José Antonio Primo de Rivera war ... José-Antonio: She would only make cowards out of them. Men need war. If you regard war as an evil, then because men need evil. Out of the eternal struggle against evil comes the triumph of good, says St. Francis. War is absolutely indispensable and inevitable. Man feels it inside with an intuitive, atavistic pull, and it will be in the future what it has been in the past ... The peoples of Earth without war? ["The leader of Falange smiles a protracted smile"]. Although Primo de Rivera is remembered mostly for his political articles in wide-circulation newspapers and
Miguel Primo de Rivera the wealthy and working classes in Spain at the time. Despite his paternalistic conservatism, Primo de Rivera was enough of a reformer and his policies were radical enough to threaten the interests of the traditional power elite. According to British historian Gerald Brenan, "Spain needed radical reforms and he could only govern by the permission of the two most reactionary forces in the country—the Army and the Church." Primo de Rivera dared not tackle what was seen as Spain's most pressing problem, agrarian reform, because it would have provoked the great landholding elite. Writes historian Richard Herr, "Primo was not