93

THE CATHOLIC STRATEGIC RESPONSE

TO UNDO 1492!
(Due to the length of this article we have retained the authors American
punctuation. The sub-headings are ours - Editor, Apropos.)
We will get Granada back!
It was some time between late 1966 and mid-1967 -- but before the
Israeli Six-Day War in June of 1967 -- that I first heard a
Mohammedan say: We will get Granada back! It was in Turkey
that these words were spoken.
The same Mohammedan was speaking about the Re-Reconquista
of Spain and the recovery of the beautiful city of Cordoba, where
the Caliphs, especially Abd el Rahman, had wisely made it their
enchanted capital and which was reported to have been more
luxurious even than Baghdad itself. But, I regret to say, I did not
know any of this at the time.
In my deficient preparation and shallow education as a young
military officer -- recently assigned for a year to Turkey, but also
with duties in Greece -- I did not even know what this faithful
Moslem plainly meant, much less the fuller strategic and religious
implications of his conviction and confident resolve -- and of his
vivid historical memory. Nonetheless, I was not quite so callow or
dull-witted to believe, when he said, We will get Granada back!,
that I was to be a part of that we -- if you know what I mean?
Greater Granada Spain and Portugal
Granada for my Mohammedan interlocutor was a synecdoche -- a
part standing for a larger whole. Granada did not just stand for
the fifteenth-century Moorish Kingdom of Granada, nor for its
capital city of Granada itself, with its beautiful gardens of the
Alhambra in the mountains one half mile above sea level and wellfortified. The city of Cordoba itself was, in the fifteenth century
about which we speak, no longer even a part of the Moorish

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Kingdom, having been earlier conquered and rebuilt by the

Christians. No, Granada essentially meant the Mohammedan
recovery of the Strategic Iberian Peninsula -- Spain and Portugal. It
implied the long-range, Re-Reconquista of what King Ferdinand
and Queen Isabel had completed finally in 1492 -- after a protracted
war of seven hundred and seventy years: from Pelayos heroic
northern initiative at Covadonga in 722, to Granada in the south in
1492. Such was the Incarnation of Christian Chivalry, which has
sometimes been called The Soul of Spain. Their Christians
enduring hope was derived from their faith. Now, however, it
might be different. There may be a new face on the matter. So
much apostasy has occurred. And the Spanish are not having
children.
The Gibraltar Vladivostok Line
During the time I was assigned to Turkey and traveling rather
widely in the Middle East, I was also shown a map where a line was
drawn from Gibraltar to Vladivostok. This line was a shorthand
way of showing me the Northern March or Frontier, and perhaps
only a Temporary Boundary, of the northward push of Islam. (After
the Suez Crisis of 1956 and the vacillations of the divided West, the
Muslims of Egypt and Pakistan, I was told, made another grandstrategic decision: to make Africa a Muslim Continent, and after
suitable educational and strategic preparations.) At the time when I
was informed of these matters, I was assisting the mission of our
strategic-minded Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), which was
headquartered in Ankara, Turkey. In 1966, CENTO had then only
three formal members, given the earlier withdrawal of Iraq from its
former strategic participation, namely: Turkey; the Shahs Iran; and
Pakistan (both West and East Pakistan, since it was before their own
civil war and the achieved independence of Bangladesh). The United
States and Great Britain were not formal members of CENTO, but
only advisors or consultants in the Southern-Tier Strategy to help
contain the Soviet Union along its fractious southern borders.
However, to the dedicated Mohammedans in this organization, the
line from Gibraltar to Vladivostok had a deeper religious meaning.
The later cultural, religious, and military history of this region -- to
include the largely Muslim Central Asian Republics -- will give

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further resonance to what was only implicit and incubating back in

1966-1967. It was only some twelve years later, on Christmas Day
of 1979 -- after the Shah had already been overthrown by Khomeini
and the other Revolutionary Shiites that Soviet Special
Operations Forces (their Spetsnaz) landed in Kabul to commence
the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and, thereby, along with some
Western aid, to incite a worldwide Muslim resistance against their
Atheist Empire. The effects of that transnational Moslem resistance
and military victory are momentous, with ongoing consequences for
the United States grand - strategically, not only now, but
protractedly into the far future. And this also includes the longrange implications for the strategically located Iberian Peninsula, and
not only Gibraltar!
The unredeemed land
In 2001, a distinguished French Colonel, whom I had met at the U.S.
Army War College, told me about another map he had often seen
throughout his two years as a visiting officer in Morocco at the
Moroccan War College. This map showed that the Moroccans still
considered as TERRA IRREDENTA (unredeemed, and still to be
re-conquered, land) the whole Iberian Peninsula and parts of
Southern France (up to around to Poitiers, where Charles Martel, in
732 A.D., won his famous victory against the advancing
Mohammedans and their Jewish attendants). Colonel Jaureguiberry
also told me what I, too, had earlier heard, namely, that several
Moslems he knows were prone to remind him that there are not
very many miles of distance between Poitiers, France and Vienna,
Austria -- two prongs of the Mohammedan advance in Western
Europe, in 732 A.D. and 1683 A.D. How many hundred miles do
you think there are? And now the Moslems have a growing
demography and promote multiple migrations into Europe. Only
nine miles of water separate Gibraltar from Morocco.
And
Morocco -- especially under King Hassan -- was not even
considered one of the radical Mohammedan countries. And there
are still people who believe that Turkey is a thoroughly secularized
modern society, with no real Moslem content and with no vestiges
left of their Ottoman Imperial Consciousness. If we believe that,
we will believe anything.

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Even when I was almost forty years ago living in Turkey, the Turkish
colonels and generals with whom I worked often proudly told me
that, We Turks ruled Jerusalem for 550 years! -- the Seljuk and
the Ottoman Turks. It was also then that I learned that Turkey was
the third country to recognize the Zionist State of Israel, after the
Soviet Union and the United States.
Back between the years 1966-1967 and 2001, when I spoke to
Colonel Jaureguiberry, I was awakened to something even more
sobering, however, and with graver implications for the Catholic
Faith and for the culture that this Faith has fecundated and enrooted
and fostered forth. I speak of the events of 1992 -- 500 years after
the Christian Re-Reconquista of 2 January 1492, which was followed
by the expulsion of the Jews on 2 August and the setting sail of
Columbus on his first voyage to the New World, the very next day,
3 August 1492.
Undo 1492
During that 500th Anniversary year of 1992 -- after the formal
dissolution of the Soviet Union -- there was an astonishingly
concerted effort of harsh and mendacious propaganda To Undo
1492!
The Mohammedans, the Jews, and the Revolutionary
Indigenists and Socialists and Defenders of the Pre-Colomban Aztec
Empire all effectively shouted, Undo 1492!
There was so much pressure on Pope John Paul II,
apparently, that he consented to suspend, or even more indefinitely
to cancel, the ongoing Canonization process of Queen Isabella of
Spain, whom William Thomas Walsh called, the Last Crusader.
If one steps back to consider this three-pronged attack to
Undo 1492!, one may suddenly realize that the common grandstrategic (not just military-strategic) target is the Catholic Church;
both the supernatural faith itself and the intimate culture and larger
Christian civilization that flows from that Faith. The Faith is not
reducible to culture, but the Faith always produced culture -variegated cultures that are rooted and marked by slow fruitfulness,
and hence always vulnerable and at risk and in need of a loving
defense. The Incarnation of Christian Chivalry always essentially

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says: the more defenseless someone is, the more that one calls out
for our defense. So, too, with the purity and integrity of the Faith
and with the precious but precarious culture which the Faith has so
variously produced.
How, then, should we consider the proper Catholic strategic
response to the battle cry, Undo 1492!? If someone is at war
with you, even if you do not know it, you are at war. Reality is that
which does not go away, even when you stop thinking about it.
Faithful to the past
Under the current conditions of disorder, within and outside the
Church especially, what is the Catholic strategic response to efforts
to undo the conquest of the Moslems, to undo the expulsion of the
Jews, and to undo the purported ill-effects of Columbus missionary
journeys to the New World?
The first thing that the informed Catholic strategist must do is have
a true and properly proportioned understanding of the past and the
grave issues that led up to the final decisions and implementing
events of 1492. The first cardinal virtue -- the virtue of prudence -is certainly the strategists virtue, par excellence, in the practical
order -- or in the realm of practical wisdom -- the recta ratio
agibilium, whereby knowledge of reality is converted into the
realization of the good, especially the bonum commune, the
common good. And, one of the requirements of prudentia is a
memoria fidelis, namely a memory faithful to the truth of the past.
To see things as they truly were, in proper proportion and in the
specific composition of the concrete context of the real life and
besetting actualities of the time -- that is part of the discipline of
true prudence!
The threats that Queen Isabel had to deal with for the thirty years
she ruled (1474-1504) are still with us today, and perhaps even
magnified -- and, so, we will be helped by the study of history.

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Godmother of America
If we understand better the context of her time and the decisive
issues and events that shaped her prudential and strategic
responses, we may better grasp what is required of us, amidst a
growing international Muslim insurgency (not just terrorism) and
amidst the deft political action of Jewish forces, and their subversive
religious actions, too. And there are other, uprooting revolutionary
developments which we may also fittingly come to consider, insofar
as they are enemies of the Catholic Faith and the Catholic Church
in the full and undiluted meaning of those two substantive phrases -without any amorphousness or ambiguity or equivocation.
Resisting an alien intrusion upon the Catholic Kingship of France,
Joan of Arc was burned at the stake in 1431, only twenty years
before Isabel of Spain was born -- on 22 April 1451. And two years
after her birth -- in the momentous year of 1453 A.D. -- the
Mohammedans conquered Constantinople and soon threatened
Western Europe, as well -- and mightily encouraged the resilience of
the Moslems (and their Jewish allies) in Spain. Given what Isabel
later did as Queen -- to oppose the alien presence of the Moslems
and the much more insidious Jewish Perfidians she herself, in many
ways, is the Joan of Arc of Spain. And, perhaps, some day she will
be known as Saint Isabel; after her own long-belated canonization,
as was also the case with Saint Joan herself. Moreover, in light of
what Isabel did to support and commission the visionary Columbus,
she is also, in the reverent words of William Thomas Walsh, The
Godmother of America.1
Catholic Castile?
William Thomas Walsh helps us see what it was like in Castile,
Spain in the mid-fifteenth century, when Isabel was a young woman
of eleven, and before she became Queen at twenty-three years of
age, in 1474. Walsh is describing the reign of King Enrique IV, the
William Thomas Walsh, Isabella of Spain: The Last Crusader (New York:
Robert McBride and Company, 1930), 515 pages. This beautiful and
profound and lucidly written book should be read by anyone who studies in
order to learn the truth. On page xiii of his FOREWARD, Professor Walsh
calls Isabel Americas godmother.
1

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half-brother of Isabel, which began in 1454. Later also called El

Impotente, the king was also widely known as Enrique the Liberal:
Enrique the Liberal was far from orthodox in his opinions and conduct.
His chosen companions were Moors, Jews, and Christian renegades;
indeed, any man who ridiculed the Christian religion was sure of at
least a smile from his Majesty, if not a pension. One of the favorite
daily pastimes at the kings table was the invention of new and
original blasphemies; obscene jokes were made about the Blessed
Virgin and the Saints. The king attended Mass, but never confessed
or received Communion. If his laxity pleased the enemies of the
Church, it offended the mass of people who were predominantly
Catholic. A petition addressed to Enrique a few years later by the
Chief Christian nobles and prelates said: It is especially notorious that
there are in your court and in your palace and about your person
individuals who are infidels, enemies of our holy Catholic faith, and
others, Christians in name only, but of very questionable faith,
particularly those who believe and say and affirm that there is no
other world but to be born and die like beasts; and there are
continually blasphemous people and renegades...whom your Lordship
has exalted to high honors and dignities in your realms. 2
After this sobering picture of anarchy and moral turpitude, Walsh
vividly gives us a larger picture of the age wherein Queen Isabels
life of virtue had to grow:
In Castile, as in Italy, a cycle of civilization was ended, and the late
Middle Ages were dying in a miasma of levity, cynicism, depravity. It
was in this very year [1462] that a new king in Paris [Louis XI -- the
Spider King] plucked one Master Francois Villon [the poet] from the
Shadow of the Gibbet. It was then that young Girolamo Savonarola
[the Dominican Priest in Florence] began to thunder predictions of the
destruction of Italy by an outraged God. Spain, too, had found evil as
well as good in the cup of the Renaissance. Her condition was worse,
in many respects, than that of Italy. The demoralization that usually
follows war had been magnified and made chronic by eighth centuries
of almost continuous conflict, struggles between Christians and
Mohammedans, between Castile and Portugal, between Castile and
2

Ibid., pp. 12-13 - my emphasis added.

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Aragon. Human life was very cheap. Contact with Moslems [as well
as the Jews] profoundly modified the influence of the Christian Church
among the people; polygamy, for example, was not uncommon,
though it usually took the form of open concubinage. And the Jews,
although possessors of a far nobler moral code than the
Mohammedans, acted everywhere as a powerful dissolvent...of the
Christian faith which was the foundation of the morality of the people
among whom they lived. Many of the clergy were depraved. And the
Court [of Enrique IV] was unspeakably foul. Isabel was disgusted by
what she saw and heard there. But for the present her youth
protected her.3
In even more trenchant words, Professor Walsh says:
Public and private morality had never been so low since Christianity
came into the land. The stench of the court began to pervade the air
of all Spain.4
Now, we may further appreciate what the undoing of 1492" might
return us to! A terrible thing to think upon! (In the words of Father
Francois Rabelais).
A fifth column
In the slow resurrection of Christian Spain and in a society that took it
for granted that heresy was a sin worse than murder, 5 Queen Isabel
was morally obligated to suppress the secret Jews (the insincere,
false, deceitfully subversive Conversos, or New Christians), to
conduct a ten-year Crusade against the Mohammedans, and to use
the Inquisition as a war measure, against the strategic salient, the
wedge into Western Europe, that the Moslems and their antiChristian abettors (Fautors!) had made. She had to face the
problem of hostile exterior lines and treacherous interior lines.
(The United States is also coming to understand more about these
matters, and not only because of its porous borders and interior
3

Ibid., p. 26 my emphasis added.

Ibid., p. 14.

Ibid., pp. 194, 183.

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cultural Balkanization, or the sleeper cells on the Inner Front

of its Homeland Security).
In 1450, there were at least 200,000 Jews in Spain and 3,000,000
New Christians or Conversos, who were mockingly called
Marranos by their fellow ethnic Jews:
The Jews of the synagogue sometimes called them Marranos, from the
Hebrew Maranatha, the Lord is coming, in derision of their belief, or
feigned belief, in the divinity of Jesus Christ. The Conversos were
assimilated in a superficial sense, for many of them married into the
noblest families in Spain, enjoyed all the privileges of Christians, and
had gradually gathered into their hands most of the wealth, the political
power, and even the control of taxation; but it was generally felt that in
a crisis they would prove to be Jews at heart, enemies of the Christian
faith, and allies, as in the past, of the half-oriental and circumcized
Moors.6
Whose side are they on?
In this context, let us consider the recent words of an aggressively
intelligent, strategic mind of Jewish ancestry, who is also known as a
prominent Neo-Conservative as distinct from a Neo-Christian.
In his book, The War Against the Terror Masters - Why It Happened Where We Are Now - How Well Win, Michael Ledeen bluntly says the
following, and with refreshing candor:
Nothing could be more encouraging to any thoughtful Muslim than a
reversal of the catastrophic trends of the past two or three centuries.
For many centuries, Muslim civilization was the greatest in the world
[China included!]. The Muslims preserved much of ancient Greek
culture at a time when Western Europe had fallen into a catatonia
that historians have called the Dark Ages. The Muslims outclassed
the Christians in most every area of human endeavor. They were
more powerful, more educated, more artistic than their Christian
rivals. And they were more tolerant and humane [sic]. It was far
better for minorities like the Jews to live under Muslim rule than under
Christian hegemony.7
6

Ibid., p. xviii, from his Foreward my emphasis added.

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If you were the Lone Ranger, would you rather have Ledeen or
Tonto beside you in the final battle against the circumambient
Indians? What do you mean, we, Ledeen?
In an even more candid book -- especially in his rare and revealing
Chapter 5 on Nationalistic Judaism -- the former head of Israeli
Military Intelligence, Yehoshafat Harkabi says:
In Nachmanidess (1194-1270) commentary on Maimonidess (11351204) Book of Commandments: We are commanded to inherit the
land [i.e., Eretz Yisreal -- the Greater Israel] that God gave to
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and must not leave it in the hands of any
other nation, .... We must not leave the land in the hands of the
[seven Canaanite nations] or of any other people in any generation. 8
Although the learned General Harkabi strongly opposed the
Yabotinsky-Begin ethos and the intransigent religious factions that
root their views in the principles of the Great Sage, Maimonides, he
usefully quotes him:
The major task that confronted the Jewish sages after the destruction
of the Second Temple [by the Romans, in 70 A.D.] and the repression
of the Bar Kochba Rebellion(132-135 C.E.) was to guarantee the
survival of the Jewish people [as distinct from the original Jewish
faith?] in a hostile milieu. As they saw it, in order to survive the Jews
had to isolate themselves from their surroundings. They enacted this
intention in the HALAKHA the body of religious laws designed to
encode a unique and binding lifestyle. Jewish uniqueness, deeply
rooted in the Jewish religious consciousness, now received precise
external expression in all details of life, as stipulated in the Talmud,
the principal repository of Jewish laws. Maimonides summarized:
[Jews] should not follow the customs of the Gentiles, ... as it has been
said: And ye shall not walk in the customs of the nations which I cast
out before you (Leviticus 20:23).9
Michael A. Ledeen, (New York: Saint Martins Press, 2002), pp. 29-30 -my emphasis added.
7

Yehoshafat Harkabi, Israels Fateful Hour (New York: Harper and Row,
1988 -- revised and updated edition), p. 144. Chapter 5, pp. 158-194,
should be read very carefully.
8

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Still speaking of the influential Maimonides and the Seven Noachide

Laws, Harkabi continues:
Maimonides himself is a major source of the treatment of non-Jews
who have been conquered and come under Jewish rule... . If the
inhabitants make peace and accept the Seven Commandments
enjoined upon the descendants of Noah, none of them is slain, but
they become tributary, as is said: They shall become tributary unto
thee, and shall serve thee (Deuteronomy 20:11). ... They must
accept both terms of peace [i.e., Agree to pay the tribute levied and
to submit to servitude -- p. 152] ... (Hilkhot Melakhim, Chapter
6:1).10
Moreover, says Harkabi:
Maimonides summarized the laws on the treatment of idolaters as
follows: It is forbidden to show them mercy, as it is said, nor show
mercy unto them (Deuteronomy 7:2). Hence, if one sees one of
them who worships idols perishing or drowning, one is not to save him.
... Hence you learn that it is forbidden to heal idolaters even for a fee.
But if one is afraid of them or apprehends that refusal might cause ill
will, medical treatment may be given for a fee but not gratuitously. ....
The foregoing rules apply to the time when the people of Israel live
exiled [as in Spain] among the nations, or when the Gentiles power is
predominant. But when Israel is predominant over the nations of the
world, we are forbidden to permit a gentile to dwell among us. He
must not enter our land, even as a temporary resident; or even as a
traveler, journeying with merchandise from place to place, until he has
undertaken to keep the seven precepts which the Noachides were
commanded to observe [hence, tribute and servitude]. (Hilkhot
Avodah Zara, Chapter 10:8). Maimonides exempted the Muslims
from the category of idolaters, but the Christians, by contrast, were
explicitly included.
His unfavorable view of the Christians was
influenced by his view of the Trinity as incompablible with strict
monotheism .... His scorn for Christians was possibly also influenced by
his Muslim milieu.11
9

Harkabi, pp. 139-140 - my emphasis added.

10

Ibid., p. 152 -- my emphasis added.

11

Ibid., p. 157 -- my emphasis added.

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Despite what Maimonides really believes about Christians, he has a

more lenient and different -- though perhaps more opportunistic
and parasitical -- view than the modern Michael Ledeen. In General
Harkabis words:
Nonetheless, Maimonides thought [in contrast to Ledeen] that the
condition of Jews in Muslim countries was worse than that in Christian
countries. He wrote in his Epistle to Yemen: The Arabs ... passed
painful and discriminatory legislation against us... Never did a nation
molest, degrade, debase, and hate us as much as they.12
Now we may better appreciate what Queen Isabel was up against -and others, too, even today. She and the Office of the Inquisition
were dealing with an insidious and intangible slayer of souls who worked
by word of mouth instead of by steel and poison. 13
Encouraged conquest
T h e Jewish Encyclopedia makes a significant admission about the
original, early eighth century Mohammedan penetration and
conquest of Spain: It remains a fact that the Jews, either directly or
through their coreligionists in Africa, encouraged the
Mohammedans to conquer Spain.14 At the outset, it was the
Christian kingdom of the Visigothic monarchy that the Arabs and
Berbers invaded, during the period 709-711 A.D., but only after
they were invited by the Spanish Jews to cross the nine-mile strip
of water at Gibraltar.15
Moreover, says Professor Walsh:
In 709 the Arab general Tarik led an army of Berbers [whom the
Mohammedan Arabs had recently subdued and organized] in
which there were many African Jews. Defeating and slaying King
Roderigo, with the aid of Christian traitors, at the great battle of Jerez
12

Ibid., p. 158.

13

William Thomas Walsh, p. 223.

The Jewish Encyclopedia (New York: Funk and Wagnall, 1904), Volume
XI, p. 485.
14

15

William Thomas Walsh, p. xvi from his Foreward to Isabella of Spain.

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de la Frontera, they carried death in all directions through the

[Iberian] peninsula. Wherever they went, the Jews threw open to
them the gates of the principal cities, so that in an incredibly short
time the Africans were masters of all Spain save the little Kingdom of
the Asturias [and the heroic Pelayo at Covadonga] in the northern
mountains, where the Christian survivors who were unwilling to accept
Islam reassembled [in 722 A.D.] and prepared to win back their
heritage.16
In his vivid continuation of the historical narrative, Walsh conveys
the events and implications which are still of moment to man:
The whole western culture of Rome was in jeopardy a second time,
from the same enemy; for by striking coincidence it was the same
Berber race that had followed Hannibal [who later faced Scipio
Africanus] across the Alps into Italy nearly a thousand years before.
The fate of all Christendom hung on the issue of a battle. The
glorious victory of Charles Martel in 732 saved our culture; but Spain
remained lost to Christendom for centuries. Christian churches were
turned into Mosques, old Roman cities were gradually transformed
into the oriental pleasure grounds of the caliphs. Cordoba under the
Ommiad, Abd ex Rahman III, in the tenth century was more beautiful
than Baghdad, and next to Constantinople, the most magnificent city
in Europe.17
Massacre at Otranto
In 1453, the Mohammedans conquered Constantinople, and
continued their marauding and cruelty in Greece and in Italy. On 11
August 1480, they conquered Otranto in Southern Italy and put
some 12,000 of the total of 22,000 inhabitants to death, very cruelly,
even women and children. In the words of William Thomas Walsh:
Of the 22,000 inhabitants, the barbarians [i.e., Mohammed II and his
Turks] bound 12,000 with ropes and put them to death, thus
helpless, with terrible tortures. They slew all the priests in the city.
They sawed in two the aged Archbishop of Otranto, whom they found
praying before the altar. On a hill outside the city, now known as
16

Ibid., p. xvi my emphasis added.

17

Ibid., pp. xvi-xvii my emphasis added.

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Martyrs Hill, they butchered many captives who refused to become

Mohammedans, and threw their corpses to the dogs. 18
And what, we may well consider, were the consequences of this
Mohammedan advance for Spain and for the Jews in Spain, who
were always suspected, in light of their history, of being an actual or
potential Fifth Column with interior lines on the inner front
of Spain?!
In Walshs fine and fair analysis:
As the story of Otranto became generally known, the panic that
Castile and Aragon shared with Italy spread to every corner of the
peninsula. Men were asking, what would become of the Christian
kingdoms if the Turks came from the east, and the Moors of
Granada, their coreligionists, took the offensive in the south against
Andalusia? In such a case the situation of Castile would be perilous.
But with secret enemies within her gates allied with the terrible foe,
her plight would be hopeless. In wartime, every nation considers unity
the indispensable condition of self-preservation. The doom of the
Conversos [the New Christians], as a nation within the nation, was
sealed with the landing of the Turks in Italy. Otranto fell August 11.
The news reached Spain some time in September. Isabel had long
been keeping in reserve the Papal bull of November 1, 1478,
authorizing her to establish the Inquisition in her kingdoms. On
September 26, 1480, she issued the order that made it effective. ...
[and] marked the beginning of the last chapter in the slow
resurrection of Christian Spain, and of a new and sad one in the
weary annals of the children of Israel.19
A Spanish New Jerusalem
We shall better understand the passionate Jewish desire to undo
1492, if we consider their status and immunities and privileged
power in Christian Spain:
In Medieval Spain, the Jews came nearer to building a New Jerusalem
than at any time or place since their dispersion after the Crucifixion
18

William Thomas Walsh, p. 192.

19

William Thomas Walsh, pp. 193-194 my emphasis added.

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[as of 1930, at least, and even in comparison with the later

Paradisus Judaeorum in Poland.] Had they succeeded and several
times they came perilously near success they might conceivably have
managed, with Mohammedan aid, to destroy the Christian civilization
of Europe. Their ultimate failure was caused chiefly by the life work
of Isabel.20
Because the Spanish Jews earlier had everywhere opened the gates
of the cities to the Mohammedan conquerors and their attendant
African Jews, the Moslems rewarded them by turning over to them
the government of Granada, Seville, and Cordoba. 21
Moreover, says Walsh:
In the new Moslem state, the Jews found themselves highly esteemed.
It was under the caliphs that they attained the height of their
prosperity. ... In Granada, the Jews became so numerous that it was
called, the city of the Jews. But the Saracens persecuted them at
times. On December 30, 1066, the Moslems of Granada, infuriated
by their exploitations, arose against them and slew 4,000. One of the
caliphs expelled all Jews from Granada.22
Above the law
Some sixty years after Saint Fernando re-conquered Seville in 1224,
the total Jewish population [in Castile] may well have been from
four to five million and this leaves out of account large
communities in Aragon and other sections. 23 Since there were
probably 25-30 million people in all of the Spanish Kingdoms at the
time, probably a fifth, or even a fourth were Jews a large minority
-- and they possessed an influence out of proportion to their
numbers.24 For example, says Walsh:
They became so powerful that the laws against blasphemy could not
William Thomas Walsh, p. 195. Professor Walshs important Chapter
XIV, from which this quote comes, should be read and savored in its
entirety.
20

21

Ibid., p. 195.

22

Ibid., p. 196.

23

Ibid., p. 197.

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be enforced. It was so plain that they were above the law that the
Cathari of Leon used to circumcize themselves that they may freely
teach as Jews the heresy for which they would be punished as
Christians.25
The situation was such that, even in the fifteenth century shortly
before Isabels reign, it was true that:
Confident and secure, the Jews lived with all the oriental ostentation of
which their luxurious nature is capable. They took no particular pains
to conceal their contempt for the lesser breeds without the law, who
paid them tribute.26 [Remember Maimonides!]
However, the Jewish population in Isabels time had shrunk from
some 5,000,000 or more to about 200,000.27 Two and a half
million, at least, had become New Christians (Conversos), and
some were sincere, but more of them were activated by fear under
persecution, or by motives of self-interest, and, according to a
Jewish scholar, Dr. Meyer Kayserling:
Their conversion was, however, only external, or feigned; at heart they
adhered loyally to their ancestral religion.
Though outwardly
Christians, they secretly observed the tenets of the Jewish faith. 28
That is to say, deceit was pervasive and provocative -- further
exacerbated by Jewish condescension and contempt. And, on top
of that,
What cannot be questioned, however, is that Conversos and their kin
everywhere controlled business, government, taxation, all that was
valuable, just as their ancestors had as Jews. ... For as Conversos, the
Jews were now capable of doing greater injury to Christianity through

24

Ibid.

25

Ibid. my emphasis added.

26

Ibid., p. 198 my emphasis added.

27

Ibid., p. 200.

Ibid., p. 200 Walsh gives the specific citation, as well, for Kayserlings
candid commentary.
28

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their influence upon the Old Christians with whom they mingled.

29

Expulsion
The original day for the expulsion and departure of the Spanish Jews
was 1 July 1492, and they made their careful and resourceful
preparations, those who declined to be baptized. About this new
Diaspora, William Thomas Walsh writes very compassionately
and movingly because it is a forced dispersion:
When the appointed day approached the time had been extended
by the King and Queen to August 2 [one day before Columbus
departed on his first voyage to America] the Israelites caused all the
boys and girls over twelve years of age to marry, so that each girl
might go under the protection of a husband. And so, putting all their
glory behind them, and confiding in the vain hope of their blindness,
wrote the curate of Los Palacios [Bernaldez], they gave themselves
over to the travail, and went forth from the lands of their birth. ... And
there was no Christian who did not grieve for them. Everywhere the
people invited them to be baptized...but the rabbis encouraged them
and caused the women and boys to sing and play tambourines and
timbrels to make the people merry. 30
This is certainly not the way the Israelis when they now have a
state and protected power treat their Christian and Muslim
Palestinians. The Israelis have shown no such compassion or
support when they have decided upon their own forced expulsions
of minorities, after the preparatory actions of contempt and
intimidation and terror! As always, contrast clarifies the mind.
Walsh continues his moving narrative by first quoting Father
Bernaldez again:
At last they [who were to embark from Puerto de Santa Maria and
Cadiz] set sail in 25 ships, but had to bribe the pirate Fragosa with
10,000 ducats -- evidently they had found some way to defeat the
royal order concerning money to let them sail for Cartagena [inside
Gibraltar on the Mediterranean Seacoast of Murcia, Spain to the
29

Ibid.

30

William Thomas Walsh, pp. 369-370 my emphasis added.

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northeast of Cadiz]. Some, however, returned to Castile and were

baptized. But most went to Arcilla, and thence to Fez [in Morocco].
Others proceeded to Portugal. ... Some went to Navarre [in Northern
Spain], others straggled as far as the Balkans. ... A larger group
finally settled at Salonika [in Greece], and formed there a colony
which persisted until 1914 [the beginning of World Ward I], when
the members were compelled to migrate, and went to New York. 31
According to Father Bernaldez, most of the exiles had sinister luck,
being robbed and murdered wherever they went, and Walsh
himself then amplifies upon this dark desolation, which also
contained an irony:
The most terrible sufferings of the wanderers were inflicted by the lust
and cruelty of the Moors on those who sailed from Gibraltar to the
Kingdom of Fez. The Jews had once been very powerful in that
Kingdom [a recurrent pattern], and one of them, a man named
Aaron, so enjoyed the protection of the King of Fez, said Bernaldez,
that he conducted himself and gave orders in the kingdom as he
pleased, and the Moors were very angry, and made a riot against the
King and the Jews, and killed the King and Aaron and then went into
the Jewries, in which there were over 2,000 households in the city,
and put them (the Jews) to the sword, and killed and plundered, and
left only those who said they would be Moors ... but many of the
Jews remained secret Jews, as in Spain before the Inquisition. ... And
the Jews, fearing to be killed, became Moors, but remained secretly
Jews. Thus in Mohammedan Fez the story of the Jews parallels that
of their brothers in Spain. On this occasion, the [new] King of Fez
offered to protect the Jews, and allowed them to hire bands of
Moorish soldiers for the purpose; but he secretly gave orders to the
men to rob them on the road. Having seized all the property of the
exiles, the Mussulmans violated the women and girls under the very
eyes of their husbands, fathers and brothers, and slew any of the men
who dared to protest. Evidently, these barbarians, too, had heard the
tale, widely circulated, that the Jewish women had swallowed gold, for
after dishonoring them, they ripped their bellies with scimitars to
search for the ducats.32
31

Ibid., p. 370.

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Such will be the further fruits of the campaign to undo 1492, if it

is successful. Then we will further taste the combined cultures of
cruelty and deceit, and their common materialist suffocation of life
and mercy and selfless love.
By way of rounding out the picture, Walsh says that
Some of the survivors staggered on till they reached Fez, naked,
starving and swarming with vermin. Others returned to Arcilla [in
Christian Spain], and begged the Count of Borva, the Spanish
governor, to have them baptized, for the love of Jesus Christ, in
whom they believed, and to let them return to Spain. He received
them with much kindness, fed and clothed them; and had them
baptized. So many were baptized, that the priests had to sprinkle
them with a hyssop in groups. During the next three years, bands of
them continued to straggle back to Spain, convinced that their
sufferings were a punishment for their rejection of Christ. ... A very
acute rabbi named Zentollo, one of ten or twelve rabbis that [Father]
Bernaldez baptized, told them that in Castile, there were more than
30,000 Jewish households, and in Aragon, 6,000 making a total of
more than 160,000 persons.33
Therefore, even the concept the expulsion of the Jews must be
thought through more carefully, especially because Queen Isabel
and King Ferdinand only had authority over Castile and Aragon,
which is hardly the whole of modern Spain, much less the whole of
the Iberian Peninsula.
Many of the expelled Jews in fact went to Portugal where they were
better able to make connections with England and other countries
who later became enemies of Spain, especially after the Protestant
Revolt began.
Exacting revenge
At a very vulnerable strategic moment in Spain in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries the expelled Jews and their sympathetic
coreligionists were able to give much important strategic
32

Ibid., pp. 370-371 my emphasis added.

33

Ibid., p. 371 my emphasis added.

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intelligence to the enemies of Catholic Spain, and thereby also

exact, at least in part, their terrible revenge.
During some Moorish uprisings in conquered Granada during the
years 1500-1501, the Moors murdered Christian priests and sold
Christian women as slaves in Africa,34 acts of cruelty and barbarity
which provoked swift and stern repression from King Ferdinand and
Queen Isabel. With support from Cardinal Ximenes de Cisneros,
the respected head of the Spanish Inquisition, the ruling couple
informed them [the Moors] that they might have their choice
between exile to Africa, and baptism.35
It is significant, moreover, that
Most of them chose baptism. Thus came into existence [analogous to
the Jewish CONVERSOS] that class of unwilling Christians known as
MORISCOS, of whom half a million were finally expelled under Philip
III in 1609... [because, in fact,] few of the Moors left the country in
1501 [when they were given the chance].36
There were various causes of the political and economic decline of
Spain during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but one cause,
in particular, which is germane to our theme, is often enough
overlooked, perhaps because it is too sensitive and explosive.
Once again, in the wise and measured and well-researched words of
Walsh, we may learn many important truths truths which will not
only illuminate our current strategic and political context, but also
the deeper Black Legend about Spain and the even deeper passion
to undo 1492. William Thomas Walsh says:
There appears to be one more cause [of the political and economic
decline of Spain], which for some mysterious reason has been passed
over in complete silence by all our historians [as of 1930]. There
can be no doubt, says the Jewish Encyclopedia,37 that the decline of
34

Ibid., p. 464 my emphasis added.

35

Ibid.

36

Ibid.

37

The Jewish Encyclopedia (New York: Funk and Wagnal, 1904), Volume

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Spanish commerce in the seventeenth century was due in large

measure to the activities of the MARRANOS [note well the
depreciative and derisive word they use for the CONVERSOS!] of
Holland, Italy [Venice, especially!], and England, who diverted trade
from Spain. ... When Spain was at war with any of these countries
[especially with the Protestant countries], Jewish intermediation was
utilized to obtain knowledge of Spanish naval activity [i.e., tactical and
strategical intelligence about the enemy]. 38
What is more, Walsh goes on to say:
It appears from the same source [the authoritative 1904 Jewish
Encyclopedia] that the Spanish CONVERSOS who settled in London
acquired within a century an almost complete monopoly of English
trade with the [Mohammedan] Levant, the Indies, Brazil, and
especially with the Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal. They [the
Spanish Conversos] formed an important link in the network of trade
spread especially throughout the Spanish and Portuguese world by the
MARRANOS or Secret Jews. Their position enabled them to give
[Oliver] Cromwell and his secretary, Thurloe, important information as
to the plans of Charles Stuart in Holland and of the Spaniards in the
New World. Outwardly [and deceitfully] they passed as Spaniards
and Catholics; but they held prayer meetings at Cree Church Lane,
and became known to the [Calvinist, Judaizing] government as Jews
by faith.39
Spain clearly had a very serious counter-intelligence problem, and
had to deal somehow with subversive networks of resentful ethnics
who still had superior interior lines on the vulnerable inner
front of Spain. What Franco later called a Fifth Column was also
a formidable power to aid Catholic Spains enemies, who were still
very strategically located, despite the supposed large-scale expulsion
of the Jews.
XI, p. 501.
38

William Thomas Walsh, p. 466 my emphasis added.

Ibid. my emphasis added. Walsh is quoting from the 1904 Jewish

Encyclopedia, Volume V, p. 168.
39

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Cromwell
Quoting some other frank Jewish scholars, Professor Walsh has a
further-revealing, extended footnote:
[Anti-Catholic, Calvinist Oliver] Cromwell was by no means
unacquainted with the resources and wide activities of the rich
Sephardi Jews of the Continent, says Albert M. Hyamson in his
History of the Jews in England, p. 176. The Spanish and Portuguese
trade [and economic intelligence network?] was in their hands; the
Levant trade also to a considerable extent. Jews helped to found the
Hamburg Bank [one of the main cities of the Hanseatic League], and
were closely connected with the Dutch East and West Indian
Companies. As bullion merchants, also, Jews were prominent, and, in
addition, many of them owned fleets of merchantmen. The second
reason for Cromwells favor was the great assistance these crypto-Jews
of London and their agents on the Continent were to the [regicide]
government of the [Judaizing, Neo-Messianic] Commonwealth. And,
when employing them on secret service, he was aware of their true
faith.40
Origin of Liberalism
Because the remainder of this extended footnote is so important
and nuanced and full of implication, I propose to continue quoting it
to the shocking end, and then comment. Walsh himself, before
quoting others, says:
Carvajal, a secret Jew who went to England as Portuguese
ambassador, was enormously wealthy, and placed a whole army of
continental agents and spies at the disposal of Cromwell [perhaps to
aid his cruelly unspeakable, Moor-like operations in Ireland?]. The
share of the Jews in promoting the Protestant Reformation is pointed
out by Rabbi Lewis Browne in Stranger than Fiction, p. 248 et seq.
Luther, he observes, studied Hebrew with Reuchlin, a pupil of Jewish
scholars in Italy, and the Jews, by their very presence in Europe ... had
helped to bring the heresy into being. But once it was born they let it
severely alone. Browne is right, too, in discerning that Liberalism is of
Jewish origin. It was little wonder that the enemies of social progress
Ibid., pp 503-504 footnote number 8 to Chapter XXXII my emphasis
added.
40

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[sic], the monarchists and the Churchmen, came to speak of the

whole liberal movement [and revolutionary leaven] as nothing but a
Jewish plot, he says on p. 305. LIBERALISM, he adds, was the
Protestant Reformation in the world of politics. ... Incidentally,
however, it brought complete release at last to the Jew [but release
from what? and release for what?]. The Jewish Encyclopedia recalls
that Luther was said to be a Jew at heart, and that he remarked on
one occasion, If I were a Jew I would rather be a hog than a
Christian.41
Luthers visceral words are all too characteristic, and for us to think
that liberated or released -- people have founded their new
false religion upon him is, indeed, in Francois Rabelais words of
high-spirited Pantagruelism, a terrible thing to think upon!
Moreover, Rabbi Lewis Brownes insights about the origins and
nature of Liberalism would provide an especially important, candid
complement to James Burnhams own brilliant analysis, Suicide of
the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism.42
Moreover, Burnhams book, often called the definitive analysis of
the pathology of Liberalism, has never, I regret to say, been
seriously counter-argued or even responded to, must less refuted.
And his analysis is even more pertinent today than when it was first
published in 1964. For, it would seem that the remnants of the
Catholic West are not very much in resistance to this dissolvent
Judaizing Liberalism. Even so-called Catholic Conservatism, or
Neo-Conservatism now, appears to be only the Right Wing of
National Liberalism.
In a small group some years ago with Irving Kristol, the former
Trotskyite and Father of Neo-Conservatism, who is himself of
41

Ibid., p. 504 my emphasis added.

James Burnham, Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and

Destiny of Liberalism. (New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House, 1964).
In 1974, Burnham and Arlington House re-issued the book with a brilliant
8-page AFTERWORD added (pp. 313-320), which was, unfortunately, not
included in the re-issued 1985 Edition of the book, published by RegneryGateway in Washington, D.C.
42

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Jewish ancestry and an admirer of James Burnham, said: Burnhams

Suicide of the West is a classic. But, no one speaks of it any more.
I then encouraged him to help bring the book back into prominent
public discourse, for he was (is) influential enough to do it. As far as
I know, however, that never came to pass.
Burnham himself, like William Thomas Walsh, had a deeply strategic
mind and could take the long view of history, and of the leavens and
dissolvents of the Revolution. It would seem that, had Burnham
known of Walsh, he would have appreciated Walshs Catholic
perspicacity and candor, and after Burnham returned to his earlierabandoned Catholic Faith, he would have, I think, cherished
Professor Walsh even more.
Near the end of his important Chapter XXXII, Walsh says, for
example:
There is a suggestion here [from the evidence of The Jewish
Encyclopedia and other forthright Jewish scholars] of a fascinating and
unexplored chapter of history, in which the tragic figure of the
wandering [and revolutionary?] Jew, defeated in his attempt to destroy
the Catholic Church and build a New Jerusalem on its ruins in
medieval Spain, is [later, and very soon] seen playing a large part in
bringing low the greatest Catholic nation in Europe at the [seeming]
moment of its final triumph, and transferring the dominion of the seas
and of world politics to the anti-Catholic power of modern England. It
would be interesting to know to what extent they instigated the revolt
in the [Spanish] Netherlands which Philip II [1527-1598, who ruled
1556-1598] attempted to suppress by the Inquisition. That they had
something to do with these matters is highly probable, for they
supported Calvinism [as with Oliver Cromwell of England and John
Knox of Scotland] and other anti-Catholic movements just as they had
supported the primitive heresies and the Mohammedanism of the
Middle Ages. It is one of the curiosities of history that they paid off
the score [at least in part] of the Spanish Inquisition at the strategic
movement when Spain, in spite of all her phenomenal powers of
recuperation, had exhausted herself at last [by way of centrifugal
over-extension, too] like a good mother in the stupendous effort to
colonize and civilize [and hence convert by heroic missionary efforts]

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vast portions of the western hemisphere.

43

That is to say, the grand-strategic political and financial action of

Jewish forces used the Judo Principle against the over-extended
and precariously balanced, expanding Empire of Spain, and applied it
very deftly, along with its power of organization and propaganda for
internal subversion and its cumulative dialectic of dissolution to
include its action as a powerful dissolvent of the Faith by way of
support given to the syncretizing and Judaizing heresies and other
Reform Movements.
Marquez versus Boixades
After considering this Judaic factor as well as the Moslem factor, the
third and last element that was especially keen to undo 1492"
during the 500th Anniversary of 1492 was represented by the 1983
Nobel Laureate in literature, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, himself a
revolutionary socialist and personal friend of Fidel Castro, and a
very anti-Catholic saboteur, as well but very subtly so! He often
expresses the view that it would be progress to return to preColomban America. And he has been known well for his defense of
the Aztec Empire and Civilization, which he favorably contrasts with
Western (especially Spanish) Christendom. Garcia Marquez would
certainly have opposed that young Christian soldier from Salamanca
University, Hernando Cortes by name, who was to carry the
Standard of Castile and Aragon to the blood-drenched altars of Mexico
where [Aztec] priests plucked out the hearts of maidens to appease an
idol.44 That is to say, to appease the phallic plumed serpent god
of the Aztecs, called QUETZALCOATL.
By way of completing this analysis of the three main streams of antiCatholic belief and thought and culture that have fervently sought
and still seek to undo 1492, it is fitting to turn to the deeply
faithful Argentine Roman Catholic professor of literature, Alberto
Boixados.
His book in Spanish Arte y Subversion (Art and
Subversion) was later expanded and modified for a North American
43

William Thomas Walsh, pp. 466-467 -- my emphasis added.

44

Ibid., p. 438 my emphasis added.

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audience, and published in English under the title Myths of Modern

Art.45
Professor Boixados of the University of Cordoba in Argentina
knows very well about the first two hostile religions who would
undo 1492!, but he also understands the more modern cultural
channels of subversion and revolutionary naturalism as in the
strategic philosophy of Antonio Gramsci and especially in the subtle
literature of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose powerful writings
should not be given lightly to those who are insufficiently prepared
to deal with the powerful subversive resources of language and his
ways of using symbolic subversion.
Let Alberto Boixados be our guide.
Quoting Garcia Marquezs own provocative acceptance speech for
the Nobel Prize, he says:
Why is it that the originality we [we writers] are permitted without
reservation in literature is denied [by whom?] with such mistrust when
applying it to social change? Nevertheless, two books published by
Garcia Marquez are significant for focusing on a negative SPIRITUAL
CONVERSION [Boixados own emphasis] linked with a radical social
change.46
The two books referred to are Garcia Marquezs One Hundred
Years of Solitude and The Autumn of the Patriarch.
In the former, The intention is manifestly to create a new order
by a conscious parodying of the Bible along with obscene and
blasphemous insinuations as in the depiction of a beautiful young
woman of reputed purity, but who incites the lusts of all of those
men who come in contact with her. In Boixados veiled but
shocking words:
For example, in his One Hundred Years, Remedios, the Beauty ... was
not of this world, because from the time she was in her mothers
45

(Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1991).

Alberto Boixados, Myths of Modern Art, p. 43 my emphasis added,

except as designated above.
46

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womb, she was safe from contagion. Her innocence is [then]

shown in her behavior: The startling thing about her simple instinct
was that the more she shed fashion [i.e. modesty and modest dress]
in search of comfort and the more she shunned conventions [i.e.,
moral limits and decency] to allow for spontaneity, the more
disturbing her incredible beauty became [for others, to others]. The
conventions [in the book] are nothing more than a basic sense of
decency, and his long descriptions of them are, or ought to be,
unprintable. This pure being arouses in others the basest of
instincts. But the satire does not end here: [after her death,]
Remedios the Beauty is taken up to Heaven, body and soul. The
allusion could not be clearer nor more diabolic.47
On this 150th Anniversary of Pope Pius IXs proclamation of the
Dogma of the Immaculate Conception, faithful Catholics should well
shudder at these words, and, in love, mightily resist such staining
mockeries and iconic or symbolic subversions. Only one who
deeply knows the Faith, but despises it, can so subtly besmirch the
teaching and intimate culture of the Faith.
As in a recent article I wrote about the Judo Principle and the
Jewish Dialectic as they are now applied or soon will be applied
in our ongoing grand-strategic irregular war and hostile
confrontation with a renewed Mohammedan Insurgency worldwide,
not just in the Middle East, so, too, with the threefold or threepronged cultural and religious attack upon the Catholic Church and
its culture back in 1992, and thereafter, designed to undo 1492.
The Jewish and Mohammedan initiatives are much better known to
us or are becoming better known -- than the subtler subversions
of the historic Faith, by way of imaginative literature.
In Garcia Marquezs new world of Macondo, says Boixados:
There is no Redemption because Marquez, true to the materialistic
and cyclical view of history, denies it: I know all this by heart, Ursula
shouted. Its as if time had turned around and we were back at the
beginning. In that circle so completely opposed to the Christian
47

Ibid., p. 44 my emphasis added.

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concept of time, there is no place for hope. Marquez world has no

meaning, no finality, and thus he destroys it: Macondo was already a
fearful whirlwind of dust and rubble being spun by the wrath of the
biblical hurricane. The only possible happiness for man seems to be
the unbridled abandonment of Amoranta Ursula and Aureliano
Babilonia. In this context the [Marquez] praise of vice seems logical,
and is defined as maturity of judgment [Cien Anos de Soledad, p.
235.] Nothing is left untouched. Not even the literary field. ...
Literature was the best toy ever invented to make fun of people.
Thus, in a world without hope and [objective] values the only thing
that works is violence. He mingles the powers of the laws of nature
and of the spirit, and disingenuously muddles up Good and Evil, thus
befuddling our powers of reason [i.e., LOGOS]. And he can do this
[subversion by way of confusion] because he is able to conquer our
admiration through his vibrant poetry and the pathos of his humor.48
Before we conclude, it is fitting to go a little further into Boixados
excellent analysis and warning about Gabriel Garcia Marquez, for, to
the extent that his mocking spirit permeates the culture of the Faith
that still exists in Latin America, he will really help undo 1492" and
the spirit of Christian chivalry. Boixados proceeds to consider
the second of Garcia Marquez two subversive novels:
In The Autumn of the Patriarch the authors daring reaches new limits
and greater subtlety. The novel has the power of a negative
conversion in both the political and the religious spheres. He leaves
not a shred of dignity to the military profession, pinning on it every
conceivable kind of degradation. Mercilessly, he destroys whatever
nobility the military profession might embody.49
Moreover says Boixados,
If the reader is a lukewarm [Christian] believer (of the purely rational
or sentimental sort) and willingly plays Marquez [cynical] games, he
will risk losing his remaining convictions. What, then, is Marquez

48

Ibid., p. 45 my emphasis added.

49

Ibid., pp. 45-46 my emphasis added.

121

game?

50

Literary art at the service of subversion

That is to say, how does Garcia Marquez use his potent literary art
for the purposes of subversion the subversion of his strategic
target? Professor Boixados continues:
I n One Hundred Years of Solitude, he ridicules the [Catholic] clergy
and hierarchy through their simplistic and puerile moralizings. And he
does so convincingly by mixing truth and falsehood. In The Autumn of
the Patriarch, on the other hand, t h e ridicule has become cruel,
satanic, and it degrades the entire supernatural world [hence the
reality of Grace]. Marquez does this gracefully and with humor, and
if the reader [especially the young and unformed reader] is not
immediately alerted, he loses the game from the start.51
Writing himself as a very well-educated and devout traditionalist
Roman Catholic, Alberto Boixados also knows how to read
attentively such multi-layered, richly allusive literature and all of its
rhetorical resourcefulness and manipulation of illusion. Therefore,
when he says about Marquez potent art, Look out!, we, too,
should be vigilant and disciplined and discerning. Boixados goes on
to specify his meaning:
[By the enchantment of his art] our spirit is surreptitiously captured
[as in a negative spiritual conversion], for the enemy is disguised in
expressions of brilliant artistry, and we are seduced to the point of
reverence. If our aesthetic admiration is not accompanied by prudent
reflection, if we are not alert to the danger to our most sacred beliefs,
then we are on the path of a negative conversion. The vestiges of our
religion will be undermined by his aesthetics and his skepticism, and
our political eyes will be dimmed.52
Garcia Marquez himself has often emphatically declared: In a word,
I believe that the revolutionary duty of a writer is to write well.
That is his obligation ... I believe that the revolutionary obligation of
50

Ibid., p. 46 - my emphasis added.

51

Ibid. my emphasis added.

52

Ibid., my emphasis added.

122

the writer is to write well, this is his duty.

53

In Garcia Marquezs confession of belief, he says:

So that there be no misunderstanding, let us start at the end. I
believe that sooner or later the world will became socialist, and for my
part, the sooner the better. But I am also convinced that one of the
things that can delay it is bad [sic] literature.
Just as for his literary comrade, Carlos Fuentes, Garcia Marquez
wants subtle and potent literature that can create new myths and
restore old myths and thereby subvert desiccated traditions as
they see them, especially the mystifications of the Catholic
tradition. Writing about Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes says:
Garcia Marquez destroys these a priori idiots in order to proclaim
a n d control t h e rights of imagination, which knows how to
distinguish between mystification, wherein a dead past tries to pass
for a live present, and mythification, wherein the live present
recovers the life of the past as well [especially pre-Colomban
myths].54
Analyzing the supposed the archetypal space of the myth where
the same things constantly become new, and the human becomes a
contemporary of the [cyclical] cosmogony, Alberto Boixados notes
that, like for Garcia Marquez, In the case of [the Mexican, Carlos]
Fuentes, this cosmogony is the Aztecs, who will, among others,
participate in the rebirth of the new man.55 For Garcia Marquez, of
course, this will be part of the renewed New Socialist Man. This
will, therefore, require a subversively dialectical Marxism that rides
on the Pre-Colomban myth to create a new epic [of revolt] which
will breed a new man56 and certainly not a Christian man. Such
demiurgic writers prepare the way for the New Coercive
Utopians.
53

Ibid., pp. 48, 94 my emphasis added.

54

Ibid., p. 62 my emphasis added.

55

Ibid., p. 67.

56

Ibid., p. 74.

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Fuentes honors and speaks about Garcia Marquez One Hundred

Years of Solitude, as follows:
It is an authentic revision of utopia, the epic and myth of Latin
America, which conquers, by demonizing, the dead moments of
historiography in order to enter metaphorically, mythically and
simultaneously into the total time of the present.57
Such are the aims and aspirations of the altogether anti-Catholic
new Latin American literature, and a revelation of their
syncretistic cosmogony and metaphysics, and some of their literary
psycho-techniques. Demonization, of which they often speak, is
also, Boixados confirms, a known characteristic of pre-Colomban
mythology, which has been exhaustively proved by Germain
Bazins studies of the religious nature of the Aztecs 58 those
whom Hernando Cortes had encountered, defeated, and helped to
convert to the Catholic Faith.

Pre- Colomban Demonism

Here is a summary of Bazins findings, in his own words:
There is another region in the world where demonism is widespread:
pre-Colomban America. Nowhere else did it flourish as in the
Americas, this sign of blood which is the sign of Satan; nowhere else in
the universe did civilized humanity remain longer under the terror of
supraterrestrial powers; nowhere else did man have a more tragic
knowledge of his precariousness in a world in which he felt himself a
stranger. There was no reason to be on earth other than to pay blood
tribute to divinities satiated with crime; the very sun demanded its
daily ration of blood if it were to consent to continue its path; Thaloc,
the god of rain, was no less exigent. The terrors of the millennium left
a memorable wake for our [Christian-Catholic] civilization. One
wonders what was the psychology of a people like the Aztecs
[recalling Moloch and the Carthaginians] who every fifty-two years
57

Ibid.

58

Ibid.

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cringed before the spectacle of the end of the world? Death, a violent
death in battle or under the sacrificial knife was the only relief
from this infernal life [without hope]. Battles were frequently waged
for no other reason than to feed these sacrificial altars where
adolescent girls, children and prisoners of war were ritualistically
immolated. This is the nauseating legacy of the Aztec civilization. 59
For the new Ideological Indigenism and romantic Comparative
Anthropology, there is a great desire to destroy the blight of
Catholic Christianity and to help undo 1492" especially the
Christian spiritual exploitation that Columbus purportedly set in
motion.
Such an undoing promises the return of a New
Revolutionary Naturalism.
After citing some specific events and subtle mockeries from The
Autumn of the Patriarch, Boixados comments:
By such a succession of incidents Marquez subtly dismembers the
supernatural order; more than once, events [are said to] occur under
the golden dome of the deceitful world of that difficult God, the one
and triune. ... Can one so easily dismiss the profound and irreverent
subversion of the natural and supernatural order. ...? 60
So many negative spiritual conversions may well have occurred
because of Marquez subversive incentives to mockery and apostasy,
and to final despair, the corrosion of hopelessness.
Yes, such artists want to create a new world, and these specially
initiated elites expect to find the dawn of a new Gnosis.61 In the
words of Mircea Eliade, this orientation constitutes in art the
absolute triumph of the permanent revolution ... all innovation [e.g.,
provocation and excess] is declared beforehand, by decree, to
be ... brilliant.62
Ibid., pp. 74-75 my emphasis added. Boixados quotes Germain Bazin,
Carmelite Studies (Paris: Desclee de Brouwer, 1948), p. 515.
59

60

Ibid., p. 47.

61

Ibid., p. 57.

62

Ibid., pp. 57-58 my emphasis added.

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CONCLUSION
By understanding the three main elements of the drive the passion
and the fever to undo 1492, Catholics will have a much more
differentiated awareness of the larger, grand-strategic psychocultural warfare in which they are involved, whether they yet know
it or not.
There seems even to be a convergence of these various antiCatholic movements, which combine to produce an updated
Revolutionary Faith along with its Neo-Messianic Fever.
On the premise that contrast clarifies the mind, Catholics require
deeper strategic studies of these false religions and armed
ideologies and their delusional dialectics of liberation.
Premature wrong action is not the prudent or truly strategic
way to resist the often combined strategic initiatives of those who
would undo 1492.
The subversive new myth
Talmudic and Kabbalistic (Gnostic) Judaism is not the pre-Christian
Judaism of the Biblical Israelites. It is a new religion and armed
ideology and revolutionary faith rooted in the rejection of Christ
and the mockery of the Humility of God in the Incarnation.
Therefore, the current use of the phrase, the Judaeo-Christian
tradition, is itself subversive, as well as deliberately equivocal and
ambiguous. It is a subversive new myth.
The cruel embodiment of false religion
The Mohammedan religion, claiming to correct the distortions of
both the Judaic and the Christian revelations, and then to bring
forth the fulfillment of Gods revelation, is in truth, a very militaristic
and sensualist, materialist, cruel embodiment of a false religion,
which is, however, clearly on the rise in a worldwide insurgency
to advance the Sword of the Prophet.

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A descent to terror and despair

The return to the naturalism and demonism of the preColomban Aztec civilization (and its analogues) would also be a
further descent into terror and despair.
The Catholic Faith and its intimate culture, by contrast, have so
much hope and love to give to the heart of man for his greater
good (and the true common good) and for the glory of God and the
gift of His Beatitude.
Dr. Robert Hickson