Talk & Silence

Six years had passed since Francisco Franco called Germany and Italy "dear nations who were the vanguard of our movement." Last week he received the A.P.'s slow-to-startle DeWitt MacKenzie and startled him with this interview:

MacKenzie: "Rightly or wrongly, the American public feels that Spain was in effect an ally of Germany and Italy and finds that hard to forgive. Did you subscribe to or support Nazi and Fascist policies?"

Franco: "I did not. Spain was not influenced by Germany and Italy, but has been developing along its own lines. . . . The Jews were not persecuted here, nor was any other religion."

MacKenzie: "Do you subscribe to the political views of Hitler and Mussolini?"

Franco: "I would call your attention to the fact that the Cortes has been functioning for three years. The Government doesn't make the laws. All the laws that the Government recommends go to the Cortes for consideration and possible passage."

MacKenzie: Does this mean that you are headed for absolute democracy,* that is, rule by the people?"

Franco: "Yes. But we must proceed slowly, step by step, until the people are properly prepared."

What Spain's people thought of this was hard to learn. Madrid's Ecclesia, new weekly organ of the influential Catholic Action, warned: "We believe that a good dose of prudence is worth-while in these matters; prudence not to deduce from the silence of the proletarian masses--forbidden to strike and restrained from means of uprising--unequivocal indications of their complete contentment." Ecclesia took Spain's leaders to task for failing to note ecclesiastical protests against injustices "for example, of absentee landlordism, a deep and endemic wrong in Andalusia, where few landlords ever know or see their possessions and where laborers live as they can on hunger wages."

Ecclesia said Franco's social legislation had not gone far enough and was not always enforced: ". . . Legislation is one thing and economic reality another, and a hard and troublesome reality it is for those who must live on wages disproportionate to the cost of living."

*The phrase "absolute democracy" was no doubt composed in haste.--ED.

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