is possible to be said of us that we are men", because neither us Father the misfortune, nor we never lose, like town, the sense of our relative value in the totality of the towns of the world. By this condition or this habit, it has been able to say of us Gabriela Mistral, in memorable poetry, who we are good losers. Neither we swore eternal hatred to the winner, nor humiliated ourselves before its success, to the point to consider him like of wood superior to ours. Argentina is the thesis of which: "the victory does not grant rights", but its ancestry is net Hispanic, because we do not think that the towns or the men are better by to have won. And it is not that we despise the value of the victory and we compare it to the defeat. The victory seems good to us, but we think that the winner not must it to intrinsic superiority on the won one, but to be better prepared or to than the circumstances him they have been favorable. And in winch of this distinction, that seems fundamental to me, the Hispanic ideal has to be elaborated.
What we do not make the Spaniards, and in this Ganivet was deceived, is supposition that we have "within us a force mother, something hard and indestructible, like in adamantine axis". This believed the stoics to it, but the stoicism or feeling of the own respect is aristocratic persuasion that sheltered some superior men, but so convinced of its own excellence that did not believe it reasonable to the common one of the mortals, and although in Spain they are produced and they are continued producing men of this type, its feeling has not been possible to spread, nor the nation has paraphrased San AgustÃÂn, to say itself like Ganivet: "Noli foras ire: in interiori Hispaniae Veritas habitat ". This we have never believed Hispanic - and the this word to it the use in his ampler sense and I hope that never we will believe it, because our tradition us makes incapable to suppose that the truth lives exclusively inside Spain or in the one of no other town. What we have believed and we create is that the truth cannot belong to anybody, in class of intransferible property. By the belief that it is not no geographic or racial monopoly and of which all the men can reach it, being transcendental, universal and eternal, we have fought the Spaniards at the best moments of our history. What it has felt always our town, in the hours of faith and those of skepticism, is its essential equality with all the other Earth towns.
The stoic sees if same like the fearless rock in which they crash, waves of the sea, the circumstances and the passions. This image are attractive for the Spaniards, because the stone is firmness and perseverancia symbol, and these are the virtues that the Spanish town has had to unfold for great works of its history: Reconquista, the Contrarreforma and the civilization of America; and also because the Spaniards we wished for our works and our life the firmness and perseverancia of the rock, but when we asked ourselves: what is the life? or, if it pardons pleonasmo to me: which is the essence of the life, far from finding within us an adamantine axis, we say ourselves, with Manrique: "Our lives are the rivers - that are going to give in the sea", or with the author of the Moral Epistle: "what more than the hay, - to the green, dry morning to afternoon". There is in the Spanish lÃÂrica thought so repeatedly no expressed, nor with as much beauty, as this one of the insustancialidad of the life and its triumphs. Campoamor will say it, with its humorismo: "Smoke the glories of the life are". Esproceda, with its impetus: "You pass, you pass in false optics... Nacaradas images of glory, - Crowns of gold and laurel, you happen". And all our great lÃÂricos will see in the life, as Sight of Mescua: "Brief good, easy wind, weighs foam". *
7 OF NOVEMBER OF 1936
Anniversary of the death of Ramiro de Maeztu
by Maria de Maeztu
Ramiro de Maeztu, teacher of Spanishness, were assassinated in the unlucky November of 1936. Her sister Maria gathers her thoughts and feelings
At that dramatic moment I see with clarity?a weigh of my congoja that shuts in me to silence? that it has already finished crossing his way of Damascus and that I begin mine, the way that without him I will have to cross infinitely single. Until now their name, the prestige of their company/signature, their moral authority, opened all the doors to me: for that reason it was my so easy life. The hour of the pain has arrived. The hour to confront solo, face to face, without defense and support, that terrible and magnificent thing that is called the truth.
Through the grates of the jail, in that memorable day, the man who was my brother, my friend, my teacher, the companion in the work, the inspirador of the creative emotion, gives a message to me. Writing in words does not come, but it is in his glance, its accent, its voice. It is his mandate that has the unalterable force of which it requests itself in silence in the hour of the death.
7 of November of 1936? Madrid.
In the patio of the jail the prisoners listen to the names that a miliciano pronounces. They are stood out the calls. A step advanced and last the cautious one to the other companions of captivity, to which they shared the anguish of the delay of the final moment.
Now the cancerbero has pronounced its name. It has wanted to pronounce it, has tried it, as if outside one between so many. But its voice, when resonating in the scope of the jail, has received eternity breath. The name that it pronounces is already an historical name. It has said: Ramiro de Maeztu . It has wanted to add a number, whereupon it goes sealed, in ignominy signal, all presidiario. But a superhuman force has stopped its voice and the name leaves single, señero, clean, clear. It is the name that hundreds of thousands of times reproduced the columns of newspapers, of best newspapers of Europe and America, on the foot of an article of perfect prosa in which a truth was enunciated, a restlessness, a yearning, a prophecy. It is the name of a man who to maintain it without fear and fault, like the one of the medioevales horsemen, is dangerous everything and at the decisive moment he has been seen, like the Truth that defends, single, definitively single, left.
The name of whatever has to die is listened to in the jail with identical emotion. But now it is added, in this case, a popularity aureole. It is a name known by all and until the Death it knows him, because it spoke and it wrote much on her: every day I request to God that gives breaths me to die with dignity.
The 7 of November of 1936, in the patio of the jail of Madrid, Ramiro de Maeztu, to the called being, sank its Earth knee before another captive. She was a priest. Its head approximated he to do delivery to him of its last confession. The priest, before the gravity of the instance, seeing that she had on his feet not to a man like another anyone but a martyr whom the border of the human has transferred already to enter the region where dwells the saints, did a gesture with the hand indicating that their sins were pardoned to him because loved much and underwent much. But Ramiro, faithful to the rite of the religion whose defense gave its life, said in clear and calm voice: Father, absuélvame...
And the dramatic gravity of that hour, that the centuries of history will cover with glory and beauty, became luminous. In its blue, clear, deep eyes; in those eyes that had absorbed with delight, in the years of youth, the beauty of the life; in those eyes by which it crossed a day the anticipated vision, accurate, safe, of which there would be to be Spain, it never shone like a faith blaze. The heart in the chest, impatient jumped to him like the one of chiquillo when they take in providing to him what yearns for. Teresa de Jesus, Santa of Avila, smiling, jovial, spirited, was giving forces him. And while it crossed, raised and calm, the corridor of the jail, was repeating the inmortales estrofas:
And so high life I hope
That I die because I do not die.
It advanced the step, raised the light truck. The white light and fries of the dawn of Madrid illuminated like a reflector its face anticipating in him the pallor of the death. Its head, under the tenuous light, slightly bluish, of that aurora, was not already the head of a man of meat and bone: it was the gorgeous figure of a sculpture carved by a Castilian imaginero, so that it can be elevated someday to the altar of the temple where God Moor. Who knows? Perhaps, to the altar of the temple of San Miguel, in Vitoria, where it received in the baptismal battery the water that for twenty centuries has been cleaning to the man of the original sin and protagonist does to him of the drama of a passion perennial?padecimiento? that it will live with terrible anguish.
Later... the way, the shutdown, the final bend. The milicianos that are going to shoot against him stop to accommodate with certainty the tube that is going to throw the shrapnel. They order to him that it advances against a wall that within moments will be splashed of blood, of the blood of a man who was what wanted to be: a Christian horseman. They already are there, in that place to give death to a criminal by the single crime of to have loved its God and to its mother country infinitely, frente.a.frente, like in the hours most glorious of Spain, two ideas, two mystics, two symbols, two manifestations of the spirit whose connection will never be arrived, never, because among them possible harmony does not fit. One is a love and affirmation idea whose sense consists of elevating to the man. The other is of negation that sets out to annul to him: she is cruel.
The final moment comes near. Within seconds the voice of that man?una harmonious and manly voice, burdens and night love song, tender and rested, a voice that acquired wonderful pathetic accent, when it spoke of the pain and the death, the two great protagonists of history? it will be extinguished for always. But still it must say a truth, the last truth, with which it is going to express in the hour of the death the sense of the life: I know why I die, you you do not know why you kill to me . The light of the dawn stops its course and seems that, again, like in the hour of the Gólgota, the shades descend at night. These shades prevent to see the fall of their body on the Earth and allow to suppose that the soul illuminated by the faith that was a transit. And like it has not been managed to find out which is the earth piece that serves as bed its mortal rest, we can affirm that whole Spain serves to him as tomb.
The death of the martyr is the true death, because it leads to the man to the border of the life in the most terrible solitude. Single, left, it has not had a hand friend who closed her eyes nor that covered with flowers her body. Of to have died in the hour of the triumph, after its corpse, like before after its word, whole Spain had gone: the Spain that thinks and that it knows where is its salvation. In that dawn of the 7 of November of 1936 he is single, and to make matters worse of treason, their twigs insisted on denying their death. Single one knows that it has disappeared of his cell in the jail of Madrid.
Where it is Maeztu? , they ask the chancelleries of Europe and America. Where this '? , they ask in London, the women who admired and listened to their word to him with delight. Where it is Ramiro? , her mother, her woman, her son asks. Where he is the teacher? , the disciples ask who have been leaving to their passage by the world.
Where this '? , his great Red Ricardo friend asks from Buenos Aires, and from Chile one of his more admiring faithfuls, Mario Garcés. Where he is the man, the apostle, the prophet, the precursor? , I ask. What you have done of him? How and why there was no a voice, a single voice in Spain that rose in its defense? What made the intellectuals, their friends of youth, their companions in the work, who did not pronounce a single word nor put their company/signature to save the life of the good man?
And when the imprecación arises terrible, desperate, I hear a clear voice that, in name of God, it answers: No, Ramiro de Maeztu has not died because it has entered the kingdom of immortality .
2003-07-24 20:41 | User Profile
Ramiro de Maeztu had some interesting thoughts, however I never like his apology of Spanishness (Hispanidad), he supported the race-mixing and he believed that all the hispanic-speakers (Spaniards or Americans) were brothers without caring their race or origins, he also believed in a Christian form of Humanism (a modern ideology in the thought of a traditional intellectual).
2003-07-24 21:39 | User Profile
I agree that his thoughts on Hispanidad are stupid and he has nothing to offer in terms of racial thought. I do like his coments on "Stoicism and Transcendentalism" and I will also say that his Catholicism is not a problem for me inspite of my adherance to Odalism as it led him into the Maurrasian Accion Espanola whose cheif publication he edited which, inspite of his silly notions of Hispanidad, was pro-Axis, corporaitst, authoritarian and had all of the positive attributes I identify with in Maurrasian thought. Also, one should note that some of the things you complain about were from his earlier times with the journal Noventayochista which was a reactionary rather then national revolutionary organ and that his thoughts progressed towards a qualified pro-Axis position towards the end of his life.
I happen to have a great deal of his writtings in Icelandic and intend to translate one of his better articles into English when I get a bit more time.
I also admire the heavy sacrifices he made in his life. Like most figures that I write about, I take certain elements of thought or action that I find useful in my "ideological toolbox" but you will almost never hear my give my unqualified support to any person or organization inclueding close comrades in life.
2003-07-24 22:47 | User Profile
*Originally posted by triskelion@Jul 24 2003, 23:39 * ** I agree that his thoughts on Hispanidad are stupid and he has nothing to offer in terms of racial thought. I do like his coments on "Stoicism and Transcendentalism" and I will also say that his Catholicism is not a problem for me inspite of my adherance to Odalism as it led him into the Maurrasian Accion Espanola whose cheif publication he edited which, inspite of his silly notions of Hispanidad, was pro-Axis, corporaitst, authoritarian and had all of the positive attributes I identify with in Maurrasian thought. Also, one should note that some of the things you complain about were from his earlier times with the journal Noventayochista which was a reactionary rather then national revolutionary organ and that his thoughts progressed towards a qualified pro-Axis position towards the end of his life.
I happen to have a great deal of his writtings in Icelandic and intend to translate one of his better articles into English when I get a bit more time.
I also admire the heavy sacrifices he made in his life. Like most figures that I write about, I take certain elements of thought or action that I find useful in my "ideological toolbox" but you will almost never hear my give my unqualified support to any person or organization inclueding close comrades in life. **
Hum, but the infamous writting of Defense of the Hispanidad it was published in the Acción Española Journal
Look here: DEFENSA DE LA HISPANIDAD by Ramiro de Maeztu [url=http://members.tripod.com/~hispanidad/maezt.htm]http://members.tripod.com/~hispanidad/maezt.htm[/url]
"Favored it in 1934 by Acción Española, including articles that summarize and synthesize the doctrine of the Hispanidad"
2003-07-25 07:30 | User Profile
Quite true but I should remind you that the journal posted plenty of material that was not endorsed by the publishing organization (take for example the crankish burblings of Ernesto Gimenez Caballero) and that Sotelo and a great many others condemned his notion of Hispanidad as they rightly should have. Somewhere around here I have my translated copy of the very good scholar the A.E. Raul Morodo who wrote "Accion Espanola: Origenes Ideeologicos del Franquismo" who published numerous refutations of Maeztu's thinking on the matter from very prominent A.E. theorists and activists. Those rebuttals were all reprinted directly from A.E. publications (and to a lesser extent by Juan Ignacio Luca de Tena who was the editor of the very influential theory organ ABC who was a qualified supporter of the Axis and Jose Antonio)
In any case, for me the bottom line is that his notions on Hispanidad and race yet when someone has something worth offering in style, substance or living example I will give credit when due. I find virtue in certain aspects of Maeztu's thought and life and state so when it is sensible to do so and condemn him on the same grounds you do in the name of nationalist spirit.
2003-07-25 09:36 | User Profile
Triskelion, Excuse me if the following question doesn't have relationship with the topic, but you read the mail that I sent you and the traslation?