Note: The Institute for National Revolutionary Studies does not share the criticisms of Ramiro Ledesma Ramos articulated by Antonio Medrano in this article, however we appreciate the work he has done to elucidate the life and work of this seminal figure of National-Syndicalism. 

This text by Antonio Medrano was translated by Georges Gondinet and published in n° 13 of the magazine Totalité.

The figure and the work of Ramiro Ledesma Ramos, nearly unknown outside of Spain and even in Spain, eclipsed by the influence of the heritage of José Antonio, deserves to be presented to the eyes of new European generations, to be brought to the consciousness of those who search for a revolutionary way of radical reconstruction and traditional normalization, for prostrated Europe today and for the decadent West. And this, not only because Ramiro Ledesma was one the most brilliant thinkers of the Spanish national revolution, the genial creator of national-syndicalism, the great precursor of the Falangist movement and the national uprising of July 18^th 1936, a man of action and thought whose message possesses much life and timeliness, but also because the analysis of his work lends itself to a propitious discussion of a series of doctrinal considerations of the greatest importance for today, where disorientation begins to make itself felt in an acute manner among the youth milieus who wish to vigorously search for an alternative to the system.

Ramiro Ledesma was born in 1905 in a small village in the province of Zamora, to a modest family. “The grandson of peasants,” as Juan Aparicio said of him, he knew since his first years the resigned and hash life of Castillian peasants. And for “his peasant roots, his stubborn Sayago ancestry” would lead to this “inner hardness” that would characterize him much later throughout his intense work. His father was a country schoolteacher, and he received from him his primary instruction and the bases of what would be his intellectual formation, solid and expansive. The teaching he received, to which he added an iron will and an intense study regimen, later opened the doors of the university to him, then reserved for a small minority, and permitted him to obtain a professional career from which he earned a modest living, taking, after having passed two competitive exams, an administrative post in the Madrid postal administration. Two facts that would have a decisive influence on the configuration of his destiny.

Santiago Montero Diaz, one of his faithful companions, distinguishes three clearly differentiated periods in the life of Ledesma: a literary period, during which he wrote his essays, tales, and novels of a violent and heartbreaking romantic tone; a philosophical period, in which the passion for knowledge and science arose in Ledesma, and a political period, during which he fully devoted himself to action and to the theoretical work of creating a new movement.

His works El seflo de la muerte (1924) and El Quijote y nuestro tiempo(1925 ; unpublished until 1971) in which he profiles the vigor of his passionate personality date from the first period– of the latter, Tomas Borras said that it “seemed to announce from afar the Don Quixotism of the Crusade.” In the second period Ledesma discovered the world of philosophy and science: at the time he took courses in philosophy and literature and physical – mathematical sciences, two domains in which he would succeed brilliantly. He imposed on himself an iron work ethnic thanks to which he acquired a solid and extended education as few did in his time. “The long hours of study,” wrote Montero Diaz, “brought him considerable scientific assets, some of the most effective and cultured that had been achieved in his generation.” The methodological rigor of the philosophical and mathematical disciplines left an indelible mark on his character, a mark that would display itself in his sober, concise, striking style, full of logic and expressive richness. At this time this admiration for the work of Kant, Scheller, Heidegger, Hegel, and above all Nietzsche, whose impact on his interior life would be decisive, was born. He was also passionate about new contributions to Spanish intellectual life, especially for the work of Unamuno and that of Ortega. He would become the disciple and collaborator of the latter, and would collaborate on different works and translations in the Revista de Occidente, the prestigious publication directed by Ortega, which then represented the pinnacle of Spanish thought. “If his personal and irrevocable fate – equally united in an irrevocable and personal manner with the destiny of Spain – had not interrupted the first duties of his intellectual life, Ramiro would figure in the history of Spanish culture as one of our first philosophers.” (S. Montero Diaz). José Maria Sanchez Diana called him “The Spanish Fichte of the 20^th Century.”

Finally, in the years 1929 and 1930, under the influence of Nietzsche and Maurras and before the turbulent events that would happen in Spain and Europe, his political vocation awoke. In his response to an inquiry on “What is the avant-garde?” published in Gaceta Llteraria in July 1930, Ledesma affirmed that from liberals to socialists to Catholics to monarchists “all fail to grasp the secret of Spain today, self-affirming, nationalist, and with the will to power.” The same year, he made a study excursion to Germany, where he would be impressed by the paramilitary formations of Hitler’s movement and by his violent fight against Marxism. In February 1931, barely 25 years old, he threw himself into politics, with the famous Political Manifesto of the Conquest of the State, one of the most important and most creative documents in Spanish political history. In March of the same year, he published the first issue of the periodical La Conquista del Estado, which would have an unfortunately brief lifespan due to continual governmental repression. These were the critical moments in which parliamentary monarchy was struggling for its last gasps and where the proclamation of the Republic was already imminent. The Conquista del Estado, whose name could not be more eloquent, was born with the goal, not to be a simple organ of expression, but to rally around itself “Falanges of the youth” who would complete the Spanish revolution.

In November 1932, the group La Conquista del Estado merged with the Juntas Castellanas de Actuacion Hispanica of Onésimo Redondo, from this merger the JONS, Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional-Sindicalista, was born, in which Ramiro would be the principal ideological mentor and the first activist. These were years of intense and exhausting struggle, which followed the creation of JONS; years of intense effort to spread cells of the new organization across the entire Fatherland. The effort of Ledesma would principally aim to win over young Marxist and anarchist militants to the national idea. “He was obsessed with the nationalization of the syndicalist masses” and “he made desperate and magnificent efforts to give the violent, deracinated, and anarchist multitudes of the CNT a national content, in the sense of the Fatherland, of filial love for Spain.” (Guillén Salaya). The success of his apostolate is testified by names such as Santiago Montera Diaz, Manuel Mateo, Alvarez de Sotomayor, Francisco Bravo, Sinforiano Moldes and Emilio Gutiérrez Palmas, all former communists or CNT members.

In February 1934 the merger of the JONS with the Falange Española, the new movement of National-Revolutionary inspiration lead by José Antonio Primo de Rivera, took place. The new organization took the name of FE de las JONS, and Ramiro, who received membership card number 1, was part of the first triumvirate assumed collective direction of the movement, with Ruiz de Aida and José Antonio.

In 1935, Ramiro Ledesma, in disagreement with the line of Falangist movement (according to his diagnosis: freezing of revolutionary spirit, passivity and inactivity, immersion in sterile parliamentary politics, growing presence of writers disconnected from the preoccupations of the people and the true political vocation, excessive “rightness” of the party, etc), separated from the Falange with a minority of JONSists established in different Spanish regions. In the months that followed, as usually happens in such cases, a series of lamentable incidents and violent confrontations took place, not simply verbal, between the dissident group and the organization in which they militated. During this same year, Ledesma founded the periodical Patria Libre and wrote his work Fascismo en Espana ? That related, from a bitterly critical point of view, the history of Spanish Fascism and ,especially, the Falange. He also published the celebrated Discurso a las juventudes de Espana, the most important of his works, a classic of Spanish national political thought. In this book, more concerned with tactics and strategy rather than theory, he traces the route that the national revolution must lead for the Spanish youth, the only force capable of saving the Fatherland, by putting itself at the head of the masses.

From what some report in his biographies, in the course of the following year, the key year of Spanish history, Ramiro made various contacts with the Falangist leadership and even José Antonio, to whom he paid a visit in prison, regarding his reincorporation within the movement, before the turn that the Spanish political situation took and before the courageous struggle of the Falange. July 11^th 1936, seven days before the rising, overcoming economic difficulties – he would find himself practically alone in Madrid – and the pressure of Marxist unions that opposed its publication – he published the first issue of his new periodical Nuestra Revolucion, “the last omen of the Spanish revolution” (J. Aparicio). The second issue of this periodical, whose release would be tentatively scheduled for the 18^th of July, would never see that day. On this date the national uprising broke out. Madrid was under the control of red militias, and thus began a bloody persecution of all the elements suspected of “reaction” and “Fascism.” Ramiro refused to flee or hide, knowing well that he was being pursued by Marxist hordes, who saw him as a dangerous enemy. On the first day of August, walking along a Madrid street with his brother, he was arrested by a patrolman of the militia. The 29^th of October of the same year, during one of the “trips” (“sacas”)¹ from the prison of Ventas, he was murdered, resisting a group of militiamen who wanted to take him, with another great Ramiro – Ramiro de Maeztu – on one of the sadly famous “promenades” (“paseos”)². “Me, you will kill me where I want and not where you want,” he cried to his executioners with his characteristic bravado, as he tried to seize one of their weapons. Then a shot fired at close range struck him down forever. “They have not killed a man, they have killed an understanding,” commented Ortega y Gasset, residing in Paris, upon learning the news of the murder of his young disciple.

The ideological message of Ramiro Ledesma could be summarized in the following manner. Regarding the objectives and guiding principles: the primacy of the nation (the idea of the Fatherland is the center of all his political philosophy, to which he tried, firstly, to give an imperial meaning), the affirmation of the state, social revolution and syndicalist organization of the economy, exaltation of heroic and combative values, reinforcement of the university system and the culture on a national and popular basis. Concerning tactics and strategy: the guiding role of the youth, the incorporation of the masses (and especially the working masses) and direct action. According to Antonio Macipe, the great revolutionary objectives of Ramiro were threefold: “the exaltation of human power,” requiring the “purification of man,” without which no revolution is possible, national exaltation, as he would affirm with insistence that the salvation of man is only possible under the protection of the Fatherland; and finally, social justice, satisfying the hungry masses, a prerequisite for community life. For Thomas Borras, the great teaching of Ramiro was to have conceived a “Spanish ethic” as a solution to the contemporary crisis, as much directed against Marxist immorality as against passive liberal immorality: an anti-separatist, anti-capitalist, and anti-communist ethic; a revolutionary, heroic, and militant ethic; a professional ethic, of the craftsman and syndicate, an ethic destined to end parliamentary and pacifist corruption, with the lawyers, politicos, and sophists, based on the conviction that “to be Spanish is not a disgrace, but a splendid blessing of life.” At the root of his political restlessness resides his Spanish anguish, being a son of the Fatherland that was once great and now finds itself trampled, exploited, and violated by internal and external enemies. “Ramiro suffered from feeling like the son of a colonized country, of a people who were slavishly hitched to the cart of foreign imperialism, when Spain by nature, essence, and power, is and must be a contender for Empire, when it’s a country of the Universe” (Guillén Salaya).

That was the life and the work of Ramiro Ledesma, traced very briefly. Now comes the necessary dissection and critical analysis to which we previously alluded; dissection and analysis that we will make in an impersonal spirit, guided by the only solid and faithful criteria regarding works of this importance: traditional doctrine.

From the traditional point of view – we must acknowledge it – the teachings of Ramiro Ledesma present themselves as the least consistent, weakest and most superficial, the least profitable and profound, with a lesser breadth of vision compared with those of the founders of the Falange (above all if we compare it with that of José Antonio). It’s maybe, of them all, the most linked with the historical circumstances, the most conditioned by the influence of the historic moment.

Ledesma was not exactly a “man of Tradition.” He was, on the contrary, a typically modern spirit, that is to say a spirit whose basic outlines were formed by the spiritual, philosophical, and existential presuppositions that constitute the makeup of modern western civilization, secular and profane, individualist and rationalist, arising from the ruin of the Medieval sacred order. With Ramiro, the modern intoxication is especially acute. He was not a man open to the content of the traditional world. There was, with him, even a hostility to this content. He could have had, on some occasions, a certain coincidence with some aspects of traditional culture (for example the communitarian ideal, the heroic ideal, the imperial ideal, etc); but this coincidence is more apparent than anything else; it is nothing more than a marginal, verbal, superficial resemblance, which involves nothing of the content. Basically, what dominated with Ramiro was always a modern attitude, a profane, exalted vitalism, without spiritual roots or dimensions. It’s a characteristic example of one of the tendencies of this complex and ambivalent phenomenon that was European fascism; which defined itself as a movement belonging to the modern world, born from within this world, as a reaction against some of the most aberrant aspects, but without touching the basis of the problem, far from it (on the contrary, it even took its power from other currents which arose from this background). In this sense, the case of Ramiro could be compared to that of Alfred Rosenberg in German National-Socialism or Giovanni Gentile in Italian Fascism, two personalities whose attachment to modern ideology is evident (we recall what Julius Evola said in this regard).

We observe with Ramiro Ledesma, as with Rosenberg or Gentile – to only cite two examples of the Fascist intellectual avant-garde – a complete and absolute disorientation, a total failure of orientation in the most fundamental aspects of existence; in the supernatural, transcendent, and divine dimension. As a good modern intellectual, aware of the currents of thought that dominated his epoch, as a man formed in the molds of modern philosophy, there was a radical ignorance with the thinker who would later found the JONS of the superior, immutable, and eternal values, values that govern life, the only ones that are capable of it orienting and giving meaning to it. To be more explicit, we can affirm that in his work and in his personality we find this lack of principles – authentic principles – that Guénon would stigmatize as the essential characteristic of modern Western civilization and of the human type that corresponds to it. It is a reality that we must recognize without passions or bias of any kind, with total impartiality and objectivity, with full independence from the sympathy or the closeness we feel with the political and human figure of Ramiro; as we must have before any other historical figure, if we want to leave the confused morass of opinions into which our epoch is plunged and discover the right and sure way to elevate ourselves.

Ramiro was a man fully plunged into the crisis of the modern world, imprisoned by it, without even the possibility of escape. That is the deep root of his personal drama, of the intellectual and spiritual crisis where his personality debated itself, as was so justly put into relief by Emiliano Aguado, his old friend and comrade, “His lack of beliefs forced him to live in the bitter distress of a terrifying crisis.” In his personality, in his thought and in his work there is certainly much passion, much vehemence – vehemence and passion of great nobility and generosity – there are also clairvoyant political solutions, but there is no one true principle, that is what, according to us, indicates the fundamental difference with José Antonio, Onésimo Redondo or Sanchez Mazas.

Some particularly negative aspects of the ideological heritage of Ramiro Ledesma, we can detach:

-The obsession with novelty, the most up to date and the most recent, which, in his vision, was elevated to the category of directing and inspiring criteria; topicality and novelty as consecrating blessing. A position demonstrating a belief in historical inevitability that is the result of this lack of permanent meaning of which we spoke: history seems to find in itself, in its own evolutionary and ascendant advance, in its “progress,” its justification. It’s this particular point of view that gave rise to the exaltation of youth as the motive force of renewal, and the admiration for Fascism as “a phenomenon of radical timeliness.” That is equally reliant on a certain revolutionary mystique, that is a capital element in the work of Ramiro: the consideration of the “revolution” and the “revolutionary” as something that has the miraculous power to rejuvenate and revitalize, that is justified in itself, that has its own legitimacy in itself, as they bring radical novelties, independent of their content. As Hugh Thomas rightly remarked, for Ledesma “all novelty, from Soviet Russia to Mussolini, should be exalted, and the old condemned.” It is easy to imagine the consequences this would have today – the application of the cult of the timely, the new, the subversive, and the juvenile ( thus would we not praise Castroism and the Sandinistas, Eurocommunism, hippie movements, currents of the Third World, Maoism and the National-Communism of the Cambodian Khmer and the Viet Cong?)

-Vitalist irrationalism to which his basic attitude, his entire vision of the world and life, reduced to, and in which there is not, there cannot be, any reference to spiritual values: exaltation of force, vitality, “heroism”, violence, action, etc. It is easy to perceive here the influence of Nietzsche, with his entire problematic message.

-The complete absence of the sacred dimension of life, that is equivalent to Tradition, in his work; the total deficiency of something that supposes, if only from afar, a vision of the sacred, religious content, fundamental metaphysics. That leads to the inevitable consequence of a lack of depth in his ideas, to which the poverty, superficiality, and partiality of judgment of the modern world testify, that we called – rightly – “the decline of the West.” numerous symptoms of this crisis, of this decline are saluted as great victories (for example: extreme mechanization and mass production, standardization, massification, etc.)

-The lack of necessary and indispensable elements to elaborate of a vision of the world and life, a deep, coherent, and complete Weltanschauung. His work is composed of clear isolated elements, passionate flashes that practically exhaust their vitality in the social and political sphere (different from José Antonio, who saw the panoramic breadth of the modern crisis that corrodes the entire life of peoples and individuals, and who insisted before all on the “manner of being,” on “poetry”, and the necessity of a totally integrated vision of life and spiritual sentiment.) Hence, the ideology of Ledesma offers little – that is not to say nothing – of orientations for everyday life, where really, today as always, the destiny of man is decided, along with the failure or triumph of a revolution. As Emiliano Aguado said, it is difficult to find in the work of Ramiro “a concrete norm on any matter of everyday life.”

The negative results that derive from the deficiencies of such existential and philosophical presuppositions gives an idea of some concrete affirmations on Ramiro’s thought. We will limit ourselves to seven, extremely famous and especially significant:

1. The idealization of the masses and collectivist standardization; said differently, of the informal and inorganic world. This goes hand in hand with a neglect of the personal, organic, and differentiated world, the only possible base of a normal order. The scheme of the personal is arbitrarily identified with that of the individual and, consequently, with the reign of individualism. The person is thus sacrificed to the masses, which precisely constitutes one of the characteristic traits of the modern crisis.

2. A totalitarian statism or absolutism which necessarily must resent personal liberty and which is only the final stage of a characteristic historical development of modern individualism. Its doctrine finds little nuance on this point and his expressions often take a brutal tone, proper to subversive currents like the Bolshevism or anarchism. His stages of the “collectivist state” and the “national dictatorship” are significant, and no less significant is the title of one of his articles: “the individual is dead.”

3. An immeasurable exaltation of violence; that is to say violence in itself, as a value in itself, independent of any legitimization and without any requirement of superior consecration or the transcendent dimension – the only way to ensure that violence ceases and transforms itself into the creative force of peace and order. We come again to this lack of nuance of ideas and expressions in Ramiro’s thought. Which allows us to say that “while Marx professed economic materialism, Ramiro professed warrior materialism”(Francisco Martinell).

4. Overdone pragmatism and activism: the cult of action for action’s sake, as something that is justified in itself – a trait, like the precedent, in which the Nietzschean influence manifests itself, “In the beginning is action, the deed. After that comes its theoretical justification, its ideological covering,” the JONS’ leader proclaimed. And on another occasion, he affirmed: our revolutionary attitude “today needs deeds, robust presence, more than doctrine.”; “From the start of our movement, there was no doctrine, that is to say an acquired intellectual conviction, but better, a voluntary ardor.” Ramiro completely misses the importance of an authentic doctrine, a theory with a true and final spiritual meaning – not a philosophical theory, arbitrarily constructed by an individual spirit – and he also misses that action without contemplation is only confusion, agitation that only sows disorder and further yet accelerates the existing chaos.

5. An extreme nationalism: all his thought rests on it, as we’ve already seen, on the absolutism of the nation as the supreme value of human coexistence. Ramiro does not see, cannot see, the gravity and the extent of the modern crisis , in the context which is inscribed upon all Western nations. He did not see the problem of collapsed and relegated Spain, which he believed could be solved with the aid of decisive political action; at the maximum, he was interested in the problem of knowing if, in the international scheme, they could affirm the “national” dimension as a key element of modern history. Even if that was maybe the least reproachable error, it was very connected with the mentality of the epoch, it’s more or less a common trait with all the fascist movements. The Falange of José-Antonio itself was not foreign to this tendency, although it tried to surpass it with a laudable intellectual effort.

6. Open admiration for the Bolshevik revolution, considered as “the first subversive fruits of the modern epoch” and as a “Russian national revolution,” on the same rank as the Fascist Italian and German National-Socialist revolutions. “Its legitimacy, meaning by this word its righteousness to present itself as a positive manifestation of the properly modern spirit, is indisputable.” he said in his Discurso. Much different and certainly far more just, would be the opinion of Alfred Rosenberg, a deep and direct expert on the reality of Russia, as a man born and raised in its distant lands, which highlights the presence of the foreign, particularly Jewish element, in this seismic phenomenon, or that of Vidkun Quisling, eyewitness of the terrible times and consequences of this revolution. “For Ramiro, communism is one more proof, the first in its time, of the revolutionary spirit of the 20^th century. Its a system which, in the tactical scheme, has its errors and successes. In the ideological scheme, he doesn’t reproach its lack of national feeling and the dictatorship of the proletariat; he didn’t seem unduly concerned with the loss of individual liberty nor the fundamental materialism of the system” (F. Martinell). Concurrently with this admiration for the Bolshevik Revolution, which ended whatever may have remained of the traditional in Russia, the deeply anti-traditional, anti-Islamic, modernist, and Westernizing revolution made by the Jew Mustapha Kemal in Turkey aroused the enthusiasm of the founder of La Conquista de l’Estado.

7. Finally, we cannot avoid making a brief allusion to the meaning of the historical preferences of Ramiro; as the vision of history is an key element to orient and define a vision of the world and life. The historical preferences of the founder of JONS are exactly oriented towards the Renaissance, the departure point of the modern world and the historical-ideological phenomenon which contained the seeds of all the aberrations that further developed in the course of centuries, some of which Ramiro Ledesma, this man of action, wanted to fight against with all his soul. That he admired the Renaissance as the era of the discovery of man and the power of the latter over nature, as a historical step of the powerful expression of vitality, violence, and heroism, is opposed, in perfect accord with the schemes of modern progressive historicism, to the Middle Ages, the obscure, dark age full of superstitions. “For me, the Renaissance”, Ramiro wrote in an article published in 1928 in La Gaceta Literaria – “ is the epoch of epochs. Our most immediate and precious tradition. The spectacle of the Renaissance is the plenitude of the earth … The dreary and obscure epoch of the Middle Ages is the great sin of man.” Ramiro would never discover this luminous, sacred, imperial, classic, unitary, Aryan, and solar Middle Ages that constituted the highest form of the political, social, and vital order of the European Occident, and which, according to Evola, is the only civilization that, after the end of Antiquity, “deserves the name of Renaissance.” Ramiro Ledesma’s passage to the positions of extreme Spanish nationalism that would mark his political itinerary embed themselves in this so symptomatic enthusiasm for the Renaissance; it’s not by chance, as the founder of JONS highlights, that Spain, “the first nation in modern history,” realized its unity through the Renaissance, that era where “nationalism” was born under the form of national monarchies. His esteem for Machiavelli, for what what he called, with words resembling Mussolini’s “the subtle and refined world of policy,” also fits into this admiration for Renaissance phenomena.

But even if we are forced to make all these critical, indispensable and incontestable analyses, we recognize at least that there are precious and constructive elements, of great intuition, in his political thought, its magnitude as the brilliant precursor, the initiator of an entire way of thought and life that would act decisively in the political and historical life of Spain. The message of the founder of the La Conquista del Estado and JONS is actually the starting point, the germinating cell, the promising seed of the Spanish revolution, and thus, what would follow in the Falange. “The great precursor,” as Legaz y Lacambra called him in his Introduccion a la teoria del Estado nacional-sindicalista, “who lived with a brilliant intuition that we are accomplished and complete men because we are accomplished and complete Spaniards, and not the opposite.” Ramiro Ledesma was “a man chosen by the destiny of Spain to introduce the initial cry of the Crusade in the moment of agony” (S. Montero Diaz) ; the man who “gave soul and doctrine to the Spanish nationalist” (E. Aguado). His thought, “one of the political programs with the deepest contents and the most durable vigor of our times,” “wove the fabric of national thought before the Crusade” (Miguel Moreno).

Ramiro Ledesma was the first to launch the cry of combat against the system in Spain, without prejudices and cliches, as dominate in our days. And with his powerful, ardent, and combative voice, he opened in the languishing and weakened milieu of the Spain of his times, an entirely new way of immense possibilities; a way that coursed through the Falange, which assumed, reinforced, and completed his message – and also corrected it on the points it needed to be. Ramiro not only posed the fundamentals of the National-Syndicalist doctrines, not only gave an intellectual vigor with his powerful intellect and solid philosophical – scientific culture to the Spanish national revolution, he also infused it with his passion and devoted enthusiasm, with the vital, poetic, and symbolic spirit which would characterize it and that José Antonio would develop later by powerfully enriching it. It was what he awoke, with a brilliant clairvoyance, the clear passion for the State and Fatherland, the desire to break with bourgeois liberal and Marxist civilization, the revolutionary project of dismantling the capitalist disorder and removing it from nationalist positions, the will to surpass the artificial dichotomy between left and right in which political discussions are debated – all things that the Falangist doctrine owed him. Ramiro was the creator of most of the symbols, signs, and key ideas of the new movement. He coined the term National-Syndicalist himself, and he also made, with other JONS comrades, the emblem of the yoke and arrows and designed the black and red flag. The true discoveries are his battle cries: Arriba los valores hispanicos » (« Long live Spanish values »), « No parar hasta conquistar» (« No stopping until the conquest »), « Por la Patria, el Pan y la Justicia » (« For Fatherland, Bread, and Justice »), « Espana Una, Grande y Libre » (« One Spain, Great and Free »). The idea of the Spanish “solar empire” symbolized by the lions’ claws resting on the sun is another one of his brilliant creative intuitions.

In addition to the preceding, it is necessary to appropriately value in the persona of Ramiro Ledesma a long series virtues and exemplary qualities: his generous and selfless devotion to the Spanish revolution; his fervent patriotism and his love of his countrymen – this noble beating in his heart, apparently cold and hard, before the misery of the people and the ruin of the Fatherland – the firmness of his so passionately and vehemently defended convictions; his great critical sense, his honesty and elevated sense of urgency (if we have criticized of his abandonment of the Falange, we can only fail to recognize how many of his criticisms were fully justified, making clear the features of his character we just underlined); his courageous and combative spirit that nothing could stop; the clarity and hardiness of his thought, with no respect for the false principles of Marxism and liberalism; his frontal attack and his implacable combat against the myths and cliches of the democratic era, of the bourgeois – individualist system that then led Spain and subjugates all the peoples of the West today; the sober, virile, austere, combative beauty of his prose, that reveals a way of being – “his prose of the direct war drum, adroitly aimed at the heart of problems, without any concession to the commonplace, nor weak or precious metaphor … a high and virile example of polemical tension and passionate rigorous temperament.” (S. Montero Diaz).

And, above all, the example of his combat, the example of his life, perfectly in accord with his ideas. A life entirely consecrated to his mission, totally separate from success or failure. A tireless, tenacious, and savage combat, most often in solitude and poverty, to which he would sacrifice everything – a brilliant intellectual career full of promising possibilities, his professional activity itself, his literary and philosophical tastes – and which was crowned by the shedding of his own blood as a martyr. “What saves the work of Ramiro, it’s the fact of having written with his life and of having known in his depths the precarious life of man today, constantly exalted by the most contrary fears and forebodings.” (E. Aguado). For all the reasons we have enunciated, Ramiro constitutes an example of the European revolutionary-traditionalist youth today: an example of what shouldn’t be in the domain of doctrinal orientation – or better disorientation, and an example of what we must be in life and devotion. An example for the importance of the doctrinal element and for the manner in which we can envision the combat in our day, and equally an example of the manner in which we must live and die.

Source: http://www.jeune-nation.com/doctrine/21126-ramiro-ledesma-ramos-le-createur-du-national-syndicalisme.html