Against Pemán and against culture

José María Pemán

(Cádiz, 1897-1981) was a traditionalist monarchist, a Catholic of daily mass and a propagandist of the early Franco regime.

His enemies do not forgive his anti-Republican commitment or his fiery oratory in favor of the coup of 1936. Journalist, son of a lawyer and politician, linked first to the

and then to the National Defense Board in Burgos, he was a speaker dazzling, a folkloristic playwright and a brilliant chronicler.

Forty years after his death, they want to erase him from the canon, expurgated at will with a censorship vocation.

They don't care about the quality of his chronicles.

Nor does his growing detachment from the regime count, with a trajectory not very different from that of the Falangist

.

They ignore his relationship with

, whom he visited during his exile, in Rome and Paris, and with whom he corresponded.

Anything goes against the author of

.

In Andalusia the authorities of several municipalities have removed his name.

A good time for his grandson,

, to dedicate to him, by way of atonement,

, an artificer's book, ready to defuse hoaxes.

When asked about the trigger, he explains to

that it was not so much "the approval of the Historical Memory Law" as its "capricious and sectarian" application against his grandfather, "first in Jerez and then in Cádiz."

To the extent that when his bust was removed in Jerez, the mayor of Cádiz,

, defended Pemán as a glory of Cádiz letters.

To then erase it from his city five years later.

"It has reached the point of delirium," García-Pita denounces, "of declaring him responsible for the death of 400 day laborers or that of his friend

.

My grandfather is not an exception in the illegal application of the

».

On the centenary of Pemán's birth,

lamented "the permanent pruning and felling of names and people" in Spain.

«This one for being a fascist, and the other for being a republican, that one for being old, that one for being simply bad, this one for being falsely good, etc.

Reasons all that hide a single unreason, political hatred, which in turn is the historical form of envy.

Another

Rabal, wrote: «

».

"Pemán, who was a columnist to whom all of us in the profession should pray, is forgotten," lamented Threshold.

Although it has been decades since

published the first edition of the extraordinary Weapons and Letters, in the case of Pemán, and of so many, some still do not understand anything.

García-Pita Pemán's book will not convince his inquisitors.

He won't get them to read classics like

and

either .

But it allows a writer as irregular as he is imposing to be rescued from the void.

"I am a witness to his virtues," wrote Paco Rabal, and he said more: "

."

Any day they also decree a fatwa against its defenders, to begin with Threshold and Rabal, for fifth columnists.

Conforms to The Trust Project criteria

Know more

• Articles Julio Valdeon