The cheesemongering of the Marcès and other Spaniards went underground in reaction to the policies of Spain’s military dictator, Francisco Franco, who ruled the country from 1939 until his death in 1975. The country’s economy was depleted by civil war, World War II, and Spain’s exclusion from the Marshall Plan. So, he initiated a grand economic plan designed to achieve self-sufficiency: Spain would pool its resources and centralize production.
As part of this policy, quotas were enacted that outlawed milk production under 10,000 liters a day. This made small dairies and cheesemaking productions (such as the Marcès’) illegal. To comply with the law, they had to sell their milk to larger companies.
I will note simply that centralized control of the means of production, whether actually implemented, or merely implied, is a key aspect of Fascism. It is what Keynes described both in “The End of Laissez-Faire”, and at the end of his “General Theory”.
Liberalism is free markets, political diversity, the right to private property, and the ability to achieve political change peacefully. Everything else might as well be called Fascism, wherever the polemicists and propagandists choose to put it on the political spectrum. Certainly, for the Spanish, whoever won the Civil War, they were going to be told what to do. The victory of the Stalinists (who in typically deceptive fashion called themselves “Republicans”) would likely have meant something close to what they have in Cuba, though, whereas the reign of Franco merely lasted as long as he did.
And Franco did not hate his country and his people. This also put him one up on those he defeated.
I can’t resist commenting–or most likely repeating a theme which occurs often with me–that the Nazis and Italian Fascists, and Spanish Fascists, and perhaps Pinochet and others, all existed in a clear continuum with repressive regimes as seen throughout human history. Mass murder is not something the Nazis invented, although wedding it to bad science was unique. But even there, the concept of defining, stigmatizing, and to a great extent deleting entire groups of people was something the Soviets really invented. They destroyed the “kulaks” before Hitler. They defined and killed or imprisoned in remote places large numbers of political non-conformists before Hitler. Hitler got the IDEA of a concentration camp from Lenin. Goebbels got many of his best ideas on propaganda from Lenin, Stalin, and ironically enough Woodrow Wilson.
What is unique in Communism is the deletion of the soul, the deletion of the self as something capable of existing outside membership in a mutable collective. What is unique is how little it gives a spirit to hang onto, and how much it asks him or her to give over in the process. You have to surrender your capacity for moral judgment. You have to surrender your history. You have to surrender your family, if asked to do so. It is assumed you will surrender any residual religious belief you may have. You might need to surrender your friends. You might have to surrender your lifestyle.
And at this moment in history, you have to do all this to join a cult which has been unmasked as inhuman, brutal, dishonest to its core, and constituted by the very worst human beings possible.
I’m rambling. I look at the gobbledy-gook Leftists keep spewing, and I continue to wonder how they are so unreflective, so uninterested in helping real human beings, so contemptuous of reason and the clear use of language. So much good is possible, and they shit on it every day, to the extent of their ability, and call their work noble.