José Antonio was very fond of quoting a phrase of Oswald Spengler’s: that at the eleventh hour it had always been a squad of soldiers that had saved civilization. At that time the young Falangists felt they were that squad of soldiers. They knew (or believed they knew) that their families slept an innocent sleep of bourgeois beatitude, not knowing that a wave of impunity and egalitarian barbarism was going to wake them suddenly with a tremendous clamour of catastrophe. They felt their duty was to preserve civilization by force and avoid the catastrophe.
