10.09
During the first half of the XXth Century in Spain it was very common in reactionary groups to refer to that conspiracy as responsible for the Spanish decadency since, at least, the reign of Philip II. The Habsburg Catholic King was the greatest enemy of some heterogeneous groups, like the Sephardi Jews expelled from Spain by the Catholic Monarchs, and their Marrano descendants, enriched by usury, who would have contacted with the Dutch rebels (William the Silent) and other enemies of catholicism and the Spanish Empire, which considered itself its firmest defender. Such would be responsible for the anti-Spanish propaganda called the Black Legend. The fact that among protestants (in special Luther) antisemitism was even stronger than among Catholics doesn’t seem contradiction enough for this theory.
Disdain towards Freemasonry had been common by the Catholic Church since Medieval Europe. Spanish dictator Francisco Franco openly referred to Popular Front government, which he and his rightist followers would successfully overthrow, as Judeo-Masonic. While anti-semitism in Nazi Germany was implemented and legislated by the German government, Franco’s Spain never produced anti-semitic laws despite his assertions of a Jewish-Masonic alliance.
That expression is not a slander of his enemies, it is also mentioned in Franquist media: . In this biographic page about Franco this interpretation of the Disaster of 98, from the «Anecdotario» of Franco himself (under the pseudonym of Jaime de Andrade) for the script of Raza, film directed by José Luis Sáez de Heredia:
«in Philippines, the foreigner promotes perturbations. Masonry invades everything. In Cuba, the rebels have powerful protectors; the same lodges, but with a great nation behind».
Jaime de Andrade adds this words:
«The Army and the Navy have been abandoned by Spain; they are prisoners of Spain. I have read General Captain staff letters that oozed blood. The government doesn’t want adventures; we must accommodate. they can not send more men. War is not popular».
One of the officials there interrupts: «What have they done to be so (unpopular)? What a shame!!». And the staff chief says: «At the end, without weapons, without forces, without foreign policy, isolated from the world, we the military will be the culprit».
His rise to the leadership of the rebelled band during the Spanish Civil War allowed him to concentrate the repression against the elements that he perceived as anti-Spanish: freemasons and leftists, features that he saw in the totality of the Republican defenders. The reconstruction he ordered at the General Archives of the Spanish Civil War in Salamanca, with all the confiscated papers, of a hall reproducing all the decorative show of a Masonic Lodge with all kinds of squalid elements is a good example of his obsession.
During the difficult 1940s, first during the Second World War in which the sympathies of the franquist regime for Germany were obvious (but with a more neutral position after 1942 when the allies were seen as winning), and later during the international isolation during the post-war, Franco produced some memorable public speeches, referring to the persistent drought (another obsession) and went on with the judaeomasonic conspiracy as the culprit of all the disasters in Spain. However, some actions favorable to Sephardi Jews during the war (like the diplomat Ãngel Sanz Briz) made it possible for him to present himself as not racist. In fact, that point was important for National Catholicism to integrate the theory without problems. “Spanish race” is just a metaphorical concept, defined just by the extension of catholic faith and miscegenation in America.
The subsequent approach to United States dampened all that rhetoric along with the too explicit fascist references of the regime, although they did not disappear completely until the end of franquism.