DOCUMENTATION
'Maritornes' Whorish Defense
of Rancid Feudalism
by Gretchen SmallReprinted from EIR, Aug. 22, 2003.
In November 2001, key ideologues of the project to create a new fascist international between Europe and South America launched a new magazine as a vehicle to promote their project to reestablish the feudal empire of the Hapsburgs. The magazine, Maritornes: Notebooks of Hispanidad, is published in Argentina twice-yearly by the Nueva Hispanidad Publishing House.
Figuring prominently on the editorial board of Maritornes are the Spanish fascist, Fuerza Nueva head Blas Piñar, and Argentine "Catholic traditionalist" writers Antonio Caponnetto and Rafael Breide Obeid. The latter is the brother of the Gustavo Breide, who heads the Blas Piñar- and Italian Forza Nuova-linked Popular Party for Reconstruction of Argentina.
New faces joined the Maritornes editorial board in the second and third issues, expanding its geographic reach. These included: Alexandra Wilhelmsen, daughter and political heir of Frederick Wilhelmsen, the founder of Northern Virginia's Christendom College, a William Buckley-linked center of Carlism and Catholic Synarchism; former Peruvian Congressman and notorious Hitler-Mussolini supporter Fernán Altuve-Febres Lores; Chilean professor of political philosophy Juan Antonio Widow, a founder in his youth of Chile's Falange, the Movimiento Nacional Sindicalista; and two Italians espousing similiar views, historian Francesco Maurizio Di Gionvine of Bologna and Prof. Giovanni Turco of Naples.
The magazine's self-proclaimed crusade is a political one: "to take up again the march which was interrupted by the cut-off of the Middle Ages, by the excesses of the Renaissance, by the obscurity of the Enlightenment." Hispanidad's goal is to revive the West, and its "Roman glories." Listed in the table of contents of the first issue, is an article on the significance of monarchy for ... Argentina today!
Drawings of medieval scenes adorn the homepage of the Nueva Hispanidad Publishing House's website, which has published books on everything from the glories of the Spanish Falange to bull-fighting, "the spirit of chivalry," Lefebvre, and British fascist G.K. Chesterton, hailed as "the knight errant." A five-CD set of the songs of the Spanish Falange from its founding to today is offered for sale, as is another with the "Hymns and Songs of Italian Fascism." (Notably, if only the word "Falange" were removed from the CD covers, the drawings of flag-waving, rifle-bearing, dying bodies could easily be taken for the Soviet realist propaganda of their ostensible enemies in the Spanish Civil War.)
Co-sponsoring the presentation of the magazine in Madrid in November 2001 was the Carlist Traditionalist Youth of Spain, whose red-bereted shock troops mimic the feudalist psychos of Tradition, Family, and Property (TFP). A message of support from the Carlist pretender to the Spanish throne, Don Sixto Enrique de Borbón, was read.
What's in a Name?
Perhaps the most revealing aspect of the Hispanidad-promoting Maritornes magazine project is the choice of name itself.
Maritornes is a character from Miguel de Cervantes' immortal Don Quixote de la Mancha: She is the whore at the inn that Don Quixote believed to be a castle.
In the founding statement of Maritornes, editor Antonio Caponnetto explains why that name was chosen. True, admits Caponnetto, Cervantes' character Maritornes is a whore, but she is "transfigured" by "the chaste gaze" of the crazy knight, Don Quixote. This comes about when Maritornes, who prides herself on being a noble lady whom bad luck had brought to her present pass, makes a date to go to bed with a mule skinner sharing sleeping quarters with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.
But she mistakenly gets into bed with Don Quixote, instead of the muleteer. Caponnetto then quotes from Cervantes' book, that Maritornes, "who went all doubled up and in silence with her hands before her, feeling for her lover, encountered the arms of Don Quixote, who grasped her tightly by the wrist, and drawing her towards him, while she dared not utter a word, made her sit down on the bed. He then felt her smock, and although it was of sackcloth it appeared to him to be of the finest and softest silk; on her wrists she wore some glass beads, but to him they had the sheen of precious Orient pearls; her hair, which in some measure resembled a horse's mane, he rated as threads of the brightest gold of Araby, whose refulgence dimmed the sun himself; her breath, which no doubt smelt of yesterday's stale salad, seemed to him to diffuse a sweet aromatic fragrance from her mouth; and, in short, he drew her portrait in his imagination with the same features and in the same style as that which he had seen in his books of the other princesses."
Comments Caponnetto: "A whore to the mule skinner and the inn keeper," but a "creature capable of 'the sweetest and most loving discourse' to the knight of the sorrowful countenance." Caponnetto then quotes Cervantes, completely missing the irony—"though she was in that line of life, there was some faint and distant resemblance to a Christian about her." Caponnetto then waxes eloquent, in terms that would even make the crazy Don Quixote blush: "Maritornes is America [the continent, not the country]. America the well-endowed. The servant become a lady, the inn become a castle, the stable a battlement, and the rickety bed a nuptial chamber.
"And if this bold analogy be valid, as we hold, it should also be applied by extension to all the lands upon which 'Hispanidad' planted its fruits, and even upon present-day Spain, which so much needs to give up her post as a servant to rise up again as an empress."
Thus, Caponnetto and all the other self-proclaimed whores in the Americas who await for the Spanish knight to take up the cudgels to bring back the never-were glories of the Spanish Empire, try to twist Cervantes' biting irony of the insanity of that medieval world view, to come to the defense of their lost cause.
