Ramiro Ledesma

Ramiro Ledesma Ramos (born May 23, 1905 in Alfaraz de Sayago , Zamora province , † October 29, 1936 in Aravaca near Madrid ( executed )) was a Spanish philosopher and fascist politician.

Ledesma came from a poor family and initially worked at the local post office. In his free time he studied philosophy ( Filosofía y Letras ) as well as physics and mathematics and completed the Licenciatura at the University of Madrid in both courses . He was deeply influenced by the German philosophers of his time, especially Heidegger .

Since the late 1920s he worked as a student of José Ortega y Gasset on the magazine Revista de Occidente and also on the Gaceta Literaria . Ledesma strongly criticized liberalism and capitalism as well as communism . As an alternative, he called national syndicalism .

Shortly before the proclamation of the Second Republic , he founded the fascist weekly La Conquista del Estado in March 1931 , an imitation of the Italian La conquista dello Stato . The paper appeared twenty-three times by October 1931.
The first edition of this newspaper propagated the foundations of Ledesma's national-syndicalist-fascist ideology:

1. The primacy of the state in all matters
2. the strengthening and unification of the Spanish nation and culture
3. the prominence of the universities in all intellectual and economic processes
4. a kind of decentralization that shifts decision-making authority and autonomy to the municipal, district and provincial levels
5. the anchoring of a syndicalist, d. H. Workers and employers in "vertical unions" uniting economic structure.

After the publication and due to further journalistic and political activities (rated as a "plot against the republic") Ledesma spent several days in 1931 and 1932, in 1933 even two months in prison.

In October 1931 Ledesma was considered to be the intellectual head during the establishment of the Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista (JONS, Associations of the National Syndicalist Offensive ). This was a fascist movement of its own. The JONS suffered from a lack of money from the start, but they were organizationally and ideologically stable. Ledesma was impressed by developments in Germany and had sympathy for National Socialism , in contrast to the leader of the Falange Española , which was founded in 1933 , José Antonio Primo de Rivera . Nevertheless, in 1934 the JONS merged with the Falange Española, which in turn did not suffer from a lack of money, but from a lack of ideological clarity.

The new party was called Falange Española de las JONS . Ledesma had chosen her symbols, yoke and arrows; this he had taken over from the Reyes Católicos . Ledesma is also considered to be the creator of the motto “¡Arriba España!” (German about Auf, in Spain! ) And “Una, grande y libre” (German: one, big and free ).

In the February 1936 elections, the FE y de las JONS won three seats in the Cortes , but was banned by the government as a result of the party's terrorist activities and was unable to exercise its mandates. After that, the party disintegrated, and Ledesma resigned from it because of ideological differences with Primo de Rivera. The JONS were re-established, but this was unsuccessful, as most of their supporters retained the name FE y de las JONS. In March 1936 Ramiro Ledesma was interned by the Republican government and later executed after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War .

literature

• Ferran Gallego: La realidad y el deseo. Ramiro Ledesma en la genealogía del franquismo , in: Ferran Gallego / Francisco Morente (eds.), Fascismo en España. Ensayos sobre los orígenes sociales y culturales del franquismo , Barcelona, ​​El Viejo Topo, 2005, pp. 253–447.
• Stanley G. Payne : Fascism in Spain 1923-1977 , The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, Wisconsin 1999, pp. 54-65.

Web links

• Ledesma's political manifesto in edition 1 of La Conquista del Estado (March 14, 1931), pp. 1f. (span.)