Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker Buckley’s seldom-acknowledged fluency in Spanish shaped his worldview—including his admiration for dictators from Spain to Chile and beyond “Up until age six I spoke only Spanish,” William F and that’s where I learned English for the first time some four decades into his career as conservatism’s intellectual lodestar his linguistic quirks had become such a fixture of U.S political culture that they were being satirized in Disney movies Aladdin asks the Genie: “You’re going to grant me any three wishes I want sprouts a snowy comb-over and puts on an unmistakable smirk a couple of quid pro quo.” The excessive verbiage and aristocratic English accent being mocked were none other than William F and emotional language contrasts rather dramatically with Buckley’s dispassionate Buckley’s era of snobbish conservatism spanned from the Goldwater 1960s through the Nixon ’70s and the Reagan ’80s Trump’s age of vulgar rhetoric began in the late 1990s and will continue for the foreseeable future But what’s in the use of one kind of language over another And how does it shape or obscure an intellectual worldview most have remarked on his “High Church,” “patrician,” or “slight English” accent using it as a license to draw conclusions about his political beliefs or those of his supporters Buckley’s fluency in Spanish may have been the more important of his linguistic influences His lifelong engagement with the Spanish-speaking world forms a largely unacknowledged part of his intellectual biography Chile and other Spanish-speaking countries fascinated him and this fascination had political consequences While his refined English accent pointed to where he came from—a moneyed Catholic family that had made it in the oil business—his fluency in Spanish hinted at where he wanted to go: toward a distinct Castilian brand of shock-doctrine despotism that he helped make a global export in the 1970s and ’80s Hispanophilia ran deep in the Buckley family himself had become fluent in Spanish at a young age having grown up in the south Texas town of San Diego After a stint as a Spanish-English translator in the General Land Office of Texas coinciding with the beginning of the drawn-out Mexican Revolution he arrived in Tampico—along the Mexican Gulf Coast and at the center of Mexico’s burgeoning oil industry—to open a corporate law office He left the country in 1921 a wealthy oil magnate who nevertheless loathed all of the revolution’s insurgents from the nationalist Venustiano Carranza to the peasant-anarchist Emiliano Zapata Perhaps “left” isn’t entirely accurate: Buckley Sr was deported for conspiring to overthrow President Álvaro Obregón whose policies had curbed Porfirio Díaz’s “concessions” to American and British investors especially objected to Article 27 of Mexico’s 1917 Constitution which gave the state control over all natural resources from the country’s soil He had founded and become the president of Pantepec Oil Company in 1913 and quickly allied his business to the short-lived military government of Victoriano Huerta most often made political allegiances that suited his property and power sometimes over his perceived political ideology This made some of his political decisions seem haphazard after Wilson occupied the port of Veracruz following a bizarre incident in Tampico was tapped by Emilio Rabasa to counsel the Mexican delegation to a peace summit meant to resolve the brooding tensions between the two nations fanning the flames of conflict whenever it suited his business plan which drew him close to the Spanish-speaking world The armed struggle of the Mexican Revolution had effectively ended in 1920 the country’s Catholic activists were ready to launch a counterrevolution the Cristeros (a Spanish neologism from Cristo Rey Christ the King) also took issue with the 1917 Constitution which crystallized the separation of church and state and forced all “religious groupings” to register with the government and Pantepec had “lost substantial assets” following the deportation Buckley Sr.—perhaps looking to recoup the losses perhaps following through on his religious commitments—met with Cristero leaders to find them a financial backer The Cristero cause had lost out to the lucrative promise of South American oil saw “the demand for political democracy in countries like Mexico and Spain as a cover for communism and anticlericalism.” The same might be said for his son liked to distance himself from his father’s unsavory support for dictatorial regimes—his father had supported successful and aborted dictatorships in Mexico and Spain—his writings on the Spanish-speaking world tell quite the opposite story It could have just as easily been in Mexico City He spent most of his earliest years with his mother His father had relocated his Pantepec Oil Company to Venezuela the year before Buckley Jr was born and after being deported from Mexico was hired along with a classmate to teach beginning Spanish professors were “overworked and underpaid,” according to one historian; the university didn’t increase the size of its faculty at the rate that it allowed recent war veterans to enroll It was somewhere between teaching beginning Spanish and reading José Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses for Willmoore Kendall’s seminar on political philosophy that the idea for God and Man at Yale germinated a fellow debater and conservative whom he used as a sounding board for the book’s provocative lambasting of their professors’ impiety Buckley didn’t rely on his own teaching experience in the Spanish and Italian department to make his argument He focused his ire instead on other faculties: sociology Only later would he take his intellectual encounter with Spanish language and culture to heart to write a sequel to Ortega’s book he wishfully titled The Revolt Against the Masses But Buckley learned from Ortega the importance of what the latter called “specially qualified” minorities in checking the power of the masses and leaders that needed to make sure that leaders such as Eisenhower kept in line and didn’t appeal to vulgar Even as God and Man at Yale hit bookstore shelves in fall 1951 Buckley was already at work on another book project He spent that fall in Mexico City working for the CIA under E later known for his role in engineering Watergate Hunt assigned Buckley to work with Eudocio Ravines a disaffected Peruvian communist who was also living in Mexico Ravines had collaborated in Paris with the poet César Vallejo he had taken over the leadership of the Communist Party of Peru (which he renamed the Peruvian Socialist Party) following the death of the renowned Marxist philosopher José Carlos Mariátegui and it was Buckley’s job in Mexico to help him prepare and translate The Yenan Way an anticommunist screed that would be published first in English in late 1951 Yet the collaboration with Ravines foreshadowed Buckley’s ability to establish a common anticommunist ground with disgruntled leftists The McCarthy era would grease the wheels for many later conversions to conservatism His primary method consisted of attracting a significant number of disaffected radicals to write and edit for his new magazine Buckley founded the National Review in 1955 under the title “Letter from Spain,” his first and only signed homily for Francisco Franco’s fascist regime appeared in its pages he claimed that Franco had done his job and done it well to “wrest Spain from the hands of the visionaries and nihilists” and reverse the course of a “regime so grotesque as to do violence to the Spanish soul.” That regime was Spain’s Second Republic a modern democracy that had elected a left-wing coalition in a landslide election in February 1936 To the delight of Germany and Italy and to the apathy of the United States and England Franco launched a military coup that summer that did violence to much more than Spanish “souls.” The Spanish Civil War went on to claim the lives of half a million people and sent more than another half-million into exile The victory of Franco’s Nationalist troops in April 1939 inaugurated his thirty-six-year dictatorship Franco’s had become a near-model regime for Buckley “He is not an oppressive dictator,” the 1957 letter continued “He is only as oppressive as it is necessary to be to maintain total power Buckley would double down on this argument in an aside from an article on Pinochet writing that Franco “believed in just as much repression as was necessary.” For Buckley the grotesque slaughter that gave birth to the regime and continued well into its first decade—along with the mass imprisonment and executions that were its hallmarks throughout—were an acceptable Politics was conditional on how much one could get away with Buckley took care to infuse it with world-historical “He saved the day,” Buckley wrote of Franco thereupon return to his plow.”  Cincinnatus is the paragon of the benevolent dictator who rules briefly and virtuously in order to accomplish a specific task But he stuck by the aging dictator long after many of his peers had withdrawn their support—or at least hushed it up it was no longer in good taste in America to openly support fascism Memories of Franco’s ties to Hitler still circulated He knew that outright support for Franco would alienate him and the National Review So he tempered his praise of Nacionalcatolicismo—“National Catholicism,” a common shorthand for Francoism—with criticisms of the regime’s centralized economy Spain’s inability to spur economic productivity was rooted in the regime’s lack of capitalism months before Buckley’s letter was published Franco famously reshuffled his cabinet to include Opus Dei “technocrats,” brought in to further cut public spending and thereby liberalize the Spanish economy Francoism was well on its way to becoming a kind of ideal regime for Buckley: a laboratory for capitalist development under a Catholic dictatorship Catholicism and capitalism were married at last behind Spain’s trajectory was a kind of roadmap to installing capitalist markets and Catholic churches simultaneously Thanks to Kissinger and other postwar right-wing diplomats it would be a roadmap that would guide U.S imperial excursions during the second half of the twentieth century It resulted in the likes of Pinochet’s Chile Buckley biographer John Judis reminds us that Buckley and Kissinger shared not only an ideological but a personal rapport “Buckley’s most important relationship in the Nixon administration was with Kissinger,” Judis writes Their friendship blossomed over a shared interest in international relations—Kissinger even invited Buckley to give a yearly lecture in his international-relations seminar at Harvard—and a mutual rejection of the so-called containment strategy of George Kennan was to stem the influence of the Soviet Union by any means necessary Kissinger’s influence on Buckley may have been stronger than the other way around; Judis goes as far as to claim that “Buckley may have allowed himself to be manipulated” by Kissinger But Buckley’s early writings in the National Review anticipated many of the ideas that Kissinger put into practice His essay on Franco contains what one might call an early theory of shock therapy Before the Chicago Boys returned to Chile ready to apply Milton Friedman’s latest textbook idea Buckley already saw this process taking place in Spain thanks to Franco’s fascist regime His formula was deceptively simple: launch a coup to win power establish a dictatorship to stamp out communism and accelerate capitalism Buckley also thought of his vision as a conservative third way of sorts the new ideology would be supple enough to be able to turn its back on either dogma—Nazism or Toryism—when convenient Buckley’s arguments enjoyed the generosity of hindsight: he claimed that dictatorship and bloodshed were necessary evils to stem the threat from the left and that a ruler’s legitimacy should be judged by his regime’s ends he was asked by the right-wing publisher Devin-Adair to write a foreword to the reissuing of Arnold Lunn’s book Spanish Rehearsal Spanish Rehearsal had become the English-language manual for Franco’s supporters Lunn’s book—a British travel narrative in Spain at its most myopic and ignorant—was Francoist propaganda not worth its weight in paper But Buckley and several of his fellow conservatives hailed it as an honest first-person account of the atrocities committed by the defenders of Spain’s democracy “Arnold Lunn exhibited the kind of indignation over the atrocities visited on innocent Christians which is taken for granted—I mean the indignation—when the victims are Jewish This volume shows not the selective indignation against persecution and torture of any people in punishment for their race or their religion or their nationality.” Buckley’s own registering of persecution and torture was curiously selective we might also add other staples of conservative thought: the victimizing narrative the universalizing of a specific religious worldview the sweeping of ideological conflict under the rug Buckley’s interest in Spanish politics waned He instead turned his attention back to Latin America where his fascination with the Spanish-speaking world had taken root It was in Chile—where General Augusto Pinochet had taken power thanks to the American-backed coup d’etat in 1973—that Buckley found the closest analog to Francoism Buckley wrote more than a handful of essays on Pinochet as a test case for instituting Catholicism and capitalism through authoritarian means “Fine-tuning repression is a distinctly unperfected art,” Buckley wrote—an art that Pinochet Chile not only enjoyed “public order,” it also boasted an “overwhelming majority of the people” who accepted the Pinochet government legitimacy thanks to repression—these were the cornerstones of Buckley’s support for dictatorial regimes from Franco’s to Pinochet’s Buckley also began to test out a new vocabulary: perhaps surprisingly Thrust into the public sphere by Cold War liberalism human rights was—and still is—a vaguely defined term Buckley was keen to reclaim it from progressive counterparts as a watchword for the anti-Communist struggle he published a short National Review essay under the title “Pinochet and Human Rights.” The essay sticks out as much for its argument in support of Pinochet’s dictatorship as for its timing according to Samuel Moyn and other historians was a turning point in mainstream acceptance of human rights as a concept: it was the year Amnesty International was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize while references to “human rights” saw a five-fold increase in the New York Times Buckley took the opportunity to deploy the term in defense of the Chilean regime questioning ideas about Pinochet’s total repression focusing too much on the regime’s systematic kidnappings and murders He instead wanted to turn attention to the regime’s laudable proselytism of free market and Catholic deism he wanted to pour cold water on the idea that Chile was violating human rights Claiming a noble strategy of momentary authority and oppression Buckley helped make intervention fashionable again for conservatives in an American postwar era of liberal imperialism Like many fashionable ideas in American politics Buckley’s stood on the shoulders of money: the short-lived American-Chilean Council was a direct beneficiary of the Pinochet regime director of the Chile Documentation Project in the National Security Archive the ACC “funnel[ed] hundreds of thousands of dollars secretly through an agent in Chile’s United Nations mission in New York to Marvin Liebman’s Madison Ave supporting lavish trips to Santiago for National Review writers Buckley was a fluent Spanish speaker through the end of his life were hired in part to help teach his children Spanish He also had a close relationship with the largely unknown Spanish painter Raymond de Botton—the great-uncle of the popular philosopher Alain de Botton—whose paintings covered the walls of his Stamford home “Much of the daily small talk in the house is in Spanish with English almost a second language,” noted the Paris Review in its interview with Buckley Three decades removed from teaching Spanish Buckley rekindled his Yale experience once more during an interview with Alan F Westin had asked him about the success of the incipient American campaign for promoting human rights around the world “The Spanish have a word: pujanza,” he told Westin “It is used to define a really brave bull who keeps charging you and keeps on charging “American policy on human rights thus far lacks that quality.” Buckley wouldn’t have to worry for very long American human rights policy in the Spanish-speaking world has not been lacking in pujanza ever since Bécquer Seguín is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Lawrence University He writes regularly for The Nation and other magazines The rioters at the Capitol are part of an unbroken American tradition Sweet talk about our “better angels” did not defeat them before and will not now Franco’s legacy and the memory of authoritarian rule in Spain loomed over last week’s Catalan independence referendum—a pivotal episode in a century-long conflict Too many of us on the left treat the right as a monolith—and it’s keeping us from effectively fighting back Please consider donating to Dissent. 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Donate $10, $50, or $500; we are grateful for gifts of all sizes By Matthew Continetti National Review In 1909 a young American living in Mexico City visited the presidential palace at Chapultepec listened as the ageing General Porfirio Díaz told the story of Mexico’s economic revival under his autocratic rule A courtier whispered into Buckley’s ear: “His excellency will never die!” He understood that Díaz’s iron fist held Mexico together Díaz was overthrown after a disputed election He was one of the few American businessmen in Mexico to speak fluent Spanish He was an intermediary between a rotating cast of Mexican strongmen and the U.S when the revolution took an anticlerical turn Buckley aided his fellow Catholics and sent money to counterrevolutionary insurgents He passed on to his children lessons — in self-reliance and nonintervention — drawn from south of the U.S “Mexico dyed our father’s politics indelibly,” said Reid Buckley “and bred in his children distrust of populist charmers of whatever ideological hue.” If you want to understand the connections between Will Buckley and the development of modern American conservatism, William F Adams Jr.’s extensive archival research sheds light on the man to whom William F and belief in the rule of law as the basis for freedom and prosperity earned him a fortune and financial patrimony was instrumental in the creation of National Review in the borderland between the United States and Mexico His father was an Irish Protestant immigrant The Buckleys were Anglos in a population that was more than 80 percent Tejano Will Buckley was bilingual at an early age Buckley graduated from the University of Texas with a law degree with the goal of providing legal services to U.S “Will was just under six feet tall,” Adams writes and with blue eyes accented by wire rim pince-nez that made him look older than his twenty-seven years.” He had entered a nation in political decay Soon Madero was overthrown by one of his generals who in turn was deposed by the primer jefe But the jefe was not primer for long bandits such as Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata roamed the countryside The Mexican Revolution taught Will Buckley that social fabrics are easily torn and hard to mend “He went to Mexico to practice law,” Buckley Jr “and saw the revolution against the benevolent and autocratic Porfirio Díaz and what followed in its wake his distrust of the revolutionary ideology.” Buckley saw plans of redistribution and social reorganization as invitations to graft and disarray “I have always regarded him as being dangerously theoretical he has the most unbounded confidence in the infallibility of his own conclusions.” And civil war did not slake the industrialized world’s appetite for energy Buckley’s firm expanded to include his two brothers He bought oil leases along the gulf in Tampico “It was never the discovery of oil that excited him,” said Will’s daughter Priscilla the techniques and tactics that enabled him to keep his small companies in the field without so much as a by-your-leave to the mastodons that sought to devour him.” Buckley’s wit and integrity kept the mastodons at bay The politicians in Washington didn’t understand Mexico If the Mexican Revolution confirmed for Buckley the dangers of political romanticism the American response to the revolution was itself an object lesson in hubris President Woodrow Wilson refused to extend diplomatic recognition to governments established through violent means Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan repudiated the “Dollar Diplomacy” of Republican administrations that had privileged commerce over democracy foreign policy was an exercise in spiritual uplift told a British diplomat: “I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men!” His passive-aggressive mix of condescension and military engagement won him no friends in Mexico Will Buckley backed American intervention in Mexico He said it was the only way to protect American interests Buckley did his best to protect Americans caught in the crossfire officials offered Buckley the chance to be the city’s civilian governor Buckley concluded that Wilson’s incursions into Mexico — another would take place in 1916 — did more harm than good “He believed it was wrong for the United States to impose its ‘republican standards’ on Mexico which had never had the remotest experience with full and free democratic government,” writes Adams It was Buckley’s opinion that Wilson held Mexico to the strictest standard and when the developing country inevitably failed to live up to Wilson’s ideals the president would lash out with the heavy hand of the U.S Buckley became a critic of Progressive foreign policy He advised the Mexican government during the “ABC” (Argentina he worked closely with Republican senator Albert Fall of New Mexico who organized a foreign-affairs subcommittee on U.S.–Mexican relations Will Buckley met Aloïse Steiner of New Orleans Aloïse was multilingual: She spoke Spanish and French in addition to English And she was a southerner who referred to herself as a “daughter of the Confederacy.” William F Buckley Sr.: Witness to the Mexican Revolution provides a reminder that for all its association with New York and Connecticut the Buckley family’s ancestry and cultural background are rooted well below the Mason-Dixon line Will and Aloïse had left Mexico for America when General Obregón became president of Mexico Will Buckley had been a neutral arbiter between Mexico’s many factions He abandoned that stance as soon as the church was attacked Buckley financed the armed opposition to Obregón “The fact that the counter-revolutionists were decent men which is that it is a very dangerous business indeed to back an unsuccessful insurrection,” Buckley Jr “And he knew it and barely escaped with his skin.” A headline in the Austin American of November 27 read: “Austin Man Draws Wrath of Obregón.” Buckley went to Texas The family’s holdings and properties were at risk He would not return to Mexico for close to a decade Buckley Sr. tapers off when its protagonist leaves Mexico skims across the remaining 37 years of his life Perhaps Mexico defined Will Buckley to such an extent that he was not the same man after his departure Or perhaps this book is more about the Mexican Revolution than it is about Buckley Will Buckley’s story did not end with his return to America some of the most important events in his biography lay in the future: the design and construction of his homes in Sharon S.C.; the education of his children; his relationship with social critic and essayist Albert Jay Nock; his business expansion in Venezuela and the global reach of his Pantepec-Catawba company; his involvement in the America First Committee; his post-war political activity; and died in 1958, National Review was struggling His opposition to the Mexican Revolution had been unsuccessful Will Buckley had set into motion a conservative revolution within the United States A revolution that was just getting started scientists have found five new coral reefs forming a so-called coral reef corridor The team of scientists from the University of Veracruz and Mexico’s National Institute of Technology announced their findings earlier this month reminding us there’s still so much we don’t know about the underwater world and Camaronera—join a number of other reefs to make up the Reef Corridor of the Southwest Gulf of Mexico which stretches from near the Tamiahua Lagoonin the state of Veracruz into the Gulf The scientists have speculated about the existence of the corridor for years This corridor stretches at least 310 miles a researcher with the University of Veracruz who made the discovery alongside Ana Gutierrez of the National Institute of Technology This corridor offers incredible biological productivity for this region The reefs offer habitat for a number of species fueling an incredibly biodiverse ecosystem bu the scientists who discovered the corridor want to change that before the oil and gas industry moves into this part of the Gulf “We want the coral corridor to be officially recognized to protect it from the fossil fuel industry,” Ortiz said This group of researchers is now working to protect the corridor in coordination with the Mexican Center for Environmental Law The fishing industry and sedimentation from runoff are threatening the reefs but the ecologists are mindful about creating protections that won’t sacrifice the well-being of the fishing industry that’s built a dependence on the thriving ecosystem “What’s most important is that these sites are where hundreds of fishermen receive their nourishment and work,” Ortiz told Earther but it’s necessary to maintain the fishing industry.” And of course the threat of climate change is looming over coral reefs, many of which are already feeling its impacts around the world. Warmer waters have caused waves of coral bleaching in the Gulf of Mexico they expel algae (a main source of food) as a response to the added stress these new reefs are scattered within and outside of protected areas Setting up protections for all the reefs is a solid first step to ensuring they survive ' + scriptOptions._localizedStrings.webview_notification_text + ' " + scriptOptions._localizedStrings.redirect_overlay_title + " " + scriptOptions._localizedStrings.redirect_overlay_text + "