Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera Quotes
Fire—without hatred.
Philosophically, Rivera was a pacifist, but when in the Spanish Civil War he hfelt he had no other recourse but to protect his people from the onslaught of the German and Italian supported Fascists. Civilian populations were deliberately bombed from the air. However, when he had to give the order to fire he added this philosophical/religious wrinkle.
Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, *-1936, Spanish Nationalist Hero, The Siege of the Alcazar
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
At first reading, this is just a common report of a German war correspondent riding along on a bombing mission. However what makes it a very important historical quotation is the description of the fires and the date. In WWII the allies firebombed Hamburg {624722} and Dresden, and were then accused by the Germans—and by some historical revisionists in the 21st century—of bombing civilian cities and using the firbombing technique where one huge conflagrant sucked the air out of the area and roasted even people in bomb shelters. However, it was clear that the Germans had started the bombing of civilian cities, but the firebombing was less clear. This quotation proves that it was the Germans who first broke the rules of war and that made the subsequent Allied use of the technique legal and for most people then moral.
José Antonio Primo de Rivera y Sáenz de Heredia, 1st Duke of Primo de Rivera, 3rd Marquess of Estella, often referred to simply as José Antonio, was a Spanish politician who founded the fascist Falange Española ("Spanish Phalanx"), later Falange Española de las JONS.
