…and pulled her critique.
To fill the gaping hole in the internet this has created, let me offer National Review's obituary for Francisco Franco, written by James Burnham:
Francisco Franco was our century's most successful ruler.... [H]e outstayed all his great contemporaries, friend and enemy: Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Churchill, Eisenhower, de Gaulle….
"[A] patient stubbornness, a flawless prudence, and an unshakable faith in his mission.... Before coming to a decision he meditated before a portable Blessed Sacrament.... 'I Francisco Franco Bahamonde, Caudillo of Spain, conscious of my responsibility before God and before history...' And, besides all the rest, luck."
Franco commanded the winning side in a ferocious civil war... held Spain aloof from World War II.... Under his postwar rule Spain transformed itself... into a modern industrial state.... Illiteracy has been halved....
[W]ith the exit of Franco... the regime was going to confront a formidable array of basic political and social problems. This fact is sufficient proof of how fundamentally Spain's regime has differed from genuine totalitarian regimes like Hitler's Reich.... Under a consolidated totalitarian regime, succession... does not raise issues involving the essential nature of the regime....
The whole concept of "fascism" for that matter has been a fraud from the beginning. Like "peaceful coexistence" and "detente," it is a tactical invention of the Soviet Agitprop, and boils down in practice to the simple definition: fascism is any regime that outlaws Communism…
