Provoking Phalanx

Spanish hearts have had room for nothing but political hatred since the overwhelming victory of the Left parties in the general elections last month (TIME, Feb. 24). Last week, after a month of passionate and random violence, the mobs had burned some 17 churches, eleven convents, 33 Rightist political clubs, ten newspaper plants and 22 miscellaneous buildings. Killed: 51. Wounded: 194. In a fog of censorship and an official "state of alarm," a wild rumor spread that land-hungry peasants had overrun the estates of President Niceto Alcala Zamora and his 78-year-old spinster aunt.

Half-sympathetic toward the Spanish peasant's belief that Jesuits and Rightist politicians are to blame for peasant poverty, squat, sack-faced Republican Premier Manuel Azana last week moved to end the violence. He called in Socialist Leader Francisco Largo Caballero, roared at him to call off his mobs, was met with evasions. He issued a decree re-seizing for distribution to the peasants lands which Spain's Left Government had seized in 1932 and which its Right Government had returned to the grandees in 1933.

The one thing Left-Centre Premier Azana knew that he could not do was to crack down on the Left mobsters of the Socialist and Communist parties, whose 99 seats in the new Cortes, added to the 165 seats of his own Republican parties, give him his mandate. Nor could he use direct action against the powerful Right coalition of Catholic Leader Gil Robles without inviting civil war. He did, however, espouse the theory that the month's violence had been the work of Rightist agents provocateurs trying to make the victorious Left look bad. Then suddenly he discovered the perfect goat--Fascism.

Spain has an extreme political fringe to the Right, its only true Fascist Party, called Falange Espanola (Spanish Phalanx) which did not win a single Cortes seat in the election. Its chief is the handsome, 34-year-old lawyer-son of Spain's famed Dictator under the monarchy, the late General Primo de Rivera. Eldest of a hot-headed trio of born troublemakers, Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera was closeted with Adolf Hitler shortly before Germany's 1934 Blood Purge, returned to Spain in time to lead his blue-shirted pistoleros against Spain's October 1934 Revolution of the Left.

Last week Premier Azana ordered Jose jailed for prosecution on charges of inciting armed rebellion. The Phalanx was outlawed, all its clubhouses closed and many of its leaders locked up. The police, given this official support, went merrily into the streets and began cracking Rightist and Leftist skulls without fear or favor.

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