People tned not to realize that Spanish culture went through its own little curve. While y’all where pitting liberal democrats against nihilistic fascists (World War 2), we were pitting christian fascists against anarcho-communist pseudo-nihilists (Spanish Civil War). Your fight was more resource rich and multi-cultural, ours was pretty much domestic and less globaly relevant (yet still parallel).
God has been dead around these parts for so long, yet his corpse kept active, that the people are more puppetry fans than worshipers.
This by way of trying to explain my obssession with Nietzsche’s fight against christianity.
Btw, I suspect we have another Spanish cultured poster in this forum. His brand of logic is pretty distinctive: neither nihilist nor non-nihilist, part of a culture that bypassed nihilism.
Think the Spanish Civil War was just trying to actualize the potential for preserving wealth and making profit on every side. The Spanish never had a revolutionary period, but were steeped in a classical culture of fractured insurgency. God didnt die in Spain, he was thrust aside and told to linger as men found excuses to ligitimize a reason to fight for their slice of a pie. In the end, nobody got shit save for a confused intellectual history that later ideologs could point to as evidence of honesty, integrity, and the purity of their lost cause. Nihilism doesnt ever flow from a death of God but the dying of enthusiasm in the coming to terms with a failed reality. Its a double insult God doesnt make things right in these moments of realization and dejected moralizing. We claim its the same as repentence… but is it?
We felt the means to get ourselves into these messes. We exect God to get us out of them. What Prophet ever arosed under the Judeo- Christian tradition who said ‘yes, its all our fault, but with a wink of the eyes, and a twitch of the nose I shall remake it better ever more?’ None… not a single one. Every prophet weve ever had in the book came from the opposite of directions, in the moments of our greatest trials, our encounter and failures up against our looming, tangible fears, and whipped the love of brother, god, duty to both and all men. Our prophets smitted us in our excess of power and abuse as much as when we were in fear and in gloom hiding. God did not die in Spain, he was pushed away by a population unworthy of him. There are no longer people worthy of our prophets, be it the militant judges or the humanism and sacrifice of Jesus, in a population such as modern Spain that temporizes every pain and hides from every threat… afraid of projecting goodwill or coercive force to do better or make anew, perfering pathetic utopian alignments in infrastructure and law while becoming more xenophobic, more and more poverty stricken, more languid, and more helpless in preventing the next bomb to unexpectedly go off. All for what? A council of sages, human rights for apes, and malfunctioning hydrogen towers? A ceremonial and impotent royal family? It wont be long until the African cities are lost at this rate. God did not die in Spain, he left in disgust to these so called heirs to The Cid. As do I. He is quite alive and dancing as never before elsewhere.
Then, of course, one has to realize that Spanish Americans and Spain are more or less as different as English Americans and England.
While they continued to fester in their post Civil War fracture, we were too busy trying to find better air coinditioning technology and refining the game theory involved in that.
It depresses sometimes that my best imaginable scenario is no longer an air conditioned room in a hot day.
It is reasuring to me its a tempting luxury I am learning to do without. Less, less, less… to the man underneath. What can I be, in my best, without these means to a satisfying end? What are the extent of my strengths and worths as a human being?
When I visit Venezuela, the experience with respect to this is fascinating: it is like having learned that it can be much colder outside than any air conditioning can make it inside puts me several levels of cool thinking above all of my compatriots. At the same time, it makes it so that I lack the intensity required to really experience tropical lands.
Then again, who nose; it’s not like I become a Contra-Nietzsche hermit: I am still among the compatriots.
I think that Christianity gets too much credit sometimes for the inevitable fights people pick. Often religious divisions follow cultural ones. My experience of Spain and spaniards is limited, I admit, but I think that even after His body has turned to dust we shall still see wars erupt from time to time over other natural divisions. We have to remember that political entities absorb unresolved conflicts that remain in tension and erupt when faith in the political process is lost.