Spains Voters Reject Aznars Popular

Spain’s voters Reject Aznar’s Popular Party

I was struck by the comment of a Spaniard in Charles Sennot’s Boston Globe piece on the Spanish elections. He quoted a voter who was disturbed by the way Aznar had manipulated information and public opinion, accusing him of lying about the threat posed by Iraq. He said that these tactics reminded him of the ones the dictator Franco used to use.

It reminded me that most of the publics in countries with fascist pasts–Spain, Germany, Italy–rejected the way the Iraq war was gotten up by Bush and his European partners. They sniffed something wrong with the manipulation that was clearly employed. They had been sensitized to such techniques by their suffering under fascism in the past.

And, it strikes me that the techniques that they minded so much are those of the Neoconservatives. What does that say about the latter? Maybe they don’t deserve Leo Strauss as an intellectual ancestor. Maybe their real genealogy is rather more sordid.